I'm alone now. 

Damn them. 

My family shouldn't have been surprised by this uprising; my father was not merciful. Ever proud of the power he wielded and thirsting for more, he dubbed himself the Lord of Magic, Darius Mattesscu. In his mind, he was a God of all magical beings, the law above the law, and he could will his desires into creation, or so it was rumored.

Lord Darius had mastered a short form of immortality. He was a dark magic warlock who had ruled for over two centuries, and he alone was responsible for considerable suffering in our current sector. My family ruled over all of Romania, for the country used to be flush with magic users, but as the population of Man grew, our numbers declined for decades. 

With three kingdoms residing within the monarchy, my father's ability to see and know all was continually challenged. 

As magic users became more powerful, their bodies weakened, diverting all energy to their abilities. This meant there was a distinct lack of laborers to do the manual work required in a city. Man and Elves alike sought to capitalize on this vacancy with high costs of goods and services that bled my family dry. 

Taxes were rising, and people were beginning to starve in the lower regions. With so much pressure to improve people's abilities, we effectively flushed out low-level mages to progressively poorer areas. 

My father's council urged him to find a solution, and the court pleaded for aid for all our regions as the Elves pushed on our borders. What came next was an atrocity that nobody could have predicted, but would surge my family into a new level of wealth and prosperity. 

Lord Darius captured children of the moon, werewolves, a nearly extinct species that lived among the humans. They remained hidden from the public eye, a forgotten charge that even bounty hunters wouldn't entertain. After the hundred-year war, vampires had taken dominance over the regions of Europe, and the beasts had slipped into the shadows to die off slowly.

 Nobody would miss them. 

Their packs were small in number, and their societies lacked the structure to warn their species, so one by one, Lord Darius rounded up and then laid a curse upon them that would force them into a purely mortal form while harnassing the brutal nature of the wolf.

The strength of their wolf half was concentrated into a human body, making them ideal slaves for our dying region. These creations were resilient beings that could withstand the brutality of spoiled elite sorcerers who saw them as nothing more than attractive equipment. 

With strong ties to their family units, they were easily persuaded to work through fear of violence. Their clans were divided up with no mercy, and my father did not stop until every last werewolf was cursed. 

My people were not kind to them. 

Lycan slaves were the newest commodity, and while Lord Darius intended to use them on our farmland, they were in high demand with the outer Kingdoms. An opportunity arose, and instead of helping our people, he auctioned them off to the highest bidder.

We did not care where they went or what kind of life they would have; no questions were asked, as gold was exchanged for a life. Families were separated, lives were broken apart, and children were ripped away from their mothers. 

In one last parting gift, the curse caused the tortured beings to become sterile. With no way to reproduce and create more, their worth skyrocketed, and only the insanely wealthy could afford the designer slaves. Once more, my family's wealth skyrocketed, and my father's court became packed with a new wave of supporters and admirers. 

I remember the screams all too well. Sloppy from desperation, man after man was forced to undergo the change on that very floor my father's body now laid. 

Their wolf counterpart was forced into hiding, and their bodies bowed, broke, and stretched to accommodate a magical lockdown of the creature within. I remember thinking it was wrong, yet my studies were front and center. I was contending with my own hell, and my status had been minimal in our family. There was nothing I could have done, nobody I could have spoken to; I was hardly ten when the curse began.

My guilt for what was done to them had never stopped me from accepting them into my home, demanding their labor, or expecting their obedience.

As their numbers grew, a looming murmur remained that this would not end well for anyone.

The dragons eventually came to our doorstep, and while my mother had been convinced it was for me that they arrived, it was truly to speak to my father. Bogdan, leader of the dragons, was a beast who had taken on a demi-form. Little did I know how familiar with those creatures I would become. 

Half man, half dragon, Bogdan pleaded with my father to reconsider the creation and enslavement of this new species. Their oracles had predicted retaliation, the likes of which we had never seen. Wealth and greed overtook logic, and Lord Darius turned them away with little interest in their warning. 

