{ A FEW HOURS EARLIER… }
The first light of morning had barely begun to filter through the heavy crimson velvet curtains of Joren Tharion's room.
The young man woke without any need for a summons. His eyes snapped open, already clear and alert, and for a moment he remained motionless, staring at the high ceiling of his chamber, where the crest of the golden phoenix was carved into the stone.
After a few minutes, with a silent sigh, he sat up in bed.
He washed with the lukewarm water the servants had prepared in the porcelain pitcher beside the basin, then combed his black hair, still disheveled from sleep, gathering it into a simple ponytail, and finally donned the light armor he always kept in plain view next to his wardrobe.
Leaving his room and reaching the dining hall, he found the table already set: a tray of freshly baked bread, fresh fruit, a pitcher of spiced juice, and, as every morning, a plate of scrambled eggs with crispy bacon—his favorite meal since childhood, the one the family cook never failed to prepare for him.
But apart from him, no one else was seated at the table: his father and elder brother had left the previous evening on business and would not return for at least two days, while his mother was surely still asleep. And so he ate breakfast alone.
The servants moved silently around him, but Joren did not spare them so much as a glance.
He ate quickly, without truly tasting the food, his gaze fixed on the plate.
When he had finished, he rose and headed toward the great entrance doors of the residence.
He had barely reached the threshold when a familiar voice caught up with him, warm and slightly sleepy:
"You woke up early again this morning…"
Joren stopped, his hand still suspended on the handle, but he did not turn.
He immediately recognized his mother's tone.
Lady Elyra stood a few steps behind him, her brown hair gathered into an elaborate braid and a faint sadness etched on her elegant features.
"I have some errands to run in the city," Joren replied without looking at her. His voice was flat, almost detached. "Then, in the afternoon, my companions are waiting for me for a mission."
Elyra sighed softly.
"So today, too, you'll be away from home the whole day…" The tone was regretful, but not accusatory. "Of course I don't blame you. You're a grown man now, with your own obligations. But you know, in these five years while you were at the academy, I missed you a great deal. That's why I was wondering if at least today you might keep me company for lunch: it would be a perfect chance for the two of us to spend a little time together…"
"I have to go, Mother."
The words came out more brusque than he had intended, cutting Elyra's sentence cleanly in half.
Joren opened the doors without waiting for a reply, without turning to look at her, and stepped out onto the tree-lined avenue that led to the main gate of the estate.
Only when he was far enough away to no longer be seen did he slow his pace, and a weight settled on his chest, dense and familiar.
He knew he had been brusque.
He knew that his mother—the figure who more than anyone else in that residence showed him affection and interest—did not deserve that treatment.
And yet, every time someone offered him such sincere affection, something inside him drew back…
"Tsk!" Joren clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, shaking his head decisively.
He passed through the wrought-iron gate of the estate, ignoring the respectful bows of the guards on duty, and set off along the orderly streets of the Prosperous District.
The sky above Raerno was clear. The morning sun caressed the white marble façades, the hanging gardens, the silent fountains.
But Joren did not pause to observe any of it.
He walked at a brisk pace, brow furrowed, hands clenched into fists at his sides.
He did not take the most direct route.
After all, he was in no real hurry for his errands—a vague excuse, in truth, behind which to conceal the simple need to get away from that house as soon as possible—and a longer path would allow him to get a little air, to clear his head before joining the others.
He crossed Loyalty Avenue, then turned down a series of secondary streets that wound southward, letting the urban landscape slowly change around him, until the air began to grow denser, laden with the acrid smell of smoke and red-hot metal.
The Iron District greeted him with its usual incessant hum: the clang of hammers on anvils, the hiss of the lit forges, the coming and going of busy artisans and apprentices.
Proceeding at a swift pace through the narrow alleys, Joren took the final bend and emerged into a dead-end alley dominated by a soot-blackened façade and surmounted by a gleaming steel sign:
"The Dragon's Jaws"
Joren slowed his pace just a fraction, adjusting his posture.
Reaching the entrance, he pushed the massive reinforced wooden door and stepped inside.
The warmth of the workshop enveloped him at once.
And that was when he saw him…
Blake Adson was there, standing near the workbench, his gaze lost in the flames of the dragon-shaped forge.
An expression of bitter contempt surfaced on Joren's face.
"Tsk! Of all the people to run into…" he muttered in a dry, irritated tone.
Blake turned slowly, eyes wide with disbelief:
"J-Joren?!" His voice came out lower than he would have liked.
Joren stared at him for a few seconds, allowing a grimace more irritated than disdainful to surface.
"I see you finally recovered from your pathetic freeze at Carameo," he began with cold irony.
Blake swallowed hard, feeling his shoulders hunch forward.
