Kaelstrid Hold stood silent and firm atop the northern cliffs, its dark stone walls rising like jagged teeth against the pale winter sky. The wind from the Sea of Butchers swept through its towers, cold and constant, whistling through narrow stone corridors and between the heavy beams of the watchtowers.
To those within, it was more than a fortress—it was a proving ground.
Riven Kaelstrid rose before the sun, as was custom in his family. The cold did not wake him; he had long stopped feeling it. His room was sparse—a carved wooden bed, an empty hearth, a sword rack that held a single training blade worn smooth at the grip.
Outside, the first stirrings of the hold began. The clang of hammer on steel echoed faintly from the smithy. Footsteps crunched in snow below his window—guards rotating their posts, stable hands leading frost-covered horses to water. No songs, no greetings, just the rhythm of duty.
Riven dressed in silence, layering wool and leather, fastening the sword at his side. It wasn't a real blade, not yet, but his hand had grown into its weight.
Today, like every day, he would train.
His father, Darnic Kaelstrid, waited in the practice yard, tall and weathered like the stones of the keep. Darnic was not a loud man, but his presence shaped silence into command. His eyes, gray and piercing, missed nothing.
"You're late," he said.
"I'm early," Riven replied.
"Then you're ready."
They said little else.
Father and son circled in the yard, feet crunching softly in the morning frost. Darnic moved with the confidence of one who had survived many battles, but today he held back. Today was not about dominance. It was about building something that would last.
After drills, Riven sat beneath the ash tree by the barracks, fingers stinging with cold. The courtyard beyond him was alive with quiet labor—fletchers at their benches, scouts returning from the hills, younger boys shadowing older ones in the art of movement, of readiness. It was a place built not just on stone, but on discipline passed from hand to hand, breath to breath.
And always, somewhere unseen, Veyra watched.
His mother moved through the hold like a flicker of candlelight. Once an assassin, now the unseen hand behind Kaelstrid's sharpest blades, she did not give lessons. She gave warnings.
When he returned to his quarters, she was there—waiting by the open window, her black cloak trailing like ink.
"You look in the eyes too long," she said. "One day, someone will use that against you."
Riven said nothing. He stood still as she stepped closer and placed something wrapped in oilskin into his hands.
A small hand-drawn map. Trees. A coast. A trail that curved into forest.
"There's a place east of the cliffs," she said. "Untouched. Forgotten. You'll train there—alone. What you become there will belong to no one but you."
Riven met her gaze.
"I'll need a better blade."
Her lips curved—not into a smile, but something close.
"You'll earn one."
That night, the fires in the hold burned low. Outside, snow whispered against the stone. Riven sat on his bed, unrolling the map again beneath the flickering light of an oil lamp.
The place was real. The cold forest. The hidden trail.
A path not just into the wilderness—but into himself.
And so, without sound or ceremony, he began planning for the day he would leave the safety of walls and find the quiet place where swords whispered louder than words—and every movement shaped the man he would become