Chapter 225: Help fix your parents’ mistakes

If I closed my eyes hard enough, I could still taste the sugar glaze from breakfast, hear Aeris giggling as we tried to stack spoons higher than the jam jar. If I squeezed my sister’s hand, it meant we were still safe, somewhere warm and bright, and Elyzara was coming down the stairs to tease us for plotting our “Parliament of Toast.”

But I couldn’t close my eyes, because they stung too much from crying, and I couldn’t let go of Aeris’s hand, because if I did, I might never find it again in the dark.

We were in a place the world had forgotten colder and older than the castle above, full of bad smells and worse voices. The walls dripped, and every sound echoed for miles, like the tunnels themselves wanted to remember our fear. Shadows pressed everywhere. I was five, but I felt so much smaller.

Aeris tried to be brave. She always did. She whispered in my ear, “Don’t let them see you cry, Arion. That’s how they win.” Her voice was only shaking a little, so I tried to be brave too. But I was shaking a lot.

The rebels masked and hooded, stinking of sweat and rage kept us in a little round room full of old chains and dust. Their torches spat ugly yellow light, making their faces worse than monsters. One of them, the biggest, paced and spat on the ground. Another, with eyes too small and mean, watched us like he was deciding what bit to break first.

“I want to go home,” I whispered to Aeris. I didn’t mean the palace, or even the dormitory. I meant the kitchen, our beds, Elyzara’s arm around us as she read one of her silly adventure books out loud, making up all the voices.

“We will,” Aeris whispered back. “Elyzara always finds us. She promised.”

But I heard the wobble in her words. She didn’t believe it, not this time.

The rebels talked in low, snappy voices.

“They’re just children, Garran,” said the woman with the hair like straw. “If we hurt them, there’s no turning back ”

“There’s no turning back already,” growled Garran, the biggest one. “The palace is on fire. Either the princess bends, or she breaks. These brats are leverage.”

He turned to us, hunkering down so his shadow loomed all over the wall. “Listen, little prince and princess,” he sneered. “You’re going to help fix your parents’ mistakes. If you do, maybe you’ll get out of this in one piece.”

I wanted to spit at him, to scream, to bite. But my mouth was too dry and my voice stuck in my chest. Aeris straightened, fierce as a kitten bristling at a wolf.

“We’re not afraid of you,” she said. (A lie. We were terrified.)

Garran grinned. “Then maybe you need a lesson.” He flicked his fingers. The woman with straw-hair hesitated, but another man stepped forward silent, masked, and mean as a wasp.

He took a handful of something from his pocket gray powder that made my nose sting. With a cruel flick, he threw it in our faces. The world went spinning, every bone aching, and I doubled over with Aeris as my head filled with fire and ice and buzzing.

I tried to scream but only coughed. Aeris whimpered, then bit her lip so hard she bled. My skin prickled with cold, then burned with heat, then froze again. My hands twisted in hers, desperate, and I tried to hold on, tried to think of sunshine and jam and Elyzara laughing. I tried to remember her voice Don’t ever let go. Not of each other. Not of hope.

But the world was spinning and the room was wrong and the rebels’ faces loomed huge and cruel. Garran’s laugh echoed. The masked man pressed something sharp and metal against Aeris’s wrist not deep, but enough to make her gasp, enough to leave a mark.

“Stop!” I tried to yell. “You said you’d just talk to us!”

But Garran only sneered. “No one listens until you make them bleed.” He yanked Aeris’s arm, forcing her sleeve up. The woman tried to pull him back, her voice trembling. “That’s enough ”

“Shut up, Mira,” Garran snapped. “You knew what this was.”

I wanted to fight. I wanted magic to burst from my hands, like in Aeris’s fairy tales, or Elyzara’s stories light, or fire, or even just a big wall to shove the bad people away. But I was just Arion, five years old, trembling and crying, clutching my sister and wishing for miracles.

Aeris tried to spit at Garran and missed. Her tears mixed with blood on her wrist, and the man Mira pressed a scrap of cloth against it. “He’s scared,” she muttered. “That’s why he’s cruel.”

I wanted to believe her. I wanted to believe we were braver than him, that hope would matter.

They dragged us into a darker room, one with old chains on the wall and a strange magic humming. I felt it in my teeth a silence that hurt, pressing out every kind thing in the world. Garran tied our hands, too tight. Mira brushed our hair from our faces with trembling hands. She whispered, “Hold on. You’re not alone.”

But the silence got worse. The masked man twisted Aeris’s arm until she yelped. Garran pressed a dagger to my cheek, just enough to scare, to promise worse.

“Tell the princess to surrender,” he growled. “Tell her if she doesn’t, you’ll bleed for every word she refuses.”

I squeezed Aeris’s hand so hard my bones hurt. “Elyzara’s coming,” I whispered, voice as small as a wish.

She nodded. “Always.”

In the dark, we waited, hope battered but not broken two children, two flames guttering but not yet gone, clinging to each other in the cold and the silence, daring the world to keep us apart.

Aeris squeezed my hand back, fierce and shaking. Somewhere in the dark, the rebels argued, their voices a faraway storm. I pressed my face against her shoulder and closed my eyes.