The Weight of Blood and Ash
Magnus was born into a name that was supposed to mean something. A legacy woven from gold and iron, shaped by hands that built empires and crushed those too weak to carry the weight of their own existence. From the moment he took his first breath, the expectation settled on his shoulders like a mantle too heavy for a child.
His father was a man of steel and silence, a titan whose words were as sharp as the blade he kept at his hip. Love was never spoken, never shown, only measured in obedience and results. His mother, a woman carved from ice, never raised her voice in anger nor in comfort. She existed as a portrait in the grand halls of their home—beautiful, untouchable, an ornament rather than a presence.
And his siblings… oh, how they thrived in the world that crushed him. They wore their lineage like armor, their smiles a performance, their words dipped in honey but carrying the sting of a dagger pressed against his ribs. They were wolves in fine silks, circling him, waiting for him to falter, waiting for him to fail.
Magnus had tried. Gods, he had tried. As a boy, he sought his father’s approval in the spaces between his scornful glances, searched for his mother’s warmth in the briefest of touches, longed for companionship in siblings who only saw him as another piece on their chessboard. But love in this family was a currency, and he had nothing to trade.
He learned young that his worth was not inherent—it was something to be earned, and even then, it was brittle, conditional, fleeting. His victories were met with indifference; his failures, with sharpened words that cut deeper than any blade. He was not ruthless enough, not cunning enough, not strong enough. Not enough.
And so, the love he once craved curdled into something else. Hatred did not come like a wildfire, sudden and consuming. No, it crept in slowly, like ink bleeding into the pages of his soul, darkening every memory, staining every moment. It was in the way his father’s disappointment tasted like iron on his tongue. In the way his mother’s cold gaze turned him to stone. In the way his siblings’ laughter felt like an executioner’s drum, sealing his fate as the unwanted, the unworthy.
But hatred, he realized, was not just a poison—it was a forge. He let it shape him, let it sharpen his edges until he became something they could no longer break. He stopped seeking their approval, stopped begging for scraps of affection. He would not become what they wanted. He would not be another link in their chain, another puppet dancing on their strings.
One day, they would look for him and find only the ghost of the boy they once ignored. One day, they would realize they had lost him—not to death, but to something worse.
Indifference.
And when that day came, Magnus would not turn back. Let them drown in the empire they built on cold ambition and hollow love. He was done being their burden, their disappointment, their afterthought.
He would carve his own path, and if the blood that ran through his veins cried out for belonging, for home—he would silence it.
Because family, he had learned, was not made of shared blood.
It was made of love. And love, in this house, had never been his to claim.
