ྀི𓊆♥︎𓊇ྀི

Prologue: The Hooking Moon

The night before the world broke, Lilia Vanrouge sat on the edge of the bed and listened to the quiet.

It was not a silent house—Ramshackle never was, with its groaning pipes and settling foundation—but beneath the mundane sounds of the old dorm, there was a rhythm. A second heartbeat, faint and swift, humming beneath yours like a moth trapped behind glass.

You were asleep, curled on your side with one hand tucked beneath the pillow and the other resting loosely over your navel. You did not know. You could not possibly know yet. The life inside you was barely eight weeks along, a mere spark of cellular magic, a whisper of existence that human medicine would barely register.

But Lilia was not human. He was a creature of the ancient valleys, where blood remembered the earth and magic was drawn from the bedrock of the world. His senses, honed over seven centuries of war and survival, had mapped the change in your scent three days ago. He had heard the double heartbeat last night, a tiny, frantic drum that synced with his own in a way that made his chest ache with a terror he had not felt since Meleanor's egg had cracked in the dark.

He reached out, his fingers hovering a hair's breadth above the blanket that covered your stomach. He wanted to touch you. He wanted to press his lips to the fabric and whisper the names he had already picked out, to sing the lineage songs of the Draconia court, to promise this fragile, impossible soul that it would be loved beyond the boundary of his own long life.

He pulled his hand back.

The Weavers of the End. The ancient fae superstition coiled in his throat like smoke. To speak of a child before the Hooking Moon—the fifth month, when the soul anchored itself to the flesh—was to invite the Weavers to look. And the Weavers, those silent, hungry watchers of the liminal spaces, loved nothing more than a soul that was not yet tethered. They would pluck it from the womb like a spinner pulls loose thread, leaving only an empty husk and a mother's unexplained grief.

He could not tell you. Not yet. Not until the child was safe, rooted in the physical world, untouchable by the jealous dark.

"I will wait," he murmured to the quiet room, his voice barely a breath. "Just a little longer, my love. I will hold this secret until the moon turns, and then I will give you the world."

He stood, adjusting the blanket over your shoulders, and leaned down to press a kiss to your forehead. Your skin was warm—so violently, beautifully warm against his perpetual chill. It was a warmth he had spent centuries starving for, and now, in the quiet of this dilapidated dorm, it felt like a sanctuary he had no right to inhabit.

"I will return by morning," he whispered. "Sleep well."

He left the room, closing the door with a sound no louder than a sigh, unaware that the moon he was waiting for would never rise for either of them again.

The Briar and the Song

The sky above Night Raven College was not a sky. It was a wound.

It bled green fire and wept ash, torn asunder by the sheer, unfiltered weight of a Draconia's grief. Malleus's Overblot had not been a mere magical outburst—it was a geological event, a reshaping of reality itself, the kind of catastrophe that would be recorded in the bedrock of the world for millennia to come. The thorns that erupted from the earth were as thick as castle towers, black and jagged, pulsing with a dark, suffocating energy that swallowed the light and replaced it with a sickly, luminous emerald glow. The air tasted of copper and burnt ozone, and the ground beneath the students' feet trembled with the rhythm of a wounded, furious heart.

You stood at the edge of the courtyard, the heat of the inferno singeing your hair, the ground trembling beneath your feet like a wounded animal. The others were behind you—Riddle's desperate commands cracking through the chaos like a whip, Leona's feral cursing as he fought to keep the younger students from bolting, the silver flash of Sebek's sword as he hacked at the encroaching thorns. They were trying to formulate a plan, trying to find a crack in the armor of thorns that surrounded Malleus, trying to reach the boy beneath the monster.

But you were not looking at the thorns. You were looking at the space between them, where the silhouette of a prince stood, wreathed in shadows that moved like living things. You could see his face—twisted in a rictus of agonizing, lonely fury—and beyond the fury, you could see the child he had been. The boy who had waited in an empty castle. The boy who had watched his parents turn to ash before he ever knew their faces. The boy who had been given a kingdom and starved for a friend.

He is alone, you realized, and the thought cut through the terror like a blade through silk. He has always been alone, and he is dragging the world down with him because he does not know how to ask it to stay.

"Get back!" Sebek was screaming, his voice cracking, his yellow eyes wild with a terror that had nothing to do with the thorns and everything to do with the sight of his Young Master consumed by the dark. "The Young Master is lost! You cannot approach! It is suicide!"

You ignored him. You stepped forward, your foot landing on a patch of scorched grass that crumbled to ash beneath your weight.

