"We were chosen and trained and bound to the clan Raikarndel through her wisdom and her power, given purpose and direction and the sacred duty of protecting the true heir when the time came for that heir to be found and brought home to claim what was rightfully theirs."

She leaned forward slightly, her intensity growing with each word, her conviction burning through the careful neutrality she had been maintaining.

"We believe you are that heir," she said.

"Not because of prophecy or tradition or the politics of succession, but because we have seen what you are, witnessed the strength of your awakening, watched you fight with power that combines both your father’s techniques and your mother’s bloodline in ways that none of the others have demonstrated, and we know with certainty that carries more weight than any formal declaration that you are the only one who carries the true blood of both parents in equal measure."

Jake looked at her with an expression that was rapidly moving from neutral processing toward something that might generously be called exasperated disbelief, the kind of look that a person gave when they had just been told something important and were simultaneously grateful for the information and deeply annoyed that it had been withheld until now.

"You’re telling me all this now," he said, and his voice was very calm in the way that calm voices were when they were being maintained through significant effort.

"After we’ve been traveling for days, after I’ve already met my half-brother who clearly has thoughts about my arrival that don’t align with your assessment of my rightful position, after we’ve been attacked by assassins and black orcs sent specifically to test me or kill me or both, you’re telling me now that I have multiple siblings scattered across the world and that most of them probably have opinions about whether I should exist at all."

Raani had the grace to look slightly uncomfortable, though she held his gaze without flinching, accepting the implicit criticism in his words without attempting to deflect or excuse the timing of the revelation.

"We wanted you to understand your own power first," she said quietly.

"To awaken fully and see what you were capable of before we burdened you with the weight of everything else that comes with being who you are, but I can see now that waiting may have been a mistake, that perhaps you would have been better served by knowing all of this from the beginning even if the knowledge came before you were ready to fully comprehend what it meant."

The conversation settled into silence after that, the fire burning down to coals while Jake turned the information over in his mind and tried to fit it into the increasingly complex picture of what his life had become, what it had always been underneath the surface of lazy afternoons and Chelsea’s kitchen and the comfortable anonymity of being a Class V swordsman in a city that didn’t care who his parents were.

Chelsea and Rosa didn’t disturb him, giving him space he needed. While others stood aside, listening with keen interest. Eskar was nowhere to be seen.

The rest period ended when Raani stood and gave the signal to break camp, and the company moved back into traveling formation.

*

They reached Roakan as the sun was dropping toward the western peaks, painting the sky in shades of orange and purple that made the massive walls surrounding the city look like they had been carved from the sunset itself rather than from the grey-white stone that actually composed them.

The walls were enormous, rising fifty meters or more above the approach road, thick enough at the base that Jake suspected you could have built entire houses inside them if someone had been inclined to hollow them out for that purpose, and the gates were proportionally massive, great iron-reinforced barriers that stood open now to allow the flow of evening traffic but could clearly be closed and barred against anything short of a sustained siege by a determined army.

What struck Jake most forcefully as they passed through the gates and entered the city proper was how fundamentally different Roakan was from anything he had expected based on his limited experience with cities in this world and how thoroughly it defied the mental template he had been unconsciously using to imagine what a great city of power and wealth would look like. Where he had anticipated flat districts spreading outward from a central palace or market square, the kind of organized radial structure that made sense when you were building on open ground, Roakan instead climbed upward and inward in a way that suggested the city had been built to accommodate the natural terrain rather than reshape it, constructed within and around a series of mountain peaks that rose from the valley floor like the earth’s own architecture reaching toward the sky.

Houses clung to the mountainsides in terraced rows that followed the contours of the slopes, connected by stairs and pathways that wound between levels in patterns that looked organic rather than planned, as though the city had grown naturally from the stone over centuries rather than being laid out by any single designer with a coherent vision.

The mountains themselves were not uniform peaks but a cluster of different heights and shapes, some tall and sharp, others broad and rounded, creating a landscape within the city walls that was dramatic and varied and completely unlike the flat urban sprawl that Jake had unconsciously been expecting.

The group that entered the city was notably smaller than the one that had left the valley five days ago, reduced now to the core escort of iron-suited soldiers and a handful of attendants riding alongside the two carriages that carried Jake and his family.

Raani had sent the other Dragon Maidens ahead hours earlier with instructions to prepare the villa for Jake’s formal welcome.

The absence of the maidens made the group feel smaller and more vulnerable, stripped of the visible markers of status and protection that their presence had provided and reduced to something that looked more like a merchant convoy than the return of the Raikarndel’s yet another son.