They took him on a day that felt no different from the others.
There was no warning bell, no omen in the air. Only the steady pulse of the suppression runes and the stale taste of damp stone. The boy—ten years old now, lean and too quiet—sat with his back to the wall, tracing an alchemical circle into dust while his mother corrected the angles with the tip of her finger.
"Too sharp," Elenora murmured, voice thin but patient. "A reaction like that doesn't explode. It corrodes. Subtle difference. Deadly one."
Across from them, Lucien watched with half-lidded eyes, conserving energy. Even seated, his posture remained disciplined, as though he could still hear the echo of a training hall instead of the drip of water from the ceiling.
The boy nodded once, fixed the line, and continued.
Then the corridor outside changed.
Not with sound—sound was common—but with intention. Footsteps that were too measured. The clink of keys that came with purpose, not routine. The boy's hand paused over the dust.
"They're coming," he said softly.
Elenora's finger froze.
Lucien's eyes opened fully.
The cell door screamed as it unlocked.
The guards who entered were not the usual ones. Their armor was cleaner. Their movements were controlled. Their faces held no casual cruelty—only practiced indifference, which somehow felt worse.
One of them glanced at the boy and smiled faintly, as if at an object he'd finally been given permission to use.
"Stand," he ordered.
The boy stood.
Lucien rose too—slowly, grimacing, but rising—placing himself half a step in front of his son by instinct.
"You will not touch him," Lucien said, voice hoarse yet firm.
The guard's gaze flicked to Lucien's shattered core—visible even without sight, like a wound in the air.
"I won't touch you," the guard replied. "You're already broken."
Elenora moved to the boy's side, her hand gripping his shoulder. Her purple eyes—deep and unmistakably royal—burned with a hatred she no longer bothered to hide.
"You can't take him," she said. "He's all we have."
The guard shrugged as though she'd mentioned the weather.
"He's needed elsewhere."
Lucien's jaw tightened. "Why?"
The guard tilted his head, almost curious. "Because he's interesting."
The boy felt his mother's grip tighten, nails digging through thin cloth into skin.
"We'll go with him," Elenora said quickly, desperate. "Please. If you're moving him—move us too."
The guard's faint smile widened.
"No."
Then, without ceremony, they stepped forward.
Hands seized the boy's arms.
Elenora lunged, weak but frantic, and caught the edge of his sleeve. For a second, she held on—her fingers trembling with everything she couldn't say fast enough.
"Listen to me," she whispered, voice cracking. "No matter what they do—"
A guard struck her.
Not hard enough to kill. Not even hard enough to satisfy cruelty.
Just hard enough to make her fall.
Lucien moved.
He shouldn't have been able to—his body was too damaged, his core too shattered—but he did anyway, surging forward with the remnants of a swordsman's will.
A guard slammed the hilt of a weapon into Lucien's ribs, folding him to the floor. Lucien coughed, blood dark against stone.
The boy tried to twist free.
A fist hit his stomach, hard and precise. His breath left him in a silent burst. The corridor tilted. For a moment he saw nothing but grey.
Grey hair.
Grey eyes.
The seal his mother had placed on his bloodline still held, still disguising him, still keeping him ordinary in their eyes—an adopted stray, a stray brought into the cell after the "real" child died.
That was what they believed.
That was what kept him alive.
"He's not even theirs," one guard muttered as they dragged him out. "Funny, isn't it? They cling to some adopted stray like he's blood."
"Shut up," another replied. "Orders are orders."
The boy's head turned, just enough to look back.
Elenora was on her knees, reaching for him with shaking hands.
Lucien lay on his side, trying to rise, eyes furious and helpless.
The boy opened his mouth.
No sound came.
The door slammed shut.
And the world—his world—became smaller than it had ever been.
The new room was not a cell.
It was worse.
It was a place built for use.
Stone walls lined with runes he did not recognize. Iron restraints bolted into the floor. A drain carved into the center like the room expected to spill things and wanted them gone quickly. Torches burned clean and steady, fed by something more reliable than oil.
They chained him immediately.
Wrists. Ankles. Neck.
A collar etched with suppressive script snapped shut with a click that sounded too final.
The boy did not scream.
He stared at the ceiling and waited for his mind to do what it always did.
Count. Observe. Endure.
But something had changed.
The absence behind him—where his parents had been—felt like an open wound.
In the cell, pain had context. His mother's whispered comfort. His father's steady gaze. The certainty that someone would touch his hair gently afterward and tell him to breathe.
Here, pain had no boundary.
Here, pain was the point.
A man entered eventually, not armored like a guard, but dressed in dark robes with silver stitching. He carried a book under one arm and a small case of instruments under the other.
He looked at the boy the way an alchemist might look at a rare reagent.
"Subject," the man said, testing the word as though savoring it. "Ten years old. Not born of them. Adopted in desperation, likely. The parents' true child died in flight."
The boy's eyes narrowed slightly.
So that was the story the cult told itself.
It made things tidy.
It made cruelty easier.
The man leaned closer, peering into the boy's face. "Grey hair. Grey eyes. Plain. Yet he survives conditions that should have killed him. Interesting."
The boy said nothing.