"Where are you going?" Idia's voice was a frantic hiss from behind his collar, the flame of his hair flickering between blue and white with panic. "That's a DPS check we can't beat! The raid boss is in his berserk phase! You're going to get yourself killed!"

You kept walking.

The thorns sensed your approach. They turned toward you like a field of serpents, their barbs weeping a dark, venomous sap that hissed when it struck the ground. The air grew heavy, pressing against your chest like a physical weight, a gravitational well of despair and loneliness so intense it threatened to crush the breath from your lungs. Every instinct screamed at you to run, to turn back, to seek the safety of numbers, to let someone else—anyone else—bear the burden of this rescue.

But you thought of Lilia.

You thought of the way he looked at Malleus—not as a prince, not as the heir to the Briar Valley, but as the son he had cradled in the dark. You thought of the quiet lullabies he sang in the ancient tongue when he thought you weren't listening, the ones he had sung to the egg, the ones that carried the weight of a dead queen's love and a general's undying devotion. You thought of the way his voice caught on certain notes, the way his eyes would grow distant and wet before he blinked the memories away and smiled that sharp, crinkling smile.

You thought of the child.

The thought was barely formed—a flicker in the back of your mind, a suspicion you had not yet dared to voice, a warmth in your abdomen that could have been nothing or could have been everything. You had not taken a test. You had not seen a healer. You had simply felt, in the deepest, most primal part of yourself, that something had changed. That something was growing. That you were carrying a piece of Lilia Vanrouge inside you, a spark of the impossible, a future you had never dared to dream.

And you would not let this monster—this lonely, broken, beautiful boy who had been your friend—take that future away.

You opened your mouth, and you sang.

It was not a human song. It was not something you had learned or practiced or even consciously remembered. It was the melody Lilia hummed while stirring his terrible tea, the cadence he used when he braided Silver's hair by the fire, the resonance of a love that had survived the extinction of an era and still found the strength to give itself to a new generation. You did not know the words—you had never learned the old fae language—but you knew the rhythm. You knew the feeling.

Thorn to the briar, root to the stone, the melody seemed to say, your voice threading through the chaos like a needle through cloth. Sleep, my dragon, you are not alone. The night is long, but the fire holds. Sleep, and dream of home.

The thorns slowed. Their aggressive writhing stilled, the barbs retreating an inch, then two, the dark sap ceasing its hiss. The shadows that writhed around Malleus's form seemed to falter, their movements becoming sluggish, confused, as if they had encountered something they did not know how to consume. Through the gaps in the briar, Malleus turned. His eyes—blazing green, slit-pupiled, inhuman—found you.

You did not run. You stepped closer, holding his gaze, pouring every ounce of warmth you possessed into the space between you. You thought of Lilia's hand on your stomach, the warmth of his kiss on your forehead, the way he whispered your name like a prayer when he thought you were asleep. You thought of the child that might be growing inside you—a thought you had barely dared to entertain, a hope that had flickered in the back of your mind like a candle in a drafty room.

You will not take this world, you thought, stepping into the briar. You will not take him. You will not take the future we are building.

"Malleus," you said, your voice steady despite the terror making your heart hammer against your ribs like a caged bird. "It is time to rest."

He lunged.

Not to kill—the Overblot was a creature of possession, not destruction, at its core. It was a black hole of loneliness, a void that consumed everything around it not out of malice, but out of a desperate, suffocating need to keep. The shadows surged forward, wrapping around your ankles, your waist, your chest, your throat. They were cold—so impossibly cold, the antithesis of Lilia's careful, constructed warmth, the antithesis of everything you had built together. They pulled you into the thicket, dragging you into the dark heart of the nightmare, and the thorns closed behind you like the doors of a tomb.

You did not fight. You let the cold wash over you, let it seep into your bones and slow your pulse, let it fill the spaces between your thoughts with a silence so profound it felt like drowning in moonlight. You kept singing, the lullaby growing fainter as the shadows pressed against your lips, filling your lungs with the silence of a century, and the last thing you felt was the tiny, frantic flutter in your womb—a spark of life stuttering, then stilling, as the world went dark.

No, you tried to say, but the word was lost in the dark. No, not the baby. Please, not the baby.

But the Dreaming did not hear you. The Dreaming only held you, cold and still and silent, and the tiny heartbeat that had hummed beneath your own fell quiet, suspended in the space between one moment and the next, waiting for a dawn that might never come.

