CHAPTER SEVEN
The docks of Verdant Port lay in ruins, strewn with the aftermath of liberation.
Splintered wood, torn sails, and the twisted metal of Warden weapons littered the planks where Thalia sat with her mother and sister, perched on a mound of salt-stained fishing nets.
The setting sun painted long shadows across the harbor, turning the water to liquid copper and casting their faces in soft amber light.
Thalia's hands trembled as she held Mari against her side, still unable to believe that she had found her family alive amidst the chaos of occupation and revolt. The smell of smoke hung in the air, mingling with salt and blood, a constant reminder of how close they had come to losing everything.
"When the ships appeared in the harbor that morning," her mother whispered, her once-steady voice now frayed at the edges, "we thought it was just another raid. We'd heard rumors of attacks on coastal villages, but nothing like this."
Celeste Greenspire looked older than when Thalia had left for Frostforge two years ago.
New lines etched her face, and silver threads now outnumbered the black in her once-raven hair.
Her hands—hands that had ground herbs and mixed tinctures with unerring precision—now bore fresh scars and trembled slightly as they clutched Thalia's arm, as if afraid she might disappear.
"I wanted to write to you," she continued, her gaze fixed on the horizon where Warden ships had vanished into the gathering dusk. "To warn you not to come home. But they cut off all messages. No one in, no one out."
Mari pressed closer to Thalia's side, her thin frame shivering despite the mild evening air.
At seventeen, she was no longer the child Thalia remembered.
Her sister had grown taller, her face losing its childish roundness to reveal cheekbones sharp enough to rival Thalia's own.
But the change went deeper than physical appearance.
The bright, curious eyes that had once followed Thalia's every move now held shadows no seventeen-year-old should know.
"You've grown so much," Thalia murmured, brushing a strand of hair from Mari's face. "I barely recognized you."
Mari didn't respond except to tighten her grip on Thalia's hand. The silence felt wrong coming from the girl who had once filled their tiny home with endless questions and laughter.
Thalia swallowed against the lump forming in her throat.
While she had been at Frostforge, learning to forge weapons and fight with magic, her family had endured horrors she could only begin to imagine.
She had been protected by stone walls and the collective might of the academy while Verdant Port burned.
The guilt of it cut deeper than any Warden blade.
"It happened so fast," her mother continued, her gaze distant with memory. "First, unnatural storms—lightning that struck with purpose, not chance. Our fishing fleet was destroyed before it could even return to shore. Then the warships appeared, more than we'd ever seen in one place."
She described how the Wardens had landed at every access point simultaneously, cutting off escape routes with military precision.
Those who tried to resist were killed immediately, their bodies left in the streets as warnings.
Most of Verdant Port's citizens had hidden, hoping to wait out what they assumed would be a typical raid—violent but brief.
"But they didn't leave," Celeste said, her voice hollowing. "They began building that wall the same day they arrived. Teams of workers, directed by their storm mages. When it was finished, they went house to house, dragging people to the market square for questioning."
Thalia's arms tightened around Mari protectively. "What kind of questioning?"
"Strange questions. Who were your parents? Your grandparents? Had anyone in your family ever shown unusual abilities? They seemed particularly interested in any signs of magic."
A chill ran down Thalia's spine despite the warmth of the evening. "They were looking for magical lineages?"
Her mother nodded. "They separated us based on our answers. Those with any hint of magical ancestry were taken to different holding pens." Her voice cracked slightly. “And they took all of the children, every single one, no matter what their answers were. I was separated from Mari.”
Thalia looked down at her sister, whose face remained turned away. She wouldn't press for details—not now, perhaps not ever, unless Mari chose to share them. Some wounds needed silence to heal.
Instead, she focused on the strategic implications, her mind working as it had been trained to do at Frostforge. This wasn't the chaotic violence of traditional Warden raids. This was methodical, purposeful—a harvesting of people based on specific criteria.
"I've heard rumors," Thalia said carefully, "that Warden raids have been changing in recent years. More targeted. But this goes beyond anything we've seen before."
Her mother nodded. "They weren't looking for supplies or slaves. They wanted specific people. The rest of us were an afterthought, it seemed."
"But why focus on magical abilities?" Thalia wondered aloud. "The Isle Wardens have their own magic—storm magic, primarily. Why would they need continental mages?"
"Perhaps they were trying to identify those who might pose the greatest threat," her mother suggested. "Those who could resist them most effectively."
Thalia frowned, her strategic mind turning over the possibilities. "If that were true, they would have executed anyone with magical potential. But they didn't—they imprisoned them. Kept them for some reason."
She stopped abruptly, noticing how Mari tensed at her words. Both her mother and sister stared at her with hollow eyes that had seen too much suffering for such speculation.
"It doesn't matter now," Thalia said quickly, changing course. "What matters is keeping you safe. The Wardens will return—they won't abandon Verdant Port so easily. We should get you to Frostforge as soon as possible."
Her mother's eyes widened. "Frostforge? The academy would take refugees?"
"They've already begun to," Thalia assured her, though she left out the complications and prejudices that had attended the first wave of Southern refugees. "And they'd certainly take the family of a graduate."
Around them, the survivors of Verdant Port had begun the slow process of reclaiming their city.
Neighbors called to one another across rubble-strewn streets.
Volunteers moved among the wounded, offering water and makeshift bandages.
At the far end of the dock, Roran directed a team unloading provisions from the captured Warden ships, his voice carrying clearly across the water.
