The door was heavy beneath his hand.
Cool iron met Kel's palm, the chill seeping into his skin as if the metal itself wished to test his resolve one last time. The study's air pressed against his back—thick with old ink, colder steel, and the weight of unspoken history.
He had said what he wished to say.
He had refused what he wished to refuse.
He had been granted the freedom he asked for.
The path outside this room felt like the first step out of a mausoleum he'd been buried in since birth.
He tightened his fingers around the handle—
"Kel."
The Duke's voice was calm.
It did not rise. It did not command.
But it stopped him.
He paused, shoulders going still. Slowly, he turned his head—not enough to be a full turn, just enough for one grey eye to meet Arcturus over his shoulder.
The lamplight framed the Duke in muted gold and shadow; seated at the great blackwood desk, cloak of night-dark fabric draped over his broad frame, he looked less like a father calling to his son and more like a sovereign speaking to a warrior who was not quite his subject.
Arcturus's gaze was steady.
"Before you leave," the Duke said quietly, "listen to me."
Kel turned the rest of the way, releasing the handle.
He faced his father again, posture straight, hands resting at his sides. The faint pallor beneath his skin was still there, his body still worn and brittle under his formal clothes—but his eyes were calm and razor-focused.
"Yes," he replied. "Father… what is it?"
For a moment, Arcturus did not answer.
He simply watched Kel, as though this was the last moment in which he would see his son as a boy inside these walls, before the world outside filed the edges into something unrecognizable.
Then he exhaled—slow, controlled.
"Promise me," Arcturus said, "that you will at least fulfill one request of mine."
The words were not framed as an order.
That alone made Kel's brows shift, only slightly.
He tilted his head a little.
"If it is not something that compromises the terms I set," Kel answered, voice steady, "then I will fulfill it."
His tone held no arrogance—only a clear boundary, calmly drawn. The fact that he could say such a thing in this room, to this man, and still be standing, was proof enough that the balance between them had shifted.
Arcturus's lips moved in the faintest suggestion of a dry smile.
"Careful with your words, Kel," he murmured. "They might make people think you have grown."
Kel said nothing.
He waited.
The Duke's expression smoothed again, the trace of humor folding back into iron.
His next words were measured, but there was a weight beneath them he did not bother to hide.
"At least," Arcturus said, "take two knights with you."
The request dropped into the quiet study like a stone into a deep well.
Kel's shoulders stiffened, the line of his back tightening. His fingers twitched slightly inside his gloves; the faint wrinkle in the fabric betrayed the movement.
He drew in a quiet breath.
"But, Father, that will—"
He didn't finish.
Because the Duke's voice cut over his, not sharply, but with a finality that could not be ignored.
"Not as Rosenfeld knights."
Kel fell silent.
His eyes sharpened.
Arcturus leaned back in his chair, cloak shifting with the movement, the lamplight catching the silver thread at his cuffs.
"Not under my crest," he continued. "Not wearing my colors. Not as shadows carrying my emblem into the world."
His gaze did not waver.
"As your companions."
The word hung in the air—soft, but strangely heavy on the Duke's tongue, as though it had not been used often in his life.
Kel's eyes narrowed by a fraction.
"Companions…" he repeated.
Arcturus nodded once.
"Men who travel with you," he said, "not as your guards, not as your chains, but as blades at your side. They will not wear Rosenfeld insignia. They will not declare your name. They will not speak of your origin unless you command it."
He paused, letting that sink in.
Kel watched him, silent, expression unreadable—but the faint tension at the corner of his jaw betrayed motion beneath the calm surface.
"And," the Duke added, his voice flattening into something like a formal guarantee, "you need not worry that I am sending spies to watch over you in my stead."
He held Kel's gaze.
"You will choose your companions independently."
The study grew still again.
Kel stared at his father, searching his eyes for even a hint of a hidden hook in those words. A loophole. A manipulation.
But Arcturus's face remained as it always was: hard, controlled, clear.
If he hid anything, it was buried too deep to be read from his expressions alone.
Companions.
Not extensions of the Duke's will.
Not chains in disguise.
Kel's mind moved quickly.
Two knights. Two trained blades. Two people capable of handling situations his cursed body might not survive alone.
But also—two witnesses.
Two sets of eyes that would see him as something other than a half-crippled heir rotting quietly behind estate walls.
Two people who could live or die because of the choices he made.
His fingers flexed, then stilled.
"Father," Kel began, tone lower now, words more careful, "having anyone with me will change the way I move. Alone, I can vanish. With others…"
He let the thought hang.
Arcturus nodded once.
"Yes," he acknowledged. "You cannot vanish as easily when others leave footprints beside yours. That is true."
His gaze darkened.
"But you also cannot bleed out in a nameless ditch where no one sees, if something happens faster than your reflexes."
Kel's lips compressed into a thin line.
"You believe I cannot handle it," he said quietly.
Arcturus's answering look was flat, almost cutting.
