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The first thing Calian noticed was the silence.
Not the silence of an empty room. Not the silence of held breath. This was deeper—a hollow absence where something vital had been. Like the space left by a severed limb. Like the echo of a heartbeat that had stopped.
Franz was dead.
The words made no sense. They refused to arrange themselves into meaning. Franz. Was. Dead. Four syllables that should have been impossible, like saying the sky is green or water burns.
Calian stood in the treatment room. Someone was speaking—Ian, maybe, or Kyrie—but their voice came from very far away, muffled by the roaring in his ears. His eyes were fixed on the bed.
On the still figure lying there.
Green eyes, closed. That sharp face, slack. Those hands that had always been moving—writing, petting cats, holding a sword, pushing bananas toward Calian—now perfectly still.
No.
The word cracked through him, splintering something he hadn't known could break.
He remembered, suddenly and vividly, the first time Franz had called him younger brother. Not prince, not Calian, but younger brother. It had been casual, almost accidental, dropped between sentences like it meant nothing. But Calian had felt it land in his chest like a stone dropping into deep water.
He remembered the bananas. The stubborn silence. The way Franz never voiced out what he felt but always appeared the moment Calian needed him. The way he sat nearby, wordless, present, a green and steady presence that Calian had stopped noticing because it had simply always been there.
And now it wasn't.
"This isn't—" Calian's voice came out strange. Scraped raw. "He can't—"
He can't be dead because I never told him.
I never told him how much it meant. I never told him that when he sat beside me, I knew. I never told him that his stubbornness, his silence, his infuriating refusal to let me push him away—that it saved me. That he, that I—
The roaring grew louder.
Someone touched his arm. He shook them off. Or maybe he didn't. He couldn't feel his hands anymore.
You worked hard, Calian had said, that time Franz came back stained with blood. And Franz had closed his eyes and said It's fine, and Calian had believed him.
He had always believed him.
Because Franz was supposed to be fine. Franz was supposed to be there. Franz was the one who always refused to eat and insisted on learning magic and glared at him for barking too much. Franz was the constant. The anchor. The only person in this wretched world who looked at Calian and saw someone worth sitting beside.
And now—
Now there was only silence.
Calian didn't remember leaving the room.
He didn't remember walking through the palace corridors, or the faces he passed, or the way people stepped aside when they saw his face. He didn't remember anything except the cold.
The cold inside him.
It had started as emptiness—a hollow carved out of his chest where something warm had been. But emptiness, he discovered, didn't stay empty. It filled with something else. Something darker. Something that burned.
It started small. A flicker. A spark.
The first time Calian felt it was when he saw Franz's sword. Still propped in the corner of his room. Waiting for a hand that would never hold it again.
The spark caught.
Then came the details. The small things that destroyed him piece by piece. The half-finished letter on Franz's desk. The untouched breakfast. The way the morning light fell across the empty chair where Franz always sat.
He was going to eat that. The thought came unbidden. He never got to.
The spark became a flame.
Calian stood in the center of Franz's room—his room, his things, his life left unfinished—and the flame spread through his veins like wildfire. It burned away the numbness. It burned away the tears that wouldn't come. It burned away everything except one clear truth.
Someone had done this.
Someone had taken Franz. Had reached into Calian's world and ripped out the only color that mattered. Had left behind this gray, hollow, wrong existence where the sun still rose and the birds still sang and Calian still breathed when Franz did not.
The flame became an inferno.
Calian smiled.
It was not his smile. It was something else. Something that had been sleeping beneath his skin since the day he first held a sword. Something that had been waiting for a reason to wake.
"When I find you," he said aloud, to no one, to the empty room, to the ghost of a brother who would never answer again, "I will make you regret even touching him."
He didn't sleep.
He didn't eat the food someone left outside his door. He didn't respond when Ian spoke to him, when Allan called, when anyone tried to reach through the wall of ice and fire that had become his skin.
He prepared.
He sharpened his swords until they could split a hair. He reviewed every one, every suspect, every person who had ever looked at Franz with anything less than proper respect. He built lists in his mind—names, faces, connections, weaknesses.
And underneath it all, the fire burned.
This is what you wanted, wasn't it? The question whispered through his thoughts, aimed at no one, at everyone, at the universe that had taken the one person Calian couldn't lose. You wanted to see what I would become.
Here I am.
He remembered Franz's voice. Stop barking, always the same line. As if Calian were a dog who needed to be quieted.
Well...
The dog had stopped barking.
The dog was hunting.
And when he found his prey—when he found the hands that had stolen his brother's future, his brother's voice, his brother's stupid, stubborn, precious existence—Calian would not bite.
He would tear. He would shred. He would burn the world down and salt the earth and make sure that everyone, everyone knew what happened when you touched what belonged to him.
Franz had never liked it when Calian barked.
But Franz was gone.
And Calian had nothing left to lose.
What if was a cruel game.
Because what if implied a choice. A path not taken. A future that could have been.
What if Franz died.
There was no what if. There was only the fire. The emptiness. The single, terrible certainty that Calian would keep breathing—would keep waking, keep eating, keep smiling—long after the fire consumed everything else.
Because that was what Franz would have wanted.
And Calian, for all his barking, had never learned how to refuse his brother anything.
Not even survival.
Not even this.
The sword in his hand caught the morning light.
Somewhere, far away, the ones responsible were still breathing.
Calian smiled, and the fire in his eyes could have melted stone.
"You should have killed me instead. Because now? Now there's nothing left of me that knows how to stop."