Chapter 149: Birth of royals and Newborn hatred

Chapter 149: Chapter 149: Birth of royals and Newborn hatred

...meet it together, hand in hand, exactly as they stood now.

The wedding was finally over, and yet its sound refused to end. Cheers still rang through the streets, drums and laughter chasing the royal carriage as it rolled away from the chapel, and Pronoia sat inside it with her hands folded in her lap, letting the noise wash over her like warm water.

She could not see the crowds lining the road. She had never needed to. She heard them instead — hundreds of voices layered together, rising and breaking like surf against stone.

"Congratulations!"

"May you have a happy marriage!"

"Long live the Crown Prince and Crown Princess!"

Flowers struck the side of the carriage and fell away again. Somewhere close, a child shrieked with delight, and a woman laughed so hard she coughed. Pronoia let herself smile, small and unguarded, and thought that joy, when it belonged to strangers who wanted nothing from her, tasted entirely different than joy she had to earn.

Beside her, Ares had gone quiet.

She turned her head slightly toward him, drawn by the particular stillness that came over him whenever his thoughts pulled him somewhere she couldn’t follow by sound alone. He said nothing. She heard only the faint creak of leather as he pressed his palm flat against the window glass, his attention fixed outward on people who had gathered simply to wish them well.

She did not ask what he was thinking. Some silences were not meant to be filled, only shared, and she had learned over the years that Ares’s silences, unlike his brothers’, never carried anything sharp inside them. She simply let her hand find his on the seat between them and left it there, and neither of them spoke again until the palace gates rose ahead, swallowing the sound of the crowd behind them.

Neither knew, in that moment, that while they rode home wrapped in celebration, some dangerous presence had already begun taking root within those same walls.

The First Prince did not knock.

He shoved the door of the King’s study open hard enough that it struck the wall behind it, and the Second Prince followed a half step behind him, his jaw tight, his eyes darker than Pronoia would ever be able to describe but which every servant in that palace had learned to fear regardless.

Neither of them had been able to enjoy a single moment of the wedding they had just been forced to attend. They had stood at the edges of the chapel in their ceremonial finery, bowing when required, smiling when watched, while inside both of them a fire had burned steadily hotter with every vow their youngest brother spoke.

Ares. Their youngest brother. Now the Crown Prince.

The First Prince could still hear the words echoing in his skull, could still feel the particular humiliation of standing beside his father as the announcement was made, watching every noble in that hall turn to look at him with expressions ranging from pity to poorly hidden satisfaction. He had spent his entire life being groomed for that title. He had endured the tutors, the etiquette masters, the endless lessons in statecraft his father had drilled into him since before he could properly hold a quill. And in one breath, all of it had been handed instead to a boy who had done nothing but marry a blind commoner out of sentiment.

The King barely lifted his head when they entered. He continued sorting through the documents spread across his desk as though his sons had not just stormed into his private study with fury written plainly across both their faces.

"Father."

No reply.

"You need to explain your decision," the First Prince said, his voice tight enough to crack.

The King finally looked up, unhurried, infuriatingly calm. "What decision?"

"You know exactly what I mean." The First Prince’s hands had curled into fists at his sides without his permission, years of careful composure fraying at the edges. "You made Ares the Crown Prince. You never gave either of us a reason."

The Second Prince stepped forward, his voice quieter but no less sharp. "We deserve to understand why."

The King set the document in his hand down on the desk with deliberate slowness, and studied both his sons the way a man studies a storm gathering on the horizon, aware of its danger but unwilling to be rushed by it.

"You are still children," he said.

The First Prince felt something ignite behind his ribs. "Children?"

"You have not yet learned to recognize what this kingdom truly needs." The King’s gaze did not waver. "You could not see true gold when it stood directly in front of you."

Silence swallowed the room whole. The First Prince stared at his father, waiting for the rest of the sentence, the explanation, anything that might make the words mean something other than what they so clearly meant.

"Then explain it," he said.

The King did not answer.

"Father."

"I am not obligated to explain myself to either of you."

Something in the First Prince’s chest went cold and hard all at once, a decade of resentment crystallizing into a single, unbearable moment of clarity. He had spent his whole life trying to be worthy of a throne his father had just decided, without a single word of justification, did not belong to him.

