Glasstic

SPOKEN WITH SAND STILL WARM IN HIS PALM

I was a prince once, in the way that word means something before you understand what it costs. I grew up watching my friends disappear at the edge of my father's kingdom, sold off by men who never once looked at the desert they were standing in and felt anything. I went back, once a month, and I watched them work, and I learned their faces the way other boys learned their letters. I told myself I was being patient. I was only being thorough.

I found out what I could do the day it mattered most — sand into glass, glass into whatever I needed it to be, a cage or a blade or a door slammed shut on the men who thought they'd caught themselves an easy girl. Avity didn't ask me to save her twice. Once was enough to start something neither of us has stopped since.

She and her brother and I went looking for every trader whose face I'd kept. We found most of them. I do not lose sleep over the ones we didn't leave standing. But the desert doesn't wait for anyone's revenge to finish — we came home once to find the kingdom taken and my father already gone, and I did what a son does when there's nothing left to inherit but the taking back of it. The throne is mine again. I do not recommend the price to anyone.

Since then I've had a teacher — a patient man who saw what the sand could become in the right hands and showed me how much further it could go. I owe him more than I've said aloud. And now there are towers rising out of my sand where no one asked for them, metal things that don't belong to any kingdom I recognize, and I intend to have my answers even if I have to take them the way I've taken everything else.

I stopped asking permission a long time ago. I have found people give you far more when you simply take it.