[ARC I: The Awakening of Thallian]
The stone beneath his spine was warm.
At first, Thallian thought he had died. The warmth—steady, pulsing—was not the kind spoken of in sermons. It beat through the cot's hay stuffing, into his skin, into his ribs. His eyes fluttered open, and the slitted light of dawn pierced the tall arrow window, brushing across his brow.
He did not move.
Not out of fear. Out of knowing.
Something had changed.
The scent of sweat was thick around him, but his skin was dry. His breathing, slow. Birds outside sang like they were inside his chest. When he blinked, he could see the cracks in the mortar. He could count each grain in the blood-caked cloth beside his cot. That cloth, he knew, had come from his own nose. He had bled during the fever.
Where the blood sank into the floor, he could still see the mark. A rust-red smear near his heel. But it looked... older. It had dried too quickly.
His mouth was bitter. Hunger clawed his stomach like a wildcat. He clenched his hands once—twice. No shaking. Too steady.
"Mother?" he whispered.
The echo in the infirmary made the word sound like someone else's prayer.
__
The door creaked only once.
Her scent reached him before her voice—rosemary, oil, and ash. A noblewoman's perfume layered over the bones of burnt prayer parchments. She crossed the threshold with quiet authority, skirts whispering against the stone.
"My boy," she said.
Thallian sat upright, despite the ache beneath his ribs. She crossed to him and cupped his face, thumbs warm against his temples. Her gaze swept his features: eyes, nose, mouth, pulse.
"You breathe like a soldier," she murmured.
He tried to speak but faltered. Her hands held a quiet power. Not magic—just a mother's strength. He looked away. Her fingers grazed the dried blood on the cot and paused.
"You bled more than we thought," she said, softly. "Three days, no waking. The priests gave you up."
Thallian swallowed. "I dreamed."
She stilled. "Of what?"
He hesitated. The truth burned his throat. "A gate. And a hill of iron bones. Something watched me from behind the sun."
Her breath caught, but only slightly. She brushed a strand of hair from his brow.
"Then you came back with something else inside you."
He blinked.
She kissed his forehead. "Sleep no more, Thallian. We must speak with the magister soon."
__
She had left with a kiss and a whisper, and before the stone door fully shut, Thallian was already on his feet.
He shouldn't have moved. His legs ached from stillness, but there was a charge in his chest—a pressure behind the ribs. The infirmary walls closed in. He needed space, stone, air.
No guards watched him as he slipped down the servants' stair. They assumed the prince too weak. A child in recovery. But his steps made no sound.
The kitchen hall was cool, the hearths dormant before second bell. In the granary annex, bins of old bread sat beside sacks of oats. He reached into one, fingers brushing against a dry heel of soldier's ration. It was barely bread—cracked, grey, full of flourworms.
He stared at it.
Then whispered, without knowing why:
"Better."
The word barely left his lips.
A pulse passed from his palm. The crust darkened, thickened. Its scent changed—warm and soft, like his mother's baking on feast-day. He broke the edge. Steam rose.
He stared.
Footsteps behind him. He turned, startled, and a voice rang out.
"Well now," said Bertran the pot-boy. "Either I'm dreaming, or you just fed a ghost."
__
Thallian didn't drop the bread—he simply held it, like it might vanish.
Bertran stood in the granary doorway, still wrapped in his night shawl, hair a thicket of straw and soot. His bare feet slapped cold stone as he approached, blinking hard like sleep still clung to his lashes.
"That smell ain't from last week's crusts," Bertran said, pointing. "You didn't steal that from Cook's oven?"
Thallian opened his mouth, then closed it.
Bertran leaned in. "You made that. Didn't you?"
Silence.
"By saints," the pot-boy breathed. "Did you pray it hot?"
"I just said a word."
Bertran circled the bin, eyes wide. "You got secrets in you now, Prince. I seen it. That bread was grey. Now it's brown like festival loaves. That ain't rot, that's—" He paused, sniffed, then grinned. "—magic."
Thallian glanced at his palm. Still warm.
Bertran leaned closer, lowering his voice. "Don't tell the Bishop. He'll drown you in the font and call it holy justice."
"I didn't mean to," Thallian whispered.
"I know. But you did." Bertran crossed his heart with two fingers. "My lips are sealed like Mother's pickle jars."
Then he grinned, broader. "Can you do the same to porridge?"
__
Bertran left him with a slap on the back and a crust tucked in his tunic. Thallian, still dazed, wandered the corridor like a boy walking through fog. Bells rang—third hour. He was late.
The courtyard was already echoing with the crack of wood against wood when he arrived, breath held.
