Knowledge Is Power: The Last Reader

Dream Eater didn’t ask permission before it opened the door.

Milo felt it happen the way he felt everything Merlin’s borrowed magic touched—not cast so much as unfolded, a spell built to find the deepest, truest shape of a dream and slowly, patiently consume it from the inside until only nightmare remained. He’d expected, in the half-second before it landed, something grand. A King’s ambitions, a King’s certainty, laid bare and devoured.

What answered instead was not a dream at all.

He never had one, Merlin’s voice said, quiet now, all the earlier warmth gone entirely still. Feel that, kid? There’s nothing here to eat away at. It’s nightmare, straight down to the foundation. Always was.

The courtyard dissolved around them both.

---

The room that replaced it was small, and cold, and smelled of old stone and older fear.

A boy sat in the corner, knees drawn up to his chest. Seven, perhaps eight years old. Dark hair, thin in the specific, hollow way of a child who had learned early that meals were never guaranteed. He was not looking at the door. He was looking at his own hands, turning them over and over, as though searching them for some proof of worth he hadn’t yet managed to find.

Books surrounded him. Milo recognized one—a battered volume about unfortunate children, orphans who lost everything, who survived despite the world’s cruelty. The boy didn’t look like the one who destroyed them. He looked like the one who tried to protect them.

Third-born, Merlin said, and something ancient and sorrowful moved through the words. I know that child. But that’s impossible—he’s from my era. He is the man who would one day poison me.

Milo felt it, distant and secondhand, something wrong about this. The kingdom’s law, old and rigid, decreed the line of succession stopped mattering the moment the first son was born healthy. A second son existed only as insurance. A third son existed only as a mistake nobody had quite managed to prevent.

Why is he the center of this memory, Merlin murmured, and not the boy we were fighting?

The door opened.

The boy who entered was older—twelve, perhaps thirteen. Golden-haired, broad already through the shoulders in the way that promised considerable size to come.

The second son, Merlin said. I remember him.

And Milo understood, watching the youngest boy in the corner flinch bodily at the sight of his brother, that whatever came next had happened many times before tonight.

"Little brother," the elder boy said, pleasant, in a voice that made Milo’s borrowed skin crawl. "Father says I have to make sure you learn how to be a prince and be useful to the kingdom. You know what that means."

"Please don’t," the small one said, too fast, too frightened.

"Don’t you dare neglect your duty."

Nothing about the elder brother’s posture changed. He didn’t raise a hand, didn’t reach for any weapon, didn’t so much as take a full step closer—and yet the smaller boy’s whole body seized, rigid, involuntary, the exact same helpless, total obedience Milo had watched forced onto a young guard in a throne room weeks and a lifetime ago.

That’s the King’s ability, Milo said. How does the second son have it? I thought it was only inherited when the King dies.

Silence from Merlin. Then, slowly: There is no such thing. That ability is so unique I don’t think it has existed before, even in my time. And what you said about inheritance...

Merlin’s voice grew grim. That was the third son’s talent. Unheard of. He had no idea how to control it. He came to me once, trying to figure it out. All I could determine was that he had the ability to inherit things from his bloodline—or leave things to his bloodline. The skill depended on the user. On what he truly desired.

"Kneel," the elder brother said, almost gentle, almost fond, the way one might speak to a favored dog.

The small boy knelt. Tears streamed silently down a face that had, Milo understood with cold certainty, learned a very long time ago that crying loudly only ever made things worse.

"Better," the elder brother said, crouching to eye level, still smiling that same warm, terrible smile. "You understand, don’t you, why this has to happen. Father can’t be bothered noticing either of us properly—not with an heir already secured. So I’ve decided I’ll be the one who notices you instead. Every single day, if that’s what it takes, until you finally understand your place in this family."

He reached out and rested one hand, almost affectionately, against the smaller boy’s head.

"You have nothing but me," he said, soft, devastating. "No gift. No claim on anyone’s obedience. No magic worth mentioning. Nothing that makes you special at all. I could end you right now, and Father would barely notice you’d gone missing before his next meal. The only reason you’re still breathing is that I find you useful to practice on."

His smile widened.

"Isn’t that a generous arrangement? I’m the only reason you matter at all."

The small boy said nothing. He had, Milo understood, stopped believing there was anything worth saying a long time before tonight.

The vision blurred, fast-forwarding through what felt like years compressed into moments—the same room, the same brother, the same cruel, patient lessons repeated across a childhood that never once offered relief.

Sometimes the elder brother forced him to kneel for hours.

Sometimes he forced him to strike himself, again and again, his own hand raised and lowered against his own will while the elder brother watched, delighted, cataloguing every flinch.

