It wasn’t just a mark.
It was a curse.
A wound carved not only by bronze and fire, but by every word my father had ever spat at me. Every condemnation. Every lash of disappointment that had shaped me long before this place did.
This was his final blessing—a brand to match the ones he left on my spirit.
And now it was forever.
And suddenly?—
I wasn’t in the Dreadhold.
I wasn’t even in Ugarit.
I was thirteen again.
His chamber rose around me—the gilded tomb he called home. Silk curtains laden with dust. The air was thick with incense and something worse—fear.
I stood trembling, my tunic ripped from my back, welts swelling fresh across my spine from the whip he’d used. My breath came shallow; my knees shook under me. And he stood above me—not as a man.
As judgment made flesh.
“You think you’re a man, boy?” he said. His tone carried that edge he saved for sermons—a knife sharpened on disappointment.
“I’m sorry, Father,” I whispered. My throat scraped raw. “I didn’t mean to fail you.”
He gave a short, cold laugh—the kind of sound that maimed deeper than shouting.
“Sorry?”
He grabbed my arm, his grip a vice, dragging me toward the hearth. The limestone floor was cool beneath my bare feet; I remembered that—the last mercy in the room.
“Sorry doesn’t fix weakness,” he hissed. “Sorry doesn’t make you worthy.”
He reached into the coals. The crackle swallowed the sound of my breath. When he turned, the sigil of House Lorian glowed in his hand—red-hot, fury given form.
“You think Ugarit will show you mercy?” he said. “This kingdom was forged in blood, in fire. It will mark you—unless you mark it first.”
I tried to pull away. My heel slipped on the stone. “Please, Father—please?—”
The iron kissed my flesh.
The sound I made didn’t belong to anything human. It ripped out of me and filled the room until even the incense trembled. The smell of burnt skin drowned everything else.
It wasn’t just pain. It was a transformation. A rewriting of who I was, charred through bone and blood and name.
He didn’t flinch. He never did.
“Remember this,” he said. “Pain is the only language this world speaks. The only thing that makes a man real.”
I crumpled at his feet, sobbing onto the polished limestone.
He looked down at me like something unworthy of the floor he stood on.
“When you stop being weak,” he said, voice flat and tired, “then maybe you’ll deserve to carry my name.”
When the world came back, it came back in pieces—sound first, then pain.
