Avis Selby was born in the dark.
Not the comforting dark of a starless night, nor the gentle dark of closed eyes and steady breath. He was born in the kind of dark that swallowed people whole, the kind that seeped into bones, whispering of things lost and forgotten.
His mother was already dead when the midwife pulled him into the world, her body cold, her lips parted as if caught mid-prayer. The healers never spoke of what killed her, only muttered of unnatural things, of omens and curses. Of the way the room trembled the moment he took his first breath.
Magic.
He was marked before he ever opened his eyes.
His father, Lord Virius Selby, was not a kind man, nor a patient one. A widower before thirty, he saw his newborn son not as a child, but as proof of his wife's ruin. Proof of the power that ran in her blood, and now, in Avis.
So Avis learned quickly.
He learned that magic was something to be silenced. That the curl of ivy reaching toward him in the gardens, the way fire bent when he walked past, the whispers of the wind that only he could hear. These things were not gifts. They were dangers. Things that could have him burned.
He learned that when he lost control, he would bleed for it.
And he learned that pain, if nothing else, could keep his magic at bay.
By the time he was ten, he had learned to be a ghost in his own home. The servants did not speak to him unless necessary. His father barely looked at him. When he did, it was always with the same cold calculation, as if measuring how much of the curse still lingered in his son's veins.
By fifteen, he had learned how to survive.
How to keep his voice steady when his father sent him to the king's court. How to play the role of the obedient son, the perfect noble, the loyal subject. How to become someone no one would suspect.
By eighteen, he was a soldier. A knight bearing the king's crest.
And by twenty, he was something else entirely.
He never planned to kill his father.
But one night, when his control slipped, when rage and grief and years of silence finally cracked open inside him, Lord Virius Selby found himself staring at his son, at the vines curling up his legs, tightening like a noose.
And for the first time, his father was afraid.
For the first time, Avis let himself be seen.
When the morning came, Virius Selby was dead, his body tangled in roots that had no right to be there. And Avis Selby was gone.
The boy he had been, the one who tried to silence his magic, to be nothing but a shadow, died that night too.
In his place stood something new.
A man who wore the crest of the very people who hunted his kind. A man who walked among his enemies, unrecognized.
A man who had spent years waiting, watching, searching.
Because he knew the truth.
He was not the only one.
And if he could find others like him, if he could reach them before the king did, before they ended up like his mother
Maybe, just maybe, it wouldn't all be for nothing.