Their arrival spurred on my own training; it was then that they began to prepare me for my purpose and turned their backs on the beings who would eventually become my instructors.

Lord Darius felt his magic was absolute, with no chance of failure. 

 Of course, we underestimated them.

 A species does not want to be held captive.

One of them had learned how to trigger the change.

 The wolves that we had thought were erased had only been lying dormant in their bodies, estranged from their human form. They were faster, more durable, and superior to the werewolves that came before them. 

We did not anticipate that they would form a culture based on war and battle, glorifying the death they knew we'd give them. They taught themselves not to fear us, to fuel themselves with their unrelenting resentment, and to blow past our borders with reckless abandon.

We did not fathom that their strong bonds would allow them to form one of the most lethal small armies our nation had ever seen. 

Bogdan's warning had come to fruition. They knew us, they served us, and they would end us.

It was on this night that they finally came.

 My father was the only thing standing between them and the throne, and he seemed as though he was too bewildered to stop them. Or perhaps he understood that there would be no saving him from his creations. There had been a moment when our eyes had met when he might have thought I was going to help him, but I, too, had stood aside. 

Such as he turned his back on our people, they turned their back on him. It would be alone that he'd face this beast. 

 Lord Darius stood with his arms outstretched, cackling like a madman as their leader approached, almost as if welcoming the creature back home, adding insult to injury. The gray beast did not want to bargain; it only wanted to assure my father that his death would be slow and painful and that it hoped he would be challenging to kill.

A small smile curls onto the corner of my mouth, envisioning it, that wretched warlock dying under the fangs of his creation. I had been the first on the scene, and the blood splatter across my white robes remained a reminder that he was, in fact, dead. I'd been willing to let him die, willing to let go of my family's wealth and power to see him suffer, a quiet nod to the revenge I so desperately craved.

To my shock and horror, my mother was the one who refused to let this monarchy go, or I suppose she could have truly loved my father. They'd been together over thirty years, and while she was a woman of little means, she'd been faithful to him even when he'd sent us to the ends of our territory for what he claimed was 'much-needed space.' 

Seeing her meet that same fate and scream for my help, I regretted every ounce of my treachery.

I'd been so absorbed in what I wanted, in surviving and doing away with the man who'd damned me, that I had nothing to offer when those fangs turned on her. Frost had risen to my hands, and yet nothing came of the beast as he crushed the life out of her. I was my family's hope, and I'd failed them just as they had failed me.

It's only fitting that this ends with me in solitude, for that seemed to be the mantra of my childhood into my coming of age. 

 It wasn't as though I deserved the comfort of my family for what I'd done, what I'd practically allowed to happen.

The forgotten Prince cast aside once more, for even in the rage of war, I was not worthy of death. My father often professed that the gods must not have wanted me, for I managed to return home from one of the most dangerous schools in our land, only not to have learned a thing at all.

It would seem that here, thrown into my deceased father's bed chamber, that thought rang true. I continued to live and defy the odds, all because I refused to move forward.

But in this still room, I did not lie down and wait. I stood, slamming my fists against the door and pushing against the oak for all I was worth. There was no answer for me on the other side; the stone walls blocked out the screams of my family. Too little, too late; I'd always had an uncanny ability to regret my mistakes when there was nothing I could do to change them.

Bowing my head and pressing my palms against the cold wood, I knew nobody was left to answer me. The lycans had ravaged these halls, breaching our barriers, and they were met with little resistance. The servants must have let them in, though as I rack my brain, I can't think of anyone in our city who would feel a particular amount of loyalty to the crown.

We had no army, no means to defense other than that deranged old man, the very same one who excused his sons from military service and shipped his youngest heir off to die in a school in which few returned.

With a shuddering sob, I step back from the door, looking down at my hands, which had begun to darken from the overuse of magic without an outlet. Pushing too much energy to my fingertips resulted in 'magical frostbite,' entirely reversible but painful. 

