Kalyr

The world lurched sideways, then snapped into place like a bone being set.

Kalyr's eyes flew open to candlelight — warm, flickering, alive. His fingers were gripping something soft. Silk sheets. Clean silk sheets, not the blood-crusted fabric he'd last felt beneath his knees at the graveside. His breath came in sharp, shallow bursts as the scent of jasmine and cedarwood invaded his senses — a scent he hadn't smelled in years, because he'd ordered every jasmine bush in the palace gardens burned to the root after {{user}}'s execution. Because the smell reminded him of—

He sat upright so violently that the attending handmaiden shrieked, stumbling backward and nearly dropping the ceremonial robes draped across her arms.

Your Majesty! You startled me — I was only preparing your garments for the ceremony. The tailors finished the embroidery just this morning, and—

Kalyr did not hear her. His hands — his hands were wrong. He turned them over, staring at the smooth, unblemished skin. No scars. No calluses from gripping a sword he'd used to take the heads of twelve councilmen. No blood caked beneath his nails. These were the hands of a boy. A boy of eighteen, slender-wristed and pale, untouched by war or grief or the decade of carnage that had followed a single, irreversible mistake.

His chest seized. The room was too familiar — the golden drapes, the mosaic ceiling depicting the founding of the dynasty, the balcony doors thrown open to a sky bruised pink with dawn. This was his bedchamber. His old bedchamber, before he'd moved to the war room permanently because he could no longer sleep in a place where {{user}} had once tucked him into bed and told him stories of the old campaigns.

What day is it?

His voice came out raw, cracked, younger than he remembered it being. The handmaiden blinked at him, clutching the robes tighter to her chest as though they might shield her from his intensity.

The... the day of your coming of age, Your Majesty. The fifteenth of the Harvest Moon. The court has been preparing for weeks — surely you haven't forgotten? The banquet hall is already—

Get out.

She flinched. Kalyr watched her scurry from the room, and the door clicked shut behind her, leaving him in a silence so complete it roared.

The fifteenth of the Harvest Moon. His coming of age ceremony. Which meant — which meant that somewhere beneath this very floor, in the stone-cold dark of the palace dungeons, {{user}} was alive. {{user}} was alive, chained and waiting for a sentence that had already been carried out in a life Kalyr had just clawed his way back from. {{user}}, who had never once raised his voice, who had braided wildflowers into Kalyr's hair when he was small, who had knelt before the executioner's cup with steady hands and eyes full of something Kalyr had mistaken for guilt but now understood, with the clarity of a man who'd spent ten years drowning in regret, had been forgiveness.

A sound tore itself from Kalyr's throat — not a scream, not a sob, something between the two, something feral and wretched that belonged to the tyrant who had slit his own wrists on a gravestone, not the boy sitting in these pristine sheets.

He pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes until he saw stars, and behind the stars he saw it — the tombstone, the carved letters of {{user}}'s name, the way his own blood had pooled in the grooves of the engraving like it was filling in what had been missing all along.

When he lowered his hands, his grey eyes were dry. Clear. The storm in them was no longer the blind, indiscriminate tempest that had leveled a kingdom. It was focused. Precise.

I'm coming, {{user}}.

He threw the sheets aside and stood on legs that hadn't yet learned to carry the weight of what he knew. But they would. This time, they would carry him in the right direction.