Chapter 1 The first city

The recruit in the yard was going to lose his footing in three more swings, and Julius had known it for a while now.

He leaned on the cold stone of the balcony rail and watched it happen. The young soldier kept pushing his front foot too far out every time he swung hard. It looked strong. It wasn't. One good shove and he'd fall on his own face.

Julius didn't say anything. He just watched, the way he watched most things.

Two swings later the captain stepped in, grabbed the recruit by the shoulder, and dragged his foot back into place with one boot. The recruit looked confused about why. Julius wasn't. He'd seen it coming. He always did.

Julius was always curious and observant type
of child , he use to observe things and in his mind he use to find ways to counter or how to make it better , that's why he saw his mistake and knew what was coming.

It was the same with all of them. There was a big man near the back who put too much weight into his downward cut, so much that for half a breath after every swing he couldn't have stopped a child. There was a swordsman by the wall who was good, really good, except that he always stepped left when he was tired, and he was getting tired. Julius logged each one and set it next to a thousand others, small true things about how bodies move and fail and give themselves away. Nobody had taught him any of it. He just saw it.

He didn't know why his head worked like this. He only knew it never stopped, and that it was the one thing about himself that felt like strength.

The other thing, the real thing, the power every Titan kid his age had already started to feel waking up inside them, had never come for him at all and he had no ASPECT as well.

"Or thats what he thought"

He pushed that thought down, the way he always did.

The grownups in the house had decided the boy was shy. They were wrong. Julius had figured out early, all on his own, that people gave away far more than they meant to when they thought no one was paying attention. A boy who talked was a boy being watched. A boy who listened saw everything. He had picked the second kind without ever saying so out loud.


Below him, the whole city was loud and happy and sure of itself.

This was Eldvar. The First City. People said it was the oldest place on all of Titania, cut straight out of the mountain by the first Titans who ever stood up under the sky. The walls weren't stacked stone. They were the mountain itself, built or designed into walls, grey and huge, running along the cliffs like the side of something asleep.It looked found, like someone had dug into a hill and learned the hill had always been a fortress, just waiting for people to move in.

Down in the streets nobody walked with a hand near a knife. Kids ran screaming and laughing between the market stalls. Old men argued over board games in the doorways. Families went out after dark and came home fine, because here, on this mountain, they always did.

They were safe. They had always been safe.

Because House Drakhar held this mountain, and House Drakhar had held it since before there was a kingdom to hold it for. And in the middle of that house stood one man whose name people said with their eyes down.

Valen Drakhar. The Unbroken Titan.

Julius's father.

One of the most strongest person on whole TITANIA (planet)

* *

Footsteps came up behind him. Heavy, slow, the kind he'd know anywhere.

A shadow fell over the last of the light, and the balcony, which had felt big a second ago, felt small.

"Thinking again?"

Julius looked up. And up.

His father didn't look like a man. He looked like one of the mountains standing which is standing from a whole and Valen stood close to eight feet, wide as a doorway, arms thick as roof beams. His hair was near black, his face dark and lined and scarred, hard as the grey rock the city was cut from. He was, most people agreed, one of the most dangerous things alive. Soldiers stood up straighter when he passed. Enemies didn't last.

"8 feet or 7 feet was normal height on the planet TITANIA , it was ruled by titans"

All of that fell off his face the second he looked down at his son.

Julius took his time. He always weighed his words before he spent them.

"Father," he said.

Valen raised an eyebrow and waited. He never rushed the boy. That was a small thing, and Julius wouldn't understand what it was worth until he didn't have it anymore.

Julius looked back down at the soldiers, at the dust, at the strong men doing the work of being strong.

"Will I become strong someday?"

For a long moment Valen said nothing.

The wind came up the face of the mountain and over the rail. Far below, the evening bells started to ring, deep old bronze that had counted the hours in Eldvar longer than the Drakhars had owned a name. And in the gap where his father's answer should have been, Julius felt something. His father wasn't searching for words. He knew the answer. He just didn't want to set it down on a ten-year-old tonight.

Then the big hand came to rest on top of Julius's head. Warm. Heavy. And the moment passed.

"Strength," Valen said, "is not how many people are afraid of you."

Julius listened. With his father, he always listened. Every word counted.

"Any fool with a sharp sword can scare people for a while." Valen looked out over the city, over the lit windows and the open streets and the kids running in the dark with no fear in them. "Strength is how many people get to feel safe because you're standing there. That's the only kind worth having. The rest is just noise that hurts people."

Julius turned the words over. He didn't fully understand them. They sounded backwards. Down in the yard, the men everyone called strong were the ones who could hurt people, and the more they could hurt, the more the others stepped out of their way. That was what strong looked like from up here.

He almost said so. He almost asked how being safe could be a kind of strength when it was the strong ones who decided who got to be safe and who didn't.

He didn't. He held the question and went quiet instead, the way he always did when something was too big to take apart yet.

But he kept the words. He kept everything. And these he would carry farther, and pay for harder, than anything else his father ever gave him.



A door opened, light shone out, and two people he loved stepped outside

His mother first. Elysia Drakhar crossed onto the balcony slow and easy, like a woman who'd never once had to raise her voice to be listened to. Her hair was the same strange white as Julius's, loose past her shoulders. Her eyes were warm where his were cool. When she looked at her husband something passed between them, quiet and finished, the private language of two people who'd built a life and planned to grow old inside it.

Hanging onto her skirt, peeking around at her giant father, was Lyra. She was barely three, all dark hair and round cheeks, and she had just learned both walking and opinions and used them constantly. The second she saw Valen she let go of her mother and made for him at a fast, wobbly march, arms up, demanding the sky. The strongest man on Titania bent down and scooped his daughter against his chest like she was made of glass, and she screamed with joy and grabbed a fistful of his beard.

Julius watched them. His mountain of a father. His white-haired mother. His ridiculous little sister laughing in the last of the gold light, the whole old city spread out safe below.

Something in his chest went still.

And he looked at his healthy and loving family and thought he wants to be like his father and protect everyone and till his father is here no one can touch them.he didn't know what this feeling is .

He didn't have the words for it yet. Years later he would. Years later, in the dark, he'd understand that what he felt on that balcony was the simplest and most dangerous thing a person can feel.

He felt like nothing could touch them.

Down in the lower city, in a high window of a guest tower that did not belong to House Drakhar, a man stood in the dark and watched the little family on the balcony.

He didn't smile. He didn't frown. He made no sound at all.

He had been watching a long time. He was patient. Patience was the whole of what he did.

He watched the big warrior lift his daughter. He watched the white-haired wife step close to her husband. And he watched the still, white haired boy who watched everything, and his eyes stayed on that boy a little longer than on the rest, the way a careful man's eye catches on the one number in a ledger that doesn't add up.

Then he let the curtain fall and was gone.

Valen Drakhar, up on his balcony with his child in his arms, did not look toward that window.

Strong men always make enemies. Valen had made more than his share, and he'd told himself, like strong men do, that he could meet any of them in the open and break them.

He was right. He could have broken any enemy who came at him with a blade.

But the man watching him now was not coming with a blade. He was coming with patience, and with paper, and with years. And there is no one stronger in any world that can save a man from someone who has quietly decided to destroy not someone 's body but his reputation and name .

The sun slipped behind the mountains and the lights of the First City began to glow. Evening bells rang across the streets. Still laughing, the Drakhars walked inside together, warm against the cold, never imagining how much their lives were about to change.

It was the last night Julius Drakhar would ever spend without worry

He just didn't know it yet.