Eleven.
I’m holding a crystal that shows me at eleven years old, a child, gap-toothed and grinning, playing in the mud outside the forge while my father laughs at something I’ve said.
He didn’t start watching me months ago.
He’s been watching me forthirteen years.
The crystal slips from my fingers and shatters on the floor.
I barely hear it. My ears are ringing, my vision tunneling, my whole body going cold despite the warmth of the mountain. Thirteen years. I was eleven. Achild. And somewhere in this fortress, an ancient Fae lord was watching me play in the mud, watching me grow up, watching me become—
Become what?
I grab another crystal from the oldest shelf. Ten years old. Nine. Eight.
Eight.
The image shows a toddler—me, unmistakably me, the same gray eyes, the same stubborn set to my jaw even then—sitting on my father’s shoulders while he walked through the market.
He’s been watching me since I waseight years old.
Sixteen years. Sixteen years of surveillance. Sixteen years of my entire life, captured and cataloged, every moment recorded without my knowledge or consent. He watched me learn to walk, learn to talk, learn to hold a sword. He watched my first skinned knee and my first crush and my first fight. He watched me bury my parents and become the village protector and grow into the woman who would one day walk into his arena.
Hemademe walk into that arena.
The realization hits like a physical blow. I stagger back, knocking over a pedestal, sending crystals crashing to the floor. The images fracture and scatter, sixteen years of my life broken into shards around my feet.
He didn’t just watch. Heplanned.
I grab the crystal showing the road again—the one where my parents died. My hands are shaking so badly I can barely hold it, but I force myself to look. Force myself to examine every corner of the image, looking for something, anything—
And then I see it.
In the corner of the image, half-hidden by trees. A shadow that doesn’t belong. A shape that’s too large, too still, toodeliberateto be natural.
Bronze skin. Silver veins.
He was there.
He wasthere, the day my parents died.
The scream that tears out of me doesn’t sound human.
It echoes off the stone walls, sharp and raw, and I don’t recognize it as coming from my own throat until I feel the burn in my vocal cords. My hands are moving before I can stop them—sweeping crystals off pedestals, hurling them against the walls, destroying sixteen years of surveillance in a frenzy of grief and rage.
“No.” The word comes out broken. “No, no, no—”
I grab another crystal and see myself at seventeen, standing over the bodies of the chaos-beasts I killed defending the north wall. The attack that came out of nowhere. The attack that killed three villagers and left me with a scar on my hip I still carry.
Another crystal: me at eighteen, collapsing from exhaustion after three days without sleep during a border skirmish. A skirmish that started when raiders appeared from the mountains—from Stone Court’s territory—and targeted our grain stores.
Another: nineteen, burying the village healer who died of a plague I couldn’t cure. A plague that swept through Ironhold and nowhere else, killing a dozen people before it vanished as suddenly as it appeared.
Every tragedy. Every loss. Every moment of suffering that shaped me into the weapon I became.
He watched all of it.
Hecausedall of it.
