and the sacred daughter vanished into a wind,
the Betrayer wept upon no altar.
She did not wail. She did not tear her garments.
No. She folded her grief into a blade—
honed it upon memory,
and named each wound a mercy.
The Forest had taken her child,
and the Prince had denied her warmth.
Leah awoke beside a still-sleeping Leon, who by now had all but moved in. Divan, to her relief, showed none of Kildra’s possessiveness. The WISP rarely interfered, surfacing only to murmur strange insights to his Herald before vanishing again into silence.
She had once thought Kildra’s clinginess was an exaggeration—something whispered about in Herald circles with a knowing smirk. But seeing it firsthand had reshaped her opinion. She used to dream of a different life—just her and Chen, unburdened by that golden, insufferable bird.
But Chen was dead. Officially, at least. And she had made her bed.
There was no version of the future where she could survive the shame of his return. Not if he looked at her with forgiveness in those eyes. Not if he tried to understand.
No—he had to remain dead. That was the only way the story worked. That was the only way she worked.
Yesterday, she’d made it official. A contract filed through her console, wrapped in just enough bureaucratic salt to sting whoever opened it. The entry read simple, surgical:
Target: Political upstart claiming to be Gru Noblemind, Reborn. Status: Disruptive Asset. Terminate upon confirmation.
Soon, she hoped, the “Chen Problem,” as she’d come to call it, would resolve itself.
But first—Cindra.
The girl had been hiding in her rooms for two days now, refusing meals, ignoring knocks, and answering messages with silence. Leah had told herself it was grief. Or sulking. Or perhaps just a Tekniak phase—though Cindra wasn’t even that.
Still, it needed addressing. Before anything else moved forward, the child had to be brought back into alignment.
Leah stood, dressing her naked body in her house dress and smoothing her sleeves with practiced calm, and made her way down the hall.
The house itself was massive, as expected from a Great House of their stature. To say Cindra had an apartment of rooms wouldn’t be much of an exaggeration.
Servants brought her meals to a private kitchenette, laid them out in the sitting room, and quietly left. They reported she hadn’t been eating.
That concerned the mother in Leah. Cindra was only twelve—just on the cusp of her rebellious stage, she understood—but the instinct to make her eat still lingered. It wasn’t rational. It was bone-deep.
“If she was eating, things would be fine.”
That single thought stuck in Leah’s mind like a burr she couldn’t shake.
It was foolish. She knew that. But it comforted her more than any report ever could.
She reached the entrance to the suite and knocked just before entering. Not that Cindra would have heard her—unless she was in the sitting room or kitchenette—but it was a cultural formality.
Leah had broken so many cultural norms lately that she felt obligated to uphold the smaller ones, if only to balance out the karma. The thought amused her, and a laugh escaped under her breath.
“Leah, are you backing into superstition now, you foolish woman?”
She shook her head at herself and stepped inside.
The central sitting room was pristine—immaculate, as always, after the servants had done their work. But it was already well into the morning, and by now Cindra would usually have left a chaos of presence in her wake: books strewn across couches, clothes discarded in half-thought arrangements, whatever gadget or theory she was tinkering with layered across the floor in stratified piles.
But this—this was untouched.
And that worried her.
She moved immediately to the kitchenette.
Breakfast sat untouched.
Cindra’s favorite dishes—items she had personally instructed the kitchen staff to prepare for her “tantruming” moods—were arrayed neatly across the counter. Still warm beneath their thermal domes. Unspoiled. Unmoved.
Not even a spoon out of place.
She lifted each dome one by one, letting the steam rise into the air. The scents were familiar—warm, soft, nostalgic. She held still, hoping, with one last irrational wish, that the smell might stir her daughter from the bedroom. That Cindra would emerge barefoot and grumpy, offer a sudden hug and a muffled “sorry,” and the day could begin like it used to.
The fantasy lingered for a few minutes longer than it should have.
When no footsteps came, Leah lowered the final dome with a quiet sigh and turned toward the bedroom.
Entering the bedroom, she was met with a surprising sight.
Clean.
Immaculate.
A sight she should have anticipated.
The servants had done their job well. Too well. The tidiness reflected back at her in the mirrored panels of the built-in closets across the room—massive things, deep enough to walk into and get lost.
Leah stepped forward and opened them, calling out, “Cindra?”
No reply.
“Cindra!” she cried again, voice sharper, louder—only to taper into a whisper as silence answered her back.
She knew.
