I nearly wept when I witnessed the glorious smoothness of the sheets on my bed, the glossy marbles of the floor underneath, the wide windows letting generous amounts of light spill directly into the room, and the cabinet in which I had my clothes hanging silently in pure bliss.

  There was, for lack of a better word, a rush of emotions. A sense of belonging so strong that I knew, at that very moment, that I’d completed something monumental and returned triumphant from a long, dangerous voyage.

  I would’ve poured myself over the bed had my body not stunk like I’d been left to marinate in a jar of pickles with an unlikely pair of rotten chicken heads in the mix.

  Therefore, it was with a touch of unwillingness that I dragged my ass toward the bathroom, where the maids of the mansion had already prepared a medicinal bath for me.

  When I reached the bathtub, I paused for a second, not in the mood to give the maids who slowly left me alone a single glance. Instead, I stood frozen against the sight of the medicinal herbs, placed wantonly around the bathtub and inside the water, violet smoke wafting off from them.

  It took me nearly a week and a series of life and death battles to even chance across a single medicinal herb. The cluster of Yellow Daydreams—yeah, that was their name—a fairly normal Bronze Rank plant was the only thing I’d managed to find in that forest.

  Here, though, the plants were aplenty, and if I’m not mistaken, the violet color indicated that these were Celestial Grade plants.

  The effect was immediate. Fast. Too harsh perhaps, for a brief moment I felt uncomfortable as smoke washed over me. All the fatigue I’d carried on my shoulders vanished right away when I dipped my feet into the bathtub. The water was perfectly warm, near-boiling, and floating across the surface were hand-sized spheres that shone with inner lights.

  “Really?” I found myself in a bit of a stupor as I regarded the spheres.

  There were about a dozen of them in the giant tub. I tugged at them as though they were toy ducks placed here to make the experience enjoyable for a small child even if I knew these were essentially Cores of beasts that I couldn’t, right now, hunt with all the runes in my disposal.

  “Diamond Cores for the winner. A hero’s welcome, so to speak,” Radek’s voice echoed soon after, followed by soft steps as he walked through the hanging fog, a smile playing on his lips. “All medicinal ones, as well. A mere sight of them would make Healers in this Kingdom weep in gratitude, for such miracles happen only in fairy tales. Better not to try and eat them, though. They’ll kill you.”

  “Thanks, I guess?” I muttered, blowing bubbles in the water as I made myself comfortable by leaning my back into the soft marble. “Not sure if I earned it, though.”

  “You have no idea.” Radek sighed out a long breath and pulled out a chair from his ring, making me somewhat green with envy once again as he settled beside me. “You’ll get one soon enough. I’ll teach you how to use it.”

  “I like practical things,” I said, hiding my smile. A ring of holding was every shut-in’s dream back on Earth. “So, you’re going to tell me what the Song of the Paragon means, or not? This is about my Father, isn’t it?”

  Radek stiffened.

  Figured that much.

  Until now, I purposefully kept away from asking the obvious. I had no father. I had no immediate family other than a mother who went by names like the Bloody Mistress, Butcher of the Dawn and so on. It could be that she could’ve killed everyone in cold blood.

  Shocking that might be, I didn’t find that too far-fetched of a thought.

  People died in this world all the time. Human corpses littered a Grade D plane’s forest that nobody cared to give a damn name. Rules were different here. Life was different here.

  I wasn’t reborn on Earth. I had to be prepared for every possibility.

  But then, in all the odd shows I’d watched, the novels I’d read and all kinds of media I’d consumed, it never ended well when you asked a single mother where the father was. It made them feel bad. It made them think as though they were not doing a good job raising the kid, as if somewhere somehow they failed at filling the giant hole of not having a father.

  Since I didn’t want to deal with the outcome, I waited for Mother to tell me everything on her own. It wasn’t that I wasn’t curious, it was that I… didn’t feel a need for a father at all. I was an adult man and I would’ve survived—probably—even had I been born as an orphan.

  No, scratch that.

  I would’ve definitely died.

  “That is true. The Song of the Paragon is the bloodline legacy you’ve inherited from your father’s line of family,” Radek said with an uncharacteristic heaviness in his voice.

  “You weren’t supposed to awaken it until you’re at least of age.”

  “Yet I did.”

