In a very far place
Far to the east, where the first light of morning threaded itself through silk banners and gilded eaves, the royal palace of House Kermstone brooded over the plain like a monument turned inward. To an outsider it might have seemed an odd architecture: a palace of fired clay and lacquered tiles so vast its courtyards could have swallowed whole towns. The façades, glazed in a thousand shifting sheens, reflected dawn like molten porcelain — brilliant and unmoved. For those who lived within its walls, that stillness had become a grammar of life: form without question, surface without secret. Two years and a half ago, the palace had learned how to hold a different silence — the silence left by a vanished son.
They had called him the Crimson Prince in the proclamations at first — a regal name meant to frame absence as honor. Then rumors had come: the boy had simply disappeared, as if someone had pulled a thread and the world folded where he once stood. No body. No trace. No sound. One moment he had been there; the next the room had been a perfect, impossible nothing. People whispered that he had been exiled for failure, that he had been weak in the face of the world's cruelties, that the palace had breathed a sigh and moved on without him. Others refused to believe the simple narrative and kept fingers pressed to lips and eyes to shadowed corridors.
Princess Rias had been fifteen when the silence settled like dust. Now she was older, Seventeen and the palace had not become gentler for her. She practiced in the training yard at dawn with a zeal that could bruise. The red blade she wielded — Naifith — was an extension of the heat in her blood: a spirit-sword that hissed with hungry flame when she swung it. Her hair — a raven black — whipped in the air with each arc; the sword's red glow painted her arms in the color of iron-warm blood. She moved with a dangerous grace, a choreography of impact and retreat, each strike a question to the space where her brother's laughter had once echoed.
Naifith struck the dummy with the force of a hammered god: slash, slash — and the air answered in fire. Sparks spit from the wood-cloth training bodies; embers hissed and rolled like angry beetles. Rias did not merely slice — she called storms of flame from the tendon of the blade and the deep well of something older that sat in her bones. Her elements were twofold: fire from her mother's line and blood-kin magic beneath it, a legacy that made her blades sing with a voice other than steel. It had been given to her without gentle counsel; she had inherited the inheritance as if it were weight, and she had learned to move with it until the motion was automatic and unforgiving.
She did not stop until the yard lay ruined around her — scorched targets, a ring of ash where flowers had been, a scent of singed lily thick as fear. Only then did she sheath Naifith and walk from the field, the sword's heat still humming under the leather. Her face was an arranged mask: cold, controlled, so smooth that anyone who did not know the way her shoulders tightened in solitude might think she simply refused to wear grief.
The palace, after the prince's disappearance, had folded inward. Her father, the king, buried himself in statecraft — statutes, treaties, ledger books that sat like stones between nights. He spoke in the efficient grammar of rulership: numbers, obligations, risk matrices—things measureable and therefore survivable. Her mother withdrew into the quiet sanctum of an aristocrat who had forChaptergotten how to laugh; she moved like an ivory statue through evening dinners, appearing only at precise hours and returning to cloistered rooms afterward. They both wore mourning as a careful fabric, and their grief was performed in private like a ritual they would not allow to spill into the courtyards.
Rias had tried, once, to make them turn their heads back toward the empty room. She had stormed into the king's study with Naifith at her hip and the heat of the training field on her skin. She had knocked until the guards' eyes widened and the king's hand trembled over parchment. She had pleaded, cried, demanded truth in a voice that had the shattered edge of someone whose world had been tilted.
They offered her platitudes and averted eyes. There were protocols too delicate to reveal. There were rumors to smother lest they topple alliances. There was the convenience of a silence that spared the court the trouble of messy emotion. The love for their son, if love it was, had folded into a geometry of duty and prevention; the king's sorrow did not reach the courtyard stones where her feet left prints. It would not be enough.
So Rias taught herself to stop asking.
