Chapter 9: Fear of Reject
[: Caelira POV :]
Two months had crawled by like dying embers, and now we were one week away from departing to Apex Academy.
It was a place whispered with awe by nobles, and though it was meant to be a beacon of glory, for us, it was merely another prison.
Revan had been chosen to attend, and as though fate had sharpened its cruel humour, we had been chosen to accompany him.
It was not as comrades or retainers, but as his slaves, his practice tools, the toys he could torment on the road when the weight of expectation bore down on him.
His inferiority complex was obvious, and in those recent days, his cruelty had worsened, had morphed into something desperate, something manic.
Revan would strike Daniel for the smallest mistakes.
If Daniel didn’t bow fast enough, if he failed to clean a blade to his liking, if his eyes held defiance, he was punished.
And when Daniel collapsed from exhaustion, Revan laughed and called him "a motherless dog who should have stayed dead"
While Velroth, that poisonous lord of ash, smiled with approval and muttered how slaves needed to be reminded of their place.
Though I had long buried my hatred beneath duty, that day, when Revan shoved Daniel face-first into the mud and made him bark like an animal, something inside me began to twist—a sickening coil of grief and fury.
But it wasn’t only Daniel he hurt.