Aurelis was adjusting the strap of his greave when Patrian found him. Kneeling in the dust of the inner yard, bronze catching the bright morning light.
The physician’s shadow fell long across the training circle and Aurelis paused, one hand still on the leather buckle.
“You’re grinding her down,” Patrian said. No greeting, no preamble. Just the flat, clinical assessment Aurelis had heard him use for gangrenous limbs and failing organs. “Her wrists are swollen. Her knees tremble when she stands. She’s favoring her left side. Compensating for strain she shouldn’t be carrying.”
Aurelis rose slowly, the greave clinking into place.
“She trains,” he rumbled. “Children recover swiftly.”
“No.”
Patrian stepped into the circle, his sandals scuffing the dust. He didn’t raise his voice. He never did. The word carried the weight of a diagnosis.
“Children do not recover from splintering. I can see it in her wrists. The tremor in her hands isn’t fear. It’s exhaustion.”
He folded his arms, his gaze as hard as the bronze Aurelis wore.
“You’re not just making her tired. You’re making her break. And if you continue, she won’t recover straight.”
He paused, his eyes narrowing slightly.
“Unless… this isn’t just your training. Because the fatigue I’m seeing doesn’t come from two hours in this dust bowl.”
He tilted his head, assessing the warrior’s reaction.
Aurelis exhaled sharply through his nose. His jaw tightened, the muscle jumping beneath the scarred ridge of his cheek.
“Noticed,” he rumbled. “The tremor. The swelling.”
He shifted his weight, bronze grinding against leather, and met Patrian’s gaze with flat, unreadable eyes. “Not mine alone.”
A pause. The dust motes hung frozen between them.
“She’s training elsewhere. Before dawn.” His hand flexed at his side, thick fingers curling into a fist. “Doubling the load.”
He turned his head, gaze scanning the shadows beyond the supply crates. Where something had been moving before dawn. “Will adjust her pace. Slow the forms.” He dipped his chin, grudging but absolute. “Your observations are valid.”
When he looked back at Patrian, something hard and cold glinted in the depths of his eyes. A suspicion confirmed. A boundary crossed.
“Will address the one doing it,” he said, his voice dropping to a dangerous murmur. “Directly.”
“You adjust,” Patrian said, his voice flat as a blade. “But understand: The damage I’m seeing isn’t fatigue. It’s structural.”
He stepped closer, his voice dropping to a murmur that wouldn’t carry beyond the dust.
“Whatever fool is drilling her in the dark, you tell them she’s not a short sword to be hammered into shape. Her bones are soft, Aurelis. Still forming. You push them past their limit now, they don’t just tire. They deform.”
He turned to leave, then paused, glancing back over his shoulder.
“If you find whoever’s doing it? Don’t break their jaw until after I’ve had words. I want to know what other damage they’ve done before you bury them.”
The sun caught the edge of his cheekbone.
“She needs rest. More than you’re giving her. Or she won’t walk straight by winter.”
Aurelis flexed his hand, feeling the scar tissue pull tight across his knuckles. Old damage that had healed wrong, teaching him the cost of learning before the body was ready.
He’d seen soldiers ruined that way. Broken at sixteen, useless by thirty.
“She rests. No drills. No stance work,” he rumbled, the words tasting like ash.
His gaze drifted back to the supply crates, to the shadows where the morning fog still clung. Someone had been taking her there. Someone close enough to know the guard rotations, bold enough to think they could forge her in secret without breaking her.
His jaw tightened until his teeth ached.
“I’ll find him.”
─ ·⋆˚☆˖°· ─
Aurelis found him at the supply crates, sharpening his spear in the dark before dawn. The same shadowed corner he’d been grinding the girl into dust. The whetstone scraped against bronze, rhythmic, focused.
He knew Aurelis was there before he spoke. His shoulders tightened, only noticeable because Aurelis had spent years reading soldiers’ bodies before they drew blades.
He didn’t announce himself.
He crossed the distance in three strides, silent as Formicari training demanded, and drove his forearm across Dionys’s throat. The impact slammed him back against the wood, crates splintering under the weight of them both. His spear clattered to the dirt.
Aurelis’s hand closed around his jaw, pinning his skull to the rough grain, his face inches from his.
“You’re breaking her,” he growled, the words vibrating through his chest. “Wrists swollen. Tremors. Patrian’s words.”
Dionys snarled against Aurelis’s grip, his hands coming up to break his hold. A warlord’s strength against a demigod’s fury.
Aurelis leaned his weight into him, immovable as bedrock.
“Structural damage,” he continued, voice dropping to a lethal whisper. “Not fatigue. Not toughness. She favors her left side. You’ve been grinding her against stone before the sun rises, and her body is failing.”
