Chapter 6 #2
The world tilts. I’m standing in the archives, holding my mother’s words in my hands, and I’m also standing beside a pyre twelve years ago, watching flames consume the person who had made the Keep feel like a home.
I remember the smell. Wood smoke and something sweeter beneath, something I didn’t understand until years later. I remember my father’s hand on my shoulder, heavy and trembling. I remember not crying, because princes don’t cry, because I had to be strong for my father who had just lost his wife.
I was twelve. I should have been allowed to cry.
She was murdered. She was murdered, and I spent twelve years thinking the world was simply cruel. Thinking grief was just something that happened, that took mothers from children and joy from fathers. Thinking there was no one to blame, no justice to seek, nothing to do but endure.
Rage should be the answer. It’s always been the answer—when I look at the Triumvirate, when I imagine Juk’s smile, when my father’s face surfaces in the dark.
Instead there is only emptiness. A hollow where the fury should live.
Grief so old it’s calcified, cracking open to reveal fresh pain underneath.
Mother.
I remember her smile. The way she laughed—a private delight she couldn’t contain, spilling out at the worst moments and the best. The songs she used to sing when she thought no one was listening—old melodies, human melodies she’d learned from travelling musicians, her voice carrying through the Keep’s corridors on quiet evenings.
The way she smelled of jasmine and ink, because she was always reading, always learning, always curious about everything.
She didn’t return. Because Juk killed her. Because she found his corruption and threatened to expose it and he decided that her life was worth less than his stolen money.
Twelve years. Twelve years of lies. Twelve years of thinking the world was random when it was just corrupt.
“Zorath.”
Fable’s voice breaks through the downward pull. Her hand finds my arm—not my hand, not my face, just my arm, a grounding point in a world that’s trying to shake apart.
“We can prove it.” Her voice is quiet. Steady.
The voice of someone who has spent years building cases out of evidence and documentation.
“We can prove all of it. Your mother, your father, the falsified records, the systematic cover-up. We can give you justice, Zorath. Real justice, not just vengeance.”
I look at her. This human woman who has handed me more pain than anyone since my father’s death. Who has spent two years investigating murders that weren’t her concern, building cases that could get her killed, hiding evidence in places the Triumvirate never thought to look.
Who brushed her fingers across my cheekbone an hour ago and saw something in me worth saving.
She’s still pale from the flight through the passages, still breathless from keeping pace with me, still clutching evidence that could reshape a kingdom. And she’s looking at me with something I haven’t seen in three years.
Not fear. Not calculation. Not the careful assessment of someone weighing my usefulness against my danger.
Concern. Genuine concern, for me, for the wounds she’s just reopened.
“Why?” The question comes out broken. “Why do this? Why spend years of your life exposing crimes that have nothing to do with you?”
“Because truth matters.” Her gaze doesn’t waver. “Because your mother died trying to do the right thing, and your father died because he trusted the wrong people, and you’ve spent three years becoming something you hate because you thought there was no other way.”
Her hand tightens on my arm. Not painful—steadying.
Anchoring me to the present when the past is trying to drag me under.
Her fingers are small against my sleeve, delicate in a way that should make them seem fragile.
They don’t. They feel like the only solid thing in a world that keeps fracturing around me.
“There’s another way. Let me help you find it.”
Every wall I’ve built says to step back. The armor of rage and cold purpose that has kept me alive for three years—it says that caring about someone in a kingdom this broken is dangerous. That letting someone see the wounds beneath the stone is suicide. The walls say all of that.
I stay.
Her hand on my arm is warm. Real. The first gentle contact I’ve allowed myself since my father died. And the way she’s looking at me—hope and determination and something fiercer beneath, something that mirrors the impossible wanting building in my chest.
I’ve trained myself to need nothing. To want nothing beyond vengeance. To hollow out everything that might make me vulnerable until nothing remained but the weapon I needed to become.
She’s making me remember what it feels like to want something else.
“Show me.” My voice is rough. Raw. “Show me everything you’ve found. Help me understand what they took from my family.”
Her face eases for a heartbeat. Relief, maybe. Or resolve. Or something deeper, something I’m not ready to name.
“I will.” She releases my arm—reluctantly, I think, though I might be imagining that. “But we need to move. Kreth knows I’ve been investigating. By now he’s realized we escaped the market. The archives will be one of the first places he looks.”
She’s right. The tactical reality cuts through the grief, forcing my mind back to survival. We have evidence. We have proof. But proof means nothing if we’re dead before we can use it.
“Can you carry everything?”
“I’ll have to leave some.” Her expression tightens. “The less critical documents. Copies I can reconstruct from memory if needed.”
“Then take what matters most. We leave in five minutes.”
She moves immediately, her efficiency replacing emotion in the space of a heartbeat.
I watch her work—the careful selection, the ruthless prioritization, the way her hands move through documents she’s spent years organizing.
She knows every paper in these archives.
Knows which ones matter, which ones can be sacrificed, which ones will build the case that brings down the Triumvirate.
She came here as a punishment, expected to fail quietly and disappear. Instead, she’s building the foundation for a revolution. Handing me weapons I never knew existed. Offering me something I’d stopped believing was possible.
Hope.
The feeling is dangerous. I know that.
But so is despair. And I’ve been drowning in despair, letting it shape me into something my parents wouldn’t recognize. Maybe it’s time to try something different.
“Ready.” Fable straightens, her arms full of bundles, her expression focused and determined. “The passage we came through—”
The archive doors slam open.
The sound echoes through the stone chamber, violent and final. I spin, my hand finding my hammer’s haft, my body positioning itself between Fable and the threat.
Kreth fills the doorway.
His massive form blocks the light from the corridor beyond, casting a shadow that stretches across the archive floor. A dozen guards flank him—more in the corridor behind, their torches casting flickering orange across his scarred face.
And he’s smiling.
“The prince and the human spy.” His voice is gravel and satisfaction. “How convenient.”
Behind me, I hear Fable’s sharp intake of breath. Her footsteps shifting, searching for escape routes that don’t exist.
“She’s been busy, your little archivist.” Kreth advances slowly, savoring the moment.
“My people found her workspace. The hidden documents, the pattern analysis, the evidence of her investigation.” His smile widens.
“We burned it all. But I suspect the truly damning materials are what you’re holding right now. ”
His gaze drops to the papers clutched in my hands. My mother’s letters. The proof of her murder.
“Those look important.” He extends one massive hand, palm up. “I think you’d better give them to me.”
Movement behind us. Guards filing in through the side entrance—the one Fable didn’t know existed, the one I should have warned her about. We’re surrounded. Outnumbered. Trapped in the archives where my mother’s truth has waited twelve years to be found.
Negotiation would be the measured response. Every tactical instinct says so. But Fable is standing behind me, and Kreth is smiling across all the buried truth between us, and the measured response has never once felt like enough.
I look at Fable. She’s pale, frightened, clutching evidence worth dying for. But she meets my gaze steadily. No pleading for me to surrender. No sign that she expects me to choose my survival over hers.
She trusts me. After everything she’s seen, everything she knows about what I am, she trusts me to do the right thing.
Make the blood mean something.
I turn back to Kreth. To the man who killed my father. Who killed my mother. Who has spent years destroying my family while I waited for the right moment to strike.
The moment is here.
My hammer clears its loop.
“You want these documents?” I bare my tusks in something that isn’t quite a smile. “Come and take them.”