“It took thirty years of hunting, but eventually they found every single name. Your mother told me her real name after you were born. It was the first time she was ever really afraid. The Ashlords hadn’t executed an escapee in nearly a decade, but now we both had something to lose. We thought the trails had gone cold….I killed the first Ashlord they sent for her. It was easy, once I figured out why he was there.”

The graves whisper at our passing feet. I never knew he killed anyone. The sun shines down overhead. We keep walking.

“She was smarter than me. Always was. Said they’d keep coming. They’d send more and more of them. She took the blame when they came back since they were going to take her anyway. Told them she’d killed the man. They took her and she made me promise not to do anything. She wanted me to raise you. Make you a man.”

He doesn’t cry, but his voice buries itself in grief. We stop in front of Mother’s headstone. This stretch of land was set aside for them: the firstborns. Sons and daughters who paid the price for the Reach’s rebellion with their lives. She was the last one they buried here. I was only two years old. I don’t remember any of it. I can barely remember her face.

“You saw what we might lose if we go to war. But this?” He gestures to Mother’s grave. “This is what’s already been taken from us, Adrian. We dared ask them for freedom, and they put our loved ones in the ground for it. My older brother was killed, too. I’m alive because I was the second. Your mother’s dead because she was the first. It was just a number game to them.”

I can feel a tightness in my chest. Until now it’s all been practice. Training sequences. Riding phoenixes. Studying alchemy. For the first time, it feels like there’s an actual weight on my shoulders. I am walking into the unknown. Real blood will spill.

“I know you’re unsettled,” Daddy says. “I’m sending you down there to start a war. I’ve been around you long enough to know that you’re not afraid for yourself. I know full well you can survive anything. You’re afraid for everyone else. What happens if you win? What happens if we actually go to war?

“But hear me say this, Adrian. Everything you saw today, that first date, that man and his three boys? That’s all an illusion. A false peace the Ashlords allow us to have. The truth of this world is buried all around you. They did all this to send a message. You are not free. You are at their mercy. And if you rise again, this is what they will try to take from you.”