Chapter 6
The room is full of crystals.
Not the phosphorescent kind that light the corridors—these are different. Larger. Clearer. Arranged on pedestals and shelves like a collection of precious artifacts, each one glowing faintly with trapped images.
Scrying crystals. I’ve heard of them but never seen one. The old woman in Ironhold used to tell stories about Fae magic, about how they could see across vast distances, watch people without being seen. I thought they were just stories.
I approach the nearest pedestal, and the crystal brightens at my presence. The image inside sharpens, and I see—
Ironhold.
My village, captured in perfect detail. The forge where my father worked, the anvil still sitting exactly where he left it.
The market square where I used to trade rabbit pelts for bread.
The defensive walls I helped repair a dozen times, the stones I know by touch.
All of it frozen in crystal like a memory made solid.
My throat tightens. I haven’t seen home in—how long? Weeks? Months? Time moves strangely in Stone Court, and I’ve stopped counting the days. I press my hand against the crystal like I could reach through it, touch the cobblestones I used to walk every morning.
I move to the next crystal. Another view of Ironhold, but from a different angle. This one shows the training ground where I practiced with the other village defenders. I can see myself in the image—my hair pulled back, my practice sword raised, correcting the stance of one of the younger fighters.
Recent. This image is recent. Within the last year, maybe.
He’s been watching my village.
The thought should feel like a violation. He told me, didn’t he? That first day in his chambers, when he explained how he’d chosen me. He said he’d been watching for months. Three months, he said. Long enough to learn my fighting style, map my courage, decide I was worth claiming.
I believed him.
I move through the room, examining crystal after crystal. Most show Ironhold—different locations, different seasons. I see the tavern where I drank alone after particularly hard days. The hill where I buried my parents. The stretch of wall where I killed my first chaos-beast at seventeen.
My whole life, captured in stone. Every place that mattered to me, every corner of my existence, recorded and stored like specimens in a collector’s cabinet.
It’s unsettling, but I tell myself it makes sense. Three months of surveillance would require many crystals. Many angles. He was thorough—of course he was thorough. He’s seven hundred years old. He doesn’t do anything by half measures.
Then I reach the back of the room, where the oldest crystals are kept.
These are different. Cloudier. The images inside are harder to see, like they’ve degraded over time—or like they were made with older magic, less refined techniques.
I pick one up, turning it toward the light, curious what Ironhold looked like before I was born, maybe.
What my village was like when his surveillance began.
The image slowly resolves.
My parents’ forge. But not the way I remember it—brighter, newer, with flowers in the window boxes that my mother always tended. The flowers she stopped planting after I turned twelve because she didn’t have time anymore, because the village’s demands kept growing.
And in the image: me. Young. Very young.
Sixteen, maybe.
The year they died.
My hands start to shake.
I set the crystal down carefully—too carefully, like it might shatter, like I might shatter—and pick up another.
This one shows the road outside Ironhold.
The one where bandits attacked my parents’ cart.
The attack I wasn’t there to stop because I was sick in bed with a fever that came out of nowhere.
A fever that kept me home. That kept me alive while they died.
The crystal shows the road, shows the bend where it happened. Shows the cart. Shows—
I pick up another crystal. And another. And another.
My hands are trembling so badly I almost drop them. The images blur as I cycle through—not from the magic degrading, but from the tears building in my eyes.
Fifteen. A crystal showing me at fifteen, gangly and awkward, training with my father’s old sword.
Fourteen. Standing at my mother’s elbow while she cooked, my face round with baby fat I don’t remember having.
Thirteen. Twelve. Eleven.
Eleven.
I’m holding a crystal that shows me at eleven years old, a child, gap-toothed and grinning, playing in the mud outside the forge while my father laughs at something I’ve said.
He didn’t start watching me months ago.
He’s been watching me for thirteen years.
The crystal slips from my fingers and shatters on the floor.
I barely hear it. My ears are ringing, my vision tunneling, my whole body going cold despite the warmth of the mountain. Thirteen years. I was eleven. A child. And somewhere in this fortress, an ancient Fae lord was watching me play in the mud, watching me grow up, watching me become—
Become what?
