Chương 3: Chapter 2: The Beast in The Cradle

Elma, six months into her involuntary second life, lay flat on her back, staring at the perfectly sculpted, corniced ceiling of her nursery. Nina Kresnik had returned to her homeland the very day Elma was born, leaving her and Christa here, in Veraxys. Apparently, Elma was the result of a political union between two great families: the Kresniks and the family she's now living with, The Altheris. This is an obscenity.

She had been forged to be a weapon: a machine of war, capable of closing five hundred feet in a heartbeat, regenerating from a snapped spine in seconds, tearing a man's head from his shoulders with a flick of her wrist. And now she was attempting to roll over. The pristine silk sheet beneath her bunched under her shoulder. She poured every scrap of focus into the task. Contract the left serratus! Torque the hips! Use the momentum of the head to— The effort ended in a puff of infant exertion.

She flopped back onto the mattress, the only result a slight, useless wobble of her cheek. She bit down on the surprisingly resilient cuff of her cotton sleeve. It was the only gesture of control she could manage in this prison of flesh.

"Is my little doll playing with her clothes again?" A maid, a plump, smiling woman named Leta, leaned over the crib. She had the audacity to coo.

"Such a strong little girl!" Leta gently disengaged the chewed sleeve from Elma's mouth and offered her a brightly colored wooden rattle. She settled for clamping her jaw down hard on the rattle, glaring daggers at the maid who continued to smile obliviously. Then came Christa. Her mother swept into the room in a flurry of silk and maternal anxiety, promptly snatching the rattle from Elma's jaws.

She launched into a sharp rebuke of Leta, her voice rising in a frantic lecture about choking hazards—a redundant fear, Elma noted, considering the wooden sphere was nearly twice the diameter of her current esophagus. Christa was a constant, hovering presence, a direct consequence of a history Elma had only recently deduced from the servants' hushed gossip. Before Elma, Christa had given birth to a son who survived barely long enough to draw his first breath.

The grief of that immediate loss had mutated into a stifling, hyper-vigilant panic that now governed Elma's existence. Christa spent hours performing a repertoire of grotesque facial contortions and nonsense babbling, desperate for a sign of life. To ensure the primary caregiver remained functional and attentive, Elma occasionally rewarded the performance with a calculated twitch of her lips. But there was only one thing that truly commanded Elma's interest: Resonance. It usually began with the candles.

With a languid wave of her hand, Christa would ignite the wicks, conjuring heat and light from nothing. The "grand finale" was always the same: Christa would weave her fingers through the air, manipulating the pressure differentials until a miniature cyclone spun between her palms. Elma reached for it. She extended her arms toward the swirling air, her mind screaming for the hum of a power source, for any tether to this energy. She felt nothing.

Christa seemed to find Elma's desperate attempt to gain this power to be amusing. She let out a delighted trill of laughter and pressed a soft kiss to Elma's forehead, completely oblivious to the cold fury burning in her daughter's eyes.

Elma found the sheer scale of the manor a strategic waste of space—but it had one immense, saving grace: her father, Lord Valerius Altheris, was almost always absent. Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation. Lord Valerius was not a man of quiet authority. Towering and broad-shouldered, draped in the golden hair of his family and richly embroidered silks bearing the crest of three converging suns, he was defined by a single, overwhelming trait: his laughter.

It rolled endlessly through the halls, a booming, joyous proclamation of his confidence and his Nation's ascendance. Always too loud, too frequent, and utterly devoid of genuine merriment. A single constant remained beneath the silks and the noise: a massive crimson hilt strapped permanently across his back, conspicuously empty of any blade. Elma had never once seen him remove it, nor seen what it was meant to hold. She had filed it away as the only detail about him that read as remotely tactical.

The occasions when Lord Valerius Altheris remembered he possessed a daughter were terrible. It happened roughly once a week. Lord Altheris would appear, freshly armored in his civilian silks, and sweep Elma up from the arms of her panicked maid.

"Ah, the little jewel! Come, little Elma. Your father has matters of state to attend to!" She was strapped to his chest, usually in a cradle that reeked of expensive leather and her father's metallic, ambitious scent. The first time Valerius took her outside, she realized the Altheris family crest wasn't a designer's flourish. The sky held three distinct suns, each drifting toward the same silent point. At midday, their movement slowed to a deliberate crawl until, at last, they converged.

The three fused into a larger star, unleashing a torrent of blinding white light across the heavens. The air, usually a thin and unremarkable necessity, suddenly felt dense. Breathing, a task her infant lungs usually found taxing, became effortless. It was as if the world itself had taken a deep breath, forcing life into her narrow chest. Then, the alignment broke. The stars drifted apart, shattering the singular white light back into three distinct, orbiting embers.

As they retreated to their separate paths, the heavy, nourishing air thinned, returning to the mundane atmosphere of the world below. She watched them until her eyes burned. It was the first time she had ever seen the sky with her own eyes. The Other had always wanted to see it. Did you see it? The thought slipped instinctively into the dark recesses of her mind, cast toward the place where his presence had once coiled around her thoughts. Years of forced companionship had carved the habit too deeply to abandon.

Silence answered her. Elma frowned faintly. Nothing. No mocking remark. No quiet breathing at the edge of her consciousness. No feeling of someone listening from behind her own thoughts. And yet she could not quite believe the silence. It felt less like absence and more like something holding its breath.

They had gathered in the Grand Study, the sort of room where important people sat around a heavy oak table to negotiate Important Things with grave expressions and measured voices. It was not a place Elma belonged in, nor one she had any desire to belong in. Her father, however, believed she needed to "breathe power" if she was to inherit the family name one day. As though simply sitting among influential people would seep authority into her lungs like incense. The heavy doors groaned open.

A woman stepped forward, the western sunlight catching the sharp angles of her gold-plate armor.

"Thiyya," Valerius barked.

"The situation at the shore." Thiyya looked like a woman who hadn't slept in forty-eight hours.

"My Lord, the situation is dire. Six Clots formed in a single night. Our current coastal garrison is being picked apart. They can't hold the line, let alone contain the spread." Six clots? A low, anxious hum rippled through the room. The attendants exchanged glances that bordered on panicked. Valerius turned to the man standing in his shadow, a figure whose presence seemed to suck the warmth out of the light.

"What do you think?" The foreign man took a slow, deliberate breath.

"A regurgitation is occurring. You must excise it before it can build strength." The resentment directed at the man was thick enough to choke on. His skin tone, the cut of his clothes, the very way he held himself—he was a foreigner, a survivor of a tragedy these people clearly thought they were too superior to suffer.

"Very well," Valerius said, his voice dropping the jovial tone.

"Send word to the other nations. We will meet this threat as a unified front." The man nodded grimly and retreated into the shadows of the pillars. Valerius crossed his massive arms, his silks straining over his shoulders.

"Once the Tide claims a land, it never retreats. If we allow this incursion to take root, the cost of reclamation will be measured in generations. Let's give it a strike it has to crawl back from."" Yes, My Lord." The response was a unified, practiced bark. Elma looked at her father with a new, colder clarity. Valerius Altheris was not merely a loud, boisterous man draped in expensive silk. He was a Strategoi and the Sovereign of Veraxys, one of the most powerful nations in the world.

How does one become a Resonant? If she was to survive this gilded cage, she needed more than soft skin and infant wails. She needed power. Six months had passed. The entity that had granted her this second chance had not spoken. What did it want? And what would happen to this fragile, new body when it finally came to collect? A warmth spread beneath her, slow and traitorous, answering the question for her. Curse this body. She turned her head toward the nearest attendant and held the look until the woman noticed.

Deal with it.