The children scattered.
One by one. Quietly. The way seeds leave a dying flower — carried by winds they didn't choose, toward soil they hadn't seen.
Prince Edrin left Eden on a grey morning in early autumn. A carriage bearing the mountain-and-stars crest of House Adelheim waited at the eastern gate. Sebas stood beside it. The Duke sat inside, uncharacteristically silent, watching through the window as his grandson walked through the castle corridors one last time.
The boy touched the walls as he passed. Fingertips on cold stone, tracing the surface the way a blind man reads a face — not looking for anything, just remembering. He stopped at the stable door. Marten was there, holding a piece of bread and cheese wrapped in cloth.
"For the road," the stable boy said.
"Thanks," Edrin said. And then, because he was ten and had not yet learned to hide the things that mattered: "I'll miss you."
Marten didn't know what to say. Nobody in the lower city had ever had a prince say that to them. He just nodded, and Edrin took the bread, and that was that.
At the gate, the boy climbed into the carriage. He sat beside his grandfather. He looked back at the castle — the towers, the walls, the Field of Crowns hidden somewhere inside, the tower room where he had slept and dreamed and watched the world from above like it was something that happened to other people.
He didn't wave.
He turned forward.
The carriage rolled east. Behind it, Eden continued — three hundred thousand people celebrating a crowning that had already become yesterday's news, buying and selling and arguing and laughing, not noticing that the smallest prince had left, because the empire had never understood what he was.
Sebas watched the boy from across the carriage. The child's face was calm. His eyes were dry. His hands were folded in his lap, holding Marten's bread like it was something precious.
The Duke placed one hand on his grandson's shoulder. Gently. The way you hold something that could break or could break you.
"Grandfather?"
"Yes, boy?"
"Will I come back?"
The Duke was quiet for a long time. The road stretched ahead — east, away from the capital, away from the crown, away from the siblings who were even now being placed in their positions like pieces on a board that none of them had agreed to play.
"You will," the Duke said.
He did not say when.
He did not say what you will be when you do.
The carriage disappeared over the hill. The dust settled. The road was empty.
And in the south — past the garrison line, past the desert, past the border that the empire watched with the comfortable vigilance of men who had never seen what they were watching for — something stirred.
Khorath did not announce itself with horns or banners or declarations of war. It announced itself with silence. The kind of silence that comes before the ground opens. The kind that soldiers learn to fear more than any sound.
The empire did not hear it.
The empire was busy crowning princes and scattering children and writing things down in notebooks and calling threats manageable and pouring wine that nobody drank.
The empire was looking everywhere.
Except south.