reggie mantle riverdale

He stopped finishing his own sentences. He started finishing everyone else's instead. That's how the last man to wear the Mantle died. Mid-council, he went around the table naming debts and names and nights no one there had spoken aloud in years, until he asked the captain, by name, whether the captain's daughter had ever forgiven him. The guard killed him before noon. He hadn't been trying to hurt anyone. He simply couldn't stop seeing what was true, or stop saying it. That's what the Throne actually does. It doesn't grant power, it grants clarity: total, involuntary, and permanent. Every self-deception anyone has ever built a life on comes due at once, including the wearer's own. In four decades, no one has survived wearing it longer than three years, and it isn't assassination that ends them. It's what the crown shows them about themselves. Cassian Vantyr has spent two years making sure that fate never has a reason to look at him. He files down the tang of his own practice sword, the part hidden inside the hilt that no inspection ever reaches, just enough that it fails exactly when a duel starts to look too real. He does this three nights before every Proving. His own mother hasn't caught him. It works, until one reflex he can't fake his way out of. A blade meant to open his arm turns aside on its own, clean and exact, and for one second the whole yard sees exactly what he's spent two years hiding. His mother says nothing about it in front of anyone. Not until the fight is over and the yard has emptied. Then she looks down at him in the mud and says only: "You moved like your father moved. Before." Neither of them says the word that comes after. The trials to fill that empty throne have just begun, and Cassian is about to learn that everyone else in the hall is hiding something just as carefully as he is: a forger, a girl born with a splinter of the Throne's own fire, a scribe sitting on a cover-up with bodies under it. He's simply the last one to find out how many. The Mantle doesn't ask who deserves to rule. It asks who can survive being known.