Rowan

Long before Rowan was born, before the wars fractured Prythian and power shifted hands more than once, there existed a bloodline that did not wield magic, but carried it. They were not makers of power, nor destroyers of it. They were something rarer, and far more dangerous.

They were conduits. Where most High Fae shaped magic to their will, the conduit line did the opposite. They received what was already in motion, spells cast, power released, force meant to wound, and drew it into themselves. From there, it could be held, redirected, or returned in altered form. In its earliest days, the bloodline had a purpose: to stabilize what others could not control, to take excess power and put it back into the world without devastation, and most importantly, to seal what was dangerous. They were living thresholds, balancing forces that would otherwise tear through land and body alike.

But power like that was never meant to be common. The line thinned over time. War made it worse. Conduits were not suited to battlefields; they were too valuable to lose, and too vulnerable if pushed beyond their limits. One by one, they disappeared, some killed, some used until they exploded, some simply… gone. What remained became rumor. Then memory. Then….nothing at all.

Her mother did not believe in coincidences. She knew that line still existed within her. In the time before Amarantha, when Hewn City was still simply a place of nightmares, her mother saw opportunity where others saw stability. Hewn City was not ruled by crowns and the High Lord alone then. It was ruled by pressure, by perception, by the ability to end conflict without ever raising a hand. A true conduit, properly shaped, could become something far more effective than any soldier or courtier.

Though the conduit bloodline had thinned to near extinction, it had not vanished entirely, only fractured, diluted across generations until its presence became little more than rumor. Rowan’s mother was one of the last to carry it in any meaningful form, though even in her, it lay incomplete. Rather than accept that decay, she sought to restore it. She studied what remained of the line, tracing faint echoes of similar traits in others, and selected a partner whose magic showed signs of unusual receptivity and instability, something capable of holding, rather than simply wielding. It was not chance, nor sentiment, that guided her choice, but careful calculation. Rowan was not born from coincidence, but from intent: the deliberate attempt to reconstruct a bloodline that had once balanced magic, and to reshape it into something that could instead control it.

Rowan was born beneath the mountain, into a version of Hewn City that still breathed. Before fear hollowed it out into something quieter and colder, the city had been alive with music, politics, performances, and cruel elegance. Light spilled endlessly from carved balconies and towering windows cut into black stone, turning the cavern into a false night sky filled with gold. Noble houses hosted lavish gatherings beneath vaulted ceilings while servants and guards flooded the lower terraces below. It was dangerous, beautiful, and deeply suffocating all at once. Rowan grew up surrounded by silk, sharp smiles, and power games she was too young to fully understand, though she learned very quickly that in Hewn City, affection was often just another method of control.

Her mother oversaw nearly every part of her upbringing personally. Rowan was dressed impeccably, taught posture before comfort, silence before honesty, and observation before trust. Mistakes were corrected immediately and relentlessly. Education existed only where it served a purpose: court etiquette, noble presentation, language, manipulation, emotional restraint, and understanding power without needing it explained aloud. Rowan learned how to identify weakness in a conversation before she was old enough to attend one herself. She learned which nobles lied with their mouths and which lied with their posture. Most importantly, she learned how to remain unreadable.

Yet despite the control surrounding her, Rowan was never obedient by nature. Even as a child, rebellion surfaced in quiet, stubborn ways. She disappeared constantly, climbed where she was forbidden, slipped away from gatherings to scale upper terraces and support arches high above the city floor. While other noble children learned dances and politics willingly, Rowan memorized routes through abandoned corridors and hidden staircases. She loved height instinctively. Open space and momentum. The feeling of balancing on structures no one else dared walk. The mountain itself became her escape long before she understood why she needed one.

During those years, she found the closest thing she would ever have to a real friendship. Another noble girl, older and far bolder in ways Rowan admired quietly, became her companion through much of childhood. Together they wandered sections of Hewn City they were never meant to see, slipping through servant passages, climbing balconies, hiding above crowded gatherings while nobles performed beneath them. Rowan was quieter between the two, more watchful, but fiercely loyal once attached. For a time, those moments gave her something dangerously close to freedom.

After she left, Hewn City changed for Rowan in ways no one else seemed to notice. The city was still loud when it wanted to be. Music still drifted from balconies. Nobles still smiled with too many teeth and hosted gatherings beneath chandeliers carved into black stone. Nothing outwardly collapsed. But Rowan felt the difference immediately, like something vital had been cut from the mountain itself. Corridors once filled with whispered laughter became quieter. Colder. Even the air felt heavier afterward. No one spoke about her directly around Rowan. Not properly. Adults lowered their voices when she entered rooms. Servants looked down. Guards pretended not to hear questions they would once have answered. But Rowan understood enough to know what had been done to her friend. She understood punishment. Understood humiliation. Understood what Hewn City did to people who refused to become what it demanded. Most of all, she understood that escape had been possible. That realization, above all else, settled somewhere dangerous inside her.

