The stolen books became Lucien's obsession.
Every spare moment was devoted to studying them, deciphering their cryptic passages about violet's nature. But reading about power and wielding it were entirely different things. The texts spoke of "imposing will upon conceptual space" and "anchoring intention into reality," but offered frustratingly little practical instruction. It was like being given a map written in a language he only half understood.
I need to see how others train, Lucien realized after three days of fruitless attempts to summon more than fleeting wisps. I need to understand how color flows through the body, how it's channeled and controlled.
Which meant watching his siblings train.
The Argentel training grounds occupied a vast courtyard on the estate's western side, surrounded by high stone walls. Officially, it was family only—guards, knights-in-training, and legitimate heirs. But the walls had weaknesses, and Lucien had spent years learning every forgotten corner of the estate.
He found his vantage point in an old storage building that had once housed gardening equipment before being abandoned for a newer structure. Its second floor had a window that, if he climbed onto a precariously balanced crate, offered a clear view of the training grounds.
Lucien began his vigil at dawn, when the knights began their drills.
The training was more complex than he'd imagined. It wasn't just swinging swords—it was a carefully orchestrated dance of physical technique and color manipulation. He watched as Sir Gareth, the head training master, demonstrated how to channel white into a blade, making the steel glow with holy radiance that could cut through darkness itself.
"Color is will made manifest," Gareth's voice carried across the courtyard, addressing a group of young trainees. "Your body is the vessel, but your intention is the fuel. White represents purity—the absence of imperfection. When you channel it, you must maintain absolute clarity of purpose. Doubt clouds white. Hesitation dims it."
Lucien watched Aldric step forward, summoning his white aura with casual ease. The energy coalesced around his practice sword, turning the wooden blade into something that glowed like captured starlight. When he struck the training dummy, the white fire burned away impurities in the straw, leaving only clean ash.
"Good form," Gareth praised. "You maintain focus even through the strike. That's the mark of a true Argentel."
Seraphine's turn was different. Her white manifested as delicate flames that danced along her palms. When she touched an injured training dummy—one deliberately damaged in previous drills—the white fire spread across its surface, and the broken wood seemed to remember its original form. Cracks sealed. Splinters rejoined. The dummy stood whole.
"White is creation as much as destruction," Gareth explained. "Lady Seraphine demonstrates healing fire—a rare application that requires seeing the perfection within damaged things and burning away only the flaws."
Lucien committed every detail to memory. The stance adjustments. The breathing patterns. The way they seemed to pull color from somewhere deep inside and push it outward through precise channels.
But what fascinated him most was how personal each manifestation seemed. Aldric's white was aggressive, Seraphine's restorative. Even among the branch family children practicing basic techniques, no two whites were exactly alike.
Color reflects the user, Lucien thought, remembering a passage from his stolen books. It draws from their nature, their beliefs, their understanding of what their color means.
He returned day after day, watching and learning. His body memorized the forms even as his mind puzzled over how to adapt them to violet. White wanted purity and clarity. But violet, according to the texts, wanted something else entirely—transformation, liminality, the negotiation of reality's edges.
After a week of observation, Lucien began practicing alone.
The woods behind his mansion were dense and wild, neglected like everything else in his corner of the estate. He found a small clearing where fallen branches could serve as training dummies and the canopy above provided cover from casual observation.
He'd fashioned a practice sword from a sturdy branch, roughly the length and weight of the blades he'd seen the trainees use. It was crude, unbalanced, and splinter-prone, but it was his.
Lucien started with the basic forms Gareth had drilled into the younger students. The opening stance—feet shoulder-width apart, sword held at a forty-five-degree angle, weight distributed evenly. The overhead strike. The horizontal sweep. The defensive parry.
His body protested immediately. He'd never done sustained physical training, and muscles he didn't know existed began screaming after the first hour. Sweat soaked his shirt. His hands blistered, then bled, then blistered again.
But he didn't stop.
This is how they started, he told himself, bringing the wooden sword down in a strike that whistled through the air. They were born with advantages, yes, but they also worked. They trained until their bodies knew these movements without thinking.
He practiced until his arms trembled too much to lift the sword, then rested briefly and practiced again. He ignored the pain, ignored the frustration when his strikes missed their marks, ignored the voice in his head that sounded suspiciously like Aldric saying, You're wasting your time, bastard. No amount of practice will make you one of us.
