Every lie they killed, two more grew back in its place.
Over the next two weeks three more accusations came, then another, and then another. Garrick's people picked each one apart and proved it false, and it never mattered. For every lie they cut down, two more were already waiting, as if the whole thing had more heads than anyone could count.
julius hated it. He hated the way the adults kept whispering when they thought nobody was listening. He hated how worried the servants looked. He hated the way his mother smiled and said everything was fine when it clearly wasn't. But more than anything, he hated watching his father leave.
Valen was still standing. He was still fighting, still keeping everyone safe. But something had changed in him. The biggest, strongest man Julius knew looked tired, and not the kind of tired that sleep could fix.
Julius was starting to understand why. Strength could solve almost any problem he had ever met. It could not make people trust you. It could not unsay a lie. It could not reach into a frightened crowd and turn the fear off. Those things lived somewhere a sword could not go, and that was exactly what made them so frightening.
One night he could not sleep, so he went to the library.
It was still his favorite place in the world. House Drakhar had been gathering books for longer than anyone could remember, and the shelves climbed so high the top ones needed a ladder. History, war, politics, aura, the shapes of far-off lands. If someone had written it down, it was probably here somewhere, waiting.
He pulled a thick book off a low shelf. The cover read The Neva System. He carried it to a table, opened it, and did not look up again for a long time.
The world was so much bigger than Titania. He had always known that the way you know a fact you have been told. Tonight, page by page, he started to feel it instead.
Five worlds circled the Neva sun, the book said, all of them tied together by trade and power and aura. The first one it described was Nebula, and Julius read that part twice.
Nebula was the center of everything, the richest and grandest world there was, the heart the whole system turned around. Six of the system's ten kings lived there, and so did the Dean of Nebula Academy, whose word was said to weigh as much as any crown. The other four kings ruled from the other worlds, one to each. Whole cities floated in Nebula's sky, thousands of meters above the ground. Other cities sat on the floor of its oceans, each one bigger than some countries. And on Nebula stood the one place every gifted child in the system dreamed about. Nebula Academy. The greatest school ever built, and only the very best were ever let inside.
Julius stopped on that page for a while. He had heard of the Academy. Every child on Titania had. And every child wanted to experince it once .
He read on. The next world was Vorthak, a green planet buried under forests so big that a whole kingdom could disappear into them and never be found again. The beastmen lived there, and so did the strongest wild beasts in the system. Even trained aura users went into those woods carefully.
Then came Noxis, where the system kept its money. It was a dark world, heavy with metal and stone, and the dwarves had hollowed out entire mountains and turned the insides into cities. Trade moved through Noxis was where most of the money came from. What happened there affected every planet, because its trade and wealth reached all corners of the system. wepons, artifact material came from here
Then Julius reached Hexa, and he stopped feeling curious.
Even reading about it felt wrong. Hexa was the cursed world, the place where the Great Dragon had died and ruined everything in its dying. The forests there were red. The rivers ran red too. The creatures had been twisted into something else, full of the bad kind of aura. Millions had died. Whole peoples were simply gone. Hundreds of years later the planet still had not healed. The book called it a scar on the universe, and that was the only part of the page that felt completely honest.
He thought KHAN defeated the dragon here and wonder what hexa would have been like before thsi battle .
Alot of life was still present on HEXA .
He looked at the drawing of the dead world for a long moment, then turned the page.
And then he reached home.
Titania, the book said, was the weakest of the five worlds. That line annoyed him right away. But the numbers under it did not argue. Less wealth. Less weight in the politics of the system. Older tools, fewer of the great organizations that really ran things. Even Titania's king was weaker than many of the rulers out among the other stars.
And yet no one looked down on Titania, for one reason. The Titans. The strongest race born anywhere in the system. Raised under heavy gravity, hardened by a hard world, a Titan child grew up stronger than most grown men from anywhere else. They stood seven feet and more. Their bones were denser, their bodies tougher, their wind longer in a fight. Titania might be poor, and far from the center of everything. No one who had ever faced a Titan in battle forgot it.
Julius almost smiled at that. That part, at least, sounded right.
He did not hear the door. He only noticed the shadow fall across his page, and he knew whose it was without looking up.
"The Neva System," Valen said, reading the cover.
"I wanted to understand the world better."
Valen pulled out a chair and sat. For a while neither of them said anything, and it was the good kind of quiet.
Then Julius asked, "Have you seen all five planets?"
"No."
"How many?"
"Three."
Julius sat up. "Nebula?"
"Yes."
"What is it like?"
Valen leaned back and thought about it. "Picture the biggest city you have ever seen."
Julius nodded.
"Now make it a thousand times bigger."
Julius just looked at him.
Valen laughed, low and real. "That was my face too."
They talked for almost an hour. Somewhere in the middle of it Julius watched a little of the tiredness leave his father's face. Not all of it. But some, and some was more than he had seen in weeks.
Then he asked the question he had been holding the whole time.
"Will everything be okay?"
The room went quiet. The smile left Valen's face. They both knew the question had nothing to do with planets or books.
Valen looked for an answer. For a long moment he could not find one, at least not an honest one. In the end he set his big hand on Julius's shoulder.
"I don't know."
The words landed hard. Because Valen always knew. Or Julius had always believed he did, which until tonight had been the same thing. Hearing his father unsure felt like the floor shifting under his feet.
Valen stood and walked to the door. He stopped there, his hand on the frame.
"The world is bigger than Titania, Julius."
Julius looked up.
"It is bigger than kingdoms." Something in his father's eyes went soft. "And your future is bigger than either of them."
Julius did not understand what he meant.
Julius start to think what his father meant and it stirred up some questions and worry in his heart .
Outside the windows, snow began to fall over the estate, slow and soft. From in here the house looked calm, and safe, and whole.
It was none of those things. Under the quiet, the pieces were already moving. The great families kept at their work. The court kept digging. King Ragnar kept watching, and said nothing. And far off among the stars, the huge uncaring world turned on, while one small house on a poor planet waited for a storm it could not even name.
It would not have to wait much longer.