Before, her climbing had been childish curiosity. A way to avoid lessons, disappear from gatherings, and feel something other than watched. Afterward, it became obsession. Rowan started climbing higher into the city than ever before, searching out forgotten staircases, unstable support arches, narrow ledges suspended over impossible drops. The higher she climbed, the quieter the city became. Nobles disappeared. Guards disappeared. The constant pressure of Hewn City loosened just enough for her to breathe. That was where she met him. The old guard occupied one of the upper perimeter levels few people bothered patrolling anymore. He was old and scarred, but broad-shouldered despite age. One of his knees were stiff enough to drag slightly when he walked. He looked more like part of the mountain than someone serving it. Rowan nearly slipped the first time he spoke to her, startled by the sudden voice cutting through the silence. “You’re putting your weight wrong.” Was all he said.

Rowan remembered staring at him across the narrow stone support she’d been balancing on, instantly defensive. Most guards either reported her or tried to escort her back below. He did neither. He only sat against a pillar beside an old lantern, watching her like someone mildly inconvenienced. When she snapped out why he cared, the answer she received made her like him immediately. “Because scraping noble girls off the lower terraces ruins my evening, Princess." It should have offended her. Instead, Rowan returned the next day. And the next. At first he taught her nothing directly. He only corrected mistakes. Foot placement, balance, weight distribution, how to land without breaking an ankle on uneven stone, how to tell which sections of Hewn City shifted during colder months. Rowan learned quickly that the mountain was alive in small ways. Stone sweated, rails loosened, and old supports groaned beneath pressure. The city could kill the careless as easily as any blade.

Eventually he handed her a weathered staff without explanation. Rowan turned it once in her hands. It was dark, old, and worn smooth with age. He was rough on her from the beginning. He was impatient, and unimpressed by excuses. Every mistake earned criticism immediately. But he never treated her delicately, never bowed to her name, never looked at her like something fragile or dangerous to manage. Rowan found herself returning simply because of that. Around him, she wasn’t a future asset, and she wasn’t a disappointment, or a daughter carrying expectations too large for her own body. She was simply a girl climbing like a lunatic through a mountain. The staff training evolved naturally alongside the climbing. Nothing elegant or ceremonial. He taught her practicality above all else. Rowan learned to fight within Hewn City itself, using architecture as instinctively as breathing. Her movements became fast, efficient, and difficult to predict. It was less like formal combat and more like survival sharpened into skill.

Somewhere during those years, Rowan stopped searching the upper levels for freedom and started searching them for solitude instead. Because by then she understood something painful about Hewn City: People abandoned and changed. Or they stayed long enough to become part of the stone.

As Rowan grew older, admiration slowly became something far more complicated. As a child, she had viewed the older noble girl with something dangerously close to awe. To Rowan, she had been fearless, and untouchable. Everything Rowan secretly wanted to be beneath the careful control imposed upon her. When she escaped Hewn City, Rowan did not hate her for it. Not then. If anything, the escape lodged itself inside Rowan like proof that freedom was real, that the mountain could be survived, that someone had finally refused to let it swallow them whole. But time passed, and childhood understanding gave way to something sharper. She learned what happened. Her friend had been engaged, escaped, slept with an Illyrian, and then was cast out. Rowan did not blame her for any of this.

The High Lord and his court still came to Hewn City from time to time before Amarantha’s reign. Not often, and never comfortably, but enough for Rowan to see them standing within the same halls she could not escape. Enough to watch them leave again afterward. To Rowan, they became living reminders of everything she did not have: freedom, power, choice, or distance from the mountain itself. She never blamed the older girl for what had been done to her. Rowan understood cruelty too well for that. Understood exactly what Hewn City was capable of when challenged. But resentment still grew quietly within her all the same, because from Rowan’s perspective, the people who knew the city’s horrors best had still left it standing. They escaped it while others remained trapped beneath it. She had abandoned Rowan, then came back and rubbed the freedom in their faces.

Her mother nurtured those feelings carefully. Never loudly. Never openly enough to be questioned. The poison came slowly, woven into ordinary conversation until Rowan could no longer separate her own bitterness from the ideas planted there. They were reminders that power protected only its favorites. That the people above the mountain pitied Hewn City while benefiting from its existence. That no one was coming to save anyone left beneath the stone. By then Rowan already felt abandoned enough for those words to settle deeply, and much more harshly.

