The nightmare shifts, and I feel her terror spike. My eyes in her father’s face. Accusation. Guilt. The crushing weight of realizing that the people who should have loved her never really saw her at all.
I sit up in the darkness, gasping, and for a moment I could swear she’s there—her presence so vivid I reach for her before remembering.
She’s gone.
She’s suffering.
And I’m the one who taught her what suffering felt like.
I think about the crystals. The hundreds of scrying crystals in my surveillance chamber, showing her childhood, her parents alive and working, her hovering at the edges of every image like a ghost in her own home. I watched those recordings dozens of times over the years, cataloging her development, noting her potential, tracking the slow transformation from hopeful child to desperate warrior.
I never paid attention to how rarely they looked at her.
The forge was always the center of those images. Her parents bent over their work, focused on the metal, on the fire, on the endless demands of their craft—on anything except the child standing in the doorway waiting to be noticed. Her father’s back turned while she practiced sword forms behind the smithy, desperate for someone to see her, to praise her, to acknowledge that she existed. Her mother’s distracted nods when Hannah showed her something she’d learned, already turning back to more important tasks before the girl finished speaking.
I saw it without seeing it. Noted it without understanding. Filed it away as useful information—she’s isolated, she’s hungry for approval, she’s desperate for someone to see her—without ever considering what it meant tobeher. Without ever thinking about how it felt to grow up invisible in your own home, to fight for scraps of attention from people who should have loved you unconditionally.
She was already alone before I started taking people away.
The realization settles into my chest like a stone. I didn’t create her isolation—I just perfected it. Took the neglect her parents had planted and cultivated it into something absolute. Made sure every mentor was bought off or driven away. Made sure every friend was conscripted or relocated. Made sure every potential connection was severed until she had no one left, until she was so starved for someone toseeher that she’d walk into a monster’s arena just to feel like she mattered.
And then I offered myself as the solution to a problem I’d spent sixteen years engineering. I looked at this broken, desperate, magnificent woman and I thought:finally, someone who needs me enough to stay.
The sound that tears from my throat isn’t quite a scream. It’s something deeper. Something primal. The kind of sound I haven’t made since the first century of my existence, when I was still young enough to feel things this intensely, still raw enough to let emotion crack through the stone I’ve built around myself.
The mountain answers.
Stone Court shudders around me—walls groaning, floors cracking, crystal formations shattering in showers of glittering shards. The bed frame twists. The windows spiderweb with fractures. My magic is bleeding out of control, responding to something I refuse to name, something that feels too much like grief to acknowledge.
I force myself to breathe. Force the power back into channels that won’t bring the fortress down around our ears. But I can feel it straining at the edges, desperate to destroy something, anything, everything.
On the fifth day, I go to the scrying chamber.
I don’t go to watch her—I promised I wouldn’t, and I won’t break that promise even if keeping it is killing me. I go to face what I’ve done. I go to look at the evidence of my crimes and make myself understand, finally, what I stole from her.
The chamber is dim, hundreds of crystals glowing faintly on their pedestals like captured stars. Sixteen years of surveillance. Sixteen years of watching a girl become a woman, carefully cultivating her suffering, patiently waiting for the moment when she’d be desperate enough to claim.
I pick up one from the early days—Hannah at twelve, practicing sword forms behind her family’s forge. She’s small, skinny, all elbows and determination. In the background, her father works at the anvil. He doesn’t look up. Doesn’t notice her. She practices for an hour in that crystal, running through the same forms again and again, glancing over her shoulder every few minutes to see if he’s watching.
He never turns around. Not once.
I saw this image a hundred times. I never thought about what it meant to her. Never thought about the hope dying in her chest every time she looked back and found his attention elsewhere. Never thought about how many times she must have practiced alone before she stopped hoping altogether.
I set it down and pick up another. Hannah at fourteen, showing her mother a sword technique she’d learned from Old Marcus. Her face is bright with pride—she’s mastered something difficult, and she wants to share it. Her mother’s response is barely visible—a distracted nod, a wave of dismissal, a return to whatever task was more important than her daughter’s accomplishment.
In the crystal, I watch Hannah’s face fall. Watch her shoulders slump. Watch her turn away and walk back to the training grounds alone, the pride curdling into something harder, something that will eventually become the armor she wears against the world.
Another crystal. Hannah at fifteen, eating dinner alone at the family table while her parents discuss forge business over her head. They’re not fighting, not ignoring her deliberately—they just… forget she’s there. She’s invisible to them. Present but unseen. A ghost at her own table.
I watched all of this. Catalogued it. Used it.
I knew she was alone. I didn’t understand she’d been alone her whole life. Didn’t understand that I wasn’t creating her isolation—I was exploiting an isolation that started in her cradle, that was built brick by brick by parents who loved their work more than their daughter.
The crystal slips from my fingers and shatters on the floor.
I stare at the shards, at the fractured image of a lonely girl eating dinner by herself, and something cracks inside me too.
Then I start destroying the rest.
