Chapter Text
Sebek Zigvolt was too loud.
Everyone knew it.
The other first years knew it Ace, who mimicked him behind his back; Deuce, who winced at the volume; Jack, whose ears flattened every time Sebek's voice hit the hallway; Epel, who once said "does he ever breathe between sentences?" to no one in particular. Even Yuu, the magicless human who seemed to have infinite patience, had been seen pressing a hand to her ear when Sebek entered a room at full declaration.
The upperclassmen knew it. Riddle corrected his volume. Leona told him to shut up. Azul assessed his volume as a negotiation tactic to be managed. Vil called it "unrefined." Idia, from behind his screen, typed volume: lethal in a chat none of them saw.
Lilia knew it. Lilia said it with a twinkling laugh and a pat on the head that Sebek both craved and loathed, because the pat was for a child and Sebek was not a child, Sebek was a retainer, Sebek was Malleus Draconia's future knight, Sebek was fifteen.
Fifteen years old, a first year at Night Raven College, away from Briar Valley for the first time, away from his mother's training and his father's quiet presence and the familiar halls where he'd spent his whole life learning to be enough. And here, at NRC, surrounded by students from across the Twisted Wonderland pure fae, beastmen, merfolk, humans, all of them measured by their magic and their lineage and their power Sebek was being measured too. And the measurement was the same one he'd been running from since he was old enough to understand it.
Half.
His mother was fae. His father was human. In Briar Valley, among the fae, this made Sebek a living asterisk a footnote in a lineage, a caveat in a pedigree. Promising, for a half-breed. Skilled, considering his blood. Loud, as if volume could make up for density.
The fae children he'd trained with in Briar Valley never said it cruelly. That was the worst part. They said it casually the way you note the weather, the way you observe that a fruit is slightly underripe, the way you mention that a classmate's magic is impressive for someone whose mother married a human. They said it the way people say things that are true, and the truth of it the casual, undismissable, structural truth of being half in a world that counted in wholes settled into Sebek like water into stone. Slowly. Daily. Into the cracks.
And Sebek was loud because the alternative was silence, and silence was where the truth lived.
The crack had been there since childhood. Not a single event not one moment, one cruelty, one breaking point. An accumulation. A thousand small measurements, a thousand casual observations, a thousand times being looked at and found close but not quite. His mother's training sessions, where she pushed him harder than the pure-fae children because she knew as only a fae mother married to a human could know that the world would punish him for the half he couldn't change, and the only defense was to be so undeniably excellent that the punishment couldn't reach him.
His father's silence. His human father, who stood in doorways and watched and said nothing, because what could a human man say to a fae world that saw his son as lesser? His father, who loved him in the quiet, helpless way of a man who'd married into a world that would never fully accept him or his children. His father, whose face Sebek saw in the mirror every morning the human jaw, the human ear shape, the human aging that would one day make Sebek old while his fae peers stayed young.
Lilia's training. Lilia, who'd chosen to train Sebek not out of pity, Lilia would never say pity, but out of something that looked, from Sebek's angle, like charity. Lilia, who trained pure-fae children and half-fae children and human children with the same twinkling, playful, ancient ease, but who Sebek was certain, had to be certain, because the alternative was unbearable trained the pure ones because they were worth it, and trained Sebek because someone had to.
Malleus. Malleus, the prince, the dragon, the being Sebek had devoted his life to serving. Malleus, who tolerated Sebek's devotion with the patient, distant amusement of someone who'd never had a friend and didn't quite know what to do with one. Malleus, who'd never once said you are enough, Sebek not because he thought Sebek wasn't, but because it didn't occur to him to say it, because Malleus, raised in isolation, had never learned that people needed to be told they mattered.
Sebek shouted about Malleus because if he said it loudly enough, often enough, fervently enough, the world would see retainer instead of half. The volume was armor. The devotion was a shield. And behind both, in the silence, was a fifteen-year-old boy who didn't know if he was loved or merely tolerated, and who was too afraid to ask.
It started before NRC. In Briar Valley. The last year before the Dark Mirror called him.
Not the self-harm – not yet. The preparation. The slow, invisible work of a boy teaching himself that pain was the one thing he could control. It started with training. Sebek trained too hard everyone said so, his mother said so, Lilia said so.
He trained until his hands blistered and his muscles screamed and his body, half-human and therefore less resilient than his fae peers, broke down and had to be rebuilt.
He trained through injuries he should have rested. He trained past the point where his body said stop and into the territory where it said I can't and then past that into the territory where it said nothing at all, because it had shut up.
His mother saw. His mother, with her green hair and her proud jaw and her critical eye, saw the blisters and the exhaustion and the relentless, punishing drive, and she said: "You are pushing too hard, Sebek."
"I must be better," Sebek said. "I must be faster, stronger, more skilled. I must—"
"You must rest. You cannot serve if you are broken."
But Sebek heard you cannot serve if you are broken and translated it, in the crack, in the silence, into
“you are only worth what you can produce. If you break, you are worthless. And he trained harder.”
The blisters became calluses. The exhaustion became baseline. The pain became normal. And somewhere in that normalization in the daily, deliberate infliction of pain through training Sebek learned the thing that would, months later, become the blade
Pain is clarity. Pain is the one thing that is mine.
Pain is real in a world that keeps measuring me and finding me less.
The first cut was at NRC. Three weeks into his first year.
An accident. A real one a training blade slip in the Diasomnia training grounds, late at night, alone, because Sebek trained alone now, because the other Diasomnia students trained in groups and Sebek didn't fit in groups, Sebek was too loud and too half and too much and the groups closed around him like water around a stone, smooth and excluding.
The blade kissed the inside of his forearm. A thin line. Red. Not deep. The kind of thing that healed in days.
Sebek stood in the dark training ground and felt the sting and the blood and the clarity the same clarity he'd been chasing through overtraining, but sharper. Cleaner. More his.
The cut was not a competition. It was not a performance. It was not a declaration of loyalty or a shout about Malleus or a wall of volume to drown the silence. It was private. A single, small, secret thing that belonged to Sebek and no one else.
He cleaned the blade. He cleaned his arm. He went to bed.
He didn't think about it again.
Until he did.