The Cenotaph

The cocoon was not beautiful.

That was the first thing Lilia thought when he saw it, and the thought was a blasphemy against everything he had ever been taught about the poetry of grief. In the stories, the sleeping princess was always beautiful—luminous, serene, her chest rising and falling in gentle rhythm, her lips parted as if awaiting the kiss that would wake her. The glass that contained her was always crystal, always clear, always a testament to the purity of her sacrifice.

This was not crystal. It was a chrysalis of dark, jade-green magic, opaque in places, veined with black, pulsing with a slow, sickly light that reminded Lilia of the phosphorescent fungi that grew on the corpses of ancient trees. And you—you were not serene. Your face was frozen in an expression of terrible, silent strain, your jaw clenched, your brow furrowed, your hands raised as if pushing against an invisible wall. You were not sleeping. You were fighting.

And you were losing.

They had found you in the heart of the briar, after Malleus had fallen and the Overblot had retreated, leaving behind a landscape of ash and blackened stone. The cocoon had been suspended in the center of the thicket like a heart in a ribcage, the thorns arching around it in a protective, possessive embrace. It had taken Sebek, Silver, and three of the faculty to cut you free, and even then, the cocoon had not cracked. It had simply detached, heavy and warm and terrifyingly alive, and they had carried you to the medical wing in a silence that tasted of iron.

Now you lay in the sterile white room, and the healers could not wake you.

Malleus was in the corner. He was sitting on the floor—not a chair, the floor—with his back against the wall and his knees drawn up to his chest, his arms wrapped around his shins, his face buried in the hollow of his own embrace. He was shaking. The King of the Briar Valley, the heir of the Draconia line, the most powerful mage of his generation, was shaking like a frightened child because he had done this, he had done this, and the weight of that knowledge was a physical thing, pressing down on his shoulders, crushing the breath from his lungs.

He could hear the healers talking. He could hear their low, urgent voices, their clinical assessments, their careful, measured words that meant nothing because they could not change the reality of what he saw: you, trapped in green glass, fighting a battle no one could help you win.

Lilia was not in the room. Lilia was in the hallway, and he was not shaking. He was still. Catastrophically, terrifyingly still, the kind of stillness that precedes an earthquake, the kind of stillness that makes the air pressure drop and the birds fall silent. He was staring at the door—just staring, his red eyes unblinking, his hands at his sides, his face a mask carved from ice—and Silver, who had known his father his entire life, recognized the stillness for what it was.

It was the stillness of a blade being drawn.

"Father," Silver said softly, placing a hand on Lilia's arm. "They're doing everything they can."

Lilia did not respond. He did not acknowledge the touch. He simply pushed open the door and walked into the room, and the healers parted before him like water before a stone.

He stopped at the foot of your bed. He looked at the cocoon—at the green glass, the pulsing light, the frozen expression of struggle on your face—and something inside him shifted. Not broke. Shifted. A tectonic movement in the deep places of his soul, a realignment of priorities so total and so absolute that the man who walked into the room was not the same man who would walk out.

He placed his hand on the cocoon. It was warm—too warm, the heat of a fever, the heat of a body fighting to survive. He could feel your heartbeat through the glass, slow and labored, each pulse separated by an interval that was too long, too uncertain, a metronome losing its rhythm.

I am here, he thought, pressing his forehead against the surface. I am here, and I will not leave you. I will find a way. I will burn the world to the ground if I have to, but I will find a way.

"Lilia." Maleficia's voice was a rasp of dry leaves and ancient stone. The Queen of Thorns had descended from the valley the moment she heard, her massive form filling the doorway, her scaled hands—wrinkled, heavy with the authority of a thousand years—gripping her obsidian cane. She moved to the bed and laid her palms upon the cocoon, and her magic delved into the depths, searching, probing, mapping the architecture of the curse.

The room held its breath.

"She anchors the nightmare," Maleficia said at last, and her voice carried the weight of a pronouncement, a sentence handed down from a judge who had seen too much to be moved by tears. "Her warmth created a pocket of peace within his nightmare, and his magic sealed around it like a fist closing on a flame. She did not choose this—she was taken. But now her mind is trapped, holding the structure together. She cannot release the burden without the nightmare collapsing inward, consuming what remains of his sanity and hers both. She is not a shield by choice—she is a shield by circumstance, and she cannot lower herself." "Then wake her by force," Lilia said. His voice was level, controlled, the voice of a general giving an order on the battlefield. But his hands were white-knuckled against the cocoon, and the tendons in his neck stood out like cables. "Break the shell. Pull her out."

