March 3009

The day his parents died, Morado wished he had never gotten out of bed, never started the day in the first place. Then, maybe, he could have frozen time and kept them alive just a little bit longer. But life didn’t work that way. It was crueler than that, and rarely did it leave room for mercy.

There was sweat running down the side of his face, as he looped around the palace courtyard, going from the back side to the front. He had just finished running a training exercise with some of the fourth years at the Military Academy, preparing for their final test before their graduation. They had worked him hard, a clear sign to him that they were ready. 

It had been just over a year since he had received his promotion, the promotion that had made him, at eighteen, the youngest general in the Empire’s history. Now, he spent his time at the Empire’s capital, its heart, working primarily out of the palace with the King. It was exactly what he had always dreamed of, to be like his father, who was a general stationed on the Empire’s east coast. Though he had never doubted that his parents were proud of him, the looks on their faces when he had broken the news had been priceless. Never had their pride in him been clearer. 

He had barely made it up the front steps, breathing heavily, before he was approached by Armani Windsor. Armani was an advisor to the King, hardly ever observed anywhere outside of his official capacity, and coupled with his height and his dark hair, the weight of his influence could command a room, whether he was wielding it purposefully or not.

But as he put a hand on Morado’s shoulder, stopping him in the threshold between the courtyard and the palace entrance hall, there was nothing strong or powerful about his presence. He was only a man, a man with a worried face and a very human body. 

He cleared his throat. “The King was looking for you,” he said, his eyes darting to the ground. “He’s in the throne room now, I think.”

“Okay.” Morado looked at him, waiting for him to add to what he had said, but he didn’t open his mouth again. It was almost as if he was afraid to. “Thank you.”

His stomach fluttered as he left Armani, whose eyes didn’t even rise to watch him go, and made his way to the throne room. Regardless of how hard he tried to prepare himself, he was still struck when he finally entered it by a sense of unease and pins and needles piercing his skin. The movement of the King, Caleb Martinez, only encouraged the sensation, as he paced the floor, hot energy radiating off of every inch of his rigid body.

When the doors clicked shut behind Morado, Caleb stopped. He was facing the wall, his hands clasped behind his back and his eyes closed. From Morado’s perspective, he was always composed, steely and somewhat emotionless to the point that he sometimes seemed inhuman, but now, he was no such thing. He was like a god who had come down to live amongst the mortals, removed from the height of his power and brought down from the world of the extraordinary to that of the ordinary. 

The look he wore was one Morado had only seen on him once, hardly a year earlier, just before he had flipped out over his wife leaving him and taking their children with her. Yet, when he could have sent his army after them, he had let them go. Morado still didn’t entirely understand why, nor did he understand how. He didn’t understand how a man capable of holding so much anger was also capable of practicing so much restraint, and, more than that, he didn’t understand how he could let his family go without a fight like that. It was something he knew he could never bring himself to do. 

Morado wasn’t sure how to address him. There were times for formality, but where it had been a constant as he had worked his way up the ranks, in his current position, it wasn’t always necessary or even expected. Often, he would refer to Caleb by simply his first name because as a high-ranking officer who also acted as an advisor, he was more than just one of the King’s subjects. He was one of his friends. 

“Sir,” he said, the happiest medium he could find between formal and casual, but Caleb shook his head. 

He had finally looked up and turned to face Morado, who could see now that the whites of his green eyes were a bright shade of red. “We should go somewhere else, somewhere where there are chairs for both of us.” He glanced back at his throne. Never had Morado seen him look at it with such disgust and resentment. “Rather than just that thing.”

Caleb moved forward and took him by the arm, leading him back out into the hall. “Come with me.”

A sheet hovered over them the entire walk to the council chamber, where the King held his meetings with his advisors. It was a simple room, somehow both subdued and intense, but it was also what Morado considered to be the most important room in the palace. It was where decisions were made; it was where the world made sense. But as Caleb took a seat where he always did at the head of its long table, the room felt heavier than ever before. 

