The year was 231AA.
Four years had passed since Paradise fell in flames and silence. Four years since the flowers were crushed beneath marching boots and firelight swallowed the sky. Four years since Joselyn Alveretta buried his name beneath ash and blood.
He was sixteen now.
But age had stopped meaning anything to him after the second year. He had even forgotten what the faces of those important to him looked like. His father, Lucia, his companions from other kingdoms. All of them.
Nothing but unrecognizable ash falling through the air.
Where once there had been a voice that burned with indignation and fear, there was now only obedience. Where once his gaze had scanned every face with sharp awareness, it now drooped low, unfocused, rarely rising past the ground. Joselyn didn't speak unless spoken to, and even then, only enough to avoid punishment. He had learned that silence was safer than resistance, that invisibility could be a shield.
He awoke each morning to the smell of moldy hay and sweat, in a cabin that could barely contain the thirty bodies packed within it. There were no separate bunks or personal belongings. Just makeshift beds carved from rotting wood and mud-stitched blankets, each too thin to stave off the cold. The other slaves stirred around him at dawn, blinking crusted eyes open to the faint light pouring through cracked wooden slats. Sometimes, someone wouldn't wake up. They'd be dragged out, barefoot and stiff, and replaced by nightfall.
Joselyn never cried for them.
He couldn't even if he wanted to.
There were no tears left in him.
The farm was a withered stretch of cracked soil, somewhere between Pyraquartz Hold and the southern borderlands. It had no name. Only fences and fields. Wheat, rice, and a lesser grain called ferralroot were cultivated there, all under the watchful eyes of guards who bore no crests. Mercenaries, bought cheap, meaner than they were skilled. They carried rusted sabers and spoke little unless to bark orders or trade jokes at the slaves' expense.
Joselyn worked the irrigation levers. Always the levers.
The system was old and cruel, a series of metal rods and pulleys meant to drag water uphill from a broken canal. Each pull required strength, endurance, and the willingness to ignore your shoulders splitting apart from your spine. Joselyn didn't complain. He didn't even wince anymore. The skin on his hands had hardened into coarse, scabbed patches, and his shoulders never stopped aching, not even in sleep.
"Think you could ever fly, Jo?" asked a voice to his left.
Arselda.
The girl who had once sat beside him in the slaver's cage, years ago, her eyes wide with terror, her knees shaking. She had grown too, but not like him. Her cheeks had thinned, her voice had become more subdued, but she still spoke. She still clung to humanity like a fraying ribbon tied around a rusted wrist.
She seemed to grow fond of him because they were both in that same cage together that day.
Joselyn didn't answer.
She kept talking anyway.
"I had a dream last night. I was a bird, and I was flying above the Land of Tides. You know, the Seaward Camelot? I saw it once. When I was little. Just the top of it from a cliff. It's all glass and silver domes floating on the ocean. My mother said they could move the whole city across the waves like a ship. Can you imagine?"
Joselyn glanced at her, just once, out of habit. Arselda looked the same as always. Wild pitch black hair braided behind her back, sun-darkened skin akin to that of dark umber, and hands that had become just as calloused as his. Her eyes, though, still had depth. Still reflected the world.
Compared to Joselyn who would most likely be seen as a ghost due to his ghost white skin and long, messy hair that reach beyond his shoulders. It suited him in a manner. It showed how the lost of his father and his people slowly drove him to not care for something as meager as physical appearance. What was the point? It wasn't as if he was trying to please anyone.
"They're doing something there this week," she continued. "The guards said. An event. A Tide Ceremony. It's for their Prince's birthday. I overheard one say they're lighting the sea with these floating lanterns made of crystal. Can you believe that? Crystal."
Joselyn blinked, not in response, but because a drop of sweat had trickled into his eye. He kept pulling the lever. Pull. Release. Pull. Release. He counted the rhythm in his mind. It was easier to measure pain in repetition.
Pull.
Release.
Pull.
He heard Arselda let out a sigh, not frustrated, but warm, like she'd grown used to speaking to silence. In truth, she had. She spoke to Joselyn every day. About dreams. About memories. About nothing. He never stopped her.
When dusk fell, the slaves returned to the cabin. Food was a single biscuit and half a bowl of boiled root broth. They weren't allowed to eat indoors, so they sat outside in rows, shoulder to shoulder, eating in silence. Joselyn didn't feel hunger anymore. He ate because it was required. Because death from starvation was the slowest kind.
That night, someone collapsed in the field.
An older man. One of the irrigation crew.
The guards beat him when he didn't rise, kicking him over until his ribs caved inward. They left him there after, face-down in the dirt, and told the others to keep working.
Arselda didn't cry.
But she turned to Joselyn afterward and whispered, "I think we're all just ghosts now. Trapped in bodies."
Joselyn didn't nod.
But he listened.
He always listened.
In his dreams, there were no memories. No images of Paradise, no flowers, no fire, no voices. Only an empty plain where the wind screamed, and a boy stood alone beneath a black sun. He didn't know if that boy was still him.
He didn't care to ask.
But somewhere in the distance, across soil and mountain and sea, the lanterns of Seaward Camelot were rising into the sky, one by one, casting a glow so beautiful it might've once made the boy from Paradise cry.
Perhaps it would've.
But that boy was long dead.
And Joselyn did not cry.