From that day forward, little Mui never smiled again.
He didn't cry either. He stopped wishing for things. The few survivors of the valley found a convenient explanation for everything that had happened that night, and the explanation was him.
The massacre. Leon's disappearance. Lord Corvus and Iriz, both dead in ways that the survivors described in whispers for years afterward. All of it, somehow, traced back to a five year old boy.
The name Anathema stopped being an insult and became something else. A title. A verdict written before he was old enough to appeal it.
Ryuuken and Rui spared for reasons Aurelith had not explained and nobody dared to ask tried everything they could think of. They sat with him.
They talked at him when he wouldn't talk back. They stood physically between him and the crowds that gathered with knives and old grief and the particular cruelty of people who need someone to blame and have found a candidate too young to fight back.
Nothing reached him.
He accepted every insult with the same face blank, empty, the face of someone who has already agreed with what is being said and finds the repetition unnecessary. He didn't search for Leon. He had lost the desire even for that. Whatever had made him want rice cakes and sled rides and a future worth wanting had gone somewhere Ryuuken and Rui couldn't follow, and what remained was quieter and harder and entirely self-contained.
At twelve, he became the head of House Corvus.
Ryuuken became his Imperial Knight. Rui became his most trusted advisor. Together the three of them rebuilt what Lord Corvus's ambitions had destroyed the reputation, the technique, the discipline that made the Corvus name mean something again in the north.
The people of the valley accepted the results and continued to hate him regardless.
He accepted their hatred because he thought it was correct. He had been there that night. He had been helpless. He had done nothing. He considered that a debt no amount of achievement could repay.
The same helplessness that had consumed him then was consuming him now.
The mist wasn't working.
He had known for several minutes. He kept generating it anyway because stopping meant accepting what was in front of him and he hadn't found the part of himself that could do that yet.
His body was paying the price. He couldn't produce his own mana he never could so he kept pulling it from the environment in amounts his body wasn't built to handle. The cuts came one by one, opening across his arms and chest and face, deep and jagged, blood running down his skin and dripping off his fingers onto the burned deck boards. He barely registered them.
Not again. Not again. Not again.
He looked up at Emerion floating in the sky silver hair, blue flames building between his hands, mana output that dwarfed anything Anathema had encountered in person and found that the lines were blurring.
He knew it wasn't her. Some part of him knew. But the flames were the same color. The pressure in the air was the same weight. And helplessness, it turned out, had a very specific flavor that didn't change depending on who was causing it.
He looked down at his sword. The firelight caught the blade.
He thought about Leon's laugh. Ryuuken stealing the last rice cake without apology. Rui's terrible singing delivered with complete confidence. A sled going down a mountain so fast it felt like the world had decided, just for a moment, to be exactly what it should be.
He raised his sword and put everything he had left into one word.
"Velarium Noctis!"
The blade hit the deck and the mist that answered wasn't controlled or careful it was everything at once, ripped from the air and the water and whatever the environment had remaining, and the cost of it tore new cuts across every surface of his skin.
He coughed blood. It hit the deck boards in a red spray.
He didn't stop.
The fog exploded outward from the impact in a wave that swallowed the entire ship deck, rigging, every surface and rose until the sky above vanished completely into white. From wherever Emerion was floating, the world below simply ceased to exist.
Anathema found the gap in the fire cage.
It was small. He knew what crossing it would cost. He went through anyway.
The blue flames weren't fire in any normal sense and his mist dampened maybe half of what they wanted to do to him. The other half hit immediately and completely his skin sizzling on contact, the smell of it reaching him before the pain did, the pain arriving a half second later and making up for the delay.
He kept moving.
He found them on the other side. Ryuuken and Rui, lying on the charred boards, chests moving in the shallow rhythm of people whose bodies had made the decision to shut down when the oxygen ran out.
"Ryuuken." He grabbed his shoulder. Shook him. Nothing. "Ryuuken, get up. Now."
Silence.
"Rui." He moved to the other one. Shook him harder. "Rui, come on. We need to move."
Still nothing.
Something cracked open in his chest that he hadn't felt crack in nine years. Not dramatically. No sound. Just a fracture in something he had spent a very long time building, and through it without his permission, without any decision on his part something came through that he had forgotten was still in there.
"Guys." His voice came out wrong. Smaller than he intended. "Wake up, please. I'm begging you."
His tears fell onto his burned hands and found every open cut at once and he didn't notice because he was still shaking Ryuuken's shoulder and waiting for a response that wasn't coming.
Above the fog, Emerion turned slowly in the white silence.
They were directly below me when the mist came up. They have to still be there.
He couldn't see anything. The fog had completely cut off his mana detection Anathema had put everything into it, which meant he was still down there somewhere, which meant this wasn't over.
He scanned the white surface below him, looking for any break in it. Any flicker. Any sign at all.
There a faint blue light, right at the position where the two guards had been lying. Small, unsteady, the kind of glow that comes from residual flame rather than active casting.
That's them.
He stopped thinking and released everything he had built the entire torrent, all at once, directed straight down toward the light. The column of blue flames descended through the fog and vaporized it on contact and hit the deck below with everything it had been holding.
Anathema looked up.
The mist was already burning away above him, the column coming down through it fast, and in the same moment he looked down at his own shoulder and saw the small blue flame still sitting there a piece of the cage fire his mist hadn't fully cleared, burning quietly on his jacket this whole time without him noticing.
The blue light Emerion had targeted.
Was him.
I really am a curse, he thought. The thought was flat and tired, the thought of someone who has had it many times before and found it no more or less true with repetition.
He looked at Ryuuken. At Rui.
He stood up and stepped in front of them and spread his arms.
"I won't let you harm them again!"
