SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

The pressure between Trafalgar and Maeron collapsed in a heartbeat, both auras pulled back the instant those words crossed the hall.

Valttair came through the doors. Nothing about him had changed, not really, except the hair. Two years shut away had given him no reason to bring a blade near his face, and it showed. His platinum hair hung longer than Trafalgar had ever seen it, and a full beard had grown in over the severe line of his jaw, the sort a man only wore after a very long time somewhere far from mirrors. Plainly, looking unkempt in front of his own family was the last thing weighing on him.

What did reach every person in the room was the power. It came off Valttair like heat off a forge, quiet and enormous, and it was nothing any of them had felt before. Not from him or from anyone.

Even Trafalgar, who had stood against things most of this table could not imagine, met that pressure for the first time in his life and understood, on some animal level, exactly why the world counted this man among its eight strongest. It was a sobering thing to feel.

Valttair’s grey eyes moved between Maeron and Trafalgar. ”What is happening here?” His voice was the same as ever, cold and level, a blade laid flat on a table.

Maeron answered first. ”We were discussing something of no consequence, Father. Nothing worth your attention. A small disagreement between siblings.”

Valttair turned to Trafalgar. ”Is that true?”

Trafalgar let out a breath. ”In part. It could have been avoided, if I had bothered to keep my ears shut.”

”I see.”

That was all he offered. He started toward the high seat at the head of the family, and every eye in the hall tracked him across the floor.

He read the room as he walked. He noted, without appearing to search for it, that Trafalgar had been placed well up the table, no longer parked at the far edge where a discarded son could be left to rot. That was his own doing. Before he came down from seclusion he had given Caelum the order to arrange the seating precisely this way, so that the whole family would open this gathering already knowing the standing Trafalgar now held with him.

He took in the rest of it in a single unhurried pass. Maeron on his feet. Trafalgar still beside his chair. Nym drained of color. Naevia planted in front of her like a wall. Ysolde with her children gathered close. Seraphine wearing that untroubled calm she wore over everything. Lysandra in the seat at Trafalgar’s side. And over all of it, the residue of two auras that had not yet cleared from the air.

”I was gone for two years,” Valttair said as he walked, ”and it appears you have forgotten how to conduct yourselves in this house. In my halls.”

Maeron dipped his head. ”If this concerns what happened just now, Father, I apologize.”

”Silence.”

The single word cut Maeron off where he stood.

Seraphine stepped in to shield her son, her voice smooth as poured wine. ”Husband of mine, surely there is no cause for such severity. It was only the children letting their tempers slip. You have scarcely crossed the threshold.”

”Do not dare lecture me, Seraphine.” Valttair did not raise his voice, and it was worse for it. ”I imagine you recall well enough what happened. My going away and lifting your punishment along with it does not make it gone. I can return you to exactly where you stood two and a half years ago, and I will not think twice about doing it.”

Whatever Seraphine had meant to add, she swallowed it.

Valttair reached the head of the table and lowered himself into his seat. He let the room carry its own weight for a breath before he spoke.

”So.” He fixed on the ash-blonde woman down the table. ”Verena. Where in the hells is your daughter?”

Verena met the question with a face that betrayed no worry at all. She was not nervous, and she did not trouble herself to pretend otherwise. ”She should arrive at any moment, husband.”

”Six months.” Valttair’s anger showed plainly now, banked low and cold. The words carried down the whole length of the table, and every person seated at it understood the weight beneath them. Rivena had been out in the world these six months doing something not one of them could name. Whether her own mother could name it was another question. Verena did not offer to fill the space with an answer, and no one expected her to. In this family, a mother who knew her daughter’s secrets guarded them every bit as closely as her own.

For a while the hall held its breath, waiting to see what the patriarch would do. Before he could carry on, the doors at the far end swung open.

Rivena walked in.

She came without a scrap of fear on her, her pride worn like a second coat. Her cyan eyes went to Valttair first, as they had to, reading her father before anyone else in the room.

The new arrangement of the table registered second. She took in Trafalgar seated high and near the center, where the disgrace of the family had no business being, and a slow, sly smile curved her mouth, as though someone had handed her a gift she had not thought to ask for.

It was a smile Trafalgar knew well enough to distrust. Whatever Rivena had been chasing out there for six months, she had walked back into the middle of the family wearing the face of a woman who had already decided the day would end in her favor. That alone told him her return was going to cost this house before it was through.

’She could have stayed wherever she has been,’ Trafalgar thought.

Valttair looked at his second daughter across the length of the hall, and when he spoke, the cold in his voice had teeth.

”Explain why I should not consider your absence an act of defiance.”