He turned sharply. "Come."

The Second Prince did not move at first. He lingered in the doorway a moment longer, his eyes fixed on his father’s bowed head, something calculating and cold moving behind his expression.

"You will regret this, Father."

The King said nothing.

"I promise you that."

Then he turned and followed his brother out, and the door shut behind them with a finality that seemed to echo far longer than it should have.

The King remained alone in the aftermath, staring at documents he no longer saw. Eventually he rose and crossed to the balcony, the night air cool against his face, the kingdom’s lights scattered below him like fallen stars.

"I don’t think I will," he said quietly, to no one. "This is the future of this kingdom we are discussing."

He rested both hands against the railing, his knuckles pale in the moonlight.

"If anyone can prevent this kingdom from ruin, it is her. Only Pronoia."

His thoughts drifted, unbidden, to a warning given to him years earlier by a dying woman he had barely known, a mother pleading with him not to use her daughter as a piece on his board. He had never forgotten those words. He had simply chosen, deliberately, to set them aside.

"This is for the kingdom," he told the dark, as though repetition might make the reasoning feel less like a betrayal. "Her mother will be proud of the good deeds she has done."

He stood beneath that sky a long while, entirely unaware of how much pain his choice would eventually cost the very family he believed himself to be protecting.

---

**Nine Months Later**

Pronoia’s cries tore through the birthing chamber, sharp and raw, each one landing somewhere deep in Ares’s chest like a blow he could not deflect.

He stood just beyond the door, unable to sit, unable to still his hands, listening to every sound that reached him and translating each one into fear. He wanted to go to her. He wanted to be the steady presence beside her that she had always been for him. But this was not a battle he could fight at her side, and the helplessness of that truth gnawed at him with a viciousness he had never experienced before.

The King waited nearby, his face composed into practiced calm, though beneath it Ares could see something far less certain moving in his father’s eyes. The old man’s hands, folded before him, betrayed the faintest tremor.

Then, without warning, a baby’s cry cut through the chamber.

Ares froze entirely, his heart suspended somewhere between terror and hope.

The King lifted his head.

The door opened. A midwife stepped through it, bowing low. "Congratulations, Your Majesty. Congratulations, Your Highness. The Crown Princess has given birth to a girl."

For one dazzling instant, nothing else in the world existed for Ares. A daughter. His daughter. Joy broke through him with such force that his knees nearly failed to hold him upright, and he laughed, unguarded and disbelieving, a sound the palace had rarely heard from him before.

The King’s relief was genuine too, though a smaller, quieter thought moved beneath it, one he was careful to bury quickly. A daughter. He had hoped, without ever saying so aloud, for a grandson, a male heir to further secure what he had already risked so much to build. He pushed the thought away before it could take root. *There will be more children,* he told himself. *This is only the beginning.* He allowed himself, instead, to simply celebrate with his son.

Inside the chamber, Pronoia lay exhausted, her whole body trembling with the aftermath of labor, every muscle spent. But when the midwife placed her daughter into her arms, everything else in the world fell away.

She touched the small, damp curve of the infant’s cheek, and then, carefully, the child’s closed eyes.

They were shaped like her mother’s own.

"Crescent," she whispered, and knew, with absolute certainty, that no other name would ever have fit.

When the King came to see the child later that evening, his gaze lingered on her face longer than courtesy required.

"Why Crescent?" he asked.

"Because she has my mother’s eyes," Pronoia said, holding her daughter close against her chest.

The King went still. For a moment something unreadable crossed his features, quickly smoothed away, though not quickly enough to escape the attention of the nursemaid standing nearby. He studied the infant, then Pronoia, and something about the shape of the child’s closed eyes unsettled him in a way he could not name and chose, once again, not to voice.

That night the palace celebrated. Music filled the great hall. Tables groaned beneath the weight of food prepared in honor of the newest member of the royal family. Ares stayed close to Pronoia throughout, his happiness so plain that even the sternest courtiers found themselves smiling at the sight of him.

But not everyone in that hall shared in the warmth.

The First Prince and Second Prince stood apart from the celebration, watching from the shadows at its edges, their expressions carved from something far colder than joy.

