That Which Defines Us

The room wasn’t meant to be lived in. The air was dry, tasting of mothballs, aged velvet, and neglect. Tall, gaunt furniture stood like specters in the corners.

A cracked chaise and a lopsided armoire were covered in sheets, and the leg of a broken table peeked out from behind a tapestry that hadn’t been moved in years. The only sign of life was the careful way the dust had been cleared from a narrow path across the stone floor and around a single window, kept meticulously clean by the room’s lone occupant.

Alakis sat on the floor beneath the window, his pale arms wrapped around his knees. The light streamed in, soft and watery, the color of distant things. It fell across his silver-white hair, which hung loosely around his shoulders like melted moonlight.

He rarely moved unless necessary. Movement stirred the dust, and he had grown to despise the way it clung to his skin. He had no proper bed, only an overturned chaise he’d lined with old drapes.

Here, he slept with his arms tucked tightly around himself as though bracing against a world that had long ago forgotten him. The silence in the room was not peaceful. It was thick and had a shape.

Sometimes it sounded like breathing when he was alone. Sometimes it didn’t. Outside the window, life in the palace passed him by. He watched the people below.

Servants and guards bustled across sunlit courtyards, and laughing courtiers floated past on gilded sandals, their voices rising in bursts of honeyed gossip. Musicians played in the evenings. Horses whinnied in the early morning.

The city beyond the walls shimmered in golds and oranges, busy and alive, so different from this forgotten place of woodrot and cobwebs. He didn’t wave. No one ever looked up.

He didn’t know what it meant to be part of it. Sometimes he wondered if they even knew he existed. His meals came once a day, and only sometimes.

A servant would leave a bowl of whatever scraps were left after the kitchens had fed the palace. It might sit outside his door for hours before he noticed. He had trained himself not to expect it.

Hunger became a thing he measured time by, and even that had begun to lose its edge. He hadn’t spoken aloud in so long his voice had begun to fade. He whispered to himself sometimes, just to remember how it felt.

He didn’t say names. He didn’t remember the last time someone had said his. “Alakis.” It sounded foreign even in his own mind. He had made a small, strange home here, a sort of sanctuary in the bones of abandoned splendor.

A washbasin hidden behind a wardrobe. A small bookshelf missing half its shelves. A broken mirror turned to the wall. He didn’t like to see himself.

The walls were lined with old portraits—faded nobles long dead and nameless, their eyes following him even in the dark. He had stopped being afraid of them. He had stopped being afraid of anything, really.

When you were forgotten, you learned there was nothing left to fear. Sometimes he traced the cracks in the ceiling with his eyes and pretended they were constellations. At night, he lay awake for hours listening to the palace breathe.

Sometimes he cried without making a sound. But most often, he just stared out the window. He liked watching people who didn’t know he was there.

He liked seeing the way they moved as if they mattered, as if someone was waiting for them to arrive. He imagined where they were going. He invented names for them.

The red-robed woman with the tray of oranges became Yelari, the fruit seller’s daughter. The tall guard with the chipped armor and crooked smile was Fareth, a soldier secretly writing poetry in his off hours.

The maid who tripped over her own feet in the mornings was Daya, the illegitimate child of a nobleman who would one day become queen. They had stories. He gave them meaning, because he had none of his own.

And when night fell and the window darkened into a mirror, he curled into his corner and pretended the silence was a blanket, not a cage.

The seasons changed and the winds shifted.

He didn’t notice it at first—not in the sky, but in the silence. The kind of stillness that comes just before something breaks. The door crashed open like a siege battering through the wall of his world.

Alakis didn’t flinch. He didn’t move at all, not even as footsteps stormed across the stone, scattering dust like frightened insects.

“Well, would you look at that,” a voice drawled, smug and syrupy. “Still breathing.”

Alakis turned his head slightly, just enough to see them. His brothers were there—two of them.

The tall one in crimson was Ronash, the sixthborn. He was built like a panther, with a smile too white to be kind. The shorter one, broader, in sleeveless silk and heavy gold, was Kelir, the fifthborn. He was twice as cruel for having never been the favorite.

