Seren Vale was the eldest.
And for a long time now, everyone knew it: she would lead the Order.
She had been preparing for it all her life.
She never needed to raise her voice to be heard. Her presence was enough. With her dark hair always perfectly kept and her steady, confident gaze, Seren radiated a calm authority—almost reassuring. She spoke of the future as an equation to be solved, of a world to be stabilized, at any cost.
Trained as a scientist, she had never fallen in love with laboratories. Data interested her less than what could be done with it. Where others saw hypotheses, Seren saw leverage. Where some sought truth, she sought efficiency.
In her eyes, morality was never more than a variable.
She loved her sister.
At least, that was what she told herself.
But that love had always been kept at a distance—analyzed, contained. Seren knew that attachment, if not mastered, became a weakness. And weaknesses had no place in the world she intended to build.
In her view, the Order had to evolve.
Harden.
Anticipate.
ASTREA, of course, lay at the heart of that vision. Seren understood her potential better than anyone—perhaps even better than their father. Where Alaric saw a moral responsibility, Seren saw continuity. A long-term solution. A way to preserve humanity, even from itself.
Restoring life was only the beginning.
ASTREA could also shape the body.
Extend existence.
Optimize what nature had left imperfect.
Including humanity itself—even if no one was ready to hear it yet.
These thoughts remained buried, carefully hidden behind a controlled smile and measured speeches. The time had not yet come. But it would.
It was in this mindset that she made a request to her father.
She wanted to marry Elias Calder.
Not out of love.
Not out of desire.
Elias embodied what the Order produced at its most loyal, most disciplined, most pure. A living symbol. Binding her fate to his was a statement of vision: that of a strong, united Order, inseparable from those who protected it.
For Seren, this union was not personal.
It was strategic.
And therefore, inevitable.
She believed Elias would understand. That his loyalty to the Order would outweigh everything else. What she failed to see—or refused to see—was that some forms of loyalty could not be decreed.
They had to be chosen.
And without realizing it, that day Seren laid the first stone of a conflict she would spend the rest of her life trying to control—
without ever accepting that it might slip beyond her grasp.