Pronoia could not see them.

She felt it instead, radiating toward her from across the hall like heat from a distant fire. Killing intent, unmistakable, patient, and old enough now that it had clearly stopped being a passing feeling and had settled somewhere far more permanent.

Her arms tightened, instinctively, around her daughter.

She said nothing to Ares. Not that night. But she understood, with a certainty that had nothing to do with sight, that whatever now lived behind those two men’s eyes would not simply fade with time.

The years that followed carried Crescent from infancy into a restless, energetic childhood, a girl who seemed constitutionally incapable of remaining still for more than a few minutes at a time. She ran through the palace corridors whenever the opportunity presented itself, often abandoning her lessons halfway through to chase some new curiosity down an unfamiliar hallway.

"Crescent."

The girl would stop, just long enough to look guilty, before inevitably trying again a few minutes later.

Despite her mischief, she adored the hours she spent with her mother above all else. One afternoon, midway through a lesson on the kingdom’s history, Pronoia felt her daughter’s attention drift entirely away from the subject at hand and settle instead on her mother’s face.

"You want to know how I became blind," Pronoia said, not quite a question.

Crescent lowered her head, suddenly shy. "Yes, Mother. What happened to your eyes?"

"I was born this way."

"Do all blind people get born like that?"

"No." Pronoia’s mouth curved gently. "I’m simply an exception."

Crescent accepted the answer without further argument, the particular satisfied silence of a child who has been told enough truth to feel trusted, and returned her attention to her lesson. For that quiet afternoon, at least, the palace felt entirely peaceful but that peace would not last.

**Five Years Later**

When Pronoia’s second child arrived, the entire palace erupted with a different quality of joy entirely.

A boy.

The King wept openly for the first time since the death of his Wife the Queen. Ares could barely speak through his own emotion when he finally held his son, his hands shaking as though the infant might shatter beneath too firm a grip.

"Crest," Pronoia said, once the boy had been placed against her chest, and the name moved through the palace by morning like wildfire.

A grand banquet followed, larger even than the one held for Crescent’s birth. The King toasted his grandson before the assembled court with tears still bright in his eyes, and Ares stood beside Pronoia through it all, radiant with a happiness he made no effort to hide.

But at the edges of that celebration, two men stood apart once again, and this time their silence carried something far heavier than envy alone.

The First Prince watched his brother receive the court’s congratulations and felt something in his chest twist tighter with every well-wish offered. Years of watching Ares’s position strengthen, his marriage celebrated, his daughter growth, and now this, a son, another reason for the kingdom to plant itself firmly behind a man the First Prince still believed had stolen what rightfully belonged to him.

The Second Prince said nothing at all, but his eyes tracked every movement across that hall with a stillness far more dangerous than his brother’s open anger. He had learned, over the years, that fury spoken aloud accomplished nothing but fury planted quietly, patiently, in the right soil, eventually grew into something that could not be uprooted.

The two brothers exchanged a single glance. Neither needed words. A decade of shared resentment had long since taught them how to understand one another without speaking at all.

Their father’s decision had cost them a crown they had spent their entire lives preparing to wear. And now, with each passing year, that decision seemed only to prove itself further correct in the eyes of the court, each birth another stone laid into a foundation neither of them had any part in building.

They would not simply wait and hope the throne might someday return to them on its own.

They needed something else. Allies. Influence. Voices willing to whisper discontent into ears that had not yet chosen a side.

That night, while the palace celebrated the birth of a prince who would one day stand between them and everything they believed themselves owed, the two brothers began, quietly and without a single misstep, to gather the first threads of a faction built entirely from grievance.

No one within those walls knew what was being assembled in the palace’s shadowed corners. Not Ares who is already lost entirely in the joy of his growing family. Not Pronoia, whose gift had shown her thrones and crowns but had never once shown her the particular shape of the danger now taking root beneath her own roof. Not even the King, who believed, in his quiet moments on that same balcony, that he had already paid whatever price his decision would ever demand of him.

But he had not.

Somewhere beyond the palace walls, two brothers bound by nothing but shared hatred had begun collecting the people who would one day stand beside them.

And they had no intention of stopping.