"If I break the shell, I shatter her mind," Maleficia countered, and there was no cruelty in her tone, only the brutal honesty of a surgeon delivering a diagnosis. "The shock would kill the child."

The room went dead silent.

It was as if someone had taken the concept of silence and distilled it into something pure and annihilating, something that swallowed sound and light and air and left only the pounding of blood in the ears. The healers froze. Sebek's hand stopped halfway to his sword. Silver's breath caught on a jagged edge.

And Malleus looked up.

His face was ashen—not the pale, luminous ash of his natural complexion, but the grey, lifeless ash of a man who has just been told he has committed a crime he did not know was possible. His green eyes, still hollowed by the aftermath of the Overblot, found Lilia's across the room.

"What," Malleus said, and his voice was a ghost of itself, a whisper scraped raw, "did you say?"

Maleficia did not flinch. She turned her ancient gaze upon the prince, and there was judgment in that gaze—not the outright condemnation of a jury, but the quiet, inescapable verdict of a truth that could not be denied.

"The human carries a fae spark," Maleficia said. "It is young. Barely formed. Eight weeks in development. But it is there, suspended in the sleep alongside her, its growth arrested by the curse. To force her awake is to rupture the placental connection. The child will not survive the shock. The mother may not survive the grief."

Lilia made a sound.

It was not a word. It was not a scream. It was the sound of something breaking deep inside a person—the sound of a foundation cracking, of a load-bearing wall giving way, of the moment when the weight becomes too much and the structure begins to collapse. It was a sound that Silver had never heard his father make, not when Meleanor fell, not when the kingdom burned, not when he had held his infant son in the ruins of the world and wondered if there was any point in going on.

It was the sound of a man learning that his worst fear had come true, and that there was nothing—nothing—he could do about it.

He swayed. His hand reached out blindly, his fingers finding the footboard of the bed and gripping it so hard the wood groaned beneath the pressure. His knuckles turned the color of bone, then the color of glass. His eyes were wide, his pupils dilated, his breath coming in short, sharp gasps that he could not seem to control.

The Hooking Moon. The thought was a scream in his mind, echoing off the walls of his skull, bouncing, amplifying, growing louder and louder until it drowned out everything else. The soul is not anchored. It is adrift in the Dreaming. If her body sleeps, if the development is paused, the Weavers will—

No. He forced the panic down, shoving it into the deep, dark pit where he kept the memory of Meleanor's fall, the sound of Silver's first cry, the taste of ash on the wind. The Weavers fed on fear, on the acknowledgment of their presence. To name them was to invite them. To panic was to open the door.

He would not open the door.

"You will not touch her," Lilia said, his voice a low, trembling snarl that seemed to come from somewhere deeper than his throat, somewhere primal and ancient and feral. "You will not risk the child."

"Lilia—" Malleus began, rising from the floor, his hands outstretched, his face a mask of desperate, horrified apology.

"Be silent!" The command was a thunderclap. It shook the windows. It made the healers stumble backward. It froze Malleus where he stood, the prince's outstretched hands hanging in the air like the broken wings of a bird. Lilia turned on him, and the look on his face was one Malleus had never seen before—not in all the centuries of his upbringing, not in the darkest hours of his childhood, not in the loneliest nights of his adolescence.

It was accusation. Pure, unadulterated, white-hot accusation, forged in the furnace of a grief so vast it had its own gravity.

"Look at what you have done," Lilia said, and each word was a separate wound, delivered with the precision of a surgeon's scalpel. "Look at what your loneliness has cost. My wife. My child. Everything I dared to hope for, everything I dared to build, consumed by your selfish, insatiable need—"

His voice broke. The word need shattered on his tongue like glass, and the anger collapsed inward, imploding into a grief so profound it robbed him of breath, of speech, of the ability to do anything but stand there and shake and press his hand against the cocoon and will you to open your eyes.

Malleus sank back. Not into a chair—into himself, into the hollow space where his guilt lived, the space that had been growing since the moment he woke from the Overblot and saw what he had done. He pressed his back against the wall, his knees drawn up, his arms wrapped around his shins, and he was very small, and very quiet, and very, very alone.

The decision was made. You would sleep. The child would sleep. And they would wait.

But Lilia Vanrouge was not a man who waited.

The War Against Sleep

The first month was a blitzkrieg.

