The midnight air of Galen Town was freezing... with sharp wind biting at the exposed skin of Sylvia’s face and hands as she flew over the quiet cobblestone streets.

She didn’t run like an adventurer anymore... She didn’t use crude loud bursts of aura to violently propel herself forward, and she didn’t rely on the heavy momentum of a frontline warrior.

She moved like a phantom... Her dark leather boots touched the edges of the tiled rooftops without making a single sound as the radiant golden aura flowing from her skin acted as a perfect frictionless barrier against the wind, carrying her forward with an elegant terrifying grace that only a high-born noble could possess.

She was Sylvia Longlon.

The intricate, glowing crest currently burning into the flesh of her back was a heavy, undeniable anchor, tying her to a brutal reality she had spent the last several months forgetting...

She landed softly in the narrow dusty alleyway behind the commercial district.

The tall, unassuming wooden building standing in front of her belonged to her supposed ’Grandmother.’

For the past few months, while Sylvia was under the effects of the memory-wiping punishment, pretending to be the boisterous, axe-wielding Taula... this tiny, cramped herb shop had been her sanctuary. It was her anchor to the town before Klaus came along.

It was the place where she stored her cheap iron gear, where she counted her coins after a long day of hunting, and most importantly, it was the first place Klaus and her had met.

Sylvia walked up to the heavy wooden back door.

She didn’t bother reaching for a key, nor did she knock. She simply pressed her pale palm flat against the wooden frame as she channeled a microscopic fraction of her golden aura directly into the lock and the internal iron mechanism instantly shattered into fine metallic dust.

Sylvia pushed the door open and stepped inside.

The shop was pitch black, illuminated only by the silvery moonlight spilling through the narrow cracks in the wooden window shutters.

The air inside was thick and saturated with the familiar scent of dried lavender and the earthy tang of medicinal roots hanging from the ceiling beams.

It was a smell that used to bring her immense comfort... It smelled like hard work and simple living but now, standing in the dark with her noble memories fully restored, it just smelled like a cage.

"You broke the lock," a calm, melodic voice spoke from the deep shadows near the front counter. "I was going to ask the landlord for my security deposit back tomorrow morning. That comes out of your allowance, Sylvia."

Sylvia turned her head and sitting on a tall wooden stool behind the polished mahogany counter was her Grandmother.

The woman sitting in the dark didn’t look like a grandmother at all... She looked like an older, slightly more refined and elegant version of Taula.

Her blond hair was tied back in a loose, messy braid that rested over her shoulder, and her piercing green eyes caught the moonlight filtering into the room.

She only had a few laugh lines around the corners of her mouth, her skin otherwise was flawless and youthful.

She was casually smoking a long, thin wooden pipe as the embers in the bowl glowed a dull angry orange in the dark room casting shifting shadows across her face.

"Didn’t you hear me?"

Sylvia walked forward with her footsteps entirely silent against the creaking floorboards.

She stopped a few feet away from the counter with her shimmering silvery-blond hair catching the dim light.

Her golden eyes, glowing with aura, stared blankly at the older woman.

"The crest broke," Sylvia stated, her voice was entirely different from the loud cheerful tone Taula used.

It was smooth and carried the undeniable crushing weight of high nobility. "The punishment is over. The Clan is calling us back to the Capital."

Her Grandmother took a slow deliberate drag from her wooden pipe, exhaling a thin, sweet-smelling cloud of smoke into the stale air of the shop.

She didn’t look surprised by the sudden intrusion... She didn’t look intimidated by Sylvia’s glowing golden aura... She just looked incredibly tired.

"Already?" the older woman sighed, resting her chin heavily on her palm.

She looked Sylvia up and down, taking in the sleek, dark stealth clothes, the aristocratic silvery-blond hair, and the distinct lack of a giant, battered battle axe.

"It feels like we just got here... You were doing so well, too. You finally found a good group of friends and you were actually smiling for once in your miserable life."

