Crushed Hope

  Garrick’s knuckles split again.

  Not from a clean strike. From refusal.

  The dummy took the hit like it had offended him personally. Its torso exploded into straw and splintered ribs of wood, the impact shock ringing through the South Wing training grounds like a bell that did not ask permission.

  White flame licked along his forearms and crawled over his shoulders, not a roaring inferno, a disciplined burn. That was the humiliating part. Even angry, his body still obeyed training. Even furious, he still fought like a Ziglar.

  He hated that most of all.

  A circle of broken dummies surrounded him, heads cracked, stakes snapped, charred husks kneeling like penitents. Servants stayed far back by the perimeter posts, eyes down, hands folded. Chosen commanders stood closer, because they were paid to be brave and too smart to pretend they were not terrified.

  Garrick inhaled.

  Unity Realm Rank 1 felt wrong. It was supposed to be a door. It had become a cage with a gold lock.

  His core pulsed, a second heartbeat of flame and stone, clean and powerful and undeniable. He had worked for it his entire life. Every bruise. Every night swallowing blood so he would not cough in front of instructors. Every campaign where he pretended the dead did not bother him because a future duke did not get to be bothered.

  And then the ancestral flame had looked past him.

  It had chosen the sick boy.

  The weak one.

  The brother everyone had quietly prepared to mourn.

  Garrick hit another dummy, and it disintegrated so completely that the stake remained standing like a mockery. His aura flared and snapped back into control, like a leash yanked tight.

  Control. Always control. That was what his father had carved into him. He wanted to laugh. He wanted to vomit.

  A commander cleared his throat behind him. “Young Lord. Your hands.”

  Garrick did not turn. “They will heal.”

  “Unity burns slower,” another one said carefully. “Especially when you keep feeding it spite.”

  “Spite is an excellent fuel,” Garrick replied.

  His voice came out calm, polite even. Like he was commenting on the weather, not trying not to shatter. He forced his fingers to uncurl. Blood beaded along the torn skin, bright and almost cheerful. The sight should have been grounding.

  It was not.

  He stared at his hands and thought, If I were not a Ziglar, I would have been allowed to be weak for one day.

  But he was. So even his breakdown had to be efficient.

  Captain Harlon stepped forward. He had the courage or the stupidity to wear honesty like armor. “The Rite of Bloodforged Trial is not a prize, my lord. It’s a slaughterhouse. The ancestral flame chooses who it chooses.”

  Garrick’s smile appeared before he felt it. It looked almost pleasant. He turned slowly and regarded Harlon like a man examining a blade for cracks.

  “I know,” Garrick said. “I have spent my whole life preparing to walk into the slaughterhouse.”

  Harlon swallowed. “Then perhaps it’s a mercy.”

  Mercy.

  Garrick felt something hot surge behind his ribs, sharp enough to be called violence. He wanted to grab that word and break it in half.

  Instead, he nodded once. “Mercy is what people call it when the universe steals from them, and they are too tired to argue.”

  Silence fell. Even the wind seemed to stop to listen.

  Echoes Unraveling

  Garrick pivoted back to the remaining dummies as if they were enemies that could be punished into fairness. His palm burned where the straw had scraped him, and the present rushed back like a slap.

  His mind refused to stay here. It kept dragging him backward, to old scenes that smelled of incense and cold marble.

  He had awakened fire and earth at five, and even that had not been enough to make his father stay. He remembered lifting his chin, scanning the crowd for Duke Alaric’s face like it was the sun. He remembered finding it and how it changed.

  A messenger had arrived. A whisper. A parchment. Whatever it was, it hit his father like a blade between the ribs. Alaric’s aura flared, and the air cracked, the whole temple trembling like it wanted to collapse into obedience.

  Then his father left without looking at him. Not even once.

  Garrick’s heart clenched now, years too late. He had replayed that moment so many times he could recite the angle of the light, the pattern of the tiles, the way his own pride had curdled into confusion.

  Back then, he still believed there was a simple reason. Something that could be fixed. A misunderstanding. A delay.

  He had gone to the East Wing. He had run because children ran when they wanted comfort. He reached the corridor and found servants and guards blocking a door like a fortress. The smell of medicine. The smell of smoke. The smell of grief that adults tried to hide and failed.