She walked the palace halls with boots that made no unnecessary sound. The corridor tapestries — painted dragons, ancestors posed in formal lacquered frames — folded along the walls like history that would not intercede. She climbed the second-floor stairs in the thin, bright morning and let the perfume of orchids trail her, a scent the palace kept in a seasonal reserve as if scent could summon memory. The paintings and neon-lit ornaments along the landing reflected her as a silhouette against a pattern of pale tiles and gilt, and the path led her to the door she avoided: Alex's door.
His chamber had been sealed the day he vanished. The lock had not been turned in two and a half years; the polished wood had a faint film where hands had once rested, the dust in the corners undisturbed as though someone had stopped and left a room mid-thought and never returned. Rias approached the threshold slow, pulse a slow drum in her throat. She could have turned back. She might have let protocol and fear and the king's measured grief be enough like many around her did. But there was a small, stubborn thing in her — a flame not unlike Naifith's — that wanted to pry loose the silence.
She placed her palm on the door. The wood was cool: the touch of an absence that had learned to be patient. For a moment she remembered the last argument they had, the small jewelry box he'd left on the floor, the string of words that had ended with a slam. She felt the ache of it like a lover's bruise.
"Alex," she spoke softly — not to the wood, nor to the dust, but to the ghost that might yet linger beneath it. "Why did you go? Why did you leave me with a silence I cannot cut?"
Her voice barely stirred the air and yet it felt, to her, like a thrown stone. She eased the latch, the mechanism obedient as if no mischief had taught it new habits. The door sighed open.
The room inside was exactly as she remembered it: a boy's life paused at the edge. Sheets folded back like a sleep not returned. Toys — not toys, but training weights and bronze miniatures of beasts he had liked to collect — lined a shelf, immaculate and gleaming, as if someone had set them down with intent the night before and simply never come back. In the corner, the desk held a notebook open to a half-drawn sketch of a place they had once planned to visit together. The air smelled faintly of his cologne and a deeper, older note of rain.
Rias stepped over the threshold as if crossing a line in a map. The place felt sacred and obscene at once — the private hearth of a boy who had become a question. She moved through the room with the small reverence of someone entering a chapel. Every object was a wound that did not scab, every scrap a memory that refused to fade.
She sat on the edge of his bed, fingers tracing the quilt's hem until she felt the familiar thrum of grief swell. In the quiet, her anger did not feel theatrical; it felt elemental. "You left," she said again, but this time it held less pleading and more iron. "You left and they wrapped silence around you like a gift. They called you a failure. They called you absent. Did you want them to be right? Did you go to spare us the truth of your weakness? Or did they erase you to hide their own shame?"
Her voice cracked like thin ice. She did not know if the room listened or if some other presence, older and darker, had come to dwell where her brother's laughter used to be. Perhaps it was only the echo of her own steps. Nevertheless, she stayed and let the room hold her until sunlight filtered through the curtains and painted slow gold across Alex's desk.
Outside the palace, in the training yards and market squares, rumors still found new mouths. Some said exile. Some said the prince had been consumed by demons in a border skirmish. Others whispered of secret orders and clandestine kings. None of those were the explanation Rias wanted. She wanted the kind of truth that could be held — blunt, ridiculous, sharply human.
When she rose at last, she did not solve anything. The door closed softly behind her, the click of lock and bolt a small, final sound that nevertheless made her body feel lighter for the moment. She walked the corridors again, and the palace moved around her like an organism ignorant of one of its cells. She had no audience, no advisors, no allies carved of granite and duty. Only the sword at her hip, Naifith, hummed faintly as if in sympathy.
"Forgive me," she muttered to the empty air, not sure whether she asked it of Alex or of the world that kept tidiness over truth. Then she turned away from the silence and went down to the training yard to swing a blade until the dawn split and the ash turned to dust.
The palace watched her go — fired clay and lacquered tiles keeping the memory of her steps — and, for a brief hour before the day's business returned with its petitions and tribunals, House Kermstone felt like a place that might yet release the prince's secret. But such things rarely happen in a single morning. The day would fold into itself, and the silence would wait, patient as ever.
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Heat: Hello guys, how are you? I hope you like the chapter. A new character has appeared and she is a princess. There will be a lot of fun in the upcoming chapters.