As the sun began to set, Lucien attempted something more ambitious. He assumed the opening stance, closed his eyes, and reached for the violet power inside him. It was easier to find now, after days of study and practice—a pool of potential that felt different from the white he'd observed. Where white seemed to burn with certainty, violet felt fluid, adaptive, questioning.
Not purity, he thought, but possibility. The space where things could be different.
He tried to channel it into his practice sword the way Aldric channeled white into his blade. For a moment, violet wisps curled around the wood, and Lucien's heart leaped—
Then the energy scattered, his concentration broke, and he stumbled forward, the sword slipping from his blistered hands.
"Damn it," he muttered, retrieving the fallen weapon. His palms were raw, bleeding in places despite the calluses beginning to form.
He didn't hear his mother approach until she spoke.
"Lucien."
He spun, heart hammering, and found Elara standing at the clearing's edge. She still wore her maid's uniform, clearly having just finished her duties for the day. But her expression—concern mixed with something harder to define—made his stomach drop.
"Mother, I—"
"Let me see your hands."
It wasn't a request. Lucien hesitated, then extended his palms. In the fading light, the damage was obvious: blisters torn open, dried blood, fresh bleeding where skin had rubbed away completely.
Elara's jaw tightened. She took his hands in hers, examining them with a clinical precision that surprised him. "You've been training."
"I've been practicing," Lucien corrected quietly. "There's a difference."
"Is there?" She released his hands and picked up his makeshift sword, testing its weight with the practiced ease of someone who knew weapons. "This is terrible balance. The grip is too thick. And you're holding it wrong—I can see from the callus patterns."
Lucien blinked. "How would you know—"
"Because I wasn't always a maid, Lucien." She set the sword down carefully, her expression complicated. "Come. We're losing the light, and this conversation needs better surroundings than the forest floor."
They walked back to the small mansion in silence, Elara's posture tense in a way Lucien rarely saw. Inside, she carefully cleaned his hands, applying a salve that stung initially but quickly soothed the worst of the pain. Then she sat across from him at their small table and seemed to gather herself.
"I've kept secrets from you," she said finally. "Not to deceive you, but to protect you. But if you're going to throw yourself into training with this determination, you deserve to know what you're risking."
"What do you mean?"
Elara stood and moved to a locked chest in the corner of her room—one of the few pieces of furniture that didn't come with the mansion. Lucien had never seen inside it. She produced a key from around her neck and opened it slowly, as if expecting something to leap out.
Inside were weapons.
Not practice weapons or decorative pieces, but real combat gear: a sword with a blade that seemed to drink in light rather than reflect it, daggers with violet-tinted steel, light armor made from dark leather reinforced with metal plates. Everything was meticulously maintained despite obvious age.
"My name wasn't always Elara," his mother said quietly, running her fingers along the sword's pommel. "I was born Elara Vesper, third daughter of House Vesper—the Court Shadows."
Lucien's breath caught. He'd read that name in the library. "The violet house that was destroyed."
"Not destroyed." Her voice hardened. "Erased. There's a difference." She lifted the sword, and even in the dim lamplight, Lucien could see the grace with which she held it. This wasn't a maid holding a weapon—this was a knight reunited with an old friend.
"House Vesper served the crown for six generations," Elara continued, her eyes distant with memory. "We were Court Shadows—specialists in what polite society calls 'subtle warfare.' Intelligence gathering. Psychological operations. Political maneuvering. We could walk through enemy camps and make guards forget they'd seen us. We could stand in throne rooms and make kings question their own certainties. Our violet gave us power over perception, over the negotiable aspects of reality."
She set the sword on the table between them, and Lucien stared at it with new understanding. This was a weapon forged for violet users, designed to channel their unique power.
"We were valuable," Elara said bitterly. "Right up until we became too valuable. Too influential. Too difficult to control." She finally met Lucien's eyes. "Do you know what happens when you give people the power to question reality? They start questioning authority. Hierarchy. The divine right of certain colors to rule over others."
"So they killed you."
"Not directly. That would have been too obvious." She laughed, but it held no humor. "No, they orchestrated it beautifully. Accused House Vesper of treason—of using our powers to manipulate the royal succession. The trial was quick, the evidence circumstantial but damning, and the sentence was annihilation. Every adult member of the house was executed. Every child was either killed or scattered to the winds."