I grab another crystal from the oldest shelf. Ten years old. Nine. Eight.
Eight.
The image shows a toddler—me, unmistakably me, the same gray eyes, the same stubborn set to my jaw even then—sitting on my father’s shoulders while he walked through the market.
He’s been watching me since I was eight years old.
Sixteen years. Sixteen years of surveillance.
Sixteen years of my entire life, captured and cataloged, every moment recorded without my knowledge or consent.
He watched me learn to walk, learn to talk, learn to hold a sword.
He watched my first skinned knee and my first crush and my first fight.
He watched me bury my parents and become the village protector and grow into the woman who would one day walk into his arena.
He made me walk into that arena.
The realization hits like a physical blow. I stagger back, knocking over a pedestal, sending crystals crashing to the floor. The images fracture and scatter, sixteen years of my life broken into shards around my feet.
He didn’t just watch. He planned.
I grab the crystal showing the road again—the one where my parents died. My hands are shaking so badly I can barely hold it, but I force myself to look. Force myself to examine every corner of the image, looking for something, anything—
And then I see it.
In the corner of the image, half-hidden by trees. A shadow that doesn’t belong. A shape that’s too large, too still, too deliberate to be natural.
Bronze skin. Silver veins.
He was there.
He was there, the day my parents died.
The scream that tears out of me doesn’t sound human.
It echoes off the stone walls, sharp and raw, and I don’t recognize it as coming from my own throat until I feel the burn in my vocal cords.
My hands are moving before I can stop them—sweeping crystals off pedestals, hurling them against the walls, destroying sixteen years of surveillance in a frenzy of grief and rage.
“No.” The word comes out broken. “No, no, no—”
I grab another crystal and see myself at seventeen, standing over the bodies of the chaos-beasts I killed defending the north wall. The attack that came out of nowhere. The attack that killed three villagers and left me with a scar on my hip I still carry.
Another crystal: me at eighteen, collapsing from exhaustion after three days without sleep during a border skirmish. A skirmish that started when raiders appeared from the mountains—from Stone Court’s territory—and targeted our grain stores.
Another: nineteen, burying the village healer who died of a plague I couldn’t cure. A plague that swept through Ironhold and nowhere else, killing a dozen people before it vanished as suddenly as it appeared.
Every tragedy. Every loss. Every moment of suffering that shaped me into the weapon I became.
He watched all of it.
He caused all of it.
The thought crystallizes with horrible clarity.
The bandits who killed my parents—did he send them?
The chaos-beasts that kept attacking our walls—did he direct them to Ironhold?
The plague, the raiders, the border skirmishes—all the things that forced me to become the village protector, that ground down my softness and forged me into steel—
Was any of it real? Was any of it chance?
“The fever,” I whisper, my voice cracking. “The fever that kept me home.”
I pick up a crystal shard and stare at it. The image is fragmented, but I can make out pieces: my childhood bed. My mother’s worried face. A cup of something steaming—medicine, I thought at the time. Medicine she gave me the night before they left.
But what if it wasn’t?
What if the fever wasn’t natural? What if it was engineered, designed to keep me safe while my parents rode to their deaths? What if he needed me alive—needed me orphaned and desperate and alone—because that was the first step in turning me into what I am now?
What if everything that happened to me—every loss, every hardship, every lonely night defending a village that would have collapsed without me—was orchestrated?
Sixteen years.
Sixteen years of my life, manipulated by a monster who was patient enough to wait for his investment to mature.
I fall to my knees among the broken crystals.
The physical pain of the shards cutting into my skin barely registers. It’s nothing compared to the agony ripping through my chest—the dawning horror that my entire life has been a lie.
He didn’t just watch me grow up.
He made me. Shaped me. Destroyed everything I loved and then sat back to observe as I rebuilt myself from the wreckage. Spent sixteen years turning me into the perfect warrior, the perfect omega, the perfect victim for his arena.
And I walked right into his trap.
I thanked him for it.