  Anya stood there, eyes rimmed red, holding a baby wrapped in a white cloth. Charlemagne was so small Garrick had thought, absurdly, that the cloth itself might swallow him.

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  Anya had looked at Garrick as if he were both a child and an heir, and neither role suited the moment.

  “Your Grace is gone,” she had said.

  His mother was gone.

  Gone was a word that made no sense to a child who had never seen an ending that could not be appealed.

  He remembered asking if she was asleep. He wondered if she would wake. He was told to stand straight. He had gone back to the training grounds the next day anyway, because the house did not pause for grief.

  Seraphina had been three. She had screamed herself hoarse. She had hit servants. She had thrown pillows. She had demanded their mother and then demanded their father and then demanded someone, anyone, to explain why a world that used to hold laughter had suddenly decided it preferred silence.

  Garrick had learned to tuck her in. He had learned to sing the lullabies their mother used to sing, even though he barely remembered the melody. He had learned to be soft in the dark and hard in the morning.

  He learned to be two people. The boy who wanted his family back. The heir who was not allowed to want things. That was how House Ziglar raised him. Not with love. With necessity.

  And necessity carved resentment into him, then forced him to call it duty.

  Then Charlemagne grew.

  Not the way heirs grew, loud and proud and adored. The sick boy grew quietly, like a shadow that refused to leave.

  Garrick blamed him at first, because it was easier to blame a baby than to blame fate. Then he watched the baby become a child who coughed blood into his sleeve after swinging a branch, and the resentment became something uglier.

  Pity.

  Guilt.

  The kind that did not make you kinder, only made you tired. And then, without anyone asking him to, Garrick began sending gifts. Once a year. Every year.

  Wooden training swords.

  Not pretty ones. Not ceremonial ones. Practical ones. Balanced. Weighted for small hands. Wrapped in leather so they would not slip when sweat turned palms into slick weakness.

  He never handed them over himself. He never wrote a note. He told a servant to leave it at the East Wing threshold like a bribe offered to fate.

  He remembered the little sickly figure lingering at the edges of his private classes. Tutors protesting. Garrick, nine years old, already wearing authority like armor, telling them to let the boy sit in the corner.

  Garrick remembered leaving snacks untouched. Pastries. Drinks. He remembered leaving combat scrolls and lesson tomes open, not as charity, as strategy. A controlled leak. A small allowance for a brother he did not know how to love.

  He remembered watching Charlemagne creep forward when he thought no one was looking, wide-eyed, cautious like a stray animal. Eating too quickly. Reading like hunger.

  He told himself it was strategy. A controlled leak. If the boy lived, he would not die ignorant. If the boy died, at least he would have held a weapon shaped like belonging.

  The truth was simpler and more embarrassing. Somewhere inside him, Garrick wanted Charlemagne to live long enough to prove they were not cursed. He wanted his mother’s death to mean something other than collapse.

  He wanted to protect one thing.

  He failed.

  Harold poisoned him. Under Garrick’s roof. Under Garrick’s watch. Harold, trusted, embedded, invisible.

  Guilt that hardened into humiliation — because it proved he had never been ruthless enough.

  Now, Charlemagne was strong.

  Now, Charlemagne was chosen for the Rite of Bloodforged Trial like a man who had decided death was negotiable.

  And Garrick was left behind.

  The Siblings’ Dilemma

  A soft footstep approached from the left. Light, measured. Only one person walked like that here.

  Seraphina. She did not announce herself. She never did. She had stopped needing permission years ago.

  Garrick kept facing forward.

  “You’re going to break the training grounds,” she said.

  “You’re going to complain about the budget?” Garrick replied.

  Seraphina snorted. “No. I’m going to complain about the smell. You always burn things when you’re emotional. It’s very dramatic. It’s also terrible for my hair.”

  That would have made him laugh once. A real laugh. Warm.

  Now it only made his mouth twitch.

  He glanced over his shoulder. Seraphina stood with arms crossed, hair tied back, posture lazy in a way that fooled strangers. Her eyes were sharp. They always were. She looked like someone who learned early that softness was a liability and still managed to keep a knife-shaped version of affection.

  Seraphina tilted her head. “Unity Realm Rank 1 and you’re still punching straw men. Father would be so proud.”