It was during those years that her mother’s treatment of her powers also began to change. What had once been correction became experimentation disguised as discipline. Rowan was pushed harder, tested further, expected to maintain absolute composure regardless of pain, exhaustion, sickness, or fear. Emotional reactions were treated as failures. Physical ones resulted in terrifying punishments. Control became everything. Long hours blurred together beneath relentless expectation as her mother sought to shape Rowan into something precise, contained, and useful. Power was never presented as something belonging to Rowan herself. It was treated as something dangerous to manage, something that could either elevate or destroy her depending on how perfectly it was restrained.

The combination hardened Rowan quickly. Isolation deepened as resentment settled into silence. She stopped speaking openly about what she felt because emotion became dangerous once others learned how to use it against her. By the time she reached her adult years, Rowan had become difficult to read even for those closest to her. She was calm, controlled. No more than a weapon waiting to be launched. But beneath that restraint lived a growing fury she refused to let anyone fully touch.

Only in the upper levels of Hewn City did she still feel remotely like herself. She climbed constantly by then, pushing farther into the mountain’s vast architecture than anyone realized. Narrow ledges suspended over impossible drops. Forgotten bridges. Support arches hidden near the cavern ceiling. The higher she climbed, the quieter the city became. No politics, no lessons, no expectations. Here, there was only cold air, stone beneath her hands, and movement. Somewhere during those years, climbing stopped being rebellion alone and became survival. Ironically, the mountain that once imprisoned her became the only place where she could briefly feel beyond anyone’s control.

Amarantha did not conquer Hewn City separately from the rest of Prythian. When the High Lords were trapped and stripped of most of their power beneath the mountain, all courts fell under her control, including the Night Court. Yet unlike many places in Prythian, Hewn City adapted to her reign with disturbing ease. The Court of Nightmares had always understood cruelty, hierarchy, fear, and survival through power. Amarantha did not create those things there. She simply amplified them.

To Rowan, the transition felt horrifyingly natural. The mountain changed during those years, but not in the ways outsiders might have expected. The lavish gatherings grew quieter. Smiles became sharper, and more careful. Nobles learned quickly which conversations were dangerous and which loyalties kept them alive. Fear settled into Hewn City like damp within the stone itself, touching every corridor and balcony. But the structure remained. The city continued functioning because survival demanded it.

Her mother adapted immediately. Of course, not openly enough to appear desperate, but strategically enough for Rowan to notice. Alignments shifted while conversations became more calculated. Information became currency. Rowan watched her mother survive through careful proximity to power, currying favor where useful, offering loyalty where necessary, and ensuring their position within the mountain remained protected beneath Amarantha’s rule. There was no open devotion, no worship, but Rowan understood the truth all the same: her mother was willing to stand close to monstrous things if it meant surviving them. And Rowan hated it.

By then, she had already become useful in ways few people fully recognized. Quiet, agile, observant, and easy to overlook, Rowan moved through Hewn City collecting fragments of information almost instinctively. She climbed through forgotten upper structures, crossed servant passages, lingered unseen above political gatherings, and carried overheard conversations back to her mother because refusing had never truly felt possible. She was never formally called a spy, yet that was effectively what she became beneath the mountain: controlled, silent, and valuable precisely because no one paid enough attention to her to fear her.

What poisoned Rowan most deeply during those years, however, was not Amarantha herself. It was the High Lord of Night. Rowan knew only what he allowed the world to see beneath the mountain. Cruelty. Submission. Entertainment at Amarantha’s side. A monster standing willingly beside another monster. Whatever truths existed beneath that performance remained entirely hidden from someone like Rowan, trapped far below the level where such secrets were shared. From her perspective, he became confirmation of everything Hewn City had always taught her about power: that it corrupted absolutely, that survival mattered more than morality, and that those strong enough to escape suffering rarely destroyed the systems beneath them. Her resentment deepened alongside that belief. Over time, bitterness settled into the spaces admiration once occupied. Because from Rowan’s perspective, those who escaped Hewn City had gone on to build lives above the mountain while the people left behind remained trapped beneath it. The city stayed cruel. The system survived. No one came back to tear it apart. No one even tried.

By the end of Amarantha’s long reign, which was ended by a mere mortal girl, not anyone who was actually under the mountain, or had even been in a position to stop this before it had even begun, Rowan had stopped believing goodness and power could exist together at all, and any good emotion left had been locked under a deep hatred that to this day, continues to be nurtured by everyone around her.