Chapter 38 The Cost of Power Untrained
POV: Seraphina
Nobody rushed Ren. That was the thing I noticed first. Even Mordain stayed quiet. Even Ragnar, who I had watched manage rooms full of dominant wolves with the particular authority of a man who did not like silence, held still and let my brother find his way to the beginning of what needed to be said.
Ren looked at the ground for a moment. Then he looked up and found my eyes. I do not know why he looked at me first instead of Ragnar or Mordain. Maybe because I was the one who had the most to lose from whatever he was about to say. Maybe because he had known me for less than a week and already understood that I needed to see his face clearly when the hard things came out.
"Three," he said. "In recorded bloodline history. Three born Alphas who made it past infancy."
The desert held its breath around us.
"The first one was a boy named Cassian. He was born in the southern territories about sixty years ago. His parents did not know what he was at first. He seemed like a strong wolf. Unusually strong. His aura started expressing itself at around eight years old and nobody in his pack knew what they were looking at or what to do with it." Ren stopped. His jaw worked briefly. "By twelve it was uncontrollable. Not violent. Not aggressive. It just had nowhere to go. He could not contain it and there was no one around him who understood it well enough to teach him how. By fourteen it turned inward."
Ragnar spoke very quietly. "Turned inward."
"When a dominant aura has nowhere to go, when it cannot express outward and it cannot be held still, it redirects," Ren said. "It goes back into the body that produced it. In a born Alpha that aura is not a small thing. It is not something the body can absorb safely." He looked at Ragnar steadily. "He died at fourteen. From the inside."
The silence that followed was very different from the one before it.
I heard Caelan shift his weight somewhere behind me. I did not turn around yet. I needed to stay facing Ren.
"The second," I said. My voice came out steadier than I felt.
Ren nodded. "Her name was not preserved in any record I could find. She was referred to in the Blackveil archive only as the girl. Born about forty years ago. Her aura expressed early and strongly, and unlike Cassian she had a family who recognised it and tried to hide her." He paused. "They were not fast enough. A coalition of six pack Alphas found her at the age of nine. They were not willing to destroy her outright. The political cost of killing a child was too high even for them."
"So what did they do?" Ragnar asked.
Ren looked at him directly. "They broke her. Deliberately and systematically. Over a period of two years they used a combination of suppressants and psychological conditioning and controlled exposure to dominant auras until she was no longer a threat to their structure." His voice did not change. That was the worst part. He said it in the flat, even tone of someone who had sat alone with this information for long enough that the horror of it had gone somewhere deep and quiet inside him. "She was alive after. She lived into adulthood. But the born Alpha she was meant to be was gone. She never expressed aura again. She never led anything. She lived very small and very quietly and she died of ordinary causes at fifty-three."
I pressed my back teeth together.
"And the third," Mordain said from across the clearing. He said it gently. Which I hated him for.
Ren turned to look at Mordain for a long moment. Something passed between them that I did not have the full history to read. Then Ren looked back at us.
"The third is me," he said.
He reached up and pushed the sleeve of his jacket back. Then the other side. In the thin desert moonlight I could see them clearly. Scars along both forearms, not the clean lines of a single event but the layered, overlapping marks of something that had happened over a long time. He reached up to his collar and pulled it aside briefly. More of them, crossing his collarbone and down onto his chest.
"I was not broken by anyone else," he said. "I did this to myself. Not intentionally. This is what it looks like when a born Alpha spends years learning to contain what he is without a proper teacher. Without guidance. By trial and error in dirty rooms with nobody watching." He pushed his sleeves back down. "Every time the aura expressed uncontrolled it came back to me instead. Every time I pushed too hard trying to hold it and lost, the body absorbed it. By the time Mordain found me at eleven I had already been marking myself for three years and I did not understand why."
I looked at my brother. At the careful, competent, quietly devastated person standing in front of me, I thought about a child doing this to himself in whatever series of rooms and hiding places my mother had managed to find before she ran out of time to find more.
"Ren," I said.
"I am fine," he said. "I learned. Eventually I learned. But it took until I was seventeen before I could hold it consistently and it cost me everything you just saw." He looked at me with those dark eyes that were our mother's eyes. "I am telling you this so you understand what the timeline looks like without proper training. Not to frighten you."
"You are frightening me," I said.
"Good," he said quietly. "You should be frightened. Not in a way that makes you stupid about it. In the way that means you will not wait."
I turned around.
Caelan was sitting cross-legged on the ground a few feet behind Ragnar. He had sat down at some point during Ren's account without anyone noticing, the way he sometimes lowered himself quietly into positions of patient attention when something had caught his full interest. His wooden wolf was on the ground in front of him and he was looking at Ren with those grey eyes that had been old since before he could walk.
He was five years old. He had just listened to the story of three people who carried what he carried and what it had cost them, and his face was calm and his hands were still and his eyes were doing that thing where they were clearly thinking three things simultaneously and choosing only to show you one.
He was five years old. Ragnar moved to stand beside me. His shoulder pressed against mine, warm and steady, and I let it stay there because right now I needed something solid and he was the nearest solid thing.
"How long do we have?" I asked Ren.
He looked at me.
"Before it starts becoming dangerous for him?"
Ren looked at Caelan. He looked for a long time. Caelan looked back at him without flinching, patient and grave and far too young to be this patient and this grave.
I watched my brother do the calculation. I watched him go through everything he knew, everything he had lived, everything Mordain had taught him and everything he had learned by surviving what Mordain had not been there for. I watched him arrive at a number.
He looked back at me.
"Months," he said. "Not years."