Ashe worked nearby, helping ferry the injured to shelters hastily erected from salvaged timber and sail.
Kaine had set up a temporary forge and was already repairing damaged weapons and tools, his pale face set in concentration as he worked.
They had all thrown themselves into helping Verdant Port's residents without hesitation, but Thalia noticed how carefully they avoided approaching her and her family. They were giving her space—time to reconnect with the people she had crossed an ocean to find.
In this brief moment of quiet, Thalia allowed herself to simply breathe. The weight of Mari's head settled into her lap as her sister finally succumbed to exhaustion. Thalia stroked her hair gently, her fingers tracing patterns as they had when Mari was small and frightened of storms.
***
Night descended over Verdant Port like a bruise spreading across skin, deep blues and purples replacing the fiery hues of sunset.
Lanterns flickered to life along the harbor, their glow insufficient against the darkness that had claimed the city both literally and figuratively.
Thalia sat on the worn stone steps of her childhood home, listening to the unfamiliar quiet of a street that had once hummed with life at all hours.
The slums had escaped the worst of the destruction—the Wardens apparently finding little value in the poorest district—but scorch marks still marred the weathered walls, and doors hung from broken hinges like wounded creatures.
Inside, her mother and Mari slept the deep sleep of the emotionally exhausted, but Thalia found rest impossible despite the day's chaos still echoing in her limbs.
Fires dotted the cityscape before her, small gatherings of survivors huddled around warmth and light.
The harbor remained the center of activity, where the newly liberated citizens of Verdant Port organized supplies and tended to the wounded.
It wasn't the order Thalia remembered from her childhood—this was clearly the desperate improvisation of recently freed captives—but it was a start.
Life reasserting itself in the face of destruction.
Thalia traced her fingers along a crack in the step beneath her, following its jagged path across stone worn smooth by years of use.
How many times had she sat here as a child, watching the ebb and flow of slum life, dreaming of something beyond these narrow streets?
Now those streets felt like fragments of a memory that no longer matched reality.
The Greenspire home had survived, its walls still standing, its roof mostly intact.
But the herb shop that had sustained their family—the small front room where her mother had mixed remedies for sailors and dock workers—was empty now, its shelves cleared by Warden soldiers, its carefully cultivated plants trampled or stolen.
She closed her eyes, trying to conjure the Verdant Port of her memory.
The calls of street vendors in the morning, the clatter of carts on cobblestones, the smell of fresh bread from the baker three doors down.
But the sensory tapestry refused to materialize.
The baker was gone—her mother had mentioned his execution in the first days of occupation when he'd tried to defend his daughter from Warden soldiers.
The street vendor who had sold salted fish wrapped in paper cones had fled before the wall was completed.
The family across the way, whose youngest son had played hide-and-seek with Mari, had been taken to a different processing center and never seen again.
A coldness settled in Thalia's chest that had nothing to do with the night air. This was her home, yet it no longer felt like home. Too much had changed. Too many were missing.
Footsteps on the cobblestones pulled her from her thoughts. Thalia's hand moved instinctively to where her glacenite blade would normally rest, but she had left it inside, unwilling to subject her family to the hallucinations it might trigger in such close quarters.
Kaine emerged from the shadows, his pale Northern features stark in the dim light.
He carried a bundle under one arm—scrolls and papers bound with cord—and his expression held none of the relief that should have followed their victory.
Instead, his brow was furrowed, his mouth set in a grim line that spoke of troubling discoveries.
"Couldn't sleep either?" he asked, though the question seemed perfunctory, a prelude to more urgent matters.
Thalia shook her head. "Too quiet. Too strange."
He nodded once, understanding without need for elaboration. Then he knelt beside her on the step, laying the bundle between them. His fingers, calloused from years at the forge, carefully untied the cord.
"I found these in the captain's quarters of the largest warship," he explained, unrolling the first scroll. "There are more—many more—still aboard. Roran helped me decipher some of the Warden language. His parents taught him more than he let on."
The parchment was covered in neat, angular script—the Warden tongue rendered in ink the color of dried blood.
Diagrams filled the margins, showing what appeared to be family trees with symbols and annotations attached to various names.
Thalia leaned closer, trying to make sense of the unfamiliar characters.
"These are records," Kaine said, his voice dropping lower, though there was no one nearby to overhear. "Detailed, systematic records of magical lineages throughout the Southern Kingdoms. Not just Verdant Port—dozens of coastal cities and even inland settlements."
He pointed to a section where the same phrase appeared repeatedly, marked with emphasis. "This term—Roran says it translates roughly to 'magic in bloodlines.' Or ‘heredity’—something along those lines. It appears in document after document."
Thalia's skin prickled with unease. "Why would they do this?"
Kaine unrolled another scroll, this one showing what appeared to be a map of the Southern coastline, with settlements marked and annotated.
"These aren't random raids anymore, Thalia.
The Wardens are targeting specific populations, specific families.
And look here—" He pointed to dates inscribed beside various locations.
"They've been building this log for years, systematically working their way up the coast."
"They need these people for something," she murmured, her mind racing through possibilities, each more disturbing than the last. "Something that requires a certain type of magic. Magic that’s linked to lineage."
The word left a sour taste in her mouth. It suggested a purpose far more calculated than the chaotic violence normally associated with Warden raids. This wasn't opportunity or chance—this was strategy, long-term planning. A project.
“This information needs to get back to Frostforge,” she said without thinking.
Kaine nodded. “At the first opportunity.”