Return of the General's Daughter

Aurora left the throne room with her head bowed, her steps heavy with defeat. The echo of her plea still lingered in the walls of the throne room, but the silence that followed had been more cutting than any refusal. She could scarcely explain to herself why she had sought an audience with King Aragon at all. Perhaps it was the memory of the boy she had once known—the boy she had once known in sunlit gardens, who laughed freely, who swore with childish certainty that the world would never change him.

But that boy was long gone. His family had been cast down, his fate uncertain for years, and she had lived too long with doubt gnawing at her heart. She could not spend her life waiting for the ghost of a man she did not know would come back one day.

Now, with her husband dead, her path lay shrouded in shadows. The future pressed in on her with suffocating weight, every breath carrying the dread of what was to come. Her family, once loyal to the general who had risen against the crown, would not be spared the king's justice. Treason was a stain that bled through generations, and she knew the reckoning would soon arrive at her doorstep.

Her feet carried her to the narrow chamber she shared with the other consorts, a place that felt more prison than refuge. The chill inside seeped into her marrow; the walls, stripped of silk hangings and mirrored finery, mocked the memory of a life once gilded with power. She pressed trembling hands to the window ledge and gazed out at the city below. Torches flickered in the dusk, voices drifted faintly upward—life beyond the castle continued, heedless of her despair. She longed to vanish into that sea of shadows, nameless and forgotten. Yet even the thought felt like cowardice.

She pressed her hands against the window ledge, staring out into the dusk. The city beyond the castle walls pulsed with torchlight and distant clamor, a world moving on without her, blind to her despair. She longed to slip into that sea of shadows, to disappear where no one would remember her name. But even that dream felt like cowardice.

Her thoughts circled back to Aragon, as they always did since the time she knew that two princes of the Delmars survived and planned to take back the kingdom. The boy she remembered and the man she had faced today did not belong to the same soul. His eyes had been colder, harder—as if every year of exile had carved something vital out of him. And yet… there had been a flicker. A hesitation. Was it mercy? Pity? Or a reminder that he had once cared for her, before betrayal drove them apart?

She clenched her fists, nails biting into her palms. Love, duty, grief—they tangled inside her until she could no longer name what she felt. She mourned her husband, though his death had brought her no freedom. She mourned her childhood, though it was long gone. And above all, she mourned herself, for she no longer recognized the woman staring back at her from the glass.

Every choice before her was poisoned. To beg for Aragon's mercy might save her family, but at the cost of her pride—and perhaps more. To stand defiant would be to watch everything she loved reduced to ashes.

Aurora sank onto the bed, hands covering her face, and for the first time in years, allowed her tears to flow unchecked. She feared for tomorrow. She feared for her two little daughters—princesses stripped of their crowns. She feared for her kin, who bore the weight of a legacy they had not chosen.

...

In the throne room, King Aragon's gaze lingered on the door where Aurora had vanished. Memory stirred unbidden: the girl with braids who had once chased sunlight through the gardens, the child he had imagined might someday share his throne. But he had not yet been thirteen when his family was slaughtered, and hers was among the hands that helped betray him.

In exile, there had been no space for thoughts of her and their shared childhood. Each day had been a battle simply to survive, hunted with a price on his head, clinging to life alongside his brother Vaskar. His most loyal knight, had fallen to protect them, his sacrifice buying the brothers six more years of freedom.

Ismael—the name he had carried like a talisman through years of exile.

He had a wife, two children, and another unborn when their flight began. Ismael had smuggled them to his wife's fishing village in the southwest, promising to return and take them back.

He never did. His loyalty had cost him his life, but it had secured theirs.

Now, Aragon had sent for them. Whatever else history would say of his reign, he would honor the man who gave everything so that the bloodline of the Delmar would not perish.

Aragon's jaw tightened at the memory. He could still see his knight's face in the torchlight of that night—grim, resolute, determined to buy the princes' lives with his own blood. Aragon had been little more than a boy then, but even in his terror, he had known what Ismael's choice meant. A loyal man had thrown himself against an army so that two hunted children could keep breathing.

For six years, he and Vaskar had lived a little bit better because of Ismael, who worked in a workshop as a metalsmith. If not for him, they would have run from shadow to shadow, sleeping on stone, eating what scraps they could find. Ismael had granted them respite until they grew a little bit stronger to face the cruel world.

They had lived because Ismael had died. But survival had not felt like victory. Each dawn had brought the same wound: a brother lost, a friend buried, and a debt carved so deep into his soul that no crown could erase it.

Aragon leaned back, the weight of his crown pressing against his temples. He had ordered his men to find Ismael's family as soon as he retook Estalis. The reports had reached him a day before: a widow, two grown children with their own families, and another born after Ismael's death, who turned eighteen. They had survived in obscurity by the sea, as the knight had wished, but they had lived humbly, scraping by on the labor of their hands.

They should not have had to.

He closed his eyes, remembering Ismael's words during those desperate nights of flight. "You are your father's sons. You are the bloodline of the Delmars. You must live, because if you live, there may come a day when Estalis lives again."

Ismael had believed in them. In him.