Page 184 of The Sun He Buried

Yes.

A child playing with a knife has better sense.

Pathetic.

I put those words into her while she stood in my snow trying not to cry. I watched her face fold. Watched her body keep every sound inside while the tears escaped anyway.

She had offered me trust.

I used it to find the soft place.

Good.

Let me feel what I am.

I open farther.

The settlement roars through me.

And beneath it, clear enough to split bone, Solveih lies awake.

Her hurt doesn’t blur with the rest. The bond has never granted me that mercy. I receive every broken piece cleanly: grief, confusion, shame she didn’t earn, and desire that survived the words I chose to punish it.

She wants me.

She wishes she didn’t.

Tonight I taught her why she shouldn’t.

The metal mask hangs from my fingers. It was forged after I took Myrkviðr, shaped from the first vein-silver cut under my rule, and bonded before every elder who once said my bloodline carried too much to command anyone.

They watched the runes burn into my face.

I wore their proof of weakness as a crown.

The dead rulers’ masks are sealed in stone. Each one carries the mark of a person who heard too much and ruled anyway. None can be worn again. The silver answers one will, then goes quiet when that will ends.

Mine has never gone quiet.

It has covered my brother’s mouth on my face, blunted a world nobody else could hear, and announced exactly which bloodline our parents wished hadn’t chosen me.

Useful object.

It worked for six hundred years.

Bare-faced on this hill, drowning beneath the lives I’m supposed to govern, I give them their old victory.

Too feeling.

Unfit.

The weakest son with his brother’s face.

My walls crack.

Not the silver. The mask’s been off many times. It’s never opened me to anyone.

Tonight, one thin line of my own pain escapes.