The older woman took another puff of her pipe with her green eyes narrowing slightly as she studied her granddaughter’s flushed face.

"You even found a boy," she teased. "A very handsome, very capable boy. You already fell in love with that commoner, Sylvia. Your heart is tied to him so why don’t we just stay here? We can ignore the summons. I can brew potions, you can swing your axe, and we can live in peace."

Sylvia’s golden eyes narrowed into dangerous glowing slits.

The ambient mana in the small room violently spiked, rattling the heavy glass jars of dried herbs lining the wooden shelves as she expended her aura and the temperature in the shop plummeted.

"I will not be compared to you, Aurelia," Sylvia spat, deliberately using the woman’s actual first name.

The disrespect hung heavy in the air which was a venomous strike meant to draw an impenetrable line between them.

A granddaughter addressing a Clan elder by her first name was a punishable offense in the Capital, but Sylvia didn’t care.

"I am not you," Sylvia continued. "I am not going to throw away my life, my duty, and my pure bloodline just to play house in a filthy backwater town with a man who doesn’t even possess a family name."

Aurelia didn’t flinch at the blatant disrespect and she didn’t raise her voice to reprimand the girl.

She just offered a lazy uncaring shrug, tapping the side of her wooden pipe against the edge of the counter to knock loose a pile of gray ash.

"At least I had a fun time making my mistakes..." Aurelia replied smoothly with her voice completely devoid of regret.

She looked around the dark, cramped herb shop, a rare look of genuine heartbreaking fondness crossing her youthful face. As she ran her fingers over the worn wood of the counter.

"You know, I will really miss this place," Aurelia murmured, almost to herself. "It was quiet. The people in this town were nice to me... They didn’t care about the Longlon crest... They just cared if my salves could cure their coughs."

Aurelia paused with her green eyes shifting back to Sylvia as she smiled... a sad knowing smile.

"And that Klaus boy you talked about all the time..." Aurelia said softly. "He seemed like a genuinely solid kid. He actually took care of you, Sylvia. He put a roof over your head and he fed you. He fought beside you. He treated you like a human being instead of a political pawn. I hope you wished him a proper goodbye tonight."

Sylvia’s hands clenched into tight fists at her sides as her nails dug into her palms so hard they pierced her skin, drawing small drops of blood that were instantly vaporized by her flaring golden aura.

’A proper goodbye...’ Sylvia thought as her inner voice dripped with agonizing, bitter irony.

She had given him a goodbye, alright.

She had screamed his name into the dark... She had begged him to break her... She had milked him dry, riding his hips until her mind shattered, and left his bed soaked in her own fluids and her virgin blood.

She had given him everything a woman could possibly give to a man.

She had surrendered her pride, her body, and her heart... then she had washed his warmth out of her body with cold water, dressed herself in the dark, and climbed out his window like a cowardly thief in the night.

Sylvia stared at the woman sitting across from her with a deep rotting generational resentment bubbling up in her chest, threatening to choke her.

She hated Aurelia... She hated everything this woman represented, and she hated the mirror this woman held up to her own tragic life.

When Aurelia had been Sylvia’s exact age decades ago, she had been the absolute pride of the Longlon family.

She was a once-in-a-generation prodigy, blessed with overwhelming physical strength and a brilliant tactical mind but Aurelia had been stubborn. She had deeply offended the Clan’s ruling elders by publicly refusing a highly lucrative political marriage to a neighboring Duke.

As punishment for her insolence, her noble memories had been forcefully sealed away by the family’s high mages.

She was exiled to a remote dangerous adventurer town on the edge of the Empire, exactly like Sylvia had been.

The punishment was designed to break her spirit... She was meant to live in poverty, learn humility, experience the brutal hardship of the common folk, and eventually beg to be summoned back to her life of luxury but Aurelia had failed the test spectacularly.

