"Will you miss me?" Aela asked, a grin tugging at her mouth that did not quite reach her eyes.
"I do not think I will," I said, a small smile of my own slipping out, which only deepened the frown already settling over her face.
Ressa held the carriage door open beside her, waiting, but something seemed to be holding Aela back from actually stepping through it. She turned toward the open door, took half a step, then turned back again, her eyes landing on mine with clear expectation.
"What?" I asked, genuinely confused by whatever she was waiting for.
"You bastard, are you not going to hug me?" she muttered, exasperated, before giving up entirely and closing the distance herself, wrapping both arms around me before I had even fully registered what was happening.
I wish I could have honoured that the way she deserved. Genuinely wished it. For one brief, reckless second, some part of me wanted to do nothing except tell her the whole truth.
That the brother she had loved so completely her entire life was already gone, and the man standing in front of her accepting this hug was nothing more than a stranger wearing his face.
I pushed the thought down instead, forcing my voice into the same practised warmth full of lies I had grown almost too comfortable wearing by now.
I watched her climb into the carriage, waved once as it pulled away, and only once she was properly out of sight did I let out a long breath, something in my chest easing at the same time.
Turning back toward the manor, I spotted Cavell stepping out through the main doors, clearly looking for me. He gave a short bow the moment he noticed me approaching.
"Young Master Yun. The lord wishes to see you in his study," he said, straightening slightly before taking his leave without waiting for a response.
He wants to see me now. That is unusual.
Making my way toward the study on the second floor, I ran through a handful of guesses instead, none of them landing anywhere close to right.
Unless it is about the Rite.
That had to be it.
The Rite of Valour.
A coming-of-age trial House Claiom had held for centuries, though calling it a ceremony was generous to the point of dishonesty.
It was a bloody proving ground, held once every three years, meant to test the house’s newest generation of Touched. The last one had been Aela’s, and she had walked out of it having cemented her strength in front of the entire house. In a few months, it would be my turn.
There was nothing simple about it. People had died in past Rites, and everyone in this family understood, without needing to be told twice, exactly what that meant about being a Claiom in the first place. Prove your strength. Prove you were worth the name. Or do not survive trying.
Stopping in front of the heavy wooden doors leading into his study, I heard his voice carry from inside, deep and unmistakable even through the wood.
As I pushed the door open, the same suffocating pressure hit me immediately, my knees buckling slightly under its weight before I caught myself and gritted my teeth through it, stepping properly inside.
The door clicked shut behind me, and my eyes swept over the space. A tall shelf of books lined the wall to my left, spines cracked and faded with age, catching the pale sunlight in dull, uneven streaks.
Rolled maps sat stacked in one corner, weighed down with what looked like carved stone markers. A cold hearth sat unlit against the far wall, faint ashes on its edges.
He sat behind a heavy wooden desk cluttered with half-unrolled parchment. He did not look up right away, still working through something with his quill as I crossed the room to stand before him, my eyes catching on a small portrait propped at the edge of his desk, angled away from me, its front hidden from view.
I already knew, without needing to see it, exactly whose face sat on the other side.
Rhea, Yun’s mother.
As he finally set his quill down, his eyes rose to meet mine, and the words left me before I had properly decided to say them.
"She wanted you to see her off," I said quietly, still holding his gaze, before I caught the way his eyes narrowed at that.
But I knew he would not mind; after all, I knew what he did in the future for her.
Giving his life to save her.
But now I would make damn sure it did not come to that.
His gaze stayed locked on mine for a long moment, the pressure in the room thickening slightly around me, before he finally spoke.
"You have changed."
He turned away as he said it, pushing a hand back through his hair, rising from his chair and crossing to the window on his left. He stood there a while, looking out, before he spoke again, quieter this time, almost too quiet to catch.
"I have not been a good father, have I?"
Nope, you haven’t. But of course I did not say that out loud; he really might kill me if I did.
"Do you know why I let them call you weak?" he said. His voice had not changed at all, but something underneath it clearly had. "Worthless to this family. I let that stand for all these years."
His gaze bore down on me steadily, and I had no answer to that question, nor did this body. He seemed to understand that too, and did not wait for a response.
His father’s silence had always been a mystery to Yun, one he had eventually stopped trying to solve, settling instead on the simplest explanation, that the man simply had not cared enough to bother. Find the original chapter at novelping dot com.
Standing here now, hearing this directly from him, I understood exactly how wrong that assumption had actually been.
His eyes drifted back to the portrait again, his features loosening slightly.
"Your mother never wanted this for you," he continued. "Not the house. Not the politics. Not what this family does to the people born into it. She wanted you free of all of it."
He looked at me directly then, holding my gaze for a few seconds before continuing.
"Every time I let them think less of you, I told myself I was keeping the last thing I still had left to give her. To give you a reason to walk away."
His voice dropped lower on that last part, quieter than anything he had said so far.
Hearing it, I understood exactly how much weight those words were supposed to carry. To this family, to Yun specifically, this admission would have meant everything. Years of silent, unexplained neglect suddenly reframed as its own kind of protection.
To me, it felt like nothing but words.
He searched my face for a moment, looking for something, before turning back toward the window.
"I cannot give you that anymore, though." His voice stayed even, but something underneath it had shifted. "Whatever is coming does not care what she wanted."
For a moment he looked exactly like what he was, a man who had lost the one version of himself still capable of protecting me from any of this. Then something in his expression closed back over, the father fading away behind the Head of House again.
He turned fully to face me now.
"You need to show them. All of them. Win the Rite. Whatever it takes, whatever it costs, you need to win it."
His words were heavy, and there was something almost unshakable in them, as if he had never doubted for a second that this body was capable of achieving it.
Hearing that, I felt genuinely thrown by the sudden shift, struggling to place where any of this was actually coming from.
He wanted me to win. To prove my strength publicly, decisively. But why did that matter this much to him now, when Aela had already given him more than enough of a safe bet toward securing an heir the house would accept without question?
Watching whatever confusion I could not quite hide play out across my face, he did not seem to expect an answer from me, and I did not have one to give him regardless.
Not that it actually mattered either way. I had already decided a long time ago, with or without his asking, that I was not going to let the world dictate to me; after all, I had created it to begin with.
If anyone tried, I had already made peace with exactly what that meant.
I would crush every last one of them if I had to.