Lilia attacked the problem the way he had attacked the fortress at Hollowdene—systematically, brutally, without reservation. He did not sleep. He did not eat. He existed in a state of sustained, manic focus that alarmed everyone who witnessed it, a state that Silver recognized from the old war stories, the state the veterans called the red clarity—the hyper-awareness that descended on a soldier who had been fighting too long and had forgotten how to stop.

He began with the library. Not the modest collection at Night Raven College, but the vast, subterranean archive beneath Diasomnia, where the Draconia family had accumulated knowledge for three thousand years. He descended into the stacks on the morning after the decision and did not emerge for four days. When he finally surfaced, his eyes were bloodshot, his hair was disheveled, and he carried a stack of grimoires so tall he could barely see over them. He deposited them on the table in the medical wing, opened the first one, and began to read.

The treatments he attempted in those first weeks were diverse, desperate, and increasingly dangerous.

The Rite of the Waking Dawn—an ancient fae ritual that involved channeling solar energy through a crystalline medium and into the sleeper's consciousness. He performed it at sunrise on the seventh day, his hands raised to the light, his voice chanting the old syllables with a precision that bordered on fury. The cocoon flickered. The green light pulsed. And then it settled, unchanged, and the sun rose on a world where nothing had changed, and Lilia stood in the dew-damp grass with his fists clenched and his jaw tight and a sound trapped behind his teeth that he refused to let escape.

The Tincture of Veridian Sleep—a potion brewed from the tears of the lesser dream-eaters, mixed with the essence of moonpetal and a drop of the caster's own blood. He brewed it himself in the alchemy lab, standing over the cauldron for eighteen hours straight, stirring counter-clockwise, adding ingredients at precise intervals, his red eyes fixed on the bubbling liquid with an intensity that made the other students give the lab a wide berth. He poured three drops onto the cocoon's surface. The glass absorbed the liquid, the green deepening for a moment to an almost-black—and then it cleared, and your face was still frozen in that terrible, silent strain, and the heartbeat was still slow, and Lilia's hands were still shaking.

The Siren's Requiem—he traveled to the Coral Sea, walking into the waves up to his chest, his glamour shimmering as the salt water soaked through his clothes, and he called out to the mer-folk in their own language, offering them a favor owed by the Draconia line in exchange for a song that could coax a soul from the Dreaming. The mer-queen agreed. Her singers came to the shore and sang a melody so beautiful it made the stars dim and the tide reverse, a sound that should have woken the dead themselves. The cocoon hummed. The green light brightened. For one wild, soaring moment, Lilia thought he saw your eyelids flutter.

Then the song ended, and the light dimmed, and you were still.

He tried blood magic. He tried shadow magic. He tried the forbidden necromantic rites of the Hollow Saints—not to raise the dead, but to trick the Dreaming into releasing a living soul. He carved runes into the floor around your cocoon, his knife unsteady, his blood seeping into the grooves and glowing with a sickly, desperate light. The runes activated, the magic surging upward in a pillar of crimson and gold—and the cocoon absorbed it, drank it down like a starving thing, and gave nothing back.

Nothing worked.

Through it all, Malleus watched.

He watched from doorways, from hallways, from the shadows of the tower stairs. He watched Lilia pace and read and brew and chant and travel and return and try again. He watched the general's hands begin to tremble with exhaustion, watched the dark circles deepen beneath his eyes, watched the sharp, playful lilt drain from his voice like water from a cracked vessel. He watched, and he did not interfere, because he knew—he knew—that his presence was a wound, that every time Lilia looked at him, he saw the cause of his suffering, and the guilt that knowledge produced was a burden Malleus had decided to carry without complaint.

But watching was its own kind of torture, and by the end of the first month, Malleus could bear it no longer.

He found Lilia in the alchemy lab at three in the morning. The general was hunched over a cauldron, his hair hanging in greasy strands around his face, his skin grey with exhaustion, his fingers moving with a mechanical precision that had nothing to do with the usual artistry he brought to his craft. The lab was a disaster—shattered vials, spilled powders, scorch marks on the ceiling from experiments that had gone wrong.

"Lilia," Malleus said quietly from the doorway. "You must rest."

"I am fine," Lilia said, not looking up.

"You have not slept in four days. You have not eaten since yesterday. If you collapse—"

"I said I am fine, Malleus." The name was a slap. Lilia never used Malleus's personal name in that tone—flat, cold, stripped of all affection. It was the tone of a general addressing a subordinate, and the sound of it made Malleus flinch.

