Valeri Ephars shuffled home, muscles sore and mind tired to a degree that she’d never quite forced herself to before. Though, despite her exhaustion, she found herself still stopping every ten or so steps and grimacing, before picking up where she had left off.

Of course, this odd, stilted movement was due to the Sharah that the Demigod himself had deigned to teach her. Being taught the Sharah was shaping up to be both the best and worst thing that had ever happened to her. She had no doubt that it would consume her time for years to come as she dedicated herself to its intricacies.

But at the moment, it was only pain, and a great deal of frustration. It was like watching someone take something so intrinsic to day-to-day life and do it ten times quicker because they learned a technique that you hadn’t. Now, after doing that same thing for your entire life, you were now trying to break the habits that you’d built to replace them with something that took practice to make faster.

It was frustrating, and even doing so much as walking had become an infuriating chore, where every tenth movement somehow broke the flow of the Sharah and required her to stop and reset her posture and begin again.

The walk home was almost embarrassing, with the few of those who roamed Crossroad’s main streets this early in the morning staring at her and instantly believing her beyond inebriation. Who else would be stumbling around on the main streets the way she was without at least a little alcohol in her system.

However, she pushed forwards without shame. The Sharah held an undeniable power, and she’d already learned some of it when she’d been sparring and training with Midday, or Rethi if she was brave enough to use his real name. The boy might be exactly that—a child—but damned if he couldn’t be just as ludicrously powerful as his master. In fact, Master Maximilian was less scary than his young companion, if you didn’t count him being a literal Demigod.

Valeri finally made it home, after an infuriating walk at a pace far slower than she’d normally walk. She walked through the side gate of her family’s home, walking through to the servant’s door with a painful shuffle, her muscles screaming at her in discontent the entire way. She opened the door to find the hallways empty, lacking the usual woman who always seemed to wait up late for her to come home. Apparently, the lack of her presence for the day had been enough to dissuade her from staying up too late a second time.

Uaele, the servant of her family who’d been helping her with any grazes or wounds she’d accrued during the weeks of training, had usually been the one to help her into the house in need be. She’d been an immense help, taking care of her when certain days had been really tough. Not having her there, waiting for her, after a long day almost felt wrong now.

Maybe it was more than just her absence, however. There was a certain air as she walked through those hallways, like a cold breeze in a normally warm location. It was just… off, however indescribable the feeling was. Her skin prickled gently with a small wave of cold sweat from a totally irrational fear, something that she couldn’t possibly justify as she finally made it through the last door, entering into the main corridors that were only metres away from her own room.

She turned to walk towards the door of her room, but felt herself jolt as she was confronted with the form of her long time attendant. She let the momentary shock drain from her muscles, glaring at the man with as much force as she could muster.

“Good morning, Miss Ephars.” He intoned neutrally, as if she didn’t know about his vicious flipside, the Shadow Walker that laid beneath the surface of the agreeable veneer.

“Don’t even bother, Yeram, if that is even your real name,” she spat, “I know that you’ve been keeping an eye on me all day.” Valeri didn’t know this, but there was almost no chance that Yeram hadn’t at least dropped in to see what she was upto once, if he hadn’t been on guard the entire time.

The man looked at her with an unimpressed glance, and she turned up her nose at him, electing to move past the man and try to make it to her own door before he could speak again. But that was when something unthinkable happened. Yeram moved to block her way. He looked deep into her eyes with his deep black ones, stopping her dead in her tracks.

“Miss Ephars.” He stated clearly, his voice reverberating with an ever so slight measure of power, “Your father has requested your presence.”

Valeri’s blood ran freezing cold. Her father had requested for her presence. That wasn’t just an oddity, or an irregularity, it was some that was so rare that she’d only ever been called for by her father three times.

Each of which had ended very poorly.

“Why?” She asked, her voice a little quieter, though just as unhappy, “Answer me, Yeram.”

The average looking, middle-aged man resisted for a moment, though in his own calculatedly precise way. She had no doubt that this entire interaction had been formulated like an equation before they even began speaking, the counter opposite to the wild unpredictability of interacting with Maximilian Avenforth.

“He has requested your presence due to your recent misconduct.” The words were placed with an unerring precision, leaving Valeri feeling even colder, and even some confusion.

“You told him?” She asked, but the man didn’t respond. She couldn’t parse what that meant, even though she’d known the man most of her life, but her father had found out somehow, and it was almost irrelevant whether it’d been Yeram’s mouth or not.

“When?” She said, the words almost demure.

“Now.” He responded in kind, the closest thing that she’d get to empathy from the stone-cold killer.

“Fine, let me change.” She said, trying to push through the man and into her room, but a soft hand placed itself against her shoulder, softer than she’d have thought an assassin would have.

“Now, Valeri.”

She stared down the man, a spark of offense worming its way into her heart as she felt the soft hand burn against her shoulder. It wasn’t hot, nor did it legitimately hurt, but it was such an oddity for the other man that her body revolted against its presence on the rough training clothing that she’d been wearing for weeks, something she’d trusted Uaele to acquire for her with a sizable finder’s fee to compensate her.

“His office?” She squeaked out through her throat, clamped shut with the wave of nervousness. She watched the solemn man as he nodded, and then hesitated for a moment, however uselessly. She could barely think straight, but Yeram’s coal black eyes straightened her mind as she turned to walk in the direction she most dreaded.

The sound of her own shoes against the stone floors echoed through the cold hallways, untouched by the morning sun and its warmth. She felt herself missing the midday sun, after having trained with a man that may as well have embodied its brightness and power. There was something about the sun that gave her energy and strength now, an unmistakeable confidence while it shone upon her dark skin.

