Danny.
Maxton. The Maxton family’s third sibling. Harold and Cassiopeia’s brother.
Phei recognized this guy he used to call Uncle Danny; the one nobody talked about; recognition was so sudden dropping like an cold ice water on him!
His small eyes moved to the passenger subconsciously... like he was unable to believe this. There had to be soone ordering him, right? Phei did not doubt Maxtons, but Danny, he was cruel but just as he was stupid and a coward to be in charge of this!
There... on the st soone older, tall and severe; silver-haired and adorned in a black suit.
The patient still posture of a man who had spent his entire life standing one step behind soone more important than himself.
It was the Ashford family’s old butler.
And on the other hand was another figure... a butler to but he was... Elliot Heavenchild family’s right hand.
The two of them were in the truck cab...
...With Danny.
The two figures sat behind the windshield in the small companionable stillness of two n who had been paid to ensure this particular car’s destruction.
Then —
The Ashford butler’s body flickered like a lie the universe had grown tired of telling.
A soft cosmic distortion rippled at the edge of the windshield, the silver-haired figure simply unrendering itself from the mont so that no post-incident witness would ever record his presence.
The finger distorted out of existence as if so high-tier magic had erased the second man from the mory of the road as cleanly as a finger wiping a sentence from a chalkboard.
The Heavenchild butler vanished with him.
Then Danny figure flickered.
For one mocking fra he was gone.
Then he was back.
Alone behind the wheel.
Grinning.
The post-incident record would now show exactly what the Legacy wanted the world to swallow: one drunk-driver collision. One tragic, random, aningless accident. Nothing more. The kind of story mortals told themselves so they could sleep at night.
The realization arrived in his small chest with the patient cold weight of a stone dropped into still water — and the ripples it sent through his seven-year-old soul were endless.
But wasn’t sothing wrong? As far as he knew... the driver of the truck...
Wasn’t it soone else? He was arrested and later died in prison...
But what was Phei seeing now?
As if to mock him more, his small eyes as if being guided by fate itself — already wet with terror — caught a final, damning detail before the impact arrived.
Glowing spells... there were nurous magical circles, pale runic light pulsing in the air allover the car, spinning like so wheels of fate on the family car: around the undercarriage, around the engine block — delicate, lethal magic spells he had not noticed in the actual afternoon ten years ago because he had been seven and had not known what magic was.
Magic his seventeen-year-old mind, which had now learned about witches and fantasy powers and the cold, smiling arithtic of orchestrated cosmic murder, recognized the magic rather imdiately.
This had never been an accident... his parents had been murdered.
The thought landed in the small body like a blade between the ribs and the small body broke sowhere private and structural.
The magic rendered them unable to hear anything beyond the car, much to that, even if his father had looked in the mirror, all he would see would be a perfectly clear road; not the truck or it’s loud honk. and cruel Danny seed to be testing that with the loud honking, as if to mock Phei even more.
His small mouth opened to scream his mother’s na one final ti, and—
KKKRRRAAAAANNNNNGGGGG.
The truck struck.... and by then the world did not break, it seed to have been folded.
The SUV was hurled forward and upward with obscene violence. The rear end lifted violently while the front end punched downward into the road like a fist from hell itself. The entire vehicle pivoted in mid-air in a long, obscene rotation that the small body could not yet process while the tal scread like living things being torn apart. Glass exploded inward in glittering storms.
The entire cabin was filled with the wet, final crunch of crumpling steel and the sickening snap of bones that no safety seat could protect.
The radio died mid-chorus.
The woman’s voice cut off on a high, held note — mid-speech — and would never finish the syllable.
The song ended the sa way his family was about to end: abruptly, without rcy, without closure.
His mother’s hand moved....
Phei watched as if the ti was moving in slow motion to prolong his hell, as the sa hand that had brushed his cheek a minute ago now reaching back across the center console with desperate, impossible speed.
She twisted in her seat against the violence of the roll, fighting the physics of the crash itself as if she was a goddess fighting the inevitable will of Heavens, reaching for him across the impossible distance between front seat and child safety seat.
Reaching...
reaching...
...for her son.
She did not stop reaching for once.
CRACK!
The horrific sound reverberated and punched into Phei... because the bones in his mother’s neck had just snapped with a small, wet, final crack — he heard it clearly, sohow, above the loud destruction of the cabin.
But then again, what would a mortal do against the will of Heavens.
In horror and wide eyes, he saw as her head lolled at an angle no living neck was ant to make.
By every law of the mortal body, she should have gone limp.
She did not stop and her hand kept reaching.
Whatever bond lived between his mother and her son was stronger than broken vertebrae and dying nerves and the universe’s cruelty.
Her fingers stretched across the gap, trembling, searching, until they found his small cheek.
Warm.
Soft.
The sa gentle pressure he had known since before he could speak.
His small face turned into her palm by reflex, the way it always had.
Her thumb — already dying, already slick with her own blood — stroked his small cheekbone.
Once.
Slowly.
Deliberately.
Her golden eyes, already being robbed of life, finally, found his face beneath her hand found him.
A small, tender flicker of love crossed them — the sa look she had given him an hour ago, a minute ago, a mont ago — and her broken mouth tried to shape the words she had said to him every single morning of his seven years.
My love.
Her thumb stroked his cheek a second ti.
Slower.
The wedding ring on her finger was warm against his small jaw.
She managed the first syllable.
A small, wet breath.
A small muh.
She did not finish the second syllable.
The flicker of love in her eyes — the small tender register that had been his entire universe for seven years — went out like a candle snuffed by the void.
Her thumb stopped mid-stroke.
Her hand stayed on his face.
It did not pull away.
It simply... stopped.
The golden eyes that had been his entire world lost their focus mid-blink and did not return.
The woman behind them was simply no longer there, her dying body kept its hand pressed gently against his small cheek, the warm fingers slack but still touching him, the thumb resting where it had been stroking, the ring still warm against his jaw.
His mother had used the last second of her life to reach him.
She had touched his face.
She had said muh.
And then she had died.
Everything seed to have been paused in ti to let the mont ti, let him watch as life was snuffed out of her and unable to do anything!
Whatever the had been holding ti in an inescapable grip, finally let go and the SUV continued its first violent roll but her body was now limp against the front seat, dark hair falling across her face, the late-afternoon Paradise sun still — still — catching it in that long, beautiful halo even as blood ran from her open mouth and down the cream upholstery like the universe painting its final cruel joke in red.
His father —
He could not see him very well as his eyes welled with endless flow of tears.
The angle of his father’s body was wrong.
He could only see the back of the driver’s seat and a long, obscene arc of dark red painting the inside of the windshield from the driver’s side. The blood moved with the rolling vehicle, redistributing across every surface in slow, terrible spirals — the dashboard, the inside of the glass, the cream seat where his mother now lay.
The cartoon dragon sticker on the back of his father’s notebook had slid forward off his father’s lap.
It was now spotted with the sa dark red.
The small, playful image — the one his seven-year-old them two had stuck there while his father laughed — was slowly being covered by the blood of the man who had laughed when they put it there.
The safety seat his mother had chosen with such careful love held him perfectly in place while the world ended around him.
And sowhere, deep inside the small body, the seventeen-year-old Phei was being forced to watch every second of it as scread without sound.
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