It took him a moment to find his voice again:
"W-What are you doing here?"
Joren looked him up and down, as if the question itself annoyed him.
"None of your business," he replied, taking a step forward. The light clink of the scabbard accompanied the movement. "Where's Thomas?"
Blake did not answer at once.
The heat of the forge burned against his face, but that was not what made him sweat.
His gaze slid for an instant toward the stone staircase that descended to the lower floor, then returned to Joren.
"He's… He's downstairs…" he murmured. "He's helping a customer choose a weapon."
"Tsk!" Straightening his shoulders with hauteur, Joren moved toward the center of the workshop, as if already weighing whether to go down or wait. On the hilt, the fingers of his right hand began to drum slowly, the way they always did whenever he was nervous.
Blake remained watching him, motionless in his place, hands clenched into fists at his sides.
Joren froze almost at once, sensing the weight of that fixed stare upon him. He turned sharply, his dark eyes narrowed to slits, irritated by that silent stillness.
"What are you staring at?" he hissed, taking a step forward with open hostility. "Have you gone into a trance or something?"
Blake blinked, shaken by that sudden rebuke, and weakly shook his head.
"N-Nothing… I'm not staring at anything," he mumbled, looking away for a brief moment, almost overwhelmed by that gratuitous aggression.
"Then make sure you don't look at me at all," Joren replied with contempt, dismissing him with an irritated flick of the hand.
Blake pressed his lips together, while a chill of icy resentment tightened around his throat.
Swallowing the insult with immense effort, he decided to ignore that childish arrogance and let slip a question as naïve as it was irrepressible:
"Why…?"
Joren lifted his chin, measuring him with pure disdain.
"Why?" he repeated with feigned irony. "Because even the sight of your face disgusts me, Blake. Seeing you every time with that pathetic, lost look almost makes me want to spit in your eye."
Joren's words fell into the workshop like drops of vitriol, heavy and cutting.
But instead of crushing Blake, as Joren had clearly expected, they produced the opposite effect: they shattered the last barrier of reverential fear that had held him back.
"Why…?" the tall, thin boy murmured.
Joren scoffed, a dry, contemptuous sound.
"Huh?! Are you deaf or something? I just explained it to you: your presence turns my stomach."
"O-Okay, but why?" Blake insisted, ignoring the provocation.
Joren's eyebrows knitted into a grimace of impatience.
"Are you messing with me?!"
"N-No… it's just that I want to understand…"
Joren clenched his teeth, irritated by that brazen insistence. "Understand what exactly?!"
Blake did not hesitate:
"I-I want to understand why you've changed…"
A dense, searing silence fell between them, broken only by the dull hiss of the flames and the intermittent crackle of the embers working the iron in the forge.
Joren remained motionless, his jaw clenched so tightly that the muscles stood out beneath the skin.
"Changed…?" Joren repeated under his breath, chewing the word with a venomous hesitation, as if it had been hurled at him like an insult. "I don't know what you're talking about…"
Blake drew a trembling breath, inhaling the dry, smoky air of the workshop.
After that brief pause, his voice slid into a clear, almost painful memory:
"When we were kids, you always invited me to play with your little group of friends. We used to meet at the same square, at the same time, to stay outside and have fun until the sun went down."
A small, crooked smile tugged at one corner of his mouth.
"Sometimes we even played ball, and of all of us I was by far the clumsiest: all it took was one attempt at a sprint for me to trip over my own feet and end up flat on the ground. Every time I fell, you would burst out laughing at my clumsiness. But then, without fail…"
His right hand rose on its own, palm turned upward, hanging in the empty space between them.
"…you would hold out your hand. You'd pull me up, give me a pat on the shoulder, and we'd start running again."
Joren's eyes followed that open palm.
For a single, almost imperceptible instant, the coldness of his gaze wavered as it met Blake's.
"I remember it very well, Joren…" the tall, thin boy said, slowly letting his raised arm fall back to his side. "Because, in the end, you were my first friend…"
This time the silence lasted longer.
Joren stared at the floor, at a point halfway between his own boots and Blake's, where the iron filings glittered like frost.
The hand on the hilt was no longer drumming, and his knuckles had gone white.
"But then, all of a sudden, everything went up in smoke…" Blake resumed, and his voice came out flatter, almost tired. "You started pulling away, avoiding me like the plague, and inevitably we stopped talking… And as time passed, things between us only got worse…"
The boy moistened his dry lips before continuing, feeling his fingers tremble slightly:
"As we grew up, you started acting like a bully. Humiliating me constantly. Making me feel the weight of every single one of my flaws. And I still couldn't understand… I couldn't understand how you could have become so ruthless toward me."
Blake took another step forward. The sound of his boots on the stone floor rang out clearly.
