When my father finally spoke, his voice was quieter than before.
"Because we believed you would die if we told the truth."
I blinked.
"What?"
His eyes met mine.
"Before your mother and I died, your grandfather and even great grandfather started noticing things."
My mother picked up the explanation without hesitation.
"At first, they looked like coincidences."
The warmth that usually filled her voice was gone.
"Important bloodlines losing children. Hidden descendants suddenly being discovered. Families suffering attacks shortly after information about them became known."
A knot slowly formed in my stomach.
My father leaned back in his chair.
"It wasn’t always the Eternals themselves."
"Sometimes it was an abomination attack. Sometimes phantoms. Sometimes entire settlements disappeared without any explanation at all."
His jaw tightened.
"Individually, none of those incidents proved anything."
"But after seeing enough of them, the pattern became impossible to ignore."
Roland folded his arms.
"The victims were never random."
His voice carried none of its usual humor.
"The people who disappeared always shared something valuable."
I already knew the answer before he said it.
"They mattered."
Roland nodded.
"Heirs."
"Descendants."
"Future talents."
"Children carrying bloodlines powerful enough to attract attention."
The air around the table seemed heavier now.
Every answer only raised more questions.
"When we started looking deeper," my mother said, "we discovered something that frightened us far more than the attacks themselves."
I frowned.
"What was it?"
Her eyes lifted toward me.
"We couldn’t figure out how the information was spreading."
For a moment I thought I had misheard.
"What do you mean?"
"We mean exactly that," my father replied. "We searched for traitors, spies and investigated anyone with access to family records."
His expression darkened.
"We found nothing."
Roland leaned forward slightly.
"And yet somehow the information kept reaching the wrong people."
My mother continued quietly.
"There were cases where only a handful of people knew a child existed."
"Sometimes only immediate family."
"Sometimes even fewer."
My father’s eyes narrowed.
"And somehow the Eternals still found them."
The knot in my stomach tightened.
"You thought someone here was leaking information."
"We suspected it."
The answer came immediately.
"But suspicion and proof are not the same thing."
My father shook his head.
"We never found evidence. Not once. Just patterns."
Roland’s expression remained grim.
"But after arriving in the Null Realm, we noticed something else."
I looked at him.
"The families that suffered the highest losses were often the same families that diligently reported every surviving descendant they still had in the real world."
For a moment nobody spoke.
The implication didn’t need explaining.
I could see it clearly.
Every family that followed tradition. Every family that submitted complete records. Every family that trusted the information would remain secure. And every family whose children seemed to die at alarming rates.
My father let out a humorless laugh.
"Maybe it was all coincidence."
His fingers drummed once against the table.
"Maybe we were seeing patterns where none existed."
He looked directly at me.
"But by that point we weren’t willing to gamble with your life."
My mother’s hand reached across the table and closed around mine. When I looked up, there was no uncertainty in her eyes.
"When the family asked whether we had left anyone behind, we lied."
The words came without hesitation.
"We told them there were no children. We told them our bloodline ended with us."
My father nodded.
"If someone was collecting that information and passing it along, then we wanted your name erased from every record that could possibly reach them."
I sat back in silence. Suddenly dozens of unanswered questions from my life snapped together.
Why nobody from the Ironharts had ever searched for me. Why the family had been so shocked when I arrived. Why I had effectively vanished from their history as though I had never existed at all.
Because someone had hidden me.
My mother squeezed my hand gently.
"We hated it."
For the first time since the explanation began, emotion slipped into her voice.
"There wasn’t a day we didn’t wonder whether we had made the right choice."
Her eyes glistened faintly.
"But the thought of losing you terrified us far more than breaking a family tradition."
After several moments, I finally asked the question that had been sitting in the back of my mind since the explanation began.
"Do you think it worked?"
The three of them exchanged glances. Roland answered first.
"I think it bought you time."
My father nodded slowly.
"Time to grow. Time to become strong enough that nobody could simply make you disappear."
A faint smile appeared on my mother’s face.
"And after that," my mother said softly, a faint smile touching her lips, "it seems the Eternals were the ones who needed to be afraid."
I nodded slowly.
"I would have done the same," I admitted. The more I thought about it, the more their decision made sense. If I had been in their position and faced the possibility of losing the only child I had left behind, I wasn’t sure I would have chosen differently. Still, one part of the explanation continued to bother me.
"There’s something that doesn’t add up, though."
The three of them looked at me.
"If there really was a traitor passing information to the Eternals, then our settlement should have been discovered long ago. The location of this place isn’t exactly a minor secret. Anyone with access to that information could have handed over far more valuable intelligence than the name of a single child."
I glanced around the dome before continuing.
"But the settlement is still hidden. Everyone here is still alive. If a leak existed, then whoever was responsible never revealed the most important secret of all."
A thoughtful silence followed.
"Which means?" Roland asked.
"Which means I don’t think there was a traitor."
My father frowned slightly.
"You think we’re missing something else."
"I do."
The idea had only just formed, but the more I considered it, the more reasonable it seemed.
"What about an artifact?"
Roland blinked.
"An artifact?"
I nodded.
"What if the Eternals never needed an informant in the first place? What if they possessed some kind of artifact capable of revealing that information? Something that could identify bloodlines, descendants, or hidden heirs without relying on spies."
The table fell silent. For a brief moment nobody said anything.
Then my father’s expression changed.
His eyes narrowed slightly as if a distant memory had suddenly resurfaced.
"Region Four," he said quietly.
The words seemed to hit the others immediately.
My mother’s eyes widened.
Roland straightened in his chair.
"Region Four and its Eternal."
A strange tension settled over the table.
I looked between them.
"What?"
Roland slowly rubbed his chin.
"That... is actually possible."
The casual confidence from earlier had vanished entirely. Now he sounded as though he were piecing together fragments of an old puzzle.
"Why?" I asked.
My father exhaled slowly.
"Because the Eternal who rules Region Four possesses a very unusual relic."
I frowned.
"What kind of relic?"
"The All-Knowing Eyes."a