The scent of oil and spice clung to them like rot. They were dressed for the palace’s inner halls—the warm parts, the soft and shining parts that pulsed with music and perfumes.

They didn’t belong in this dusty place. Yet here they were, tracking mud and laughter across Alakis’s world of silence.

“Still keeping rats for company, little brother?” Ronash asked, toeing an empty bowl near the door.

Kelir bent to pick up one of the draped fabrics Alakis had lined his sleeping place with. He held it up with a sneer. “Is this a curtain or a shroud? Either way, it suits you,” he said.

Alakis stood slowly. Not out of pride. Not defiance. There was simply no point in staying on the floor when they were here. He didn’t speak. They didn’t expect him to.

Ronash circled him once, his eyes glittering. “He’s so quiet. Like a doll. How do you think he’d look painted up? Or should we leave him dusty? Might be more authentic that way.”

Kelir chuckled. “Let’s find out.”

They didn’t tell him where they were taking him. They never did. That was part of the game.

Alakis didn’t ask. They wouldn’t answer truthfully anyway. Ronash led the way with a confident stride, his silk robes brushing against the marble.

Kelir walked just behind Alakis, occasionally prodding him with the flat of a jeweled ring or flicking dust from his shoulder with mocking disgust.

“No wonder they keep you tucked away like mold,” Kelir muttered. “You smell like old books and bedrot.”

They dragged him through a corridor he didn’t recognize. It reeked of roses and wine, lined with doors carved like peacock feathers and incense smoldering in golden bowls.

And then they arrived.

The air was thick. Gold and vermilion clung to every wall, every pillow. The ceiling was strung with silks that danced lazily in the warm breeze from hidden vents.

Perfume clung to every surface.

The walls were painted with scenes that would have scandalized the gods.

Velvet drapes of bloodred and molten gold spilled from archways carved in floral lace. Lamps burned low and warm behind colored glass. Incense coiled like smoke from a dragon’s mouth, heavy with honey, musk, and something darker.

Water gurgled lazily in shallow basins ringed with white lotus petals. There was laughter here, and music. Lilting strings and breathy flutes were all stitched together with the scent of food and drink.

The concubines were sprawled across lounges and cushions, their eyes painted, lips red, skin oiled and gleaming. They were half-dressed and wholly amused, their laughter curling like smoke from their mouths.

They lounged like jungle cats, baring teeth in amusement as Alakis was shoved into the room by his brothers.

No one asked why he was here. They knew.

Ronash announced, spreading his arms with the grandiosity of a theater performer, “Darlings, a rare treat for you all. Our father’s most precious disappointment, plucked from the shadows just for your entertainment.”

Laughter rippled around the chamber like oil on water.

Kelir caught Alakis by the arm and dragged him to the center of the chamber.

A woman in a gauzy violet robe stepped closer. She leaned in to study Alakis the way one might examine a peculiar animal. “What is he?” she asked.

“Look at him. Look at those eyes. Like dead pearls.”

“He’s even paler than the marble.”

“Do you think he’s sick?”

“Is he a phantom?”

“He is,” Ronash purred. “A ghost of the bloodline. A whisper our dear father keeps locked away.”

Another woman giggled, swirling wine in a golden cup. “What’s the game this time? Are we to teach him how to please? Or are we simply watching him break?”

“Oh, break him,” said a third. “Please. I love the sound things make when they shatter.”

A grape was flicked at him. It bounced off his chest and landed on the floor with a wet sound. A silk scarf was thrown next, settling over his head like a mock veil.

“Look at his bones,” one whispered, circling Alakis like a lioness sniffing a wounded cub. “You could play him like an instrument.”

“His wrists are so small. Like a girl’s.”

“Not even a pretty girl,” said another. “He looks like something that crawled out of a mausoleum.”

“More like a pit of peasant corpses.”