  “Yet you did,” Radek nodded. “Small glimpses of it, but it is an undeniable fact that you’ve heard the call of the Paragon right when danger proved unmountable for you. You’ve cleverly heeded the call and prevailed in the end. It was a beautiful thing to watch even with all the horrors involved. You don’t get to see such an ability manifest in a child’s body every day.”

  “The call of the Paragon… You mean the voice I heard,” I muttered, remembering that odd sensation of having an inner voice in my body that somehow knew not only what I should do, but how I should do it, as well. I wouldn’t have thought, not in a million years, to climb on that Eagle’s back in a situation where its talons seemed painfully dedicated to tear me into pieces. “It was certainly something else.”

  “The Song of the Paragon is first and foremost an ancestral guide to safety,” Radek began, his voice still heavy, one hand propped under his chin. “A wisdom so deep it feeds on experiences of generations of Paragons to guide the newblood through troubling circumstances. It’s meant to keep the line afoot and every new member safe across their inevitable ascension to greatness. Your Father’s was the Crimson Song. Yours has yet to manifest a color.”

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

  “Crimson Song?” I tilted my head, confused.

  “The song of blood,” Radek answered. “One of the rarest manifestations of the bloodline. Crimson Song is the call for battle, granting the wisdom to expect the unexpected, find every hole in an opponent’s defense, exploit every single opportunity, however momentous they may be, in perfect, devious precision. He once carved a world wide open through a single fissure hidden miles deep underneath the earth. He was many things, your father was, but before any of them, he was a true Paragon of War.”

  There seemed to be a pause, a moment of reflection, displayed clearly in Radek’s hazy eyes as though during his speech he somehow glimpsed into the past and remembered an odd memory that surfaced without a warning.

  His shoulders hunched, lips parting vainly even as I waited for words to spill out.

  Paragon of War, he’d said? That was some information. A Paragon was not just a strong person capable of breaking the worlds. A Paragon was the ultimate apex one could reach in this giant Planar System.

  They could live throughout eternity and might think it’d been only a few hours.

  Such was the depth of their power that their presence alone affected reality itself.

  And my new father was supposed to be one?

  Where the hell was he, then?

  “We do not speak lightly of the names of such figures, for names carry with them a certain intent that could bring unwanted attention,” Radek said with difficulty. “You will learn about your legacy when your mother is certain of your safety. Until then, you’ll be left in the dark. I’m afraid there’s no other way around it.”

  “I’m not safe here?” I protested. “Surrounded by Celestials and an army of soldiers—”

  “You are. For now,” Radek said, glancing around him. “But there are things in this Planar System that could erase Celestials from the very earth with no effort. To achieve true freedom, you have to become one of them.”

  “What?”

  “You will do it,” Radek said. “As Belfray said, you’re born with the manner of it. Take your bath, now. You have training to be about.”

  I tried once again to make myself heard, but was left disappointed as Radek exited the bathroom without a further word. He left me alone in the bathtub, to the medicinal smoke of the herbs and with questions needing answering.

  And yet I didn’t know what to expect, or even learn. I wasn’t sure if I really wanted to learn, either.

  This was all too complicated.

  The bath was nice, though.

  …

  In the days following my return, I’d begun to catch signs of a change in the mansion. It was the little things, but with time, they became quite obvious. The mansion staff, aka the soldiers of my mother, treated me with such diligence that it bordered on being uncomfortable. It was as though they tried their utmost to not make a single mistake. Even the maid that often tended my bedroom refused to make a sound when she was around me.

  Then there was my Mother, who tried really hard to manage a poker face during our morning sessions, but ultimately failed as now and then cracks appeared on her expression.

  “Enough for the day. You’re dismissed,” she said after a muted session of back and forth, sheathing her sword in one graceful motion before turning her back against me. “Hardel’s waiting for you.”

  “It’s been a week, mum, but still we’re doing this?” I said, glancing down at Beatrice, my palms sweaty and muscles pulsing with strength. “You’ve been awfully quiet for these past couple of days. What makes you so uncomfortable? It’s the bloodline, isn’t it?”

  “There’s nothing about you that could make me uncomfortable, my love,” she said, her expression stiff. “This is about me. We all have our demons. Give your mother some time.”

  “You know you can always talk to me, right?” I said. We had, after much effort, sorted some of our differences, and I didn’t want to lapse back into the same distance we’d kept between us in the past. “I’ll always be here for you.”

