Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king-Chapter 995: Father and prince(4)

The shuttered windows barred the world from entry, allowing only narrow, dust-mottled beams of light to slice through the room. In that singular, suspended moment, the distance between the sovereign and the heir seemed to collapse into the simpler and yet harder reality of a father and his son.

For a long, agonizing stretch, Alpheo simply watched the boy. A part of him cursed his own tongue. He wondered what madness had possessed him to lay his story bare.

It had been a reflex, a spur-of-the-moment surrender to a child’s tears. He felt the cold prickle of regret; he shouldn’t have been baited so easily. The secret was out, and secrets, once exhaled, could never be breathed back in.

The silence began to grate on his frayed nerves.

"So... what now?" Alpheo asked, his voice sounding hollow and metallic. The skull-cup sat forgotten on the desk as he pinned his child with a weary gaze. "You’ve found the key to the door. You’ve seen what is inside . What else is there to say?"

Alpheo had raised Basil to be more than a typical high-born lordling. He had intentionally cultivated in the boy a mind wider and more flexible than the rigid, selective arrogance of the aristocracy. It was a political necessity; if Yarzat was to survive, it needed a successor who understood that power was a scale, one that required the weight of the commoners to counterbalance the inevitable greed of the lords.

He didn’t press Basil for a reaction. He simply sat there, watching the gears of the boy’s mind grind through the revelation. He wondered what specifically was poisoning his son’s thoughts: the fact that he was the scion of a runaway slave, or the realization that his father had been a stranger to him for twelve years.

If the Alpheo of the future could have looked back upon this moment, he would have burned with shame. For in his self-pity, the Prince of the present failed to see that his greatest achievement was not the conquest of cities or the breaking of sstates, but the quiet, steel-spined resolve of the boy standing before him.

The one that he had aided in making.One that he will always be proud to call his blood.

"Does Mother truly not know?" Basil asked, his voice steady. He turned his head, forcing his eyes to meet his father’s gaze.

"No. She doesn’t," Alpheo said, turning his face away from the agonizing clarity in his son’s expression. He couldn’t bear the lack of judgment he found there; it felt worse than condemnation.

He aimed for the cup.

"I can understand why you didn’t... why you said nothing until now," Basil murmured.

Alpheo offered no reply, his jaw set in a hard line.

"Are you ever going to tell her? Or will you keep her in the dark for the next ten years of your marriage, just as you have for the last?"

Still, nothing came from the Prince.

"The more you wait, the less prepared you’ll be," Basil said, his voice gaining a soft edge, as if he were the adult in the room. "You made a family. You have spent more than a third of your life by her side. If you truly believe she is so shallow that she will discard you for the past that you rose from , then by all means, keep your secrets.

But if this is merely the fear of what she might say... then you should take the jump. You should see if the life you’ve built for ten years was a foundation of stone or merely a pile of sand.

I believe she will not care."

Alpheo finally spoke, spurred by the boy’s audacity. He didn’t yet realize that Basil was undergoing his own ordeal. "And with what authority do you offer me this wisdom?"

"With the knowledge of a son who knows both his mother... and now his father, too," Basil said. He drew closer, his shadow falling across the maps on the desk. "Do you believe the years you passed together to be meaningless? I have seen her worry, Father. I have seen her try to reach you through the walls you built. She isn’t blind to your pain and have tried to aid you."

Basil reached out and firmly took the wine cup from his father’s hand. Alpheo didn’t resist; he didn’t even look up. "You are surrounded by hands extended to help you, but it means nothing if you refuse to clasp a single one of them."

"I am simply... overwhelmed,I need no help than you are not already providing" Alpheo muttered, his old defenses rising like a reflex. "The work is vast. I see their worry; they don’t hide it well. But I don’t need help. I am doing all that can be done.We have enemies on all sides, and I am working my ass off to see us survive it.

It is merely a setback, a minor shadow. I have enclosed myself in duty before; I will emerge when the task is finished."

Basil let the lie hang in the stagnant air. He knew the difference between the "duty" of the past and the "drowning" of the present. One was a choice; the other a slow-motion suicide.

"Do you think he would like to see what has become of his death?"

The question became shard of glass dragged across an open nerve. The fragile warmth that had begun to thaw the room froze instantly. 𝒇𝒓𝙚𝒆𝔀𝓮𝓫𝒏𝓸𝙫𝓮𝓵.𝓬𝙤𝙢

"He is dead," he angrily spat as if that answered everything. "What use is there in interrogating the ghost of a dead man? There is nothing left but the dirt!"

"And yet you were the one that made him so. Wasn’t this what you said?" Basil countered, his own voice rising. "If he were to step into this tomb right now, if he were to look upon the man he died to protect... what would he say? What would he do?"

Alpheo’s hand spasmed around the skull-cup. "He would call me spineless," he hissed, before tilting the bone back and taking a long, frantic gulp of the sinful liquid. He drank and drank the more he remembered of him. ’’That’s what you want to hear?’’

"I don’t think there was anything else you could have done that day," Basil tried, his tone softening for a heartbeat.

"I know!" Alpheo’s eyes flared with a sickening, acidic light. "I know what they all say! They bring me their pity like it’s a gift! ’It wasn’t your fault, Alpheo,’ ’The battle was too harsh, Alpheo. ’ I am aware of the lies, just as I am aware of my cloth! The truth is I grew complacent."

He slammed the cup onto the desk, wine splashing across the maps of the empire he was supposed to lead. "I was a fool, intoxicated by my own legend. I thought that as long as I gave it my all, the heavens would bend and show me the way, just as they had a thousand times before. I was blind. I started to see the men I called brothers as less. The hubris of it..."

Basil watched him as he ranted on and on.

He watched the man who had been his sun, his protector, and his hero, and for the first time in his life, he felt a white-hot, blistering anger. It wasn’t because of his father’s failures; it was because of what he was choosing to be and do.

Choosing to let the light he provided for everyone else go out because he preferred the cold of his own guilt. Aware only of his shadow instead of all his light.

With a sudden, violent movement that shocked even himself, Basil reached across the desk and grabbed the wine urn and hurled it against the stone floor. It shattered with a deafening crash, the dark liquid pooling like blood among the shards.

"Will you find it now?" Basil screamed. "Will you find the better part of yourself at the bottom of the cup? Or the one after that? You sit here and rot!At the first failure of yours, hiding in your shadow. Don’t you realise that if you are the one rotting what other chances do we have?What type of figure you strike when anxiety is in all of our hearts and the one that should lead us out of it, is instead building a wall around himself?"

Basil took a ragged breath,perhaps realising what he was doing but acknowledging he had gone too far to turn back. "You speak of Uncle Egil’s sacrifice? Maybe Uncle was wrong! Maybe he made a mistake thinking you were worthy of his life! Maybe he died for a man who didn’t even exist except in his thoughts!He died for a drunkyard."

The silence that followed was broken by a sound like a whip crack. The same one Alpheo recalled and was haunted by in his nightmares of when he was a boy and a slave, and that he never thought could ever become one for his son.

His palm struck Basil’s cheek, the force of it sending the boy who had never feared his father reeling back.

But then he looked down at his son. He saw the red mark blossoming on Basil’s skin and shame took the place where rage was.

Shame gave way to guilt. And guilt gave way to disgust.

He saw what he had become, causing the prince to see his lunch once more on the floor of his work-room.