“You should sit,” said the King, gesturing to the seat on his right. At that moment, it was the worst thing he could possibly have said. It meant there was something to sit down for.

Morado did as he was asked, and, cautiously, he said, “Tell me.”

It felt like sitting in a sickroom, the smell of illness and the weight of exhaustion filling the air. The look Caleb wore on his face was somber, as was the drone of his voice, as he finally met Morado’s eyes. He cleared his throat. “You knew your parents were on an exploratory mission for me?”

Morado nodded. His father had come to the capital just over a month earlier to talk to Caleb about it, and when he had asked later what they were going to explore, his father had been flaky about it. It didn’t matter that they were the same rank. The father would always be the father and the son would always be the son, so Morado had known better than to push. He had also known that whatever it was Caleb was sending his parents to do must be off the record. Either that or it must be more dangerous than his father was willing to let on. It had come to his mind several times since, as the date their mission was supposed to start had approached. That was a week ago.

“I’m sorry.” Caleb’s voice was lower than Morado had ever heard it before, low and apologetic. “I received the news less than an hour ago… I don’t have all the details yet, but I know that things went south. And your parents…” He shook his head. “They’re dead.”

It was what Morado had expected, but the words still struck his heart like a blade of ice, every inch of his body going cold. His stomach no longer churned but came to a lurching stop, as if two words could single-handedly halt every metabolic process in his body. His training took hold. He couldn’t let his feelings show, and he couldn’t let them take over his mind. All he could do was keep breathing. 

He thought of his family back home, his brothers and his sisters. This couldn’t be about him. It was about them. “My siblings. They’re all still children. What about them? What will they do?”

Cole was fifteen, Ash fourteen, Alice twelve, and Ebony eight. He was an adult, who, though he was still young, had already started to build a life of his own. They still needed their parents.

Caleb stuttered, caught off guard. “They’ll be taken care of,” he said. “I can arrange to hire someone who can look after them or I can see about relocating them here so they can be with you or—”

Morado wanted to scoff, to tell Caleb that he was ridiculous and heartless and that he should have known better than to even suggest that he might hand off his own blood to someone else when they needed him most. Narrowly, he managed to keep himself composed. “Respectfully, no. I won’t let someone else take care of them, and I won’t uproot them when they need stability most. I can’t.”

“I—I don’t know what else to offer. I can work with you, but I would rather not relocate you to Rowan right now.”

“I didn’t ask you to.” The last thing Morado wanted was to move back home just to take over as general in his father’s place. He had always wanted to be like him, but he had never wanted to be him. Being given his job would do more harm than good. “I don’t want you to relocate me.”

Caleb frowned. “You don’t want me to hire someone, and you don’t want me to relocate them, but you don’t want me to relocate you either?”

“I quit.”

It was a decision he had never thought he would make, yet it came to him with so much ease that it was like it had been his plan all along. He had everything he had ever wanted—had already achieved everything he had ever dreamed of and still had his entire life ahead of him—but there were plenty of other things he enjoyed. He could find other work to do, but he couldn’t replace his family even if he tried. The last thing he wanted to be when they needed him was unavailable, busy with his military responsibilities. His parents had always said they wanted him to do what made him happy, and this was that. This was what they would want him to do.

The King stared at him, sitting back in his chair. His eyes were wide, and when he spoke, his voice shot up an octave, as if he couldn’t believe what he was saying. “You quit?” He scoffed. “I didn’t believe your father when he told me about his less than ten-year-old son that he believed could command an army if anyone would take a child that seriously—I thought he was just being a proud parent, exaggerating—but then I met you, and I saw it too. 