As a final check, she moved to the rear section of the wardrobe, where outdoor gear was kept—hiking cloaks, traveling boots, and old expedition packs.
Two sets were missing.
The boots. The overcoat. Both gone.
Two backpacks missing from a rack of many—bags designed from smart material, cut in the old Red Guard style. Gifts from her father.
Leah exhaled slowly, a whisper more admission than sound.
“So. Not a tantrum, it seems.”
She stood there a moment longer, staring at the empty rack.
“Two days,” she murmured. “Can get far. But first—where?”
Her voice was steady again. Cooling. Shifting gears.
She turned from the closet, instinctively tempted to head straight to her study and issue a full network warrant—mobilize the Telle, flag merchant docks, send a trace through the orbital relay.
But no. Not yet.
She would walk the city first.
If Cindra had simply wandered, if she’d gone to a friend or tutor or into one of her strange private moods, then it would be wasteful—and obvious—to deploy resources prematurely.
Leah smoothed her sleeves again. Composure first. Surveillance second.
Let the city show its truth.
There were only three places her child would visit in the regular course of a day—and a fourth, if she’d actually left the city. Leah wasn’t ready to face that last one. Not yet. A departure would mean intent. Would mean betrayal. Would mean the past catching up to her in the shape of her daughter.
So she began with the familiar.
The schoolhouse.
It stood on the western ridge of the inner borough—a massive slab of concrete and logic, eight stories high and older than most of its teachers. Built during the Tower’s second architectural wave, it was designed to handle over four thousand students at maximum rotation. Wide glass corridors formed hollow squares within each floor, intersected by thick-walled lecture halls, engineering labs, and long recreational galleries.
Automated carts ran to and from the complex every cycle, ferrying students from across the borough like clockwork. Everything timed to a fractional standard—a legacy of the old M1 WHISPs who still optimized the curriculum. The building itself bore no warmth. It functioned. Perfectly.
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Fresh-eyed Leah had helped fund its third-level expansion nearly twenty years ago, during the city’s last education reform. As the new Lady of a newly risen Great House, she had even given a speech at its re-dedication—full of hope, full of scripted dreams.
Chen hadn’t cared for any of it, of course. Not the ceremony. Not the title. Not even the house they moved into. He said walls were only useful when the world was trying to bury you.
She had convinced herself, back then, that he’d grow into it. That stability was just something he didn’t know he wanted yet.
She’d never once walked these halls with her daughter.
Now she walked those polished floors alone, surrounded by the efficiency of a city he never loved.
She quickly found the entrance attendant—a bored-looking woman tapping through retinal logs—and inquired about her daughter’s recent visits.
The answer came back too easily.
“Last recorded entry was thirty-two days ago,” the attendant said. “She wasn’t attending. She was guest-teaching. Second floor, Lecture Hall B. Something about mathematical calculations in orbital decay—Golden Age Studies Department.”
Leah stared at the woman, trying to keep her expression neutral.
She hadn’t known any of that.
She left the building without another word, moving through the automated doors and down the shallow ramp that overlooked the garden tier.
Her thoughts caught on a single phrase, looping again and again as her heels clicked against the path:
But she’s only twelve years old.
Only twelve…
The words sounded smaller each time she said them.
As if she were trying to convince someone who was no longer listening.
The next place she would possibly visit was her tutor, Madras, whose residence was not far from the school—a convenient arrangement given his profession.
His home was modest: a two-story structure wedged between an administrative archive and a transport hub, likely rented through one of the academic guilds. The lower floor served as his office—cluttered, no doubt, with papers—while the upper floor, with its narrow balcony and mismatched windows, was where he lived.
Leah approached the entrance, suddenly aware of how little she truly knew about the man who had, for nearly a year, shaped her daughter’s thoughts more consistently than she had.
The door opened quickly.
“My Lady!” Madras exclaimed, surprised. “What do I owe the pleasure of seeing you today, Lady Deau?”
The use of her name irked her. Leon had been pressuring her to change it for days—to say he was moving fast was an understatement—and Madras’s formal greeting brought that unwanted thought back to the surface. She pushed it aside.
“I’m looking for Cindra,” Leah said plainly. “She’s run off.”
“Oh! Oh my,” Madras stammered, wringing his hands. “That… would explain the cancellation I received. I thought I—well, I feared I’d offended you somehow, Mistress.”
He looked genuinely unsettled. The sort of man who dealt in equations and historical axioms—not disappearances.