She could hear the Shadow Walker behind her, though only because he wanted to be heard. The dark before the sun rose was likely the time when the man felt most confident, capable of appearing and disappearing at a moment’s notice, using shadow itself as a cloak.

They turned a few corners, the corridors becoming even more lavish as Valeri travelled towards the most trafficked part of her home. The main entertaining areas, and then the most lavish parts of the home where her father eternally sat. His office. The two massive wooden doors, intricately carved to intimidate as many people that walked through them as they could, softening them with the effort of opening the doors in the first place.

Valeri wanted the hesitate at the boundary into the other man’s demesne, but she didn’t allow herself, easily pushing against the doors and opening them as she walked into the room powerfully. She turned from side to side, scanning the room that just about bled wealth, cases of extremely fine knickknacks that Valeri could personally care less about. However, the office lacked one vital part to its décor.

Her father wasn’t in the room, behind the massive wooden desk that he’d had to tear out a wall of his office to insert. In that moment of suspicion, she felt the heavy blade on her back weigh even heavier as her mind turned to the blade at the first sign of something being off.

“To your left, daughter.”

Valeri’s blood turned to ice, the voice of her father radiating its unmistakable coldness, the callous sounding voice only held any beauty at all because of the accent that he’d inherited from his earliest years in Veringohs, which lilted and swayed like a sultry dance. To Valeri, however, the beautiful accent which many sought after for the possessor’s singing voice, only sounded like cold anger.

There was very little beauty in it for her now, the sound of her mother’s warm tone having long since faded from her mind, replaced by her father’s cold indifference.

Valeri turned her head to her left, finding a bookcase that had been shifted to reveal a door, a bookcase on a set of rails to move out of the way and allow entry to the door that rested behind. Through the slight crack in the doorway, she could see a warm light within, no doubt a warm fire of some description. She didn’t give Yeram and perceived satisfaction by turning back to him, so she just pushed through the door and entered her father’s secret study, one that she’d never known existed.

She looked around the room briefly, finding it to be a far more functional room than the one she’d come from, a much smaller desk and shelves upon shelves packed with papers and folders. In just paper alone, the room was likely worth a small fortune, though selling pre-used paper was just about impossible. The room held no personal affects whatsoever, which fitted her father all too well.

The man himself sat behind the desk, his willowy form almost looking emaciated since she’d last seen him. The man, despite his stick thin limbs, was aging gracefully, even his greying hair only toed the line of being the odd grey hair on an otherwise youthful head of hair and looking more ‘official’ now that he had a sizeable streak at the sides of his head.

He was probably aged somewhere in his fifties, though she’d never cared to learn his exact age, nor did she specifically care to. Her father’s skin was noticeably lighter than her own, like a dark tea that’d been diluted with a decent portion of milk. Her dark skin, one of the many signs of royalty in the kingdom of Veringohs had been inherited from her mother, though some of her facial features had been taken from her father instead.

“Valeri Ephars.” Her father intoned, his face clenched in an emotion that made the otherwise warm room feel freezing cold with distaste and disappointment.

“Jitah Ephars.” She shot back, matching her father’s energy and denying to sit in the chair that had clearly been placed there for her to sit in, with the chair not at all matching with the surrounding décor.

Her father didn’t even bother to comment on her snide remark, putting himself above her with a distant glare before he looked down to his papers and began to scratch at them with his inordinately expensive metal pen.

“It seems that learning the rapier was not enough for you?” His dry voice intoned, smothering her in the room that was made to feel claustrophobic, even though it wasn’t anywhere near that small. Valeri glared at the man who had continued his work in the silence. She’d begged him years ago, through Yeram, to allow her to learn the rapier. He’d agreed, under the conditions that she’d have to do any other classes that he so pleased.

Of course, when she learned that she had a distinct distaste for her teachers, her father didn’t let her renege on the agreement. As was his way.

“It wasn’t. It never was, and you know that it wasn’t.” Valeri said, her voice only just keeping its levelness.

“You broke the terms to our agreement.” The cold voice returned, though Valeri found herself oddly unaffected by the voice that had haunted many of her dreams. It was the voice that stood as the precursor to a decree. A singular word could instigate a crushing slew of consequences…

Yet, for the first time ever, Valeri could feel the heat of strength warm her muscles as she stood in the presence of her father. The man had once held an indomitable power over her, and in a way he still did. But why did she feel so different about it now? What had changed?

She waited for a moment, before a small lock on a door in her mind broke, blasting the door wide open and unleashing something in her that she would never had dared to allow out around her father.

Anger. Actual, full-fledged anger.

She reached behind her, unlatching a few little ties that held the scabbard to the harness she wore for the blade to rest across her back. With the few small movements, she grabbed the scabbard that dropped from her back as she undid the last tie.

Then, with a powerful slam she brought the blade down across the man’s desk, the violence of the movement making the table shudder and creak under her strength. Her father, ever the stoic one, managed to keep his composure as the force of her movement blasted the papers off the table and to the floor, leaving her father with a spilt ink pot, which had managed to cover many of the documents that had remained on her father’s table.

“That is what you care about?” She hissed, allowing anger to filter into her voice, “You care that I broke your stupid agreement?”

He looked up from his table to stare at her with a severe gaze, allowing her to see the first genuine emotion on her father’s face for what may be the first time in her life. Her father’s jaw, defined even with his slight frame, was clenched with an anger that mirrored her own.

“It is all I care about.” He growled, his tone beyond furious, “If I did not, then the power I hold would be nothing more than the paper upon my desk that you’ve so disrespected. I would be careful, Valeri, my power certainly does not end in paper.”