Ser Veon stood at the circle's edge, one arm crossed over the stump of the other. His gaze swept the drill lines, then fell on Thallian with no surprise.
"You live," Veon said. "Then you fight."
Thallian nodded, wordless.
A practice sword was tossed to him. Ash-wood, dulled at the tip. He took his stance—low, centered, the way Veon taught. Across from him stood Garic, a stable-boy twice his size.
The clash came fast.
Thallian struck once. Garic parried. Thallian struck again—then again.
On the third blow, the sound changed.
Wood on wood became something else. Like iron on iron. Garic stumbled back, arms shaking. His sword cracked down the middle.
Silence rippled through the yard.
Veon stepped forward, eyes narrowed—not afraid, but attentive.
"You're not holding back," the old knight muttered.
Thallian dropped the sword. It clattered like steel.
He said nothing.
Veon did not press.
Yet.
__
The cracked sword still lay at his feet when the court bell rang again. Thallian didn't wait to be dismissed. Veon said nothing—his gaze followed the boy, not unkind, but unreadable. Veon had been a Roman legion-man once, long before the Empire cracked and retreated west, back over the sea. He had marched under a purple eagle and burned shrines to gods he never prayed to. Now he trained princes, with one hand and no faith.
Thallian walked the long inner hall alone, the echoes of his steps swallowed by stone. Banners hung above—some newer, bearing the Cross; others older, faded with the sigils of broken tribes. His grandfather had died in that conflict: a king beheaded for honoring spirits that the Church now called demons.
The chapel doors groaned as he pushed them open. No priests inside—only dust, candles, and silence.
He knelt.
The altar bore no image. The court had not chosen between the Lamb and the Horned Oak. This was Belgica: where faith bled slow.
"I won't lose to it," Thallian whispered.
He touched the space over his heart.
"I won't let it rule me."
He meant the hunger. The heat behind his ribs. The way he had looked at the girl in the courtyard—the one whose name he didn't know, who'd glanced at him only once with a smirk and an unbuttoned collar. The way his mind had wandered afterward.
"I bind myself."
His fingers clenched.
"I will not take a woman—not until the one meant for me comes. No servant, no noble, no guest. Not even in thought."
A soft cough from behind. He turned—Bertran again, leaning against the wall like a gargoyle.
"You pray loud for a quiet prince," he said. "Thought I'd find you brooding with the skulls."
Thallian blinked.
Bertran tossed him a pouch. "Cook said eat this before you pass out. You look like you've fought a dead saint."
As Thallian opened it, he noticed someone else watching through the cracked chapel door: a dark-eyed man in clerical black, his ring glinting with a red jewel.
Malden, the Bishop from Treve. Watching. Judging.
Curious.
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Bertran had long since gone, muttering about stolen figs and divine flatulence. Thallian remained, seated cross-legged on the chapel floor, chewing slowly through the dried apricots Cook had packed. The candlelight shuddered against ancient beams. He stared at the floor.
His vow still hung in the air.
He felt no divine answer. But silence, when deep enough, could almost speak back.
A rustle broke it.
At the edge of the sacristy, beneath a patch of straw near a cracked offering bowl, something small moved. Thallian froze. A rat—not diseased, not frantic, just thin and old. Its ribs moved shallowly, its eyes wet with fever. It sipped from a puddle pooled in the bowl's base. A prayer offering from earlier in the day.
Thallian knew what it was: tainted water, mixed with powdered aconite, used to keep pests from nesting too near the altar. It should kill the thing within minutes.
But something twisted in him.
He crawled forward. Gently. A whisper now, like before.
"Live."
His fingers brushed the bowl.
The rat paused. Shuddered.
Then—slowly—drank again. Its trembling ceased. Its movements smoothed. It sat upright, blinking, almost proud.
Thallian's heart beat once. Then again, slower.
Behind him, a voice: quiet, amused.
"You do not call upon God. Nor pagan tongue. And still you bend life. That is dangerous."
Thallian turned.
The Bishop had entered fully now, black robes brushing the stone like creeping smoke. He stepped lightly—too lightly for a man of sixty winters.
Malden studied him, eyes like burnt amber.
"Your Highness," he said, with the tone of someone testing a blade's edge. "You may have been touched by grace. Or you may be a wound in the world."
Thallian said nothing.
Malden turned to the rat. "This is not the miracle of the saints. This is something else."
Far behind the Bishop, in the shadow of the doorframe, a second figure stood for only a moment. Hooded, hunched, muttering into a rosary carved of black stone.
A whisper passed from the shadows:
"...reminds me of Canaan. Hm. Flesh-shaped miracles..."
Then the man was gone.
Zepia Eltnam Atlasia.
But Thallian did not yet know that name.