The man smiled as if pleased by the silence. "Let's see what you are."
The first session was not a beating.
It was a lesson in helplessness.
They didn't strike him until he was certain they wouldn't.
They spoke softly while tightening restraints. They adjusted runes carefully, turning suppression up and down like a dial. They watched his breathing, his pupils, the way his muscles tensed.
Then they hurt him.
Not with rage.
With method.
His body reacted the way any body would—flinching, trembling, trying to escape. But escape was impossible, and the room never changed, and the man kept writing notes while the boy's world narrowed to sensation and restraint.
Afterward, no one cleaned him.
No one spoke his name.
They left him there until he lost track of time.
That was when the first fracture formed inside his mind.
In the cell, he had been a boy enduring cruelty.
Here, he was a thing being tested.
A stray with no pack.
A subject.
He broke a little at a time.
Not dramatically.
Not in a way that gave anyone the satisfaction of seeing him fall apart neatly.
He broke the way stone breaks under water—slowly, invisibly, until suddenly there are cracks everywhere and nothing can be made whole again.
He began speaking to himself.
At first, it was silent—lips moving without sound, repeating sword forms his father had taught him, reciting potion ratios his mother had whispered into the dark.
Then he began answering questions no one asked.
What is your name?
I don't know.
Where are you?
In a room.
Why?
Because I'm interesting.
Sometimes he laughed.
Not because anything was funny—but because the sound proved he could still do it.
Sometimes he cried and didn't realize until his face was wet.
Worst of all were the moments when he stopped feeling anything at all.
Those moments terrified him more than pain.
Because numbness felt like forgetting.
And forgetting felt like death.
Two years passed in fragments.
He didn't see his parents again.
Not once.
At first he tried to count the days, carving tiny marks into the stone when they unchained him long enough to drag him to a corner and pour water over him. But the marks were scrubbed away eventually. Or he forgot to make them. Or he made too many and none of them meant anything.
By twelve, his body looked like a record of everything he had survived.
His back carried lines that never fully faded—evidence of whips used not to kill, but to teach his skin what it meant to anticipate. His arms were crossed by older cuts, some shallow, some deeper, all intentional in placement. They didn't just hurt him anymore.
They marked him.
Layer upon layer.
A map of ownership.
The boy no longer flinched at the sight of blood.
He watched it the way he watched everything—with a strange, distant calm, as if it belonged to someone else.
That calm was not strength.
It was what remained when fear had nowhere left to go.
The man with the book returned often.
He was joined by others.
Some spoke in low voices about mana flow. About bloodlines. About seals and inheritance. The boy learned quickly that they believed his parents' "real" child had died—stillborn in the wilderness, consumed by the dangers of flight.
They believed the boy had been adopted afterward.
A stray picked up to soothe grief.
An attachment.
A mistake.
And because they believed that, they didn't look too closely at him.
Not at first.
But as the boy reached twelve, something began to change.
The sessions shifted.
The pain became… purposeful.
They introduced new runes, unfamiliar ones that made the air taste metallic. They pressed heated symbols to his skin—not to burn randomly, but to trace patterns that reacted to the suppression collar.
They took measurements. Blood samples. Nail clippings. Hair strands.
The boy watched the strands of his grey hair fall into a small glass vial and felt something stir beneath his ribs—something that did not belong to the room.
A hidden pulse.
Sealed.
Waiting.
The man's pen scratched across paper.
"Subject displays abnormal resilience," he murmured. "Pain response subdued. Psychological dissociation increasing. Excellent. This will make deeper trials easier."
The boy's mind drifted, trying to escape into memory.
He pictured his mother's black hair, the royal purple eyes that held warmth even in a cell. He pictured his father's white hair, blue eyes that never lowered, even when broken.
And he pictured what his mother had once whispered—so long ago it felt like another life.
You were never meant to look like this.
Your hair should be white.
Your eyes purple.
The boy touched the side of his face with a trembling hand and wondered if that person still existed under the grey.
Or if the room had already carved him into something else.
The first "experiment" began on a night when the torches burned a little brighter than usual.
They strapped him to a table instead of the floor.
A circle of runes glowed beneath him, humming softly like something alive.
The man leaned over him, eyes bright with a scholar's hunger.
"Let's see," he whispered, "if we can make the seal speak."
The boy's eyes widened.
Seal?
So they knew.
Or suspected.
Cold dread slid through him—not because he feared pain anymore, but because pain was predictable, and this wasn't.
The man placed a hand over the boy's chest.
The runes flared.
The suppression collar pulsed.
Something inside the boy responded—faintly, instinctively—like a sleeping beast stirring when it heard a distant call.
For the first time in years, the boy wanted to scream.
Not from agony.
From the terror of being seen.
And somewhere, deep under grey hair and grey eyes and scarred skin, the bloodline his mother had buried shifted—as if answering, against its will.
The boy stared at the ceiling, lips parting, breath shaking.
His sanity—already frayed—threatened to snap.
Not because of what they were doing.
But because he realized something with sudden clarity:
He didn't know if his parents were alive.
And he didn't know if, when he finally saw them again, he'd still be a boy they could recognize.