The neckline of his tunic was yanked, exposing one shoulder. A smear of ash was drawn across his collarbone with a fingertip dipped in wine.

“Let’s decorate him,” a woman suggested. “He needs color.”

A concubine adorned with gold bangles pulled a paintstick from a pouch. She began sketching curls and flowers along his other arm, muttering something about “prettying up the broomstick.”

One took a brush and teased his tangled hair, tsking as strands pulled loose. “It’s like spun spider silk. No weight at all.”

Alakis stood there and let them.

He was too pale. Too thin. He was ugly. There was no strength in his limbs. His shoulders sloped like a child’s.

His hair was unnatural. His eyes strange. He didn’t have his brothers’ golden skin or squared jaws or broad chests. He didn’t have their booming voices or war-born scars.

He had nothing. He had always had nothing.

He thought maybe he had been born wrong. Like a mistake the gods had forgotten to destroy.

He didn’t remember his mother. He didn’t know if she’d have wanted him. He only knew she had died, and he hadn’t. And that had been the beginning of everyone’s resentment.

“Does he even speak?”

Alakis opened his mouth, then closed it. What would he say?

Someone else laughed and stepped closer. “No, no—wait—make him perform something. Let’s see what tricks the ghost knows.”

Ronash snapped his fingers and tossed a coin at his feet. “Dance, little dog.”

More laughter. Cruel now. Demanding.

Alakis stared at the coin for a moment, the glint of gold against the rug. He didn’t know how to dance. But he moved.

He did what he thought they wanted. It was a jerky, pitiful mimicry of the movements he had seen once from far across the garden walls. Arms lifted, feet slid, a strange swaying like a marionette half-strung.

They hooted and hollered.

“This is too much!”

“My shawl could do better!”

“How creepy!”

Something was poured over his hair, oil or wine—Alakis couldn’t tell.

“Aish!” One of the concubines clicked her tongue in disgust. “Those movements are an affront to the meaning of dance. He cannot be allowed to deface such an art. Little ghost, stop that nonsense and crawl!”

That got them screaming with laughter.

And so he crawled.

Because that, he knew how to do.

He lowered himself until his cheek nearly brushed the rug and crawled in a circle. Not because it made sense. Not because it had meaning.

Because they had told him to.

Because if he didn’t do what they wanted, maybe they’d hit him. Or worse—forget him again.

And somehow that thought hurt more than the laughter.

The humiliation was not new. It was just louder here.

It was Ronash who caught sight of the shadows shifting in the corner. A figure arrived, taller than the rest, silence wrapping around him like a blade unsheathed.

The laughter stopped.

Even the music faltered, dying midnote like a throat cut too quickly.

The King of Elgar had arrived. Vandu, the Lion of the Eastern Dunes, Lord of Iron Banners.

He stood in robes that whispered royalty in every thread. Dark bronze with accents of indigo and bone white accompanied a crown wrought like twisted flame, gleaming on his brow.

His eyes were sharp, sunken slightly, as if the weight of ruling had long since begun to hollow him from within.

But his presence was heavy. Heavy enough that even Ronash stepped back, wine cup lowering in instinctive reverence.

The king said nothing at first. He looked at Alakis.

No, not at him.

Through him.

Like he was surveying something he had stepped in.

“What is this?” Vandu asked. His voice was not raised, and yet it carried. It echoed through the room like a curse made flesh.

Ronash made a low bow, feigning grace. “A jest, Father. A bit of sport with—”

“Silence.”

The word stopped the room, colder than ice. Alakis felt the weight of that gaze now settle on him properly.

He didn’t flinch. He didn’t tremble. He simply looked up.

Vandu’s lip curled. “So this is where you’ve scuttled off to,” he said. His piercing gaze followed the slow drip of honey that trickled down Alakis’s face.

Vandu approached slowly, his footsteps heavy and deliberate. He lifted the boy’s chin with the crook of one ringed finger.

“You’ve grown,” he said. It wasn’t admiration. It was an accusation. “And yet you are no more than you were. A pale, trembling blemish.”

