The corridors beyond the command center were brighter than the room Elara died in, but they felt colder.
The child walked alone.
No guards followed. No cuffs clinked at their wrists. No one rushed them forward. That was Kain's idea of mercy—space, silence, and the illusion of choice.
The doors parted as they approached, sensing the clearance still stamped into their identity. Elara's clearance. The Phantom Queen might be dead, but the system had not yet learned to forget her.
Neither had the child.
Every step away from the execution chamber made the air feel heavier, as though the walls themselves were pressing in, trying to reclaim what had been lost. The hum of machinery echoed through the vast facility, a thousand hidden engines working to keep a dead empire alive.
The child's reflection slid along the polished steel walls—small, pale, eyes too old for their face.
They did not cry.
Not then.
They reached a junction where three corridors met. For a moment, they stopped, unsure which direction led to the surface. They had never been allowed to walk these halls freely before. Every time they had left their quarters, it had been with guards, with restraints, with Elara's shadow wrapped around them like a cloak.
Mother.
The word still existed inside them, even if the woman no longer did.
A memory rose without permission.
Elara kneeling in front of them years ago, silver hair loose, eyes sharp but strangely gentle.
"Do you know why they fear me?" she had asked.
The child had shaken their head.
"Because I do what they cannot. I choose who lives, and who doesn't. That is what power is." She had placed her hand over their heart. "One day, you will understand this better than anyone."
The child walked on.
They reached a transport platform, empty except for a single waiting shuttle. Its engines idled softly, ready to carry them somewhere Kain had decided was safe. Somewhere clean. Somewhere far away from blood and thrones.
They did not board it.
Instead, they sat on the cold metal bench and stared at their hands. They were still shaking, just slightly. Not from fear.
From restraint.
They closed their fingers slowly, nails biting into skin.
You only allowed me to watch.
The words echoed again, sharper now. Kain had not meant it that way. He probably believed he had done something righteous. Necessary. Leaders always did.
So had Elara.
A shadow moved across the platform.
The child looked up.
A woman stood there, tall, dressed in the dark uniform of the inner council. Her face was unreadable, eyes flicking between the child and the shuttle.
"You're supposed to be gone already," she said.
"I know," the child replied.
The woman hesitated. "Kain ordered that you be taken to Sanctuary District. You'll be given guardians, education, a new identity. A life."
"A life like whose?" the child asked.
The question caught her off guard. "Better than this."
"That's what she said too."
The woman's jaw tightened. "Elara was a tyrant."
"Yes," the child agreed quietly. "So was everyone who stood beside her."
Silence.
"You stood beside her," the woman said.
"So did you."
Her eyes flicked away. That was answer enough.
The woman stepped closer. "You should go. Staying here isn't safe."
The child tilted their head. "From who?"
"From what you represent," she replied. "You are the last living blood of the Phantom Queen. People will want you erased. Or used."
"Like before."
"Yes."
The child stood. They were shorter than her, smaller, but there was something in their gaze that made her shift her weight.
"I won't go to Sanctuary," they said.
"You don't have a choice."
The child smiled faintly. "Elara taught me that choice is what happens when someone believes they own you. Kain believes he freed me. That means he won't watch me."
"And where will you go?" the woman asked.
"Somewhere he isn't looking."
She studied them for a long moment. "If you walk out of this platform, I am required to stop you."
"Are you?"
Her lips parted, then closed.
"I used to believe in her," the woman said quietly. "In what she promised. Order. Stability. A future."
"And now?"
"And now I watched her bleed on a floor while a man who calls himself a liberator didn't even close her eyes."
The child nodded. "That's when you realized it wasn't justice. Just a transfer."
The woman swallowed.
She stepped aside.
"There's a maintenance lift at the far end of this corridor," she said. "It leads to the lower city. No scanners. No records."
"Why are you helping me?"
"Because," she replied, "someone should remember her as more than a headline."
The child walked past her.
At the corridor's end, they stopped and looked back.
"She wasn't kind," the child said. "But she was honest about what she was."
The woman said nothing.
The lift descended into darkness.
Below the citadel, the world was different.
The lower city was a sprawl of broken towers and flickering lights, crowded with people who had lived their entire lives beneath Elara's reign without ever seeing her face. Here, her death was just another rumor, another story passed through static and fear.
The child moved through the crowds unnoticed, hood pulled low, eyes taking everything in.
This was what Elara had ruled.
Not the command center. Not the throne.
This.
A group of people gathered around a screen on a street corner. The broadcast played Kain's face, solemn and controlled.
"—the Phantom Queen has been neutralized," he was saying. "Her reign of terror is over. A new era begins today."
The child watched.
Kain's voice was steady. Convincing.
A lie wrapped in order.
They turned away.
That night, in a narrow room above a closed shop, the child finally allowed themselves to sit.
The silence here was different. No machines. No guards. Just distant voices and the hum of a city that did not care who ruled it.
They pressed their hands to their eyes.
For a moment, Elara was there again — standing tall, silver-haired, dangerous, alive.
You will understand power.
"I do," the child whispered into the dark.
Power was not in killing.
It was in being remembered.
They opened their eyes, and something inside them settled — not grief, not rage, but something colder and far more patient.
Kain had killed the Phantom Queen.
But he had spared her heir.
And that, one day, would matter more than he could possibly imagine.