“She hasn’t contacted me since,” he said quickly. “You’re welcome to come in and look around, if you like—I have nothing to hide from one such as yourself, my lady! I only want to help find that genius and ensure her safety.”
He rattled on, stepping aside, voice climbing with each sentence.
“Soon enough, it’ll be me who needs tutoring from her,” he added with a nervous laugh.
Leah stood there. Quietly judging the man before her. If he was lying he was a genius actor keeping the same role from the start of her interactions with him.
“That’s fine, Madras. I know you wouldn’t lie about this.”
She almost asked if he had any idea where Cindra might have gone—any place she’d spoken of, even in passing—but thought better of it. The less he knew, the safer it would be. Safer for him. Safer for her.
It was already bad enough that this visit would be in the rumor mill before the hour turned.
She headed next to the Central Library—a monolithic structure built to cradle a single, vaulted Calder Tablet, one of the few remaining from the Golden Age. It had been the city’s foundation—literally. From that one sliver of knowledge, the Last City had been designed, constructed, and refined.
Every data terminal within the structure was hard-linked to the master slate. Every search, every access request, every node: registered, catalogued, and controlled.
Leah approached the main desk and, invoking her house’s weight, instructed the attendant to pull her daughter’s most recent inquiry history.
What came back made her stomach tighten.
Norte maps. Cultural profiles. Language coursework. Background on forest-based dialects and travel customs.
Everything one would need… for a trip to look for her father, as she had said she would.
Leah stood still for a long moment, reading the list again. Not because she didn’t understand it—but because she did.
With a sour heart and a bad taste in her mouth, she made her way to the port.
As with the library, she used her house’s authority to press past the Merchant Guild’s usual protocols, directing the attendant to search the departure manifests for any movement in the last two days that might match her daughter.
A number of entries could be construed as possible hits—young passengers, partial names, minor ticket anomalies.
But one line stopped her cold.
Redacted. Carefully.
"Credit to be applied to House Deau with discretion. Lord’s eyes only."
The words blurred for a moment as she stared at them.
Someone had known Cindra’s purpose.
Or at least… Cindra had convinced someone to sanction it.
The listed departure was to a local trade port—a small detour that, at a glance, looked innocuous. But Leah studied the route, cross-referenced the map, and saw the truth.
Cindra was covering her tracks.
This would dead-end most people.
But Leah wasn’t most people.
She returned to her study that evening, locked the door, and placed an information warrant through the Telle’s deep-web backend—this time under her personal authority, with the bounty tripled.
Days passed.
Then, finally, the answer came.
A three-legged trip, booked by pseudonym, masked by staggered port entries.
Destination: Myrsport. A two-week journey, if not delayed.
“Talented teen aboard,” the tagged note read.
“Fixed a ship midway. No ID match. Kept to herself. Traded repair for passage.”
Another line had been added, unofficial, nested in a ghosted sideband Leah almost missed:
“Others had plans for her. Myrsport may never see her arrival.”
Leah read the last line again.
Others had plans for her.
That was intolerable.
She closed the manifest window and opened a high-level Telle operations screen—one used only for off-record acquisitions and loyalty grooming. It wasn’t a bounty. It wasn’t surveillance.
It was courting.
She set up the ticket.
Category: Recruiting
Status: Identified asset
Aliases: Cindra
Region: Norte’am, West Corridor
Age range: 10–13
Potential: Exceptional
Notes/Instructions: “Genius girl. Observe. Approach if viable. Offer sanctuary, not suspicion.”
Then, as if sealing the order with blood, she typed one final line manually:
“No matter what she says—she is ours.
She is mine. —Head”
***
She sat at her desk, about to pause the kill order interface.
All she had to do was press un-authorize. One tap. One confirmation.
And yet.
Her hand was slow to move, clicking with a reluctance unfamiliar to her.
It wasn’t morality. It wasn’t love. It was something colder. Something more frustrating.
She didn’t understand why she wanted him dead so badly. Not really. She told herself it was about shame. Narrative. Control.
But sitting there, reading through logs and manifests, it began to sound hollow.
Why am I trying so hard to erase a man who never fought me?
Her reflection in the monitor looked tired. Not defeated—just old. Old in a way she didn’t like.
She leaned back, eyes scanning the files on her daughter’s disappearance. Routes, behaviors, probabilities. Threads fraying across the continent.
Who would find her?
Not Leon. Not any of her Telle agents—not fast enough. Not gently.