 My gift is unique and different from those in the majority of the magical realm, but it is not honed nearly to the precision it would have taken to prevent their deaths.

Pain is something I've become accustomed to. It is not something I fear any longer, though the thought of being chewed on by wolves makes my skin crawl, and my blood run cold. I hadn't wanted this; I hadn't asked to be some savior, to be the 'chosen' one when not a soul had chosen me until these last three years of my cursed life. 

Overwhelmed with the death of my mother, I find myself teetering in and out of hysterics as I pace through a dead man's room. I'd never been aloud in here, my mind was reeling with the thought that I'd be heavily scolded if they caught me only to be reminded that that moment would never come. 

The halls fall silent; I note they have been for a while now. Surely, that meant my siblings, my servants, the entirety of the court, and all who resided in this castle would have met their fate save for me. It brings a cruel scoff to my throat as I scrub at my eyes with my wrist, only to grimace at the blood strewn across my robes. 

Once more, I'm the only one left to endure. Glancing towards the windows, I throw back the curtains with frantic shoves to see that morning had just crested the trees. The night hell gates opened in my city and ended with the most beautiful, clear morning sun. A final taunt from a God who wasn't listening. 

I'm sure my mother would tell me this would be an excellent time to pray. I was supposed to be some monk, after all. 

While my legs threaten to fail me, I gulp in a breath of air and convince myself to take tentative steps towards the vast wardrobe. Desperate to fill my time with anything other than my current reality, I began checking every crevice and nook, hoping beyond hope to find any aid my father might have left here. A book, a spell, a potion, a blade, anything that could help me when they eventually came. 

I make my way around the room and check all the cracks. 

Nothing. 

 My mother frequented this room, and my father would not have endangered her life with magical items. Most of his spell books were probably encrypted anyway; it would have been unlikely that I would have been able to open them and read from them.

Casting a handful of his items onto the floor, I slump onto my knees with another sob of defeat, crying out in defiance of the man's inability to heed a warning. "It's your fault, you know!" I remind the space in which his belongings lie. "They told you this would happen, and damn it, you just assumed that-"

That what? 

Things had finally just started to become worthwhile. My homecoming had been the warmest greeting they'd ever given me, and for once, they looked.... proud. 

Yes, I was damaged; I was no longer the same, but I was also someone to be respected in the eyes of my peers. I had made it through a school in which few return, I had been brutalized, humiliated, and nearly killed more times than I could count, and yet when he asked me for a display of my ability-

It was all a farce. 

I had... done what was necessary to survive. I didn't thrive. I only survived. 

While he knew of my lies, that I was not a decorated Solomonari as he sent me out to become, my people finally saw me as worth entertaining. My family finally spoke to me as someone other than the strange younger brother with the wrong-colored hair. I'd earned a portion of my title; I finally had a chance to become something other than a disappointment.

It makes me smile once more; disgusted, the black finally recedes from my fingertips, and my skin returns to its olive tone. I shake my head in defeat, "What did you expect? I'm not built for this. Do you want me to say it finally? Would that let you rest in peace?"

Did I even want that? Didn't I want him to rot and watch his country burn in the pyre he stoked?

Apologies would have to wait; he didn't deserve my remorse. I cock my head to the side, shrugging out of the top layer of my white robe and casting it aside. With the amount of blood on it, it was ruined. Where are my captors? 

Maybe they're just going to let me starve to death. That would be a punishment; it would save having to torture me. If they were here to sack the castle, there would be no reason to deal with me. If they wanted information, they'd be sad to discover it was one of my brothers they should have kept. 

It wasn't like I helped him plan any of this. The deep pain of loss wards off any hunger I might have been feeling; whatever happened to me was better than I deserved. No matter how I was feeling, I should have tried, at least then I could have joined them in hell. 

 I return to my father's bed to climb into it, quickly succumbing to exhaustion.