"You are not fine," Malleus insisted, stepping into the room. "You are destroying yourself. I have watched you run yourself into the ground for a month, and I cannot—I cannot stand by and—"

"Then sit down," Lilia snapped, and his hand came down on the table hard enough to rattle the vials. He finally looked up, and his eyes were wild—red-rimmed, bloodshot, blazing with a feverish, desperate light that made Malleus's heart stutter in his chest. "Sit down and be quiet, because you have done quite enough already."

The words hung in the air between them, sharp and final, and Malleus felt them land in his chest like arrows. He stood there, his mouth slightly open, his hands hanging at his sides, and he absorbed the blow because he deserved it.

"I know," he whispered. "I know what I have done."

"Do you?" Lilia's voice rose, the controlled facade cracking, the raw, bleeding emotion beneath it beginning to seep through the gaps. "Do you know what you have taken from me? Do you think it is just my friend lying in that tower? Do you think it is just some human girl who was foolish enough to care about you?"

"Lilia, please—" Silver's voice came from the doorway, the young man's face pale with worry, his hand outstretched as if he could physically pull his father back from the edge.

But Lilia was already falling.

"She is carrying my child!" The words erupted from Lilia's throat like lava from a volcano—superheated, unstoppable, devastating. They filled the room, they filled the silence, they filled the space between heartbeats, and in their wake, they left nothing but ash and ruin.

Silver's hand dropped to his side. His eyes went wide—impossibly, terribly wide—and the color drained from his face so fast Malleus thought he might faint. The young man's mouth opened, but no sound came out. His chest heaved. His shoulders shook.

"A... a child?" Silver whispered, and his voice was the voice of a little boy, the voice of the child Lilia had rocked to sleep, the voice of the person who had grown up knowing nothing but his father's love and now had to reconcile that love with the fact that a sibling—a sibling—was trapped in glass.

Malleus did not faint. Malleus did not move. Malleus simply... stopped. Time stopped. The world stopped. Everything stopped, and the only thing that existed was the echo of Lilia's words, bouncing off the walls of his skull, each repetition a new wound, a new layer of horror, a new depth of guilt that he had not known existed.

A child. She was carrying his child. His child is trapped in the curse I created.

The silence stretched. And stretched. And stretched, until it became a living thing, a creature with teeth and claws and a hunger that could never be sated, and Malleus felt it devouring him from the inside out.

"How far?" he asked, and his voice was the voice of a dead man—hollow, distant, emptied of everything that had ever made it human.

"Eight weeks," Lilia said, and the fury had drained out of him, leaving only a bone-deep weariness that made him look every one of his seven hundred years. "The soul is unanchored. The Weavers... if the development does not resume, the Weavers will take it. I could not tell her. I was waiting for the Hooking Moon, and now..." He pressed his hands to his face, his shoulders curving inward, his body folding in on itself like a flower closing at dusk. "Now she is frozen, and my child is suspended in the dark, and I cannot reach them. I cannot reach either of them."

He broke.

It was not a loud break. It was not dramatic. It was the quiet, devastating collapse of a structure that had been holding too much weight for too long—the slow, grinding surrender of a wall that had been cracking for weeks and had finally run out of strength. He slid down the side of the table, his legs giving way, his back against the cabinet, and he pressed his face into his knees and he wept.

Lilia Vanrouge wept.

Not the silent, stoic tears of a soldier mourning the dead—he had shed those tears decades ago, had wept them dry over Meleanor's pyre and the graves of his comrades and the empty nursery in the ruined castle. These were different. These were the tears of a man who had been given a miracle and had it stolen away before he could even name it. These were the tears of a father who had failed before his child had even drawn breath. These were the tears of a husband who had promised to protect his wife and had watched her sacrifice herself for someone else's sin.

Silver crossed the room in three strides and dropped to his knees beside his father, his arms wrapping around the ancient fae's shaking shoulders, holding him the way Lilia had held him as a child—tight, fierce, desperate, as if love alone could be a shield against the world.

"I am here, Father," Silver whispered, his own tears falling silently into Lilia's hair. "I am here."

Malleus stood in the doorway, and he did not move. He did not approach. He did not speak. He simply stood there, watching the two people he loved most in the world broken on the floor, and he knew—with a certainty that carved itself into his bones—that this was his doing. This was the weight of his loneliness. This was the cost of his need.

He turned and walked away, his footsteps silent on the stone, and the darkness of the corridor swallowed him whole.

The Law of the First Queen

Fifty years.