From her position at the edge of the deck, Arlienne watched.
She had her trident resting against her shoulder, her expression carrying the particular quality it got when something had moved past the point where she needed to intervene and become something she could simply observe. She watched Anathema stand in front of his guards with his arms spread and his burned body and his face still wet with tears and the column of blue fire coming down toward him.
"I guess everyone is a hero and a villain at the same time," she said, to no one in particular.
"What in the world is happening on my ship?!"
The Captain came through the door with the energy of a man who had been watching from a window for exactly as long as his patience allowed and had now run out. Grey mustache. Three gold stars on his shoulders.
The expression of someone whose property has been on fire for several minutes and who has decided that this stops now.
He read the deck in two seconds flat the fog remnants, the burn marks, the unconscious guards, the boy standing in front of them with his arms out, and above everything the column of blue flames descending fast.
He acted.
He pulled from the ocean on both sides of the hull at once two columns of seawater rising and merging into a wall that placed itself directly between the fire and the deck. The collision was immediate. Blue flames met the water and died.
For one moment the deck went quiet and the Captain exhaled and it looked like it was over.
Then the water hit Anathema.
The flames had transferred everything into it in the instant before they died all that heat, all that energy, nowhere to go except forward and what reached Anathema wasn't water anymore. It was just below boiling. It hit him square in the face and chest and drove him backward off his feet and the sound he made was the sound of someone being hit by something that has bypassed every defense and reached somewhere completely unprotected.
The Captain stared.
Arlienne stared.
Anathema hit the deck and lay still. His body showed everything the night had cost him the mana cuts layered over the cage burns layered over this, a complete record written across his skin. His chest moved. Barely, but it moved.
The Captain looked at the damage to his ship. Then at Emerion and Arlienne. Then at his ship again.
"You will have to explain this!" he barked, his fury barely contained as he turned on them both.
"He started it!"
"Anathema is a monster!"
"The silver haired guy is a hero!"
"He's our savior!"
"He saved the day!"
The voices came from every direction windows, upper decks, doorways all at once.
The Captain looked at his passengers and then at Emerion, who had just landed on the deck and was looking at the crowd with the expression of someone who has woken up in the middle of a sentence and is trying to locate the beginning of it.
"Huh? Yes... um, why are they cheering? For whom?" Emerion asked, genuinely confused by the waving crowds and the chants.
"Well, looks like you've gained some unexpected attention again," Arlienne smirked.
"You damaged my property, you know that?" the Captain growled, stepping toward them.
"Well, forgive us for saving the life of an innocent kid. We should have cared for your precious property more," Arlienne replied, meeting the Captain's explosive glare with a cool look of her own.
"Here is the sum for your damages," a stern, youthful voice cut in.
A heavy bag of coins hit the Captain in the face.
He spun around.
A girl of around fourteen stood with her arms crossed and an expression of complete satisfaction at her own accuracy. Short black hair cut to her shoulders. Sharp eyes.
The posture of someone who has been told to behave many times and has arrived at a complicated relationship with the concept.
"Nyxelle."
The woman beside her had golden blonde hair and a natural elegance in the way she stood unhurried, straight-backed, the kind of presence that doesn't announce itself because it doesn't need to.
Her light blue eyes were warm, and when she reached out and lightly caught Nyxelle's ear between two fingers, she did it with the ease of someone who has performed this exact motion many times.
"Mother, he was being a jerk!" Nyxelle pouted, her hair swaying with the indignation of it.
Her mother sighed once, released her ear, and turned to the Captain with a smile that was both genuinely warm and completely final.
"I hope this sum will cover your repairs," she said softly.
The Captain opened his mouth. Looked at her face properly. Closed it.
"Lady Seraphyne." He straightened. The anger in his posture deflated several degrees without him appearing to decide to let it. "You're aboard. You-- you didn't need to--"
"I insist. Children make mistakes at this age. I hope you won't hold them accountable," Seraphyne said, her soft voice carrying a quiet weight as her eyes moved briefly to the Dawnveil siblings a glance that lasted one second and held considerably more than a glance usually did.
"If you say so," the Captain said, and bowed.
"Wonderful." Seraphyne turned to Nyxelle. "Now. Those three injured boys need to be carried inside. One at a time please."
Nyxelle looked at Anathema and his guards with the expression of someone significantly revising their expectations for the evening.
"All three?"
"All three."
Nyxelle sighed the sigh of someone who wants their objection on record even if it changes nothing, and moved to comply.
"And you two." Seraphyne looked at Emerion and Arlienne with the same calm warmth she had turned on everyone else. "Come with me. You've both been in a fight whether you're showing it or not."
Emerion's throat moved. He knew exactly who this woman was. The knowledge sat in his chest alongside the strong suspicion that she knew exactly who they were as well.
Arlienne appeared at his shoulder and spoke at a volume meant only for him.
"Let me handle the talking. Don't panic."
He nodded.
Behind them the passengers were still calling out as the ship eased toward the nearby island hands waving from windows, voices carrying across the water:
"Thank you for saving us all!"
"Thank you for saving our children!"
"You did great beating that Anathema!"
"He's a hero!"
Emerion nodded at each of them with the polite uncertainty of someone receiving credit for something he hadn't fully processed yet.
Arlienne, walking slightly ahead, noticed the Captain at the railing. He was no longer looking at his passengers or his damaged deck. He was having a tense, low-voiced conversation with several figures on a second vessel that had pulled alongside theirs a ship that looked like it had been maintained with the specific minimum required to keep it floating and no more. The kind of ship that didn't want to be looked at directly.
She noted it. Filed it. Kept walking.
"Are you coming?" Seraphyne's voice came from the interior doorway, patient and warm.
"Coming," Arlienne said.
They followed her inside.