During her exile, devoid of her noble pride and her family’s crushing expectations, she had fallen deeply irrevocably in love with a commoner mercenary.

She was so utterly consumed by her love for him that when her memories eventually returned and the crest on her back flared, she refused to go back to the Clan.

She chose the commoner over the Longlon name and she had fled.

Aurelia and her lover ran across the continent. They jumped from Empire to Empire, sleeping in caves, hiding in the slums of massive cities, and constantly evading the Longlon family’s elite trackers.

They lived like hunted animals for three agonizing years, surviving only on their wits and their devotion to one another but a high-born noble bloodline could not be hidden forever.

The Clan’s executioners eventually caught up to them.

Sylvia knew the story by heart... It wasn’t a secret... Her father had made sure she memorized every single gruesome detail as a cautionary tale since she was old enough to speak.

The Longlon executioners cornered the runaway couple in a freezing snowy mountain pass.

They didn’t just kill the commoner... That would have been too merciful... They butchered him... They murdered the man Aurelia loved in cold blood, piece by piece, breaking his bones and flaying his skin while forcing Aurelia to watch every single agonizing second of it.

They traumatized her beyond repair, completely breaking her mind and her spirit and the tragedy didn’t end with his death.

During her desperate time on the run, living in squalor drinking contaminated water, and surviving in freezing conditions, Aurelia had contracted a rare, incurable magical sickness.

The disease slowly rotted her womb from the inside out, poisoning her aura pathways.

She managed to have one child... a son before the sickness rendered her entirely barren, sealing the fate of her direct bloodline and even the son was for the commoner.

That son was Sylvia’s father.

Sylvia’s father grew up in the suffocating, judgmental, hyper-competitive halls of the Longlon estate. He carried the eternal inescapable shame of being a half-blood bastard born from a disgraced runaway.

The other nobles mocked him behind his back... The elders treated him like dirt... He hated his mother for what she did to him...

He hated her for diluting their pristine genetics, for making him a laughingstock among the high aristocrats, and for forcing him to work ten times harder than anyone else just to prove he was worthy of the Longlon name.

Sylvia and her younger brother were raised to share that exact same burning hatred. They were taught to despise their Grandmother.

They viewed her as a pathetic stain on their legacy, a living reminder of the catastrophic consequences of choosing love over duty yet, despite the universal, crushing hatred directed at her from her own family, Aurelia always seemed so incredibly carefree.

She smoked her cheap wooden pipe.

She tended to her mundane herb gardens. She smiled at the servants, and she walked through the grand halls of the estate as if the ghosts of her past didn’t haunt her every waking step.

Her total infuriating indifference to the pain she had caused her son infuriated Sylvia more than anything else in the world.

There was a specific incident that broke their relationship entirely, right before Sylvia was exiled to Galen Town.

During a massive, formal family banquet, surrounded by hundreds of judging nobles, Sylvia had finally lost her temper.

The pressure of her own arranged marriage was suffocating her, and seeing Aurelia sitting there, calmly sipping wine, had snapped her restraint.

Sylvia had stood up and openly, viciously cursed Aurelia in front of her father and all the Clan elders.

She had called her Grandmother a worthless selfish traitor who ruined their lives for a momentary thrill, a pathetic whore who traded a kingdom for a corpse.

Aurelia hadn’t yelled back and she hadn’t cried.

She had simply set her wine glass down, looked at Sylvia with dead, hollow green eyes, and condemned her to the exact same fate.

’You are so proud, Sylvia...’ Aurelia had whispered that night with her voice easily going over the silent banquet hall. ’But pride is fragile...You will forget who you are... You will fall in love with a nobody and you will realize exactly why I ran.’

Sylvia closed her eyes, fighting the sudden, agonizing burning sensation building behind her eyelids as her breath hitched in her throat.

The curse had worked. Aurelia had been entirely, horrifyingly right.

