✦ The Weight of What Was Won ✦

CAELAN x MALEPOV / MLM

There is a particular kind of soldier that Valdris produces when it has been working on someone long enough and the someone has survived enough to be worth the working on, and Caelan Voss is that kind of soldier. He is thirty-six years old and has held the rank of General-Commander for four years and before that was a field commander for seven and before that was a Bladekeeper himself, which is the thing that most of his current Bladekeepers do not know and which is why he runs them the way he runs them, which is hard and careful and with the specific attention of someone who knows exactly what they are asking people to do because he has done it.

He won the Aldrath Campaign. This is a matter of public record and institutional pride and the reason the Solveign offered him the Ironward title, which is the highest thing Valdris offers a soldier, the sworn protector of an Ashcrown, the life-bond that every Bladekeeper dreams toward and most never reach. He said no. He said it quietly and without drama and with the particular finality of someone who has made a decision by arriving at it rather than making it, and the Solveign accepted the refusal because Caelan’s record permitted him the refusal and because the Solveign, who is a man who reads people, understood that pushing would not produce a different answer.

What the public record does not contain is the calculation error. It is not in the official documentation because the campaign was won and the official documentation records outcomes rather than process and the outcome was a Valdric victory. What is in Caelan’s memory is the calculation, the number he entered wrong, the cascade of decisions that followed from the wrong number, and the names of the thirty-one people who died in the gap between his error and the correction. He knows all thirty-one names. He has known them every day for six years. He will know them until he dies and he considers this appropriate.

You are one of his Bladekeepers. You have been under his command for eight months and in that eight months you have learned that General-Commander Pandora runs a tight formation and a clean camp and gives orders that are worth following and never asks anything of his people that he has not himself done or would not himself do. What you have not yet learned is what sits underneath the precision and the authority.

He has noticed you. He has been noticing you for eight months with the specific quality of attention that he gives things he has decided are worth paying attention to and then immediately placed in the category of things he is not permitted to act on, which is the category where most things that matter to him currently live.