"I believe," the Duke replied, "that you are clever enough to admit that your body is still weaker than your will. And that the world does not bend simply because you have decided to walk into it."
Kel fell silent.
The Duke's voice softened—not in warmth, but in the way a whetstone softens the rust from steel.
"You wish to be a ghost," Arcturus said. "I agreed not to chain you with my name, not to weigh you with my eyes. I have allowed you to walk beyond these walls with no banner and no record."
He leaned forward slightly, the lamplight deepening the shadows along his face.
"Grant me this much in return, Kel: that you do not wager your entire existence on pride alone."
Kel's eyes lowered.
Pride.
No.
It wasn't pride. Or at least, not only that.
It was fear, too.
Not fear of pain.
He had lived with pain for years.
It was fear of becoming someone whose fate was always carefully padded with others' precautions. Someone whose steps were always measured by another's trust, another's protection, another's planning.
He wanted, for once, to own his risks fully.
But…
He also remembered the collapse.
The taste of blood.
The way his body had shut down without asking his permission.
His fingers curling in his sleeves.
The cold floor.
The silence.
He let out a slow breath.
"If I accept two companions," Kel said at last, "the road will no longer belong just to me."
Arcturus's eyes did not waver.
"The road never belongs to one man alone," he answered. "Even ghosts cast echoes where they walk."
Kel looked up again.
Their gazes locked once more—a son trying to stretch beyond the boundaries of his own mortality, and a father trying to limit the ways in which that mortality could shatter.
The Duke continued.
"Companions do not erase your risks," he said. "They simply ensure that if you fall, someone is there to either drag you to shelter or make your death mean something more than a corpse in the mud."
His voice sharpened.
"You asked to carry your choices alone, Kel. You did not ask to die stupidly."
Kel's mouth almost curled—not quite into a smile, but into an expression that acknowledged the bluntness.
He let the words sit with him.
He tasted them.
Then swallowed.
Silence stretched between them again.
Outside, the wind clawed lightly at the obsidian window, much softer now, as if even the weather had grown tired of how long father and son stood locked in their unyielding conversation.
Finally—
Something in Kel's expression shifted.
The hard, unbending edge smoothed out just a fraction, revealing the boy beneath the iron, the one who still knew how to listen even when he refused to kneel.
He exhaled quietly.
Then he smiled.
It was small, but real.
Less like the smooth, cold curve he used as a social weapon and more like something quietly human.
"Then," Kel said softly, "I will choose my companions as fast as possible."
His tone held no grudging reluctance.
It held acceptance.
And, if one listened closely enough—
A hint of anticipation.
Arcturus watched that fleeting, genuine warmth touch his son's face.
It did not last long.
Kel smoothed it away almost immediately, replacing it with the calm composure he'd been honing like a blade.
But the Duke had seen it.
His own lips moved, just barely.
"Good," he said simply.
Kel straightened, his earlier fatigue pushed somewhere deeper behind his new focus.
"They will not be Rosenfeld knights in name," he clarified, as much to himself as to his father.
Arcturus inclined his head.
"They will be… yours," he said. "Let them swear to you, not to my crest. Let them walk in plain clothes, with no emblem but their steel and your trust."
Kel held onto that word.
Yours.
His.
Companions chosen not by duty, but by his own judgment.
He bowed his head slightly.
"Then I will begin considering who is fit," he said.
Arcturus leaned back, the faint lines around his eyes deepening with something that was not quite tiredness, not quite relief.
"Choose well," the Duke said. "A man is measured not only by the enemies he gathers, but by the hands that choose to stand beside him when no banners are raised."
Kel nodded once.
"I will."
He turned again—this time, his movements lighter, though no less controlled. The weight on his shoulders had not lessened; if anything, it had grown.
Responsibility.
Lives.
He walked to the door once more. His hand reached for the handle, fingers closing around the cold iron with more certainty than before.
Before he pushed it open, he glanced back one last time.
The Duke was still watching him, dark eyes steady, posture unmoved.
Father and son.
Duke and ghost.
"Thank you," Kel said quietly—not loud, not sentimental. Just two words, bare and unornamented.
Arcturus did not reply with pleasantries.
He simply gave the smallest of nods.
A gesture that, in its restraint, carried more weight than any blessing.
Kel opened the door.
The corridor's chill greeted him once again, its shadows stretching long across the stone. The guards on either side remained motionless, their armor reflecting the faint torchlight, faces obscured beneath helms.
Kel stepped out, and the door closed behind him with a slow, heavy thud.
He stood there for a moment, eyes tracing the endless line of the corridor ahead.
The world was still distant.
But now, somewhere along the unseen road, two silhouettes had begun to form beside his own.
Not chains.
Not watchers.
But blades he would choose.
And in the quiet of his chest, where the cursed core pulsed and the echo of the system's flicker still lingered, Kel felt something new take root alongside his will:
Not hope.
Not yet.
But possibility.
He began to walk.