SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

The eight had circled one another for as long as the histories bothered to record it, allies on paper and rivals underneath, every truce a held breath between one quarrel and the next.

No one climbed to the top of this world and stayed there by trusting the house across the border. The war against the Thal’Zar had been the loudest clash the Eight had seen in a generation, and wars of that size never ended where they began. Borders shifted. Debts changed hands.

Houses that had spent decades pretending to admire one another turned up fresh reasons to stop pretending. Trafalgar had spent the years since the fighting watching where the pieces came down, and marking which of them had come to rest within his reach.

House Sylvanel had walked out of that war richer than it walked in. For most of three years, Sylvanel and Morgain together had kept a hand around the throat of the Thal’Zar leadership, and Sylvanel had worked that grip without an ounce of shame, dragging back everything the fighting had cost them and a good deal more piled on top.

The arrangement had ended a little over half a year ago, when the hold the two houses shared slipped loose in a meeting Trafalgar had arranged with his own hands. He pushed the memory down as it tried to rise. That was a tale for the day he stood in front of Darian again, and not a heartbeat sooner.

What came out of it that carried weight here was plain enough. Sylvanel and Morgain, two of the Eight, two houses that by every unwritten rule of the game ought to have been circling each other with knives, now held to an understanding that had not cracked once.

In a web of families that treated friendship as a debt to be called in later, that alone put Sylvanel high in his thoughts. It also meant he watched them without blinking. An ally who had profited that coldly from a shared grip understood leverage down to the bone, and a house that understood leverage would turn it on a friend the day the friendship stopped paying its way.

For the present the arithmetic favored keeping Morgain close, and Trafalgar meant to keep it that way, and to know the instant it changed.

Thal’Zar filled the other half of that ledger, and Thal’Zar had done what almost no one gave it a chance of doing. It had shrugged off the restrictions Morgain and Sylvanel bolted onto it after the surrender and stood on its own feet again.

The land that had burned was green. The army that had been shattered was being reforged, quicker than any outside eye had predicted. Their treasuries had swelled, their people had come home, and their strength had climbed at a rate that put a knot in the stomach of every neighbor, all of them wondering behind closed doors whether a beast this quick to mend might soon come looking to avenge old wounds.

It would not. Trafalgar knew that with a certainty none of them could touch, because whatever face Thal’Zar turned to the world, its head still answered to him.

Darian du Thal’Zar wore the crown Trafalgar had set on his brow. The beastkin were a people who never forgot a debt, loyal past all reason to whoever had reached a hand down into the pit when it counted, and it had been Trafalgar’s hand that hauled Darian up into the high seat of a Great Family.

Two years on, not one other soul held a thread of direct sway over him. He had ruled without a misstep, kept his movements free of anything worth flagging, met every duty pressed on him, and in all likelihood done half the quiet work that set Thal’Zar back on its feet so fast.

And Trafalgar did not trust it to hold forever.

Loyalty bought with a rescue was a true thing, but true things aged, and a crown had a habit of teaching the head beneath it to hunger for more.

Whatever the beastkin patriarch felt today, the two of them would have to face each other across a table before long. That meeting would answer the one question worth asking of Darian: whether he knelt out of fear, out of need, or out of something that had begun, somewhere across these two years, to look like the real article.

A loyal Thal’Zar in his pocket was worth more than half of what the family had handed him by blood. A Thal’Zar that decided it had outgrown its debt was a Great Family’s army aimed at his spine. Everything hung on which way the beastkin’s heart had turned, and hearts were the one thing Trafalgar had never learned to command outright.

House Dvergar had troubles enough of its own to stay busy. The dwarves were at war, not against any of the Eight but against a cluster of lesser houses that had made the mistake of coveting what the Dvergar held. Mines, in all likelihood. Metal roads, the deep underground holdings, the raw ore that fed every forge worth the name and every artifact that had ever come screaming off an anvil.

The Dvergar held their ground, because the Dvergar always held their ground, yet a war like that burned through resources the way a fire burns through air, and even a mountain’s worth of stubborn dwarves could be worn thin if the bleeding dragged on long enough.

It was not his war, and he had no intention of making it one. All the same, whoever held the ore held leverage over every forge in the world, his own included, and the day the Dvergar either bled dry or bent the knee to whoever finally broke them was a day worth watching for well ahead of time. Weapons and artifacts did not grow out of good intentions. They came off Dvergar anvils, or off metal the Dvergar controlled, and leverage like that had a way of turning a distant war into everyone’s problem at once.