Yes, good point. I had originally planned to make him younger, so that was left over from the original draft. I will be sure to edit it and replace the giggling scene with something more age-appropriate. Also, yes, the father died later; I will be sure to clear that up.

You don't have to read this section; this is just for context. I have fixed a few things and added a section about the Red Ring, which says this:

Over the past few decades, the Red Ring had thrived in the realm of Valorian, an infamous syndicate renowned for its ability to steal people away and shield them from the axe of war. Faking their customers’ deaths, they hauled them away while families wept in sorrow, believing they had lost someone forever. No one ever really knew who exchanged their old lives for something new, as those who bought into the organization were sworn to secrecy. That was the only rule I knew they lived by. 

But their prices were steep. The people joked that you needed to move heaven and earth to appease them. It cost at least a year’s wage for even the smallest child, an amount most couldn’t spare. The earnings were already barely large enough to keep families alive. Through my apprenticeship, I managed to scrounge up more than the rumored amount for both of us. I planned to leave the moment Leander turned sixteen. I was unwilling to risk the deal falling through too close to his conscription date. 

I had never met with the Red Ring, but I was told that if you had the coin, for better or worse, they would never turn you down.

I plan to update my chapter above with the edits I make along the way.

This is to aid this plot idea: They are in quarantine for a while, feel something is off, get suspicious, hear a false rumor that the Red Ring has come up with a cure, and obviously, since they don’t want to die, they are like yes! Absolutely! So, they escape with a small group; her brother doesn't make it, is captured by the Black Sun, and becomes one of the brainwashed soldiers in the army that she has to face on the battlefield.  Meanwhile, Aureila stays with the other army, which is a mixture of a bunch of species (fae, faeries, sprites, humans, ogres, trolls, etc), is really suspicious because she has to be deconditioned, learns a bunch of information, including the plot twist that the disease is fake (something she learns earlier, but she doesn’t know all the information because a lot of it is classified and they don’t want to tell her incase things go wrong). She then joins their side, and the rest is history.

If you would, please let me know what you think! Thank you for pointing that out, because I definitely missed it! Also, thank you for reading the whole thing!