"Axel, if there is anything that I want you to value in this ruined life, it is courage. A heart that fights is a heart that wins."
I scrunched my face. The logic didn't hold together when I turned it over in my mind.
"Mother, people lose because they fight. When there is a fight, there's bound to be a loser, and courage leads both people to fight." I waited for a moment before adding, "Didn't father lose too? Isn't that why he isn't here on my birthday?"
My mother's hands stilled on the table.
I didn't understand it then, not fully. But looking back, I think she could handle an Undefined or the weight of a fractured world pressing down on her shoulders every waking moment.
What she couldn't handle was me.
My way of thinking always caught her off guard. I saw things too clearly for a child, dissected comfortable truths with the same detachment other children applied to pulling wings off insects.
A ten-year-old should still be susceptible to the comfortable lies adults told: that courage mattered, that resolve mattered, that the willingness to fight no matter how blind was somehow noble.
But I did not easily digest such things. I chewed on them, found the bones, and spat them back out with questions she couldn't answer.
I think that made her motherhood journey more difficult than her years as a professor in the Definition Academy had ever been. Students at least accepted wisdom when it came from authority. I required proof.
Of course, the absence of my father made my argument difficult to dismiss.
She leaned back in her chair, her jet-black hair drinking the light and reinforcing the shadows across her features. Her sea-blue eyes, not so different from my own, gazed at me with a warmth I refused to meet. A graceful, sad smile spread across her lips.
"Your father didn't lose... he had to leave to protect both of us... and the world."
I turned my eyes to look at her. Unlike my mother, I had red hair that fell just above my brows, parted in front. I shrugged, giving the gesture of someone stating facts rather than opinions, despite my puffy cheeks and shortness.
"Rin and Esmer say he simply wasn't strong enough. If he was strong enough, he would've stayed and fought for his family. Father ran and betrayed us because he was scared!"
"Axel?!"
"I'm simply telling the truth, mother."
I rose from my seat at the vast dining table, the one set only for two, where a simple cake waited with a single candle burning blue. The flame didn't waver as I walked toward the door.
"Axel, I'm talking to you. Come back here now!"
I did not turn around. My small feet carried me out of the dining hall and into my room, leaving my mother alone with the untouched cake and the silence that followed.
Even though I wished I had taken a bite. Cake wasn't a common commodity these days, and my stomach knew it. But my pride and anger got the best of me.
In more ways than one.
Because that night, that conversation with its cold logic and colder dismissal, was the last conversation I ever had with my mother.
After that night, I never found her again.
No one did.
There was no trace, no sign of struggle, and no farewell. Friends and servants searched. The Definition Academy sent investigators who combed every corner of the estate, interviewed every witness, traced every lead into dead ends. None of them found her.
Nightsinger, an Established Champion who had faced horrors that would break lesser minds, had simply... vanished. As if she'd never existed at all, except in the memory of a boy who had walked away from her on his tenth birthday.
The night my mother disappeared, everything came apart. Not all at once, piece by piece, like a structure losing its load-bearing walls.
The servants left first then the government arrived with documents and justifications, confiscating the properties of a traitor's family. Apparently that was the official designation now. With my mother gone, there was no one left to stop them from taking whatever they wanted.
All that remained was this castle where she had vanished, and the dreams.
Maybe they were just dreams at first. But dreams became nightmares, and nightmares became a nightly ritual of waking with an airless breath, chest so tight that suffocation started to feel almost consoling. At least it would be an ending.
I sought as many cakes as I could find. Hunted for them with every allowance the government deigned to provide from the properties they'd stolen. I ate until my stomach ached, and then I ate more. But nothing filled the hollow where that uneaten slice still sat, and nothing saved me from the erosive regret of not making my mother happy when I had the chance.
Until there was nothing left to do but live with it.
I stared at the decrepit ceiling, mended with mismatched paper boards thick enough to hide the rot beneath. Another night survived. I grunted and hurled myself forward, a little too heavy for the motion to be graceful.
I didn't mind. Didn't mind my fleshy skin, or the soft curve of my chest that hadn't been there eight years ago.
The cracked mirror by the wall showed me what I'd become. I hated looking at it, hated having to glimpse how fat I'd allowed myself to grow. But I looked anyway. Some part of me thought I deserved to see it.
I just never knew when to stop eating.
I didn't regret it though. I was never going to not eat again.
I hissed at my reflection and dragged myself away. My pajamas were patterned with strange creatures my mother had called "Pokémon," some relic from before the Fracturing that had belonged to her mother. The pants were enormous on me even now. She used to joke that she'd have to triple in size before they'd fit her.
Dipping one hand into my waistband to scratch, I stuck the other into my nostril and headed toward the toilet.
A low rustle stopped me. Then a gruff, sleep-heavy voice.
"Uh, Axel... why are you up so early?"
It took me a moment to process. My eyes widened, then narrowed.
'Of course.'
I turned back to see a platinum-haired girl on my bed, half-buried in sheets. A loose tank top did little to contain her, the side of her chest threatening to spill free. Ysoriel. My girlfriend, apparently, though the word still felt strange even after all these months.
"I'm usually up about this early," I said.
"Huh? Really?" She stirred, blinking at the unfamiliar ceiling. "Where am I?"
"My place."
Her pale face, flawlessly beautiful in that effortless way I'd never understand, formed a small frown.
"And what is today?"
I forced my mind backward. Yesterday had been the Academy's last day of preparation and briefing, which meant today was...
"The Awakening… The Day of Definition."
Her face went paler still, dread stretched across her features like frost spreading over glass.
"Crap. Crap, Axel, what the hell?!" She was off the bed in an instant, her lithe frame moving like flowing water as she grabbed her clothes. Her hair was a disaster but she didn't seem to care. Even disheveled, Ysoriel looked like a queen sculpted from the first winter snow.
She paused at the door and smiled at me, though it didn't quite reach her eyes.
"We'll see today... right?"
I looked down.
The Day of Definition. We'd been preparing for this since birth, all of us. The day we'd be Defined and awaken our Classes.
After the Fracturing tore the world apart, Classes and Skills were all that kept humanity from extinction. The Defined could fight back against the horrors that crawled through the cracks in reality. They could rebuild, protect, and survive.
But Definition wasn't guaranteed. Those who failed to awaken became the Undefined, grotesque things that devoured the Defined without mercy or memory of who they'd been. When that happened, the Enforcers put you down before you could hurt anyone.
So today was blessing and curse braided together. Awaken a decent rank Class and you were set for life. Fail to awaken at all, and death was already waiting with the Enforcers' hands around its leash.
This was why today wouldn't be easy for either of us.
I smiled, trying to hide the bitterness… Probably failing.
"Right... we'll see."
Ysoriel rolled across the bed, pressed a gentle kiss to my forehead, and pulled back with that same fragile smile. She didn't speak aloud, but I could read her lips.
I love you.
I mouthed the words back.
I love you.