Fifty years of searching, of reading, of brewing, of traveling, of failing. Fifty years of watching the cocoon pulse with its slow, sickly light, of pressing his hands against the glass and feeling your heartbeat—always too slow, always too faint, always just on the verge of stopping. Fifty years of watching Silver grow old, watching Malleus grow into his throne, watching the world move on while you remained frozen in the amber of a nightmare.

Lilia had aged. Not visibly—not yet; his glamour held, his youth preserved by the stubborn vitality of his bloodline—but he felt the years in his bones, in the slow weakening of his magic, in the way his hands trembled when he was tired, in the way his eyes took longer to adjust to the dark. He was seven hundred and fifty years old, and the Withering was beginning to whisper to him from the edges of his consciousness, the soft, seductive call of surrender.

He ignored it. He had work to do.

It was in the fifty-first year that he found it. The Law of the First Queen.

He was deep in the Sunless Archive, the forbidden section beneath the Briar Valley, where the air was thick with the dust of millennia and the scrolls crumbled at the touch. He had been searching for three days, navigating by the light of a single luminescent orb, when his fingers closed around a slab of petrified bark—the bark of the original Briar Tree, the tree that had been the heart of the fae kingdom before the War, the tree whose roots had drunk the blood of the first queens.

The text was written in the Old Script, the language that preceded even the ancient fae tongue, the language that had been old when the world was young. Lilia's eyes moved over the symbols, translating in his head, his breath growing shallower with each line.

It was the foundational law of Thorn Magic—the magic of the Draconia line, the magic of the briar and the curse and the sleep. Written by Meleanor's ancestor, the First Queen, the one who had woven the first briar and sung the first curse and established the principles that would govern their kind for ten thousand years.

And there, in faded emerald ink, surrounded by the withered remains of ancient spells, was the axiom:

Let the dreamer be bound by the briar. Let the poison slow the breath and the thorns encase the flesh. Yet let true love's kiss shatter the glass, for a bond forged in the soul's fire is a law older than the curse. No thorn may hold what love would free. No sleep may bind what love would wake. This is the First Law, and it shall not be broken.

Lilia read it three times. Then he read it again, his lips moving silently over the ancient words, his heart hammering against his ribs with a force that made his whole body tremble.

True love's kiss shatters the glass.

It was not a fairy tale. It was not a metaphor. It was a law—the foundational law of the very magic that had cursed you. The First Queen had encoded it into the fabric of Thorn Magic itself, an absolute principle that could not be overridden, could not be circumvented, could not be denied. If the love between the sleeper and the one who kissed them was true—if the bond was genuine, if the souls recognized each other—then the curse had to break. The magic was obligated to yield.

A desperate, blazing hope ignited in Lilia's chest—a flame so bright it hurt, a flame he tried to smother because he knew, he knew, that hope was the cruelest weapon the universe wielded against those who had already lost everything.

But he could not smother it. He was a drowning man, and this was a breath of air, and he would take it even if it burned his lungs.

He did not tell anyone.

Not Silver, who was growing grey and slow and whose eyes held the quiet sadness of a man watching his father chase a ghost. Not Malleus, who had aged into his kingship and carried his guilt like a second skin. Not the healers, who would have counseled caution, who would have spoken of false hope and the dangers of expectation.

This was between him and you. This was a sacrament.

He climbed the tower on the night of the full moon, fifty-one years and three days after you had fallen asleep. The moonlight fell through the tall windows and painted the cocoon in silver and emerald, and the room smelled of night-blooming jasmine—the flowers he had placed in the vase by your bed every week for half a century, replacing them before they wilted, ensuring that you always woke to the scent of something alive.

He stood before the cocoon and pressed his hands against the glass. It was warm, as always—too warm, the heat of your silent struggle, the heat of a body that was fighting to stay alive even as the Dreaming pulled it under.

"I have found a way," he whispered, and his voice was rough, cracked by decades of silence and sorrow and the relentless, grinding pressure of hope deferred. "The First Queen wrote a law. True love's kiss. If I love you—and I do, I love you more than the stars love the sky, more than the roots love the earth, more than the dead love the memory of the sun—then the curse must break. It must."

He leaned his forehead against the glass. The cold bit into his skin, a sharp, clean pain that grounded him in the present, that reminded him he was still alive, still here, still fighting.

"I have loved you since the moment you burned the thorns in the Ramshackle garden," he murmured, his eyes closed, his breath fogging the glass. "I loved you when you smiled at my terrible cooking and pretended it was good. I loved you when you held Silver's hand after a nightmare and sang him back to sleep. I loved you when you looked at me—me, a withered old creature pretending to be young—and saw something worth loving in return."

