Chapter 13 What Fathers Leave Behind
Ren couldn't sleep.
Not because the inn's mattress was too hard — he'd slept in far worse places. Not because of the Void Core pulsing in his chest, either, though its rhythm tonight felt slower, deeper, like a second heart dreaming of something Ren couldn't see.
What kept him awake was the letter.
Gareth's bloodstained letter, folded inside the inner pocket of his jacket since the night he'd lost everything. Ren had read it dozens of times — every word already carved into his memory. As though the letter had been waiting to be read in a way he'd never tried.
Ren got out of bed, stepping past Kael who slept with a soft snore in the corner of the room, and climbed to the roof through a creaking wooden staircase.
He wasn't alone.
Aela was already there. Sitting on the edge of the roof with her legs dangling, looking out over a Helgard that never truly slept. Oil lamps flickered along the streets below like fireflies too tired to fly.
"Can't sleep either?" Ren asked, sitting beside her at a polite distance.
"I can rarely sleep," Aela answered without turning. "Old habit."
The silence that followed wasn't the awkward kind. It was the kind that waited — waited for one of them to decide to fill the emptiness with something real.
Aela spoke first.
"You know why I know how to navigate places like this?"
"Your father."
"Yes." The word dropped like a stone into still water. "Commander Voss. Champion of justice. Guardian of order. Hero." Each word came out like a thorn she was pulling from her own flesh. "At least, that's what people saw."
"I didn't leave because of one big moment, Ren. There was no dramatic scene where I uncovered proof of corruption and escaped in the middle of the night." Aela smiled — a smile that didn't reach her eyes. "It was worse than that. I left because of accumulation. Years of watching my father crush small people in the name of something he called order. Merchants whose businesses were shut down for refusing to pay the 'security tax.' Low-rank Awakeners sent on suicide quests because they knew too much."
The night wind carried the smell of sulfur from the distant mines. Aela drew a slow breath.
"But that's not the part that hurt the most." Her voice was quieter now, nearly lost among the sounds of the city. "My mother wasn't fully human. Half Sylvari — a forest race from the eastern territories. She died when I was little, and my father never spoke of her. Never. As if that part of his life — of my life — had never existed."
Ren felt something tighten in his chest.
"Two years ago, I found an operations document signed by my father. An arrest order for twenty-three Enchanters who'd been teaching magic to non-human races. The stated reason: 'threat to racial stability.'" Aela let out a small laugh with no humor in it. "Half my blood comes from my mother. And my father signed an order that essentially said people like her — like me — were a threat."
"Aela—"
"I don't hate him." The words came out fast, like something she had to say before she lost the nerve. "And that's what hurts the most. I still love him. I still remember how he used to carry me when I was small, how he taught me to shoot a bow in the backyard. He's my father. But he's also the man who rejected half of who I am."
Ren was quiet for a long time. Inside his head, information churned — Commander Voss, Gareth's abduction, a bigger network. He knew things about Voss that would destroy Aela if he said them now.
He didn't say them.
Not because he was a coward, or because he didn't care. But because this new Ren — the calculating Ren, the one who planned — knew that timing was everything. That information was a bullet, and he wouldn't fire it until he knew exactly where to aim.
"We're the same," Ren said at last. "Betrayed by the people who were supposed to protect us."
Aela turned to look at him. Her eyes were wet but no tears fell — she wasn't the type to let tears win.
"Yeah," she whispered. "I suppose we are."
After Aela went back to her room, Ren took out Gareth's letter.
The paper was worn — folded and unfolded too many times. The bloodstain in the corner had darkened to black. But tonight, under the Helgard moonlight, Ren noticed something he'd never seen before.
A faint shimmer. Almost invisible. Like light trapped within the fibers of the paper itself.
"Finally, you see it."
Lyra. But her tone was different — no sarcasm, no humor. Only sharp focus and something deeper. Something that felt like... recognition.
"That letter isn't ordinary. The ink Gareth used contains mana residue encrypted within it. A mana-encrypted message — an ancient technique. Very ancient. This technique hasn't been used since..." Lyra stopped. A pause far too long to be natural.
"Since when?"
"Not important right now." A deflection too clean to be accidental. "What matters — the message is layered. Each layer requires a certain level of power to unlock. With your current abilities, you can only read the first layer."
"Show me."
Lyra guided him. Ren channeled a thin thread of Void energy to his fingertips and touched the surface of the letter. New letters appeared between the lines he'd long memorized — glowing faintly, blue-green, like light at the bottom of the sea.
Two things.
A place name: Thornwell.
And a warning: Don't come alone.
The rest was dark — layers of locked text, waiting for strength Ren didn't yet possess.
"The next layer... I'd estimate you need at least C-Rank to open it. Maybe higher."
Ren stared at those two words. Thornwell. He didn't know what it was — a city, a building, a person, or something else entirely.
"Ren." Lyra's tone softened — something that happened very rarely. "Gareth knew encryption techniques that should have vanished from this world. That's not something an ordinary grandfather learns."
"He wasn't an ordinary grandfather," Ren murmured. "I always knew that."
"You knew. But now you're beginning to understand how much you didn't know."
Ren sat there until the moon shifted across the sky. In his left hand, Gareth's letter with the name Thornwell still glowing faintly. In his right, the Awakener card that read Eren Valk, D-Rank Fighter.
Climbing ranks was no longer about power or pride. Every level he reached was a key — a key to reading the next layer, to understanding what Gareth was trying to say, to finding his grandfather before it was too late.
Ren folded the letter carefully and slipped it back into his inner pocket — right beside his fake ID card. Two objects that defined who he was now: the lie that kept him alive, and the truth that waited for him to grow strong enough to find it.
He climbed down from the roof without a sound.
Tomorrow, Eren Valk would take on another quest.