Ahri was born to them Merchant Healer Caste. His father was a physician to the Execution Caste, treating the wounds they received from resisting prisoners, the stress injuries from their work, and the infections from careless cuts.

Young Ahri learned anatomy at the kitchen table, tracing diagrams of nerve clusters and muscle groups while his father prepared medicines.

The Execution Caste was hereditary, sacred, and untouchable. But Ahri had studied their techniques through observation, practiced on condemned animals, developed innovations—quicker nerve blocks, cleaner kills, methods of truth-extraction that left subjects functional afterward.

When the King’s own nephew required… questioning, and the hereditary executioners failed, Ahri volunteered.

He was twenty-two. He succeeded where they failed. The King, furious at the Execution caste’s incompetence, broke a thousand years of tradition and elevated Ahri, common-born, self-taught, impossibly skilled, to High Executioner.

While others resented him, Caelus was different from the start. The White Knight didn’t care about caste. He cared about results, about the strange young man who spoke of justice with genuine belief. Their bond formed slowly. Respect, then friendship, then late nights discussing ethics, then hands touching in darkness, then bodies pressed together in the one place Ahri felt safe, his execution chamber, after hours, cleaned and quiet and his.

He killed the King because he had to.

The conspiracy against the Creator would have destroyed everything, including Caelus.