  “My little Knight,” she muttered, her lips softening into a smile. “There’s nothing to worry about. I just need time. You go ahead and work on your craft. Mother’s going to be fine.”

  Soon after, Belfray announced his presence with loud footsteps, always the butler burdened with the duty of accompanying me to my lessons. He gave a nod at Mother, whose back still remained somewhat stiff, then turned and gestured at me to come close.

  I obliged.

  A part of me didn’t want to leave this woman alone, but I was at best limited in my options to provide solutions to whatever troubles weighed on her mind. It was likely something about my so-called father. There was no way a relationship between a Paragon and a Celestial could be a simple thing.

  “Is she okay?” I muttered as we climbed the long steps of the training complex with Belfray. “Is there anything I can—”

  “I’m afraid not, Young Master,” Belfray said with a shake of his head. “Your Mother is a strong woman. We all have our ways of dealing with the past matters.”

  I guessed he was right.

  “I’m thinking of paying a visit to the town,” I said, deciding to change the subject, as we made our way to the archaic blacksmith that sat in the darkest corner of the mansion. “Mother said that I’ve earned the right now that I completed the Trial of the Wild.”

  “That, she’s right.” Belfray nodded, but he did look a touch uncertain. “But maybe I should send a few men—”

  “Belfray,” I said. “Radek will be more than enough. I don’t need a host of guards with me.”

  “My apologies, Young Master.” He paused. “I’m afraid this old butler still suffers from the fact that even though you’ve managed to survive a week through the jungle, you’re still nine years old.”

  “Radek told me there are likely more than a handful of nine year olds doing pretty bad things in the Planar System. I’m hardly the most unique case,” I said, in part since I didn’t want to let go of my hard-earned freedom.

  “He did?” Belfray’s eyebrows rose, then his face dropped. “Of course he did. He’d made a habit of playing tricks on people’s minds when he was in academy. Bad tricks, I might add, that happened to look like unfortunate coincidences. He got away with it most of the time, but you shouldn’t take him as an example. Heart Mages are complicated, yet devious creatures.”

  “You knew him from the academy?” I blurted. I didn’t need Belfray to tell me about Heart Mages. My lessons with Radek taught me enough. What was surprising was that Radek was seven years old when he first attended the academy. Belfray was a Knight. How come he knew him from such a young age?

  “I had the misfortune of being involved with him on more than one occasion,” Belfray admitted, sounding like he greatly lamented those memories, and yet I could see a small smile on his lips. “Handed him quite a few sentences myself when the adults remained silent.”

  “How?”

  “Well, Blaston might be the most famous Magical Academy in the Planar System, but the Kaeller Knighthood wasn’t less predominant in the Path of Glory. Both academies shared the capital of Harlox, one of the most prized worlds in the Planar System. We had our fair share of quarrels with the Mages.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I said. “Radek has never told me about it.”

  “Well, it’s certainly hard to tell tales of youth that involve getting your ass kicked on a constant basis, isn’t it? Not that we didn’t have our similarities, of course, for we were both orphans and the youngest of our classes, which motivated us well against each other.”

  “How old were you when you first arrived at the Knighthood?” I asked him the same question I did to Radek.

  “About eight, I believe.”

  “A year older than Radek, then.”

  Belfray stiffened. “Did he put you up to this? Always reminding me how great a genius he was even though we had hardly a year between us back in Harlox… Heart Mages, indeed, Young Master. Better to be cautious around those bastards.”

  “Sure you want to use that word around me?” I glanced back at the dark corridor.

  Belfray looked confused for a second.

  “I knew your plan. I heard it from the maids,” I said, pausing my steps and crossing my arms. “I’m the lost son of the Lord Master who’s supposed to take the throne, right? The bastard son who, unlike others, carries himself with promise and strength.”

  “Who?” Belfray demanded. “Who told you?”

  “Mary did,” I said, remembering that odd woman who stopped me in the middle of the day to tell me all about these plans. I couldn’t understand how her mind worked, but was grateful for the information.

  “That girl…” Belfray sighed loudly. “I might have to take her for a—”

  “Don’t change the subject, Belfray,” I said, scowling up at him. “I don’t like when people keep things from me.”

  “Young Master, this matter was supposed to be handled quietly, without disturbing your training.” Belfray panicked. “You need not burden yourself with—”

  “I’ll help you.” I looked him in the eye. “That’s why you’re going to tell me the whole plan.”

  .....