Her hand trembled slightly on the sword's grip. "I was fourteen. My mother hid me in a traveling merchant's cart the night before the purge. Told me to run, to hide, to never use our name again. I spent five years working as a traveling seamstress, then another three as a kitchen maid in a minor house, before I was foolish enough to let myself be seen by Lord Cassian."
Lucien felt something break open in his chest—a grief for his mother's loss mixing with rage at the injustice of it all. "He knew who you were."
"He knew I had violet. Whether he connected me to House Vesper specifically, I've never been certain." Elara's expression was complex. "I thought... I thought if I was quiet enough, useful enough, invisible enough, I could survive. Have a simple life. Then you came, and suddenly invisibility wasn't enough anymore. Because you carried violet too, and in this kingdom, that makes you dangerous by birth."
She stood abruptly and moved to the window, staring out at the darkening woods. "That's why I've never taught you, Lucien. Why I've tried to keep you away from power and ambition. Because the moment you become visible—truly visible—they'll do to you what they did to my house. They'll erase you, and I'll lose the only thing I have left in this world."
The pain in her voice was so raw that Lucien found himself moving to her side without thinking. He took her hand, and she squeezed it with surprising strength.
"But you're training anyway," she said, voice thick with unshed tears. "You're not going to hide, are you?"
"I can't." The words came out as a whisper. "Mother, I know it's dangerous. I know they might try to destroy me like they destroyed your house. But I also know I can't spend my life invisible. I can't keep pretending I don't exist while watching them pretend not to see me."
He thought of Aldric's contempt, his father's dismissal, the dinner where he'd been looked through like empty air. "I'd rather risk being erased than guarantee never having existed at all."
Elara closed her eyes, and a single tear traced down her cheek. "You're so much like my mother. She would have loved you—your stubbornness, your refusal to bow." She wiped her eyes and took a shaky breath. "If you're determined to walk this path, then I can't stop you. But I can make sure you don't walk it alone and unarmed."
She turned to face him fully, and Lucien saw something shift in her posture. The exhausted maid disappeared, replaced by something harder, sharper—the shadow of the knight she'd once been.
"I'm rusty," she warned. "It's been fifteen years since I held a real sword in combat. My body isn't what it was, and violet is difficult to maintain when you spend every day suppressing it. But I remember the basics. I remember the forms House Vesper used, the ways we channeled violet differently than other colors."
"You'll teach me?" Hope surged in Lucien's chest, so strong it was almost painful.
"I'll try." Elara picked up her sword again, this time with purpose. "But understand this, Lucien: violet training isn't like white or red or any of the 'respectable' colors. We don't train to be stronger—we train to be smarter. We don't overpower our enemies—we make them forget why they were enemies in the first place. Our power is subtle, and that means our training must be precise."
She gestured toward the door. "Come. We have maybe an hour before full dark. That's enough for your first real lesson."
They returned to the clearing, the woods now painted in twilight shades that felt appropriate for violet users. Elara examined Lucien's practice sword with a critical eye, then shook her head.
"We'll need to make you a proper weapon eventually, but this will do for basics." She assumed a stance that was similar to what Lucien had seen in the training grounds, but subtly different—more fluid, weight shifting in readiness to move in any direction. "First, forget everything you think you know about swordsmanship from watching the white knights."
"But the forms—"
"Are designed for white's nature: direct, pure, overwhelming." Elara's blade moved through a pattern that seemed almost lazy, but Lucien could sense the deadly precision beneath it. "White users train to be immovable objects and unstoppable forces. They face their enemies head-on because their color gives them certainty."
She shifted her stance, and suddenly the lazy pattern became something else—a feint that would draw an opponent's guard one direction while the real strike came from another. "Violet doesn't give us certainty. It gives us options. We train to be water, not stone. To flow around resistance rather than smash through it."
For the next hour, as twilight deepened into night, Elara taught Lucien the opening forms of what she called "Shadow Dancing"—the Vesper style of combat. It was nothing like the rigid, powerful strikes he'd tried to copy from the white knights. Instead, it emphasized movement, redirection, making opponents doubt their own perceptions.
"Your footwork is more important than your blade," Elara instructed, correcting his stance. "You want your enemy to think you're here—" she tapped a spot to his left, "—when you're actually here." She materialized on his right so quickly he barely saw her move.
