"Axel, if there is anything that I want you to value in this ruined life, it is courage. A heart that fights is a heart that wins."
Axel scrunched his face. The logic didn't hold together when he turned it over in his mind.
"Mother, people lose because they fight. When there is a fight, there's bound to be a loser, and courage leads both people to fight." He let the words settle between them before adding, "Didn't father lose too? Isn't that why he isn't here on my birthday?"
His mother's hands stilled on the table.
She could handle Undefineds. The weight of a fractured world pressing down on her shoulders every waking moment. But her son's way of thinking always caught her off guard. He saw things too clearly for a child — dissected comfortable truths with the same detachment other children applied to pulling wings off insects.
A ten-year-old should still be susceptible to the comfortable lies adults told: that courage mattered, that resolve mattered, that the willingness to fight no matter how blind was somehow noble. But Axel did not easily digest such things, and that made her motherhood journey more difficult than her years as a professor in the Definition Academy had ever been.
Of course, the absence of his father made the boy's argument difficult to dismiss.
She leaned back in her chair, her jet-black hair drinking the light and reinforcing the shadows across her features. Her sea-blue eyes — not so different from her son's — gazed at him with a warmth he refused to meet. A graceful, sad smile spread across her lips.
"Your father didn't lose... he had to leave to protect both of us... and the world."
Axel turned his blue eyes to look at her. Unlike his mother, he had red hair that fell just above his brows, parted in front. He shrugged — the gesture of someone stating facts, not opinions — despite his puffy cheeks and shortness.
"He simply wasn't strong enough. If he was strong enough, he would've stayed and fought for his family. His courage and resolve might as well have forged his heart to stay instead of to run and betray the world."
"Axel?!"
"I'm simply telling the truth, mother."
He rose from his seat at the vast dining table — the one set only for two, where a simple cake waited with a single candle burning blue — and walked toward the door.
"Axel, I'm talking to you. Come back here now!"
He did not turn around. His small feet carried him out of the dining hall and into his room, leaving his mother alone with the untouched cake and the silence.
Even though he wished he had taken a bite. Cake wasn't a common commodity these days, and his stomach knew it. But his pride and anger got the best of him.
In more ways than one.
Because that night — that conversation with its cold logic and colder dismissal — was the last conversation he ever had with his mother.
After that night, Axel never found her again.
No one did.
There was no trace, no sign of struggle, no farewell. Nothing. Friends and servants searched. The Definition Academy sent investigators who combed every corner of the estate, interviewed every witness, traced every lead into dead ends. None of them found her. Nightsinger, an Ascended-Champion who had faced horrors that would break lesser minds, had simply... vanished. As if she'd never existed at all — except in the memory of a boy who had walked away from her on his tenth birthday.
And now, eight years later, Axel still dreamed of that night.
He dreamed of the cake he hadn't eaten. The words he hadn't taken back. The doorway he had walked through without looking back, because he was angry about his father's disappearance in his life and took that anger out on his mother.
He had been ten years old and had thought he knew better.
His chest ached with the familiar weight of it — not sharp anymore, not the fresh wound it had once been, but something that had settled into his bones like a second skeleton he would carry forever.
Axel exhaled slowly, his breath fogging in the cold air. The white sky stretched above him, pale and indifferent. A breeze cut across the courtyard, sharp enough to sting, and he shivered — pulling his attention back to the present.
He looked down at his hands, calloused, rough and wrapped around a long stick broom like they belonged there.
'How the mighty fall.'
He continued to sweep.
Just as he resumed, footsteps stomped through the yard — getting closer with each brush of his broom against the concrete, each sweep pushing aside fresh snow.
"Axel!!" The owner of the footsteps called out as she got closer.
Axel turned to her and paused mid-sweep, looking at her as she reached him.
"What are you doing?"
Axel looked at the broom in his hands, then returned his gaze to the lady's green eyes that seemed to absorb the light surrounding them rather than reflect it.
"Sweeping?"
The lady's long platinum hair danced with the gentle wind and caught the morning light. Her expression did not match the softness of her appearance.
"It's 7 AM, Axel. Why are you even sweeping at this time..." She paused and rested her face in her palm, heaving a brief sigh.
"You know what? Never mind. What is today?" She fixed him with a stern look.
Axel looked up as if finding the answers in the skies.
'I don't even know... who keeps count of the days at times like these?'
Days were marked by devastation and catastrophes — by which Sanctuary fell, which horde emerged, which Champions died holding the line. Did one truly have the luxury to keep tabs on dates?
'Unless you're the daughter of a Transcendent-Champion, who recently claimed the third Sanctuary of humanity.'
For the son of a traitor like him, this was purely luxury.
"Goodness, Axel. Today is the Day of Definition! And Charles is waiting for us! We depart by 10 AM."
Axel's mouth hung slightly open.
"Oh..."
"Yes... Oh," the young lady repeated in a mock tone.
A small crease formed on Axel's brow.
"I... forgot." He studied her face. "Ling, are you sure it's today?"
She stared at him, disbelief plain on her features.
Axel let out a broken chuckle — the first sound from him that resembled anything human. The sound scraped against the cold air, hollow and brief.
"Ah... I guess I'll know my fate sooner than I expected."