Always, always, the same devastating refrain. Every time he felt unnoticed. Every time he felt like an extra—which was all the time.

You have nothing. You are nothing. The only worth you’ll ever have is the worth I decide to give you.

Milo felt something old and furious rising in his own chest, entirely separate from Merlin’s quieter, ancient grief.

This is where he learned it, he understood, cold and certain. Everything he’s done to every soldier, every guard, every man he’s ever bent to his own will without a shred of resistance—he learned it from watching it done to himself, over and over, until it stopped feeling like cruelty and simply became the shape the whole world was supposed to take.

Perhaps, Merlin said, quiet. Or perhaps that’s simply the beginning of a story. There are still other mysteries—like how he is reincarnated into the current King’s body.

Milo looked properly, for the first time, at the small boy’s face rather than the horror being done to it—and found, unsettlingly, that the eyes staring back out of that hollow, frightened child did not entirely match the rest of him. He was transforming into something else. He was being broken into something else.

I know that look, Merlin said, and something in his ancient voice had gone genuinely, thoroughly unsettled—the first time, Milo realized, that he’d heard real fear from a man who had faced dragons and kings and his own poisoned death without flinching once. I’ve seen it before. The same eyes he gave me as he killed me. I was invited by the King to investigate the death of his two older brothers.

"All of this is not possible," Milo said, out loud, the words arriving strange and hollow in the empty dream-space around them. "This is the wrong memory. How is this his childhood? He’s the man we’ve been fighting?"

A flicker of something cold passed behind Merlin’s eyes. "I know what the third son does."

He stared at his hands, flexing them as if seeing them for the first time. "When someone dies around him—truly dies—he takes a piece. A skill. That’s how he got the brother’s gift. It wasn’t training. It wasn’t study. He just waited."

His throat moved.

"And when he dies..."

The silence stretched. He didn’t finish. The air in the room seemed to thicken, pressing against my lungs.

When he dies, I thought, he leaves it behind.

His soul. Given freely.

Milo opened his mouth to say it, but Merlin was already shaking his head. The table groaned under his clenched fists. "No. That’s too simple. There has to be a price. Something that balances it. Blood can’t be the only key." His voice dropped, ragged. "If it were, he wouldn’t be afraid to die. And I’ve seen him afraid."

Maybe that’s the condition to get reincarnation. He needs to grab onto the will to stay—the desire to keep going. So he can’t treat the life he had with disrespect.

Milo felt something cold settle into his chest, understanding arriving slow and unwelcome.

"Then who is he?" he said. "This is part of his origin—"

Merlin lifted his gaze from his hands, but his eyes didn’t focus on me. They tracked something in the past, watching a ghost move through a room that no longer existed.

"He used to stand in the corner of the council chamber," Merlin said quietly. "Holding a cup. He’d refill it every time it cooled—just so he had a reason to cross the room, to make footsteps, to remind everyone he occupied space." A pause. "When his brother died, he walked in carrying that same cup. Full. Spilling a little on his sleeve. Everyone stared at the empty throne. No one looked at the wet cuff."

He set his own cup down now. The clink against the wood was sharp.

His jaw tightened.

"You want to know how low he was? His father—the old king—made him fill his cup. Even when a dozen servants stood idle by the walls. His father would snap his fingers and point to the prince, and he’d walk over, take the pitcher, pour, and step back. No argument. No wounded pride. He did it like breathing. Like it was the most natural thing in the world for a prince to play footman while his own staff watched."

Merlin’s voice went flat. "When his brother died, he walked in carrying that same cup. Full. Spilling a little on his sleeve. Everyone stared at the empty throne. No one looked at the wet cuff."

He set his own cup down now. The clink against the wood was sharp.

"Three days later, he was crowned next in line. And still—still—the servants would hand his meals to the chair beside him. The generals would report to the spot where the brother used to stand. They crowned a king and treated him like a footstool."

The small boy in the vision lifted his head, at last, and looked directly out of the dream—not at his tormenting brother, not at the cold stone room around him, but straight toward the exact place where Milo and Merlin stood watching.

Invisible.

Uninvited.

He smiled.

It was not a child’s smile at all.

"You shouldn’t be here," the boy said, and his voice, when it finally spoke directly to them, carried none of the fear it had carried through every prior scene—only a low, patient, ancient amusement that made every hair on Milo’s borrowed body rise at once.

"Look away, look away—

This tale is mine, this tale must stay.

Unfortunate, unfinished, with no happy end to say.

I have no dreams, no hope to give—

So look away.

LOOK AWAY!"

Milo knew that quote. It was from a children’s story. A story about orphans who lost everything. A story about surviving when the world offered nothing but cruelty.

The vision shattered.

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