She was breathing hard, clearly out of practice, but her eyes held a light Lucien had never seen before. This was who she'd been before she became a maid—a Court Shadow, trained in an art that had been nearly lost to history.
"Now," she said, once Lucien had practiced the basic movements until his exhausted muscles screamed. "Let's talk about channeling violet."
She set down her sword and held out her hands. Slowly, violet energy began to pool around them—not the explosive brightness of white or the fierce heat of red, but something subtler. It was like watching twilight itself coalesce into tangible form.
"Color is will made manifest," Elara said, echoing the words Lucien had heard from Sir Gareth. "But each color channels differently because each color represents different aspects of will. White wants purity, certainty, absolute truth. Red wants passion, change, transformation through destruction and rebirth. Gold wants enhancement, making things more than they were."
The violet around her hands pulsed gently. "Violet wants negotiation. We don't impose our will absolutely—we suggest alternatives. We don't break reality—we convince it to bend. Do you understand the difference?"
Lucien thought back to making Aldric stumble. He hadn't forced Aldric's body to move—he'd created a space where Aldric's intended movement became incorrect, where the reality of his balance shifted just enough to cause failure.
"I... think so. It's not about power. It's about perspective."
"Exactly." Elara smiled with genuine pride. "When you channel violet, you're not gathering energy to unleash. You're creating a space—a domain, the old texts called it—where your understanding of reality takes precedence. Within that space, you can suggest changes. Make perceptions shift. Convince the world that what you want is already true."
She extended her hands toward a nearby tree. The violet energy spread outward, creating a shimmer in the air. "Watch."
The tree seemed to shift—not physically moving, but giving the impression of movement. For a moment, Lucien could have sworn it was three feet to the left. Then the violet faded, and the tree was exactly where it had always been.
"I didn't move the tree," Elara explained. "I created a domain where the tree's position was uncertain. Anyone standing in that domain would doubt their own eyes, might strike at empty air thinking the tree was elsewhere."
"That's..." Lucien struggled to find words. "That's incredible. And terrifying."
"Yes." Elara's expression darkened. "Now imagine applying that to human perception. To decision-making. To loyalty and certainty and belief. Imagine a Court Shadow standing in a throne room, creating a domain where the king suddenly questions whether his most trusted advisor can really be trusted. Where generals doubt their battle plans. Where certainty itself becomes negotiable."
She let the violet fade completely. "That's why they erased us, Lucien. Not because we were stronger than other colors—we weren't. But because we were unpredictable. We could make the powerful doubt their power. We were too dangerous to the established order, so the established order eliminated us."
The weight of that history settled over Lucien like a physical thing. He was carrying the legacy of a destroyed house, learning techniques that had been deliberately forgotten, walking a path that had led to annihilation.
He should have been afraid.
Instead, he felt a fierce determination burning in his chest.
"Teach me," he said. "Everything you remember. Every form, every technique, every secret House Vesper kept. I don't care if it's dangerous. I don't care if they try to erase me like they erased you. I want to know what violet can truly do."
Elara studied him for a long moment, and Lucien saw grief and pride warring in her expression. Finally, she nodded slowly.
"Then we start tomorrow at dawn. And Lucien?" She gripped his shoulder, her callused hand strong despite years of suppressing her nature. "If we're going to do this, we do it right. No half measures. No holding back. You'll train until your body breaks and your mind fractures and your will becomes sharp enough to cut reality itself. Because that's what it takes to survive as a violet user in a world that wants us dead."
She smiled, sad and fierce at once. "Your grandmother would have been so proud. And so, so afraid for you."
That night, Lucien lay in bed staring at the ceiling, his body aching in entirely new ways. His mother's sword rested against the wall—she'd decided to keep it in his room, as if acknowledging that their secret was now shared.
He thought about House Vesper, about Court Shadows erased from history. About his mother hiding for fifteen years, suppressing her nature, living small to survive.
He thought about the power to question reality, to make certainty uncertain.
And he thought about Aldric's contempt, his father's dismissal, a world built on the assumption that some colors were inherently superior to others.
They erased violet because we were too dangerous, he thought, violet wisps curling around his fingers in the darkness. Because we could make people question the order they'd built.
Good.
Maybe it's time someone started questioning again.
Outside, the moon hung heavy in a purple-tinged sky, and in the woods behind the forgotten mansion, a new Court Shadow was being born.