The voice ca from behind him, and it was familiar in the way that old scars were familiar.
"Kaiden Grey."
He didn’t turn around.
"We need to talk. Right now."
Selena Ashborn’s voice carried the clipped authority of a woman who’d grown up being obeyed. Behind her, Kaiden heard two more sets of footsteps on the stone, and he didn’t need to look to know who they belonged to. The twins walked the sa way they’d always walked, a half-step behind their older sister, the natural rhythm of two people who’d shared a womb and never quite separated.
Kaiden kept his legs dangling over the edge and his eyes on the basin.
"You’ve gone too far." Selena’s boots stopped a few ters behind him. Her voice dropped to a hiss that was quiet enough to stay between them and sharp enough to cut. "Father is furious. Do you understand what you’ve done? What that little performance is going to cost you?"
"He was already furious," Kaiden said. To the basin.
"This is different and you know it." She stepped closer. "You’ve always kept your distance and known your place. But now, you tried to humiliate him in front of the entire country. In front of his own guild. You stood there and played rebel and made him look like a fool on a live broadcast."
"Cassian. Calix." Kaiden’s voice was calm. "How are you two?"
Neither twin answered imdiately. One of them shifted his weight, a small sound of boot on stone.
"Don’t deflect!" Selena snapped. "Father has been patient with you. More patient than you deserve. He ignored your stream. Ignored you parading around with those won and dragging the bloodline through the mud. He let you play your gas because you weren’t worth the effort of stopping."
Kaiden tilted his head. Still facing forward.
"But you challenged him publicly. You asked a question you knew he couldn’t answer, and you did it in front of a million people because you wanted to wound him. Don’t pretend otherwise."
"I asked a reasonable question," Kaiden said mildly. "If he’d had a reasonable answer, there wouldn’t be a problem."
"He will never forgive this." Selena’s voice trembled at its edges, and the tremor wasn’t grief. It was fury. Deeply, personally felt. "You’ve been testing him for weeks, and you just pushed past every line he had. When this competition ends and the caras turn off, there will be consequences. Real ones. No amount of streaming or public sympathy or Association paperwork will protect you."
"She’s right, you know." One of the twins growled. Calix. He always echoed Selena with less polish and more heat. "You signed your own death warrant up there."
"She’s right," Cassian added, quieter. "You can’t win this, Kai. Not against him."
Kaiden was silent for a mont.
The wind moved across the ridge, carrying the last traces of ozone from the basin below, and his legs swung gently over the drop.
"Selena."
His voice had changed.
"Do you rember when you were sixteen?"
Selena didn’t respond.
"You’d just co back from your first guild training session. You were so excited you couldn’t stop talking about it at dinner. The instructor, the drills, the way it felt when your mana first connected to the training construct." He paused. "Your eyes were glowing. Literally glowing. And you kept looking across the table at because you wanted to be impressed."
The silence behind him was complete.
"I was. I was so impressed I couldn’t eat. I sat there with a fork in my hand and thought, ’My sister is the coolest person alive.’ I wanted to be exactly like you. Not father, nor mother. I wanted to be like you. Your confidence. The way you walked into a room and everyone just paid attention."
He let the words settle.
"And Cass. You used to follow around the estate like a shadow. You’d tug on my sleeve and ask to read to you because you said I did the voices better than the tutors." A breath. "And Cal, you were the one who convinced to sneak into father’s study because you swore you’d seen a sword in there that could talk. We spent forty minutes looking for it. It was a coat rack."
Nobody laughed. Nobody moved.
"Those are so of my favorite mories. The lot of us in that house, before any of it mattered. Before mana, before tiers, before anyone cared what letter sat next to your na on a governnt registry."
He let the silence hold.
"Then I didn’t awaken."
The warmth bled out of his voice the way color bleeds from a photograph left in the sun.
"You first, Selena. Then the twins, both on the sa day. And I waited. Months. A year. Two years. Sitting in that house watching everyone around develop abilities that made them superhuman while I stayed exactly what I’d always been."
"Don’t-" Cassian started.
"I’m not finished."
Cassian went quiet.
"I could have lived with that. Eighty-five percent of the world didn’t awaken. I would have been in good company. I could’ve been your managers, your assistants, whatever you needed so that you could focus on growth instead." His voice was even, the calm of a man who had processed this a long ti ago and was now reciting conclusions he’d reached years back. "But that isn’t what happened."
He looked out over the basin. The amber light was fading toward gold.
"What happened is that my sister, the one I idolized, started treating like I was trash. What happened is that the twins who used to follow around the estate started flinching when they had to look at . What happened is that I sat at a dinner table every night and watched my family realize, one by one, that I was embarrassing to them."
He could feel Selena’s fury behind him, rigid and hot, but she didn’t interrupt.
"Alice tried," he said, and his voice softened for a mont. "She’d climb into my bed at night and press her forehead against my arm and whisper that she didn’t care about tiers or any of it. That I was still her big brother and that was enough."
Silence.
"And mother tried, in her way. Tuition paid. Room maintained. Staff reminded to treat with respect." He paused. "Logistics and zero judgnt. Because that was how she loved, and I understood that, even then."
His legs swung over the drop.
"But none of that changed the fact that the people I grew up with, the siblings I loved, decided I wasn’t worth looking at anymore. And I always wondered: what did I do? Was there a test I failed? A conversation I missed? So mont where I could have proven I was still worth sothing?"
Nobody answered.
"Or was the cri just being in the unlucky eighty-five percent?"
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