Chapter 3: Lesson for Children?
The council chamber lay buried deeper than most disciples ever guessed, a cavernous hall carved from the living heart of the Black Mountain itself. No windows, no sky, only the faint crimson glow of floating lanterns that drifted like dying embers. The obsidian table was thirty metres long and seamless, cut from a single slab taken from the mountain's core millennia ago. Fifteen elders sat around it in perfect, terrible silence.
Four women. Eleven men. Heads of the fortress's oldest bloodlines.
At the head waited the sixteenth chair: higher-backed, older, empty.
No one had dared sit there since the last Great Elder fell in the Void War.
Mak broke the quiet first, voice like grinding stone.
"Where is that youngster Ter? He calls an emergency meeting and keeps us waiting like common disciples?"
Cana, sharp-eyed and sharper-tongued, leaned back with a lazy smile.
"Careful, Mak. You're over three hundred years old. One might think you're scared to say 'youngster Ter' to his face."
Clay chuckled. "Or are you just jealous May reached Returning Origin before your precious Lark?"
Cliff slammed a palm on the table. Lanterns rattled; shadows leapt across the walls.
"Please. Some decorum in front of the younger generation."
Behind the elders, pressed into the darkness, stood the successors: silent silhouettes, breathing trained to nothing. They were not nervous apprentices but living blades, honed since birth to watch, listen, and one day replace. Only the Great Elder's seat had no shadow waiting.
Sarah spoke softly, almost kindly. "May isn't here either."
"She's handling diplomacy," Cana answered at once, pride unmistakable. "My student has grown into quite the woman."
The doors groaned open like a dying beast.
Great Elder Ter entered alone. Crown tilted, mantle rippling though no wind touched the chamber. The temperature dropped ten degrees in the space of a heartbeat.
Mak didn't wait.
"Why waste our time, Great Elder?"
Ter's reply was calm, almost bored.
"Do I need to explain why the butterfly flaps its wings?"
Craig barked a laugh. "Touché."
Ter ignored him and continued.
"I have an announcement."
"If it's about May's breakthrough, we already know," Cana cut in, unable to resist.
"It is not."
He let the silence stretch just long enough to taste fear.
"I have decided to evict Tor."
The chamber detonated.
Cana's faction rose halfway from their seats, voices overlapping:
"He has committed no crime!"
"The fortress is wealthy enough to support a thousand like him!"
Cliff's faction countered with cold pragmatism:
"He contributes nothing."
"No mandate, no talent, no future."
Mak's faction was loudest, cruelest:
"Enslave him. Strip the bracelets. Keep the weapon and discard the child."
Shouts became curses. Fists struck stone hard enough to spark. Mantles flared like storm clouds colliding.
In the shadows, the successors shifted: Lark's fingers tightening on invisible rifle grips, Roe licking his lips, Crow's void blade already half-drawn.
Ter's voice cut through the chaos, quiet yet absolute.
"Silence."
The pressure that followed crushed every sound. Even heartbeats seemed to pause. A lantern guttered and died.
Ter's gaze swept the table.
"Do you know why he never trains with the clan?"
One of Mak's men sneered, emboldened by numbers.
"Because he's trash with no mandate."
A few nervous laughs followed.
Ter smiled. It was not kind.
"Very well. He leaves tomorrow at noon. I invite any who disagree to stop him personally."
The temperature plummeted further. Breath misted in the air.
Mak's knuckles whitened around his sword hilt.
"This is meant to be a democracy, Elder."
Ter's hand left the hilt of the sword that wasn't there today.
"Who said I planned to interfere?"
He turned, mantle flaring once like a closing wing.
"Enjoy the show."
Then he was gone.
In the vacuum he left behind, the silence was worse than the shouting had been.
Cana leaned toward her neighbour and whispered, barely audible,
"This is why I love watching the boys play politics."
Her companion barely suppressed a giggle.
But every elder in the room felt the same chill crawl down their spine.
Three nights ago, a hidden crystal had recorded a ten-year-old boy erasing a training hall that had survived wars older than nations.
Tomorrow, that same boy would walk past them toward the gate.
And not one of them, not even Mak, truly believed they could stop him.
Somewhere in the dark, Lark smiled the smile of a man who had already ordered plasma rifles.
Somewhere deeper, Roe licked his lips again.
And high above, in a cottage that smelled faintly of ozone and old power, Tor slept through it all, dreaming of skies he had never been allowed to see.