He saw it in Dionys’s eyes.
The flicker.
The realization.
His struggling stopped, muscles going rigid beneath him.
“No training,” Aurelis hissed as he released Dionys’s jaw but kept him pinned with a forearm across his collarbone. “No dawn drills. She’s confined to the healing tent until Patrian clears her. And you—” he pulled back just enough to let Dionys breathe, to see his face clearly. “—you come with me. Now. To see what your secrets have cost.”
He stepped back, his hand shooting out to grab the front of his chiton, hauling him upright with a fistful of cloth. He dragged him toward the medical tent.
No choice given. No quarter offered.
Aurelis shoved Dionys through the tent flap hard enough to stagger him, the canvas snapping as loud as a whip crack against the bronze of his armor. The interior smelled sharp. Blood, poppy, crushed yarrow. Patrian looked up from his worktable, his expression flat and unsurprised.
“Show him,” Aurelis commanded, his voice stripped to gravel.
Patrian set down the bone needle he had been sharpening and wiped his hands on a length of linen that had seen better days. The movement was deliberate, slow.
“Sit,” he said, nodding toward the low stool beside the examination table.
He turned to the shelf behind him, retrieving a wax tablet where he’d pressed his observations. His thumb traced the shallow grooves he’d carved.
Evidence.
“Her wrists,” he said, his voice flat. He held out his own hand, palm up, and tapped the soft depression just below the thumb. “Here. The swelling is visible to the naked eye, now. Warm to touch. The flesh gives beneath pressure.”
He set the tablet down between them, the wax catching the dim lamplight.
“You taught her to strike before dawn. Good. She’ll have speed. But she is five years old, Dionys. Her bones are cartilage and promise.”
Dionys stared at Patrian’s hands. Scarred, precise, the hands that had stitched Alessia back together when he’d failed to stop the blade that found her. The hands that had measured his daughter’s ruin in increments of swelling and heat and had pressed against her small wrists and found them yielding like overripe fruit.
His daughter.
The words hit him like a spear to the chest.
She wasn’t his. Not by blood. But she called him “Uncle,” and he had answered by grinding her bones to dust.
“I understand,” he said.
His voice sounded like gravel.
He didn’t look at Aurelis. Couldn’t. The weight of his disgust, his pity, would have crushed what was left of Dionys’s pride. Instead, he stared at the wax tablet, at the shallow grooves marking her wrists, and saw his own fingerprints in every notch.
Sharp, he’d told her. Fast. Like smoke.
He’d made her a weapon.
“No training,” he repeated, the words tasting like rust. “No dawn.”
He stood, the stool scraping loudly against the packed earth, and he finally looked at Patrian, letting him see the ruin in his eyes, the hollow where certainty had lived before he’d carved it out with diagnosis and fact.
“Tell Alessia,” he said, his voice dropping to a whisper that barely stirred the air. “Tell her I’m sorry. Tell her I thought I was making Stella ready. I thought—”
He stopped. The excuse died in his throat, too small to survive the reality of a child’s swollen wrists.
“I stop. For now,” he finished. “Until you clear her. Until she’s… until she’s steady.”
He turned toward the tent flap, but Aurelis’s bulk blocked the light, his shadow falling across Dionys. He stopped, not meeting his eyes.
Aurelis didn’t strike him. He expected it, Aurelis could see it in the tension in his shoulders, the way he braced for impact, his jaw tight and eyes hollow.
He stepped closer, invading the space where shame suffocated him, his voice dropping to a gravel scrape.
“You taught her to hunt.”
An assessment.
Dionys flinched.
“Not how to break,” he continued, his hand rising between them. Not a fist, but a flat blade held vertical. “The looking. The patience. That was yours. Valuable.”
His fingers curled slowly into a fist, the knuckles cracking once in the silence.
“But bone has rules. You ignored them.”
He stepped aside from the tent flap, but not in retreat. The movement created a corridor, narrow and final. He gestured toward the grey morning outside with a jerk of his chin.
“When she heals, you continue. Dawn. With me. My pace.”
His eyes locked onto Dionys’s, amber against black, unflinching.
“You teach her to see. I teach her to strike. Coordinated. Structured.”
He moved forward, forcing Dionys to take a step back into the light, his bulk looming until their shadows merged into one dark stain on the canvas.
“Push past my limits again,” he murmured, the words a low vibration in his chest. “I will stop you.”
He straightened, letting the threat settle between them.
─ ·⋆˚☆˖°· ─
Dionys found her in the supply lane, sorting bandaging with the efficiency of a quartermaster. She looked up when his shadow fell across the linen, and her smile died before it fully formed.
