"Why did you agree to this marriage, Rosa?" he clarified, gesturing vaguely between them, encompassing the opulent room, the invisible chasm separating them. "You didn't want it. That much has been painfully obvious since the moment I first stepped into this room on our wedding night."
He met her gaze steadily, refusing to be deterred by the coldness that began creeping back into her expression, like frost reforming on a windowpane. "Someone like you," he continued, his voice gaining a note of conviction, acknowledging the strength he had just experienced firsthand, "someone with your talent, your Spirit potential… your will…" He deliberately emphasized the last word, recalling the crushing pressure she had unleashed. "You're not the type to simply bow to political expediency without a fight."
He took another small step closer, driven by the need to make her understand the dissonance he felt. "Even under pressure from your family, and from the Arch Duke, from the whole damn system… you could have resisted. You could have refused. Someone with your capabilities, your potential strength, could have garnered support. There are factions, nobles, even elements within the Royal Court who might have backed a powerful, defiant young talent seeking to escape an unwanted union. You didn't have to marry me."
He let the question hang heavy in the air. It wasn't an accusation, but a puzzle he genuinely couldn't solve, not based on the fierce, proud, powerful young woman he was seeing glimpses of beneath the icy exterior. Why bind herself to him, the mediocre Ferrum heir, when she clearly despised the arrangement and possessed the nascent power to potentially defy it?
Rosa's expression, which had briefly shown flickers of surprise and calculation, hardened completely. The curiosity vanished, replaced by a familiar mask of utter indifference, laced with a disdain that felt practiced, perfected. She looked at him as if he were something unpleasant she'd discovered stuck to the sole of her exquisitely crafted shoe.
"You," she stated, her voice dripping with a chilling condescension that made her earlier anger seem almost warm by comparison, "are not worthy to know."
The dismissal was absolute, final. A slammed door in the face of his attempt at understanding. It relegated him back to the status of an insignificant annoyance, unworthy of explanation, unworthy of consideration. The gap between them yawned wider than ever, seemingly unbridgeable.
Just after the dismissive words left her lips, something flickered past her head. It was infinitesimally fast, a momentary distortion in the air near the dark strands of hair that had escaped her usually severe hairstyle. It was like a mote of dust catching the sunlight, but brighter, hotter, leaving a faint, lingering orange afterimage that vanished almost instantly.
It was so fast, so subtle, that Rosa, wrapped in her disdainful pronouncement, didn't even seem to register it. Her cold gaze remained fixed on Lloyd, daring him to challenge her dismissal.
One lazy hand of Lloyd was pointing toward Rosa.
It wasn't a thread. It wasn't a trick of the light.
It was steel. A wire, finer than a human hair, impossibly thin, drawn from the very essence of his bloodline power. And it glowed with a faint, internal heat, the orange flicker the visual signature of the innate fire ability that ran deep within the true Ferrum lineage, allowing them not just to manipulate metal, but to shape and temper it with their will.
There, a grim satisfaction bloomed in Lloyd's chest, pushing aside the sting of her dismissal. Let's see if this is worthy of your attention.
His mind flashed back, unbidden, to a dark, dusty archive room deep within the Ferrum estate. Twenty-two-year-old Lloyd, reeling from the brutal, sudden assassination of his father, his mother, his younger sister Jothi. The weight of the Arch Duchy suddenly, terrifyingly, his. Desperate for answers, for strength, for anything that could help him survive the vipers' nest he'd inherited, he'd stumbled upon an ancient, leather-bound tome hidden behind a false panel (he was informed by his late father).
The Book of Ferrum: True Lineage.
Its pages, brittle with age, spoke not of the publicly known Ferrum Void Power – Iron Body, the ability to harden one's skin, and Iron Manipulation, the crude shaping of nearby ferrous metals. That, the book revealed, was a deliberate fabrication. A shield. A lie maintained for generations to protect the family from enemies who would covet their true strength.