Alakis lowered his gaze, knowing that the king was taking note of every bruise, every stain, every bit of him that was not right.

“It’s time,” Vandu said simply. He turned away, as if speaking further was a waste of breath. “You’ll be of use to your kingdom, after all.”

Ronash looked up, startled. “You mean—she accepted?”

“She did.”

All eyes were suddenly on Alakis, but not in the same way as before. Some of the concubines shared looks of pity, while others raised their brows high in shock. Even his brothers were at a loss for words.

The room remained quiet for a breath too long. Long enough that the concubines no longer bothered to pretend they weren’t watching. Long enough that the incense curling from the braziers seemed to thicken with tension, winding up into the ceiling like the rising spirit of a condemned man.

Finally, Kelir stepped forward. He kept his tone neutral, even as a flicker of unease stirred beneath the surface. “Sending him to her…,” Kelir said slowly, his eyes flicking from Alakis to the king’s broad back. “That will be of use to us?”

“It will.”

Alakis’s heart thudded harder in his chest. He looked to his brothers, from Kelir to Ronash, frozen near the colonnade, their jaws tense. There was no comfort in either of their expressions.

Ronash scoffed quietly, more to himself than anyone else. “Can he even survive more than a few hours with her?”

The jibe wasn’t even cruel. Not in the way Ronash usually was. It was tired. An exhale of disbelief, as though someone had declared a cat fit to lead a warband.

Vandu stopped.

Not dramatically. Not with a turn or a glare. He simply ceased movement, as though hearing something that made the air itself too thick to move through. Then, slowly, he turned his head enough to look at Ronash from over one shoulder.

There was a pause.

“You will find,” he said, “that she does not measure men in the ways we do. That is why she has remained where we could not tread.”

“She’s a monster,” Ronash muttered, though not quite loud enough to be bold.

“Yes,” Vandu said, turning back toward the door. “What else could topple Nahr’Zul’s six-century empire as though brushing sand from a table? She shattered the Rilks and their cavalry of fifty thousand and scattered them like frightened dogs. She reduced Sharuhl’s legion of fire sorcerers to blackened bones in temple ash. And Qassira with its parade of armored war elephants, each one a moving fortress, still brought to its knees before a single year’s end. One after the next, within a decade.”

Kelir let out a quiet breath. “So we are to bow and scrape, to sell our pride so cheaply?”

Vandu’s voice was low, threaded with the dry rasp of a seasoned general. “As I have no sorcerers, no cavalry, and not a single gods-damned elephant, we play the dog. We wait. We smile when spoken to. Because survival, for now, demands obedience to what should have been dust long ago.”

This finally silenced the battle-craving princes, but they shifted, uneasy energy rippling through them. Their instincts screamed against what they were being told, but the weight of their father’s words held them in place.

Just barely.

Vandu’s eyes narrowed with that cold, tired wisdom that only time in the field could bring. “You don’t bury the mountain you must cross. You endure it. And hope it doesn’t collapse beneath your feet.”

Alakis flinched at his mention. His skin crawled under the weight of the moment, the creeping certainty that he was being offered up like a sacrifice. He hadn’t yet begun to understand what this bargain demanded of him.

“Yes,” Vandu said simply. “He will.”

Ronash’s hands clenched, his face twisted with a mixture of disbelief and disgust. “And if he dies?”

Vandu eyed Alakis the way one might look at a dagger chipped and left in the rain, only to find use for it still. “Then he dies in the service of Elgar.”

The younger princes were silent now. The harsh truth of their father’s words settled over them like a cold wind.

The world had changed. The weight of Elgar’s pride had buckled beneath the pressure of kingdoms far mightier than theirs. Now they were forced to play the role of the subservient.

The kingdom, once a beast that tore through its enemies with teeth bared, now walked a quieter path. It was paved with compromises and concessions.

And Alakis, the boy who had once known nothing but the sword and the blood of battle, was to be its most delicate bargaining chip. The world had finally come to collect what it had left behind.