“I let you start your training early, and you excelled to the point where I let you graduate from the military academy early too. And then it didn’t take long for it to become clear that someone like you, someone with your skill and leadership ability, shouldn’t be answering to anyone but me, shouldn’t be outranked by anyone but the King, so I promoted you again and again until we got here, and you want to throw all of that away? No, you need to take time off. Be with your family, process this, feel your grief, and then come back and—”

“No.” Morado got to his feet, shaking his head. Looking down at the King, unable to be convinced that he was wrong, everything felt final. “Thank you for everything, but I resign. I’ll pack my bags.”

He would be a liar if he claimed that he didn’t wonder as he walked away if it was possible that he had made a mistake. The entire walk from the council chamber to his bedroom, the entire time he spent packing his belongings, and his entire trip home, his mind kept going back to the worst-case scenario. Every plan he had ever made for himself had gone up in flames with this quick, thoughtless decision to give up his greatest achievement. Emotions were running high, the lump in his throat a constant, and he saw no way to distract himself from them if he didn’t have his job. But maybe a distraction was exactly what he didn’t need. Maybe what he needed was to be entirely present as he pressed the reset button on his life. 

—   —   —

There were many ways Morado could have chosen to make his journey home, but he had chosen one of the longer ones. Crossing from the Empire’s capital to its eastern coast over the Great Lakes, he had taken the time to think, but he had also taken it to cry, to get as much of his grief out of his system as possible before he had to be strong again. Because, while he was no longer a general, once he was home, he would be a protector again. 

When he finally did reach the remote village where he was from, it was early morning and the streets were just beginning to awake. The light of the sun was bright and gold, the sky clear and a breeze flowing through the trees. It was still quiet, any noise that was present stark in light of the silence. 

He could hear activity—laughing, bickering, and movement—coming from inside his family’s home even before he fit his key into the lock of the front door. It creaked as it opened, and the noise ceased, each of the four children in the front room stopping to see who was entering their house. The Universe held its breath. 

They were still oblivious, lucky enough not to know what they had lost, and they had no idea that their brother was about to demolish the bliss of their ignorance. He wished they could stay in it for just a little while longer, but he couldn’t do that to them. Withholding bad news didn’t make it any less true. It only made it worse. 

When they saw that it was him, their faces lit up, they fought each other to get out from around the couch and into his arms first, and, the biggest smile he could manage plastered across his face, he resented the fact that while they were thrilled to see him now, they would soon be wishing he had never shown up.

He hugged them, kissed them, and ushered them back to the couch, where he sat in its center with them around him. He had an arm around each of his two sisters, as his brothers sat on the floor in front of them. They had all grown since he had seen them last, but still, they looked small. When it was the five of them, they would always revert back to their order of birth, each of them looking up to the older and down on the younger. Morado, Cole, Ash, Alice, and Ebony. And now, they were all each other had. 

Alice, who shared his wide blue eyes, was the first to realize that his sudden return wasn’t necessarily a good thing. It shouldn’t have surprised him. She had always been bright. 

“Is something going on?” she asked, and then, “Is something wrong?”

Her voice sounded a million miles away, as he remained, somehow, simultaneously a distant spectator and painfully aware of everything going on around him. He couldn’t lie to her, and he couldn’t wait any longer. This was it, the moment he had steeled himself for. 

“It’s going to be okay,” he said, and was surprised not only by the words that came from his own mouth but by the fact that he believed them. “But, yes. Things are going to be different now.”

“What is?” At fifteen, Cole would have been left in charge of the other kids while their parents were away, but Morado could see the sense of responsibility it had given him crumbling. He could see him becoming a little brother again, allowing himself to be uncertain, and in his eyes, as he looked up, he could see his fear. He knew enough to know what was coming.

Morado’s grip on them tightened, as he closed his eyes and took a breath. Every inch of his body burned and tingled like it had been ravaged by fire, but he didn’t let it take him down. And as he broke the news, holding them close, he knew that if there was one thing he was certain of in this moment of uncertainty, it was that he had made the right choice. Coming home was not a mistake.