Chen.
It always came back to him. Not because he was perfect. But because he was quiet. And thorough. And when he searched for something—someone—he didn’t stop.
And he didn’t know.
No one had told him about Leon. No one had told him she had moved on. They all thought he was dead.
That gave her an opportunity.
A horrible, seductive little idea wormed its way into her thoughts:
"Just call him."
Her spy feeds were long dead, but his wireless wrist pad—if he still wore it—could likely still receive a ping.
She keyed in the encrypted channel, hesitated once.
And pressed send.
The connection request sent a muted chime through her console. No immediate response. She waited, resisting the urge to pace.
Seconds passed. Then a flicker.
The screen lit.
And there he was.
Chen.
Alive. Disheveled. Surrounded by people cheering behind him. He looked older somehow—but only in the eyes. His face hadn’t aged, not really, but something had receded. A man hollowed by trauma and time.
And yet it had only been a few weeks since they last spoke.
That made it worse.
Something in her soul contracted. Heavy. Unwelcome.
He blinked at her—and then he smiled.
“Leah? Love!”
Her name in his voice was a wound.
She didn’t truly smile. Her lips bent into the shape of one, but her eyes remained fixed, her voice carefully balanced.
“You’re alive,” she said.
“Yes... I... I am,” he replied, voice low, surprised. “Did you think otherwise?”
He frowned, his gaze flicking past the lens. He was already wondering how she had reached him. The clone should have decommissioned the old device, rerouted the channel. This connection should’ve been closed.
“You were reported dead,” she said, cutting off the thought. “Formally. There was a funeral. A state one.”
Chen nodded slowly, eyes never leaving hers. “Were you… were you weeping?”
He gave a weak smile. “I apologize. I’d assumed Kildra would have resurrected me there. A second me, but there.”
A pause followed.
Not silence—just vacancy.
Neither of them knew what to say. Both were speaking into different rooms.
One an actor.
The other—oblivious.
“Kildra,” she echoed, with a dry laugh. “She’s no longer herself. Just a shell of former glory. She came by for the funeral—didn’t speak. Almighty and worthless.”
She looked away just long enough for him to register the jab. He didn’t reply.
There was a silence. Not sharp. Just long.
Leah tapped a file onto the projection line and sent it to his display—Cindra’s records, the manifests, the destination.
“She’s gone,” she said. “Left the city. She’s looking for you.”
Chen’s face changed. Not shock. Just… something like guilt that finally had a place to sit down.
“I need you to find her,” Leah continued.
He didn’t hesitate.
“I will. We can. I can come get you...” he offered.
That simple. That clear.
But then—
A voice off-screen, cheerful and warm.
“Leah, love, do you want tea or just me—oh, you’re on a projection.”
Leon stepped into frame like it was his home. Shirt half-buttoned, towel slung over his shoulder, a man unbothered by legacy or consequence. He leaned down and kissed her cheek with the casual intimacy of someone who had done it many times before.
Chen didn’t speak.
Didn’t move.
His eyes just held. The beginning of madness starting to form.
Chen didn’t move.
He just stared.
Leah opened her mouth to say something—anything—but nothing coherent arrived.
"Chen... You're dead." She said in a whisper.
As if it explained everything.
As if that made it better.
Then Divan’s voice curled into the call, dripping with cruel delight.
“Oh, if it isn’t the Cuck.”
Chen blinked once.
A long, slow breath followed—just enough to betray the blow, not enough to show the wound.
Divan’s owl form looked like a poor imitation of the real thing. A copy without breath.
“You should be dead, Chen. No idea how you're not. But—we'll find out. Maybe it’s for the best after all. Kildra needs you. We'll find you Chen, you know. She still calls for you.”
Leah stepped forward, trying to reassert control.
“You weren’t supposed to see this. This isn’t about—”
This—isn’t—about—what?” Chen said, his voice low and flat. “Betrayal!? 'Cause... that is what this is."
Divan chuckled. “Be grateful. She is cared for now.”
The call cut as Chen closed the channel.
For the first time in weeks, she felt cold.
And in the stillness of her shame,
the Betrayer found no forgiveness—
only purpose.
She did not kneel.
She did not confess.
She whispered to a false god.
And he, vain and starving,
mistook her whisper for prayer.
So he crowned her in secret.
Anointed her in shadow.
All the while our Prince
Wrestled to reclaim a kingdom
not meant for hands of mortals.