She had forgotten her pride. She had fallen in love with Klaus and as she lay in his arms tonight, she completely understood why Aurelia had thrown everything away just to spend three years with the man she loved.

...But understanding it didn’t mean she was going to repeat it.

Sylvia forced her eyes open. She walked forward, stepping behind the counter as she completely ignored Aurelia, moving toward the small, cluttered wooden desk tucked into the far corner of the shop.

She opened the heavy top drawer, pulled out a fresh expensive sheet of thick paper she had hidden away, and reached for a long feathered quill and a bottle of jet-black ink.

She struck a match against the wood as the sudden flare of bright warm light illuminated her pale face.

She lit a single, thick wax candle, letting the flame cast long dancing shadows against the walls.

"What are you doing?" Aurelia asked quietly, watching her from the stool with her pipe resting forgotten in her lap.

"Leaving a message..." Sylvia replied with her voice sounding hollow.

She uncorked the ink bottle and dipped the quill into the dark liquid as the sharp metal tip hovered over the pristine blank paper.

Sylvia’s hand was shaking violently as the overwhelming physical strength granted by her golden aura was entirely useless against the crushing suffocating weight currently pressing down on her chest.

She didn’t hate being with a commoner...

That was the most painful, devastating truth of all... She loved it... She loved him.

She loved Klaus with an intensity that terrified her./. She loved his dark eyes. She loved the way he always moved in battle, making sure she was safe.

She loved the way he handled and she loved the way he swung his sword... What was there not to love about him?

Thinking back to just a few hours ago, when he was buried deep inside her, stretching her apart and filling her womb with his heat... she wanted nothing more than to run away with him.

She had wanted to throw away the Longlon name, marry him in a cheap church, and get pregnant with his children.

Sylvia wanted to build a quiet, simple life with him... far away from the politics of the Capital but she couldn’t.

She refused to repeat the tragic fate of her Grandmother and she refused to become a second runaway.

If she ran with Klaus, the Longlon executioners would eventually find them.

It was a mathematical certainty. They would hunt them down, they would corner them, and they would butcher Klaus right in front of her.

They would tear him limb from limb, just like they did to Aurelia’s lover.

And even if they somehow miraculously survived, she would be abandoning her father and her younger brother to the wolves.

They trusted her to restore the family’s broken honor... They needed her to come back and prove to the other high nobles that the Longlon bloodline was still strong, that the stain of Aurelia’s mistake had been washed away.

She was the heiress and she was going to deliver on that expectation, even if it destroyed her soul so, Sylvia simply had to cut the cord.

She had to destroy the bridge connecting them so thoroughly and so viciously, that Klaus would never ever try to look for her.

She couldn’t leave him with hope as hope would get him killed... She had to hurt him... She had to make him hate her with every fiber of his being...

Sylvia pressed the sharp metal quill to the paper and began to write.

To the Commoner,

The first four words felt like swallowing jagged broken glass as her throat tightened, threatening to choke her.

A single, heavy tear escaped her golden eye. It slid down her pale cheek, falling toward the paper but before the droplet could even touch the wet ink, her golden aura flared instinctively.

The intense radiating heat of her aura incinerated the tear instantly, turning it into a tiny wisp of steam that vanished into the cold air.

She wasn’t even allowed to cry...

Sylvia kept writing. She poured every single ounce of cruel, vile, noble arrogance she possessed into the letter...

She wrote about how she was a high-born noble and the heiress to a very big Noble family.

She mocked the very idea that she would ever want to infect her pristine superior lineage by breeding with a peasant like him.

She lied through her teeth with her hand shaking as she claimed that the sex they just shared was pathetic.

She insulted his size, his stamina, and his technique, stating coldly that she was barely satisfied and could find better pleasure in any cheap,rundown brothel in the Capital.

Her hand moved faster across the paper as the words became sharper and more toxic, specifically designed to dig into his deepest darkest insecurities that she had now noticed.

She called him insensitive and she called him a spineless coward who hid behind women...