"For years I racked my brains. I kept asking myself: what did I ever do to him? Why, all of a sudden, did he start treating me like garbage? But it was no use: I couldn't find a logical explanation…"
He stopped for a few seconds, and when he resumed his voice came out lower:
"The only clue I had was that everything started after what happened that day… From then on, you shut yourself away, you never spoke to me again, and your laughter turned into insults… Thinking about it, it couldn't have been a simple coincidence…"
At those words, Joren's entire posture turned to stone.
His breath caught halfway in his lungs: the cold arrogance of a moment earlier vanished instantly, replaced by the rigid alertness of an animal that has just heard a branch snap in the woods.
"Shut up…" Joren murmured, closing his fingers around the hilt.
Blake did not seem to notice, nor to hear him.
Or perhaps he did, but he continued anyway, accelerating the rhythm of his words with the feverish urgency of someone whose seconds are numbered:
"I-I know that day completely shattered you. I see it in your eyes when you avoid my gaze. I feel it in the hostility with which you rush to push me away. I know it well, because I know the agony of someone who resigns himself to dragging around in silence a weight that is devouring him… In that, we're alike… t-terribly alike! Neither of us knows how to turn the page… but precisely because I know what it feels like, I can't look the other way! Despite the way you treat me now, I want to help you! I want to hold out my hand to you the way you used to hold out yours to pull me up. I want to fix things between us! S-So if there's really something tormenting you, if it's because of what happened that day… I just want you to know that-"
"ENOUGH!"
Joren's roar thundered through the workshop.
With a lightning-fast movement, the young swordsman drew his blade and pointed it straight at Blake, stopping a few centimeters from his chest.
Blake recoiled instinctively, almost tripping over his own feet, his breath catching in his throat as he watched the reflection of the flames race along the edge of the steel.
"J-Joren, please, c-calm down!" Blake stammered, terrified.
Joren clenched his teeth, glaring at him with a look full of spite.
"Shut your filthy mouth! I don't want to hear another word!" he snarled, advancing the tip of the blade until it almost brushed Blake's throat. "Who the hell do you think you are to lecture me like this?! You're nothing but a good-for-nothing! A weakling! A failure! I don't care about your bullshit… So watch how you speak to me, you little shit!"
"And you'd better lower that sword…" a female voice said.
It was calm, cold, and came from behind him.
Joren stiffened at once, caught off guard by that voice, but above all by the contact of a cold blade that had settled without the slightest sound against his neck.
'What the-?!'
Holding his breath, the boy slowly turned to see who was behind him, and a single instant was enough for him to recognize her: the red-haired woman, the same one he had seen in the company of that masked brat!
'How is this possible?!' he thought, with a flash of pure bewilderment. 'I didn't sense her presence at all…'
Before Joren could say or do anything, the sound of heavy footsteps echoed from the stairs.
"What the hell is going on up here?!" Thomas's voice thundered as he emerged from the lower floor.
The blacksmith stopped on the top step, his eyes darting rapidly from Joren, rigid under the edge of Ananya's blade, to Blake, trembling against the workbench.
"Joren!" the young blacksmith thundered again, taking a decisive step toward them. "What on earth were you thinking? Lower that sword at once!"
For a moment the entire workshop seemed suspended in a silent limbo.
Joren clenched his jaw, rage boiling beneath his skin at the humiliation of having been caught off guard by that woman, but the blacksmith's warning—combined with the constant pressure of that icy blade against his neck—forced him to rein in the impulse to react on instinct.
With a slow movement, Joren withdrew his blade, sliding it back into its sheath with a metallic clink.
Only then did the red-haired woman withdraw her own blade, letting the weapon slip to her side before taking a step back to rejoin the tall, thin boy.
"Tsk! Don't get the wrong idea. I didn't come here looking for trouble," Joren growled, smoothing his tunic with feigned nonchalance in an attempt to hide the frustration and humiliation he had just suffered.
Thomas, however, did not yield an inch. He planted his feet firmly on the ground, fists clenched at his sides.
"Oh, really?" he shot back in a hard voice. "Then how do you explain all this?!"
Joren slowly shifted his gaze to Blake, who was still gasping for air, clinging to the workbench as if his legs could no longer support him.
The swordsman's lips curved into a grimace full of cold contempt.
"I was just silencing an annoying fly," he hissed, in the tone of someone who has just stepped on something insignificant. "It was buzzing too much, and out of line."
His words fell into the void.
No one spoke.
The entire workshop plunged into a heavy, suffocating silence.
It was a long wait charged with tension, broken only by Blake's still-trembling breath and the soft crackle of the embers in the forge.
The gazes of the blacksmith and the red-haired woman stayed locked on Joren, heavy with unspoken hostility.
In the end, it was Joren himself who broke that unbearable stillness.
