Chapter 32 #2
Ark felt his chest collapse inward. The walls of his ribs pressed against him. He couldn’t draw a full breath. This couldn’t be the end. It can’t be.
The physician cleared his throat gently.
“I understand how difficult this is, but the Daemaris speaks true. There is only management. Spells to anchor his body when magic strains it. Potions to cool the burning. Rest, when he can afford it. But the symptoms escalate year after year, and a Daemar’s role requires much magic—leading to more fatigue, more organ stress.
Some days he cannot rise from bed. Others, he fools us all with perfect clarity. ”
Ark turned toward the window, his throat too tight to speak as the physician detailed the brutal, clinical reality.
“He has kept it from everyone,” Sir Harland continued. “Your mother, and those of us in the inner circle, have helped shield the truth. The rest of the world still believes he’s the powerful Daemar.”
“When, the entire time, he’s been dying,” Ark murmured.
“He’s been fighting,” his mother corrected. “Every day.”
Ark touched a hand to his temple. Fighting. While he’d been resenting his father. While he’d let old wounds fester into silence. He thought he’d protected himself with distance, but all it had really done was blind him.
And now he sat here, with the truth finally laid bare—too late to take any of it back.
“What are his current treatments?” he asked.
The physician hesitated. “What’s kept him going this long are the best magical stabilizers we have—sigils burned into the body, potion regimens, temporary anchors to prevent magical backlash. But none of these are cures. They only buy time.”
“Is there really no other way?”
“In recent years, there’s been progress in cross-disciplinary medicine—human surgical techniques combined with elven magical stabilization.
In theory, your father could receive transplants for his worst-affected organs.
But the operation itself is only half the challenge.
The other half is keeping him alive through it. ”
Ark’s jaw tightened. “Explain.”
“For that, we need an elf physiomancer to regulate his etheric currents during the procedure. She slows his body without stopping it—stretches the surgeon’s window without risking collapse. If we can stabilize him long enough, the new organs could allow his body to recover to a functional state.”
“In theory,” Ark echoed.
Sir Harland nodded grimly. “It’s only been attempted four times. Two partial successes. One failure. One death.”
Ark exchanged a look with his mother. Both their jaws clenched.
“Can he undergo the surgery?” he asked.
“Your father’s body is weak,” Sir Harland replied. “His magic fights to keep him upright, but it won’t hold much longer. I won’t lie to you—the chance of success is small. But it is still a chance.”
“Or,” his mother said quietly, “we could choose to spend whatever time he has left with him.” Her voice was calm, but Ark heard the strain beneath it.
Sir Harland’s voice gentled. “The decision lies with the patient and the family. But if you’d like to pursue the aggressive path, there are two physicians I’d like you to meet.”
A soft, metallic tinkle split the silence. Ark’s head snapped up.
His mother was already moving, skirt whispering past him as she crossed to the door. She never ran, but every step was urgent, controlled and exact, like a woman long practiced in hiding her panic.
Ark followed, slower. Each step felt heavy, as though wading through tar. He stopped just short of the doorway, unwilling to cross the invisible threshold between past and present.
At the bedside, his mother bent low.
“Kassenor,” she murmured, her fingers brushing the damp hair off his father’s forehead. “You called?”
His eyelids twitched, then opened. The eyes beneath were pale, rimmed with red. They wandered half the room before settling on her. “I sensed . . . our son. But it must’ve been my imagination.”
Ark’s mother turned to him. He stepped out from behind the door.
“I’m here, Father.”
His father’s eyes tracked toward him, slow and unfocused, then sharpened with recognition. For a moment, they only stared. The silence swelled with years of unspoken words.
“You’ve grown,” Kassenor rasped. His voice was hoarse, but it still carried a trace of authority. “How can it be that you seem . . . taller than I remembered?”
“Perhaps it’s because you’ve grown smaller,” Ark said before he could stop himself. He approached and sat on the edge of the bed.
A faint curve tugged at the corner of Kassenor’s mouth. “Illness has a way of humbling even the proud.”
“How are you feeling?”
“Like a demon who’s been dying for over fifty years.”
Ark nodded slowly. Now that they were at the edge of the abyss, the honesty was startling. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Kassenor studied him. “What would you have done differently?”
Ark opened his mouth, then closed it. He didn’t have an answer. Would he have been less angry? Less resentful? Or would he have simply traded one kind of distance for another?
“I don’t know,” he admitted.
Kassenor’s gaze softened. “Neither do I.”
Ark looked at the man who had once loomed like a mountain in his boyhood—the hollowed cheeks, the too-thin hands, the unmistakable evidence of decades spent fighting a battle no one else could see.
“Why did you keep it from me and Oromon?” Ark pressed, his voice low. “You’d rather push us away and have us think you don’t . . . care. Why?”
Pain shone in his father’s eyes, and he didn’t say anything for a long time, his throat working.
“I didn’t want you, and your brother, to carry this burden,” he said.
“I thought if I kept it from you, I could protect you both from it. That, perhaps, when the end comes, we’d be so far apart you wouldn’t grieve for the loss, since I was never there to begin with. ”
Ark let out a laugh—raw, full of disbelief. It had clawed its way out of him, unbidden, like the only response his body had left. “Even if I didn’t grieve your death,” he said, the words scraping out, “I would’ve mourned the loss of what could’ve been.”
He stared at his father, his eyes burning.
“Instead, I widened the chasm between us. I spurned everything you wanted to give me—out of spite. Politics, especially politics. In my heart, I thought it was your greatest love.” He paused, his voice dropping.
“So I built my own world, convinced myself I didn’t need your approval—that I was better off without it.
But I was just building a different kind of distance, wasn’t I?
A way to prove I could succeed without you, while still aching for you to notice. ”
Ark leaned forward, his voice rough. “Do you know what it does to a boy? To practice a spell until his hands shake—all for a moment of his father’s attention?
Only to be told the Daemar is busy?” He shook his head.
“‘Busy’ was the weapon you gave me to bludgeon my own worth with for more than thirty years.”
His chest was heaving. He couldn’t stay here—couldn’t breathe. He felt like his heart was tearing at the seams. He started to rise, to pull away, to find somewhere the walls weren’t closing in.
A trembling hand caught his wrist. “Arkenoth.” His father’s voice was barely a whisper. “Don’t go.”
Ark froze. He looked down at the hand on his wrist—the pale, fragile fingers, the veins visible beneath the skin. This was the hand that had held the Regency Council in its grip. Now it could barely hold him.
Slowly, he sat back down. He didn’t pull his hand away. He let his father hold it, let the thin fingers curl around his.