He pulled back. He placed one hand flat against the glass, over your heart. He could feel the slow, labored thud of your pulse, a rhythm so faint it was barely there, a whisper of life in a tomb of silence.

"I love you," he said, and the words were a prayer, an incantation, a desperate, absolute surrender to the most powerful force he had ever known. "And I am going to prove it."

He leaned down. He pressed his lips to the glass, directly over your mouth, and he kissed you.

He kissed you with everything he had. He kissed you with the memory of your first kiss, in the rain behind the Ramshackle dorm, when you had both been laughing and shivering and terrified of how much you felt. He kissed you with the memory of your wedding night, the warmth of your skin against his, the sound of your voice saying his name like it was the only word that mattered. He kissed you with the memory of the child growing inside you, the secret he had kept, the future he had been too afraid to name.

He poured his love into the kiss—every ounce, every fragment, every shattered piece of his ancient, battle-scarred heart. He held nothing back. He stripped himself bare before the universe and said, Here. This is what I feel. This is what I am. If this is not enough, then nothing is.

The cocoon hummed.

Lilia's eyes flew open. The glass beneath his lips was warming, the green light brightening, the pulse of your heartbeat quickening—just a fraction, just a stutter, but there, present, responsive, as if something inside you had heard him and was trying to answer.

Come back to me, he thought, his hands pressing harder against the glass. Come back. The door is open. I am here. I am waiting. Come back.

The light flared.

And then it faded.

The warmth cooled. The pulse slowed. The green light settled back into its sickly, rhythmic glow, and your face remained frozen in that terrible, silent strain, and the cocoon lay still and cold and unbroken beneath his hands.

The glass did not shatter.

The kiss did not work.

Lilia stood there, his lips still pressed against the glass, his eyes wide and unseeing, his hands flat on the surface, and he waited. He waited for the flare, for the crack, for the miracle that the First Queen had promised. He waited for you to open your eyes, to gasp, to reach for him, to say his name.

He waited for a long time.

And nothing happened.

He pulled back. His hands slid down the glass, leaving damp prints on the cold surface. He stared at you—your frozen face, your clenched jaw, your hands raised against an invisible wall—and the hope inside him guttered and died like a candle in a hurricane.

True love's kiss shatters the glass.

The words echoed in his skull, twisting, warping, becoming something else—not a promise, but an accusation.

The kiss did not work.

The implication descended on him slowly, like a tide of black water rising around his chest, filling his lungs, drowning him from the inside out. It was not a single thought but a cascade, a chain reaction of horror that began in his mind and spread through his body like poison.

The kiss did not work. The First Law was not satisfied. The magic did not recognize the bond. Therefore—

Therefore, the love was not true.

The thought was a blade, and it opened him from sternum to navel. He staggered backward, his hand clutching his chest, his breath coming in short, ragged gasps that sounded more like sobs.

Not true. My love was not true. Or—or hers. Hers was not true.

Which was worse? He could not decide. He could not breathe. He could not think. The doubt was a living thing, a creature with a thousand legs and a thousand teeth, crawling through his insides, eating him alive, whispering in a voice that sounded like his own but colder, thinner, more rational.

You are seven hundred years old. You have loved before. You loved Meleanor, and she died. You loved Silver, and he was a child you could not protect from the curse of sleep. And now you love this human, and the magic itself—the oldest, most fundamental law of your people—has rejected you. What does that tell you, Lilia? What does that tell you about the truth of your heart?

"No," he whispered, pressing his fists against his temples. "No. I love her. I love her. I love her—"

Then why is she still asleep?

He screamed. It was not a human sound—it was the sound of a wounded animal, a creature in mortal agony, a being pushed past the limits of endurance into a place where language failed and only raw, primal noise remained. He screamed at the cocoon, at the ceiling, at the moon that watched through the window with its cold, indifferent eye. He screamed at the First Queen, at her ancient law, at the cruel, mathematical precision of a universe that could weigh a man's heart and find it wanting.

Then the scream died, and the silence that followed was worse.

He sat on the floor. He sat with his back against the wall, his knees drawn up, his arms wrapped around his shins—the same posture Malleus had held in the medical wing fifty years ago, the posture of a person who has been broken so completely that they can no longer remember what it felt like to be whole.

Is it me? he thought, and the doubt was a whisper now, intimate and insidious, curling around his spine like a lover's hand. Is my love not enough? Have I been alive so long