  “Careful,” Garrick said quietly. “If you keep talking like that, you’ll start to sound like you care.”

  She smiled, all teeth. “I care about the property damage.”

  He turned fully now, letting her see him. Letting her see the blood on his hands, the soot on his forearms, the white flame curling like a temper barely restrained.

  Seraphina’s gaze flicked to his knuckles. Then to the pile of broken dummies. Then back to his eyes.

  “You broke through,” she said. Her tone shifted under the sarcasm.

  “Yes.”

  “And you thought that would change Father’s mind.”

  Garrick’s jaw tightened. He did not deny it.

  Seraphina’s expression softened by a fraction, which on her face was practically a confession. “Garrick. He made the order weeks ago.”

  “I know.”

  “Then why are you still surprised?”

  Because some part of me is still five years old, looking up at him in a temple, Garrick thought. He did not say it.

  Instead, he said, “Because I earned it.”

  Seraphina stepped closer, boots crunching lightly over scorched straw. “So did Charlemagne.”

  The name hit like a slap. Garrick’s flame surged. The air warmed. Servants took a subtle step back, like animals sensing a predator shift its weight.

  Seraphina raised a brow. “There it is. That look. I missed it.”

  “You enjoy this,” Garrick said.

  “I enjoy honesty,” Seraphina replied. “Especially when it’s ugly.”

  Garrick exhaled through his nose. “Say what you came to say.”

  Seraphina leaned in slightly, voice low enough that even the commanders would have to strain. “Charlemagne is not trained for that trial.”

  Garrick’s throat tightened. It was the thought he kept trying to crush because it carried a different kind of fear. “Yes,” he said.

  “And Father is still sending him.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you think that means Father wants him dead.”

  He stared at her. Seraphina’s eyes did not flinch. She was cruel enough to say the thing out loud. Loyal enough to share it with him first.

  Garrick’s voice came out rougher than he intended. “I don’t know what Father wants.”

  “That is the problem,” she said. “We never do.”

  Garrick looked away, jaw working. A laugh tried to rise in his chest, bitter and sharp. He had spent his whole life reading battlefields, predicting enemy movement, smelling betrayal in a room. And he still could not read his own father. That was a special kind of incompetence.

  Seraphina’s tone turned lighter again because she did not know how to stay soft for long. “Also, if you keep smashing dummies like this, you’re going to make the servants start a betting pool on when you finally punch through a wall.”

  Garrick blinked once. “They already have one.”

  Seraphina’s eyes widened, pleased. “Oh. What’s the line?”

  “Two days,” Garrick said flatly.

  Seraphina laughed. A real laugh. It echoed, and for a second it sounded like their childhood, like something that belonged to a world before grief.

  Garrick hated that it made his chest ache.

  Then her laughter faded, and she stepped closer again, voice sharpening. “Garrick. Listen to me. If Charlemagne dies, you do not win. You lose anyway.”

  “I know.”

  “No,” she said, pointing at his chest like she could stab the truth into him. “You lose your brother. Father loses his heir. The house loses the flame’s chosen. And you get to sit on a throne made of ashes while everyone whispers you were second choice.”

  Garrick’s flame flickered. He had thought that exact thing alone in his room, and it had made him want to tear his own heart out.

  Seraphina watched his face like he was a battlefield map. “You hate him for taking what you wanted.”

  Garrick’s lips pressed thin.

  “And you hate yourself for hoping he fails,” she continued.

  A hot sting rose behind his eyes. He crushed it instantly.

  Seraphina’s voice dropped. “You know what the most disgusting part is?”

  Garrick did not answer.

  She leaned in. “Part of you is proud of him.”

  The words landed soft and lethal. Garrick’s breath stalled.

  Proud. Yes.

  The sick boy who never stopped. The scrawny shadow who kept training with broken scraps. The brother who survived poison, betrayal, a lifetime of neglect, and still came back with a blade in his hand and a legacy in his eyes.

  Proud. It felt like treason. It also felt like truth.

  Garrick turned back to the last standing dummy. He did not roar. He did not rush.

  One step. One breath. One controlled strike. The straw collapsed cleanly.

  Control returned. That terrified him more than rage ever had.