You’ll forgive me if my memory of arriving at court is imprecise.

I was very small. Barely past the age where walking felt like an experiment rather than a certainty. The road into the capital blurred into sound more than sight: wheels on stone, the hush that follows when too many people pretend not to stare.

They brought me through the outer gates just after dawn.

That timing was deliberate. The court liked to believe early light made things gentler. Less suspicious. As if the sun itself could be persuaded to approve of their decisions.

It never does.

I wasn’t raised inside the palace walls before that day. Oh no. I was kept just close enough to be watched, just far enough to avoid… disruption. A sanctioned residence. Outer ward. Safe. Quiet. Containment, dressed up as courtesy.

She did not come to see me. My mother.

Not really.

The maids whispered about it in the way people do when they think babies cannot understand… that my mother had visited a handful of times that first year, always brief, always impatient. That she asked for gold more often than she asked after me. That she never stayed long enough to watch me sleep.

I remember her presence the way one remembers a draft in a room, something passing through, never settling. There was no cruelty in her absence. No rage. Just… vacancy. Disinterest. A quiet choosing of herself over anything that required endurance.

Even then, I understood.

Disappointment is a strange thing when you have not yet learned to expect comfort. I did not cry for her. I simply noted the pattern and set it aside. Humans, I learned early, often confuse love with convenience… and mistake detachment for strength.

It was not malice that kept her away.

It was weakness.

By the time they decided I could be introduced to the court, I had already been weaned, already steadied on my feet, already learned which silences were dangerous and which ones were simply empty.

Maelin lifted me down from the carriage herself.

Her hands were warm. Always warm. The kind of warmth that doesn’t ask permission before it stays.

“Easy now,” she murmured, smoothing my sleeve as though silk could calm a room full of cowards. “Lots of noise today. You don’t have to listen to all of it.”

I did anyway.

The court unfolded in layers, ministers in their ceremonial blacks and golds, attendants too eager to please, guards standing very still and failing miserably to look uninterested. They looked at my hair first. Always the hair. Then the eyes.

Then they looked away, as if they had laid their eyes upon something they shouldn’t have.

And perhaps they had.

I took one step. Then another.

Maelin stayed close, unbowed, unawed. She did not kneel. She did not bow. She did not pretend I was fragile.

Someone whispered something sharp.

Someone laughed too quickly.

I reached for Maelin’s sleeve.

She squeezed my hand.

That should have been warning enough.

They didn’t take her immediately.

That would have been crude.

Instead, they did what frightened people always do… they made it administrative.

Her quarters were reassigned.

Her access was delayed.

Her presence quietly redirected.

Small things. Polite things. Cowardly things.

I noticed when she didn’t come that evening.

The room felt wrong without her. Too hollow. Too loud. As if the walls themselves were holding their breath.

I called her name.

Once.

Twice.

No answer.

Something inside me pulled.

Not panic.

Not fear.

Recognition.

The scream tore out of me before anyone could stop it.

It wasn’t loud.

It wasn’t shrill.

It was deep.

The world answered.

Stone cracked. Chairs slid backward as if shoved by invisible hands. A ceremonial blade tore free from the wall and buried itself an inch from a minister’s eye.

Another lodged itself beside a heart.

No one moved.

No one breathed.

I screamed again.

The mirror broke.

Not delicately.

Not quietly.

It split with a sound like thunder striking glass.

Zarek had not intended to cross realms that day. He had not intended to be seen.

But some bonds don’t require summoning.

He stepped through shadow and reflection alike, the air bending around him as law peeled away. The guards never saw him enter. The court only felt the sudden, unmistakable pressure of being observed correctly for the first time.

“Ignorant,” he said softly, to no one who would survive hearing it. “You mistake proximity for permission.”

The man holding Maelin never felt the blow, only the absence of certainty, of memory, of the moment itself unraveling.

Zarek knelt in front of her.

“You’re not meant for this,” he told her gently. “But you were never meant to be unguarded either.”

She blinked at him.

Calm. Confused. Unafraid.

He took her hand and returned her to me as though restoring a misplaced truth.

He erased what needed erasing.

Not everything.

Maelin knelt in front of me, checking my face with shaking hands.

“I’m here,” she said softly. “I didn’t go anywhere.”

I believed her.

I did not believe the court.

I remember the mirror cracking.

I remember the way the shadows leaned toward him like recognition.

I remember looking up into eyes that had already decided something irreversible.

Zarek sealed the fracture slowly, deliberately, leaving a scar where the glass refused to forget.

Then he was gone.

After that, no one touched Maelin again.

No one reassigned her.

No one questioned her presence.

No one explained themselves.

They didn’t apologize.

They adjusted.

Oh… they never tell this part correctly.

You’ll hear that I screamed. That the palace shook. That a demon lord appeared from nowhere and vanished just as quickly. They’ll make it sound chaotic. Accidental. Dangerous.

It wasn’t.

They removed Maelin because they thought love was leverage.

They learned otherwise.

What you should understand — what they never did — is this:

I didn’t call him.

I didn’t have to.

He didn’t require summoning.

Some vows don’t need words.

Some protections move before you know you’re in danger.

They like to pretend this was the day I learned to wield power.

That’s adorable.

This was the day the world learned I already had it.

Because they had learned something important.

Removing Maelin was not punishment.

It was provocation.

They had hoped to shape me into something manageable.

Instead, they discovered that I did not ask for what was mine.

The world simply moved.

And if you’re wondering whether that frightened them…

Yes.

It should have.