Lord Regent Cassian Vaelor had always smiled like a man who knew where the bodies were buried, because he had put most of them in the ground himself.
In the first life, it had been Cassian who slipped nightshade into Kairos's wine the night before the execution. Cassian who whispered to the king that his son plotted regicide. Cassian who stood at the block and caught Kairos's severed head when it rolled, cradling it like a long-lost brother while the crowd cheered.
This time, Cassian was forty-seven, handsome in the way a viper is beautiful, silver threading his temples, voice smooth as oiled steel. He still wore mourning black for the late king (Kairos's father), even though the old man had been dead six years in this timeline.
He summoned Kairos to the old solar the morning after the rift closed, under the pretense of "discussing succession contingencies."
The room smelled of beeswax and treachery.
Cassian poured two glasses of deep red wine from a crystal decanter. The same vintage, Kairos noted. The same poison, if the faint almond scent beneath the currants was any indication.
"My nephew," Cassian said warmly, sliding one glass across the desk. "You were magnificent last night. The realm is in your debt."
Kairos took the glass but did not drink.
Remorse stirred at his hip, whispering Cassian's name in a voice like grinding ice.
Cassian's smile did not waver. "Come now. A toast. To family."
Kairos lifted the glass, swirled it, then—casually—tipped it into the fireplace. The wine hissed as it met the flames, turning them briefly violet.
Cassian's mask slipped for the first time. Just a flicker.
"Careless," he murmured. "That was a '58 vintage."
"And this," Kairos said, drawing Remorse in one fluid motion, "is a blade that remembers every drop of blood you've ever spilled."
The sword ignited—not with fire, but with cold white light that filled the room like moonlight on snow. Cassian's eyes widened as the runes flared, spelling his own name across the fuller in letters of frozen starlight.
He lunged for the hidden dagger beneath the desk.
Too late.
Kairos moved faster than any eighteen-year-old should, fifty years of muscle memory guiding his arm. The flat of Remorse cracked against Cassian's wrist—bone snapped like dry kindling. The dagger clattered away.
Cassian scrambled back, cradling his arm, real fear in his eyes now.
"You're… not him," he hissed. "What are you?"
Kairos pressed the tip of the blade beneath Cassian's chin, forcing his head up.
"I'm the echo you tried to silence," he said softly. "And I remember everything."
He did not kill him. Not yet.
Instead, he carved a single shallow line across Cassian's cheek—just enough for blood to well. The moment it touched Remorse's edge, Cassian screamed.
The wound would not close. It burned with the memory of every life he had taken, every betrayal he had orchestrated. He clawed at his face as phantom blades sliced through his mind—ghosts of the men he had poisoned, the women he had ruined, the nephew he had beheaded.
Kairos watched without pity.
When Cassian finally collapsed, sobbing and begging, Kairos crouched beside him.
"You will confess," he said. "Publicly. Every crime. Every plot. And then you will name your allies. If you lie even once, the wound spreads. Slowly. Until there is nothing left of you but truth."
Cassian nodded frantically, blood and tears mixing on the carpet.
Kairos sheathed Remorse. The blade drank in the traitor's agony like wine, humming with satisfaction.
He left the solar without looking back.
In the corridor, his women waited—drawn by instinct or Selene's sight. Isolde's hand found his first, fingers threading through his blood-specked ones.
"It's begun," she said quietly.
Kairos pulled her close, kissed her hard enough to bruise, then did the same to each of them in turn—Seraphine, Lyralei, Amara, Liana, Selene—claiming them openly in the hallway where any servant might see.
Because he was done hiding.
"Yes," he said against Selene's lips. "The cleansing starts now."
Behind the solar door, Cassian's screams echoed like the first crack in a dying regime.
Kairos smiled, slow and terrible.
The root of all poison had a name.
And tonight, he would burn it out.
Lord Regent Cassian Vaelor was born the second son of a second son, and from the cradle he understood what that meant: nothing was ever meant to be his.
His elder brother, Eldric (Kairos's father), inherited the crown, the glory, the love of the people. Cassian inherited the shadows: the ledgers, the spies, the quiet knives that kept thrones upright when the songs grew too loud.
He was the smarter one. Everyone knew it, and no one was allowed to say it.
At sixteen he could balance the kingdom's budget in his head. At twenty he spoke seven languages and had already arranged three marriages that bought Eldoria twenty years of peace. At twenty-five he discovered his first taste of real power: a duke who opposed the king found his entire family dead of "plague" within a fortnight. Cassian had smiled at the funeral and felt the first stirrings of something darker than ambition.
Jealousy is a patient poison.
He watched Eldric marry for love—first Kairos's mother (a foreign duchess of legendary beauty who died birthing the heir), then Isolde, young and ruthless enough to keep the court in line. Cassian himself married a quiet, plain noblewoman who gave him no children and conveniently drowned in her bath when he was thirty-three. No one investigated. By then half the council owed him favors written in blood.
When Eldric began to age and the Voidborn threat loomed on every horizon, Cassian saw his opening. The king was tired. The prince—heir—was brilliant but reckless, beloved but untested. Cassian fed the fears: whispered that Kairos's victories came too easily, that his alliances with elves and islanders smelled of foreign influence, that the boy looked at his father's throne the way a starving wolf looks at a lame stag.
He was careful. Always careful.
The poison took three years to perfect: slow enough that the king's decline looked like grief and age. When Eldric finally died, Cassian was named Regent "until the prince proves himself worthy."
Kairos never got the chance.
Cassian orchestrated the final betrayal with the precision of a maestro: forged letters, bribed witnesses, a single doctored ledger showing Kairos siphoning war funds to foreign accounts. The council—half of them terrified, half bought—voted unanimously for execution.
On the day of the beheading, Cassian wore mourning black and stood close enough to catch his nephew's head when it fell. He told himself it was mercy: better a quick death than exile or imprisonment.
He lied even to himself.
In the years that followed, Cassian ruled as king in all but name. He married Isolde off to a distant duke to keep her quiet (she had always suspected). He sent the elven ambassadors home with veiled threats. He burned the island treaties and watched the Voidborn swallow the kingdom piece by piece, telling himself survival was its own crown.
When the final rift opened above the palace and the Void Emperor itself descended, Cassian was the last to flee. He died screaming in the throne room, crown melting into his skull as darkness took him.
Death was not merciful the second time.
Now, in this new timeline, Cassian is younger, healthier, still smiling that same oiled-steel smile. He has no idea the boy he once murdered has returned with fifty years of hate tempered into something colder than any poison he ever brewed.
He believes the game is still his to play.
He is wrong.
Remorse remembers every drop of blood he spilled.
And Kairos has finally stopped being careful.