“I broke her,” Dionys said, his voice scraped raw.
He stepped closer, close enough that Alessia had to tilt her head back to meet his eyes. Close enough that she could see his hands shaking at his sides.
“Dawn drills. Secret. I taught her to move before she looked.” He swallowed. “Patrian examined her. She’s damaged. Not cuts—inside. Bone. Muscle. She needs rest. Complete. No training. No blades.”
He reached out, not to touch Alessia, but to brace his hand against the crate beside her, leaning his weight into it until the wood creaked.
“I thought I was making her ready.” His jaw tightened until his teeth ached. “I was making her broken.”
He stopped. Exhaled. The words tasted like ash and blood.
“I’m sorry, Alessia. I’m sorry.”
The bandages slid from her fingers, piling in the dirt at her feet. Clean linen, wasted.
She heard broke her before she heard anything else.
Her chest was tight, a familiar vise from Ellun when she would wait for the lock to turn, but worse because it was Dionys saying it, his voice scraped raw, his hands shaking where they braced against the crate beside her head.
“You—” she said, and the word came out flat. Deadly. “—were the shadow.”
She stepped back, putting space between them before she did something she’d regret, her mind racing backward through the mornings. The fatigue she’d blamed on Aurelis. The trembling hands Stella had hidden. The way she’d fallen asleep against Alessia like she was drowning instead of resting.
“Patrian examined her,” she repeated, her voice distant. “Bone. Muscle. How bad?”
She didn’t wait for the answer. She was already moving, shoving past him, her bad ankle screaming as she pivoted toward the medical tent.
Dionys’s hand caught her elbow, his grip iron-tight, hauling her back before her bad ankle could twist beneath her. He forced her around, his other hand coming up to bracket her jaw, anchoring her head so she had to see him, had to hear him through the panic.
“Sleeping,” he growled, the word scraping out rough as stone. “Safe. Patrian watches.”
He let his forehead drop to hers, breathing hard against her skin, smelling the herbs and blood on her from the healing tent. His hands trembled where they held her, the tremor traveling through his fingertips into her bones.
“Not ruined,” he rasped. “But she needs stillness. Quiet. No blades.”
He pulled back just enough to meet her eyes, his own hollow and black with guilt. “You run, you fall. She sees you break.”
His jaw tightened, tendons jumping beneath the skin. He released her jaw, stepping back. His hand found her shoulder, heavy and grounding.
“Go,” he commanded, jerking his chin toward the medical tent. “Slow. Or I carry you.”
Alessia shrugged off his hand, hard and sharp, rejecting the weight of him. Her shoulder screamed where his fingers dug in but she didn’t care. Not about the pain in her ankle or the twist in her gut or the way her hands were shaking so badly she couldn’t hold a weapon if she tried.
He did this. Dionys. The one she let sleep beside them. The one she trusted to guard Stella while she stitched strangers back together.
“You don’t get to decide how I move,” she hissed, the words low and ragged, barely more than breath. “Not anymore. You gave up that right when you decided my daughter was a sword to sharpen in the dark.”
She stepped forward. One step, then another, her bad ankle buckling slightly on the packed earth, but she caught herself. She didn’t fall. Wouldn’t, not in front of him, not when Stella needed her upright. She forced her spine straight, her chin up, even though her vision was blurring at the edges with the effort of not screaming.
“Stay here.” She didn’t look back at him. Can’t. If she looked at him she’d either stab him or collapse, and she didn’t have time for either. “Don’t follow. Don’t touch her. Don’t breathe near that tent until I say so, or I swear by every god that ever ignored me, I’ll find a way to make you bleed.”
She limped toward the medical tent as fast as she could, half-running, ignoring the fire lancing up her leg with every step.
The flap was open. Alessia pushed through, and the smell of herbs and soap hit her like a wall. Clean, sharp, safe.
She stopped. Just long enough to see her.
Stella was small and curled on the bedroll, her hands limp at her sides instead of clutching her dagger. Patrian sat nearby, his expression unreadable, but he nodded when she entered. Acknowledging the storm Alessia brought with her, permitting her to approach.
She dropped to her knees beside Stella and reached out with hands that were still trembling from rage and fear. She touched her wrist, feeling for swelling, for heat.
Stella stirred, a flutter of eyelashes, a soft murmur, her fingers twitching toward Alessia’s, seeking even in sleep.
“I’m here,” she whispered, fierce and broken, gathering Stella against her chest. “I’m here, Starlight. I’m not going anywhere.”
She pressed her face into her hair and held on, rocking them both as the dawn broke cold and grey.
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Tiny Raven 
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