He cleared his throat with poorly concealed irritation, forcing himself to bring his attention back to Thomas.
"Anyway…" he resumed in a rigid tone, straightening his shoulders. "As I was saying, I only stopped by to pick up the work I commissioned from you."
Thomas stared at him for another moment, then snorted loudly through his nose and crossed his arms over his chest.
"Then I have some bad news for you: your Runic Armor isn't ready yet," he asked, changing tone but remaining visibly annoyed by the chaos he had found. "This week there have been problems with the supply of raw iron from the Carameo Mine. I had to fall back on another supplier, but the goods still haven't arrived."
"Tsk!" Joren furrowed his brow, frustration rising again. "How much longer do I have to wait?"
"The material will arrive with the first caravan this afternoon," Thomas replied bluntly, spreading his arms. "After the final touches, your order will be ready and finished to perfection by tonight."
Joren remained silent for a few seconds, weighing the situation.
"Fine," he said curtly, turning toward the entrance door. "I'll come back tomorrow morning to pick it up."
With that, he added nothing more.
He cast one last sharp glance, first at the red-haired woman—who was watching him with impassive indifference—and finally at Blake, who was still trying to catch his breath.
Then he strode toward the exit, shoved the heavy reinforced wooden door open, and vanished into the alley, slamming it shut behind him with a dull thud that made the walls vibrate.
The cool air of the Iron District hit him all at once, but Joren did not slow his pace.
He walked with his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his trousers, fingers clenched into furious fists that trembled slightly from the repressed tension.
His breathing was still uneven, heavy, while Blake's voice continued to buzz in his head like an annoying fly impossible to swat away.
"You would hold out your hand… You'd pull me up, give me a pat on the shoulder, and we'd start running again…"
Joren ground his teeth.
'What kind of memory did he have to go digging up…' he thought, turning the corner of the alley with long strides, putting distance between himself and that damned workshop.
But the memory refused to fade.
On the contrary, it insisted on resurfacing with cruel clarity, accompanied by that even more unbearable voice:
"I want to hold out my hand to you the way you used to hold out yours to pull me up. I want to fix things between us!"
Joren's fingers tightened even harder in his pockets.
"Dumbass!" he growled. "There's nothing to fix…"
Those words followed him turn after turn, until the workshops thinned out behind him and the clang of hammers dwindled to a distant echo.
Joren didn't even notice.
He walked with the heavy step of someone trying to outrun something that is running right beside him, his mind clenched around a single, painful sentence:
"If it's because of what happened that day… I just want you to know that-"
Joren had silenced him at once.
He had threatened him with the blade just to keep him from finishing the sentence.
And deep down, he knew exactly why…
'I don't need your pity!' he repeated to himself, clenching his jaw. 'I don't need anyone or anything!'
But Blake's voice wouldn't stop following him:
"In that, we're alike… terribly alike!"
Alike?
Him and Blake?
'You're wrong! We're not the same. We never will be…'
That last thought resonated inside him steeped in the usual anger, yet tinged with something else—something new and unexpected.
A tone that, to an outside ear, might almost have sounded… pained?
"Tsk!"
With an irritated grunt, Joren shook his head and quickened his pace even more, trying to escape that weight before it could take root completely.
It was then that he realized he had reached a crossroads.
An intersection he knew all too well, where the main avenue split into two roads.
Almost without meaning to, Joren came to an abrupt stop.
To the left, beyond a row of plane trees with yellowing leaves, the Association Headquarters rose with its austere façade, the banners motionless in the still air. His companions were waiting for him there to train together and then leave as a group in the afternoon for some mission.
To the right, the avenue descended gently toward the Prosperous District, between well-kept hedges and wrought-iron gates. That same road led straight to the family estate, where his mother would remain alone for the entire day.
Joren remained motionless in the center of the crossroads.
The "errands" with which he had dismissed his mother had just proven useless: the armor would not be ready before that night.
He could therefore go left, pound a training dummy until his hands bled. And then, choose with his companions a mission that would keep him far from the city, far from his home—letting exhaustion erase everything, the way he had done every day since returning to Raerno.
It was simple. It was safe.
It was also, perhaps, the only thing he had ever known how to do.
"Tsk…" he murmured, a sound now weary and hollowed out.
His gaze went left, then right.
Then left again, and a second time to the right, as if waiting for something to decide for him.
A light breeze stirred the leaves of the plane trees.
Somewhere in the distance, a bell struck the hour.
And it was precisely that chime that brought a sudden thought to his mind:
'If I keep running away, I'll only end up proving him right…'
With that thought in his head, Joren exhaled slowly, almost reluctantly.
Then, without hesitating any longer, he turned his back on the Association and took the road to the right, stepping onto Compassion Avenue…