Time passed differently for Aelira.

 

It did not flow in days or seasons, but in bruises that hardened into calluses, in scrolls studied until her eyes blurred, in the meals left wordlessly at her door.

 

Yuan left her when she was eight. Ten years stretched since then, and the child he left had been carved into something both fierce and unrecognizable.

 

By eighteen, her reflection no longer startled her for its strangeness—but for how much it resembled the mother she could scarcely remember.

 

Her once-soft cheeks had sharpened into high, sculpted lines. Her lips, full and pale, often pressed into silence rather than words. Her skin, though kept fair within the confines of the palace walls, carried the faint etchings of training—subtle scars across her knuckles, the line of an old blade’s graze along her shoulder, a healed welt across her side. Even her body itself had changed: once small and fragile, now lithe and dangerous, every curve tempered with strength. Her waist narrow, her frame balanced, her movements a dance between grace and precision—elegance formed not by luxury, but by survival.

 

Her hair, long and dark as polished obsidian, fell like ink down her back, sometimes braided in the manner of warriors, sometimes left loose when she meditated. And her eyes—emerald, bright and arresting—had lost none of their beauty, but all of their warmth. They no longer widened in fear or wonder; they cut through the world with quiet, unyielding restraint.

 

Vaelen had forged her into something deliberate.

 

She learned to breathe with discipline until her heartbeat was no louder than the whisper of her pulse. To let the weight of the earth steady her when fear clawed in her chest. To stand like stone, to move like water, to strike like fire.

 

Her studies expanded beyond magic. She absorbed the politics of Solhara and its enemies, the delicate balances between kingdoms, the art of rhetoric and silence. She did not train to lead—Kaeyla was the crown. Aelira was the shadow. She learned enough to understand power, but never to wield it openly. She learned to read the intentions of men from the twitch of a hand or the pause before a word. She knew secrets of the throne she would never sit on, because her role was not to rule—it was to protect, unseen.

 

And she learned to fight. Gods, how she fought.

 

Every day her body was tested to breaking. Her muscles learned endurance before strength, precision before power. She fought with blades that were too heavy for her arms until they became light. She fought against shadows summoned by Vaelen, against enchantments designed to force her into exhaustion. She fell, bled, burned her hands on weapons—but rose each time.

 

Because her existence had only one condition: control or annihilation.

 

She had no friends. No laughter. No softness. Vaelen spoke little, and when he did, his words were commands, not comforts. The palace servants avoided her like she was something cursed. The court pretended she didn’t exist.

 

So she grew into silence. She obeyed without pause. She endured without question.

 

By eighteen, she was beautiful—radiant, inhumanly so. But her beauty was the cold beauty of a blade: perfect, sharp, and unyielding.

 

And yet, when night fell and shadows deepened, when the weight of obedience pressed too heavily against her chest, her thoughts curled back to one thing.

 

Her sister.

 

Kaeyla.

 

The name was the only softness left to her, the only ember glowing faintly beneath the ash.