Chapter 2: The Beginning.
The glow was subtle.
Subtle enough that Elian hadn’t even noticed it until it was too bright.
He held the staff in a tightly closed fist, chanting the same mantra of submission that had been drilled into him since he was old enough to talk.
It spread faster than he could track, climbing from his knuckles up into the black wood grain, and every part of him that had ever been drilled into obedience screamed at him to grip tighter, chant louder, force it back down before it embarrassed him in front of forty relatives and a Magistrate paid specifically to watch him fail with dignity.
So that’s exactly what he did.
Wrong, as it turned out, in every possible way.
The mantra came faster with each passing moment, words he’d never once questioned the meaning of echoing over and over again in his mind;
Yield the self, still the want, let the working pass unclaimed.
The tighter he held to them, the harder his fist closed, the brighter the staff burned, like it was feeding on the exact thing he was trying to starve it of.
Somewhere above him he heard the murmur in the hall change pitch, curiosity sharpening into something closer to alarm, chairs scraping back.
This isn’t how it’s supposed to go,
He thought, distantly, underneath the panic.
It’s supposed to just... sit there. It’s supposed to do nothing. That’s the whole point.
One of the crystal petals cracked, a single clean fissure running from tip to base, and through it came a thread of light so pale it looked almost like moonlight caught in glass, spilling out over his white-knuckled hand.
The sound it made wasn’t loud.
It didn’t need to be.
In a vault that had swallowed six generations of silence, even a small sound felt like a supernova.
The Magistrate, a dry, unhurried man who had officiated this exact ceremony for the last three Valcourt failures without once raising his voice, took an audible step forward.
"Young master..."
Fenwick started, and then didn’t finish, because he clearly had no precedent for what came next in the script.
Elian didn’t move. Couldn’t, really—his hand was still locked around the staff, mantra dying somewhere in his throat, watching that single hairline crack of light like it might vanish if he blinked.
Some frantic, cornered part of him kept waiting for it to go out.
It didn’t.
It just sat there, glowing, quiet and undeniable, doing the one thing this staff had never once done in his entire life.
more than his entire life actually, it was doing something it hadn’t in two hundred years.
It had noticed him.
Upstairs, the murmuring had stopped being a murmur.
Lord Edric Valcourt had gone very still at the head of the room, the particular stillness of a man recalculating an entire family’s expectations in real time.
Roderic, to his credit, was already halfway out of his chair, some instinct pulling him toward the vault stairs before his brain had caught up to why.
To the staff’s credit, the crack didn’t widen. It just held there, that single thread of pale light running the length of one closed petal, patient in a way nothing about this ceremony had ever been.
Elian became aware, distantly, that he was still gripping the staff hard enough to hurt, still half-chanting a mantra that had clearly stopped doing anything useful several seconds ago, and that every single person in that hall was staring down into the vault at him like he’d just set something on fire in church.
Let go, he told himself.
Let go of the staff. Let go of the mantra. Let go of whatever face you’re currently making, because it cannot possibly be a good one.
Let.
Go.
He unclenched his fist instead, slow, like the staff might bite him if he moved too fast.
The crack of light didn’t fade when contact broke.
If anything it steadied, settling into something closer to a low, patient glow, the way a coal keeps its heat long after the fire’s gone out.
"That’s..." Fenwick cleared his throat, visibly failing to employ his decades of practiced neutrality.
"That has not happened In this family... before."
"I’m aware," Elian said, before he could stop himself, and immediately regretted it. Because his voice came out several registers higher than he’d intended and cracked embarrassingly on the second word.
Above him, the hall had gone from murmuring to something closer to a held breath.
Forty relatives who’d come expecting a brief, dignified nothing were now getting a considerably less brief, considerably less dignified something.
And Elian could feel every one of those stares landing on him at once, hot and curious and—worse—impressed, in a way nobody had ever once been impressed by him before.
He hated it.
He hated it with the specific, cornered intensity of someone who’d spent his entire life building a face designed to be looked past, and had just, very publicly, failed at that too.
It dawned on him that he really hadn’t been made of glass all along.
Roderic reached the top of the vault stairs first, and for once his older brother wasn’t smiling.
"Are you okay?" His brother stopped at a distance that could be considered normal for such an occasion, his face still visibly lined with fear and frustration of not having been there for Elian.
Elian felt embarrassed, for some reason. He could feel the heat rising in his cheeks, and his eyes involuntarily broke away from Roderic’s face.
Maybe it was the shame of having shown everyone such a disgraceful scene, or maybe it was the years of quiet envy and resentment of having been overlooked finally surfacing, Elian didn’t really know.
Though one thing he clearly understood was the pain that shot up through his arm and directly attacked his brain with the ferociousness of an eagle swooping in for pray.
All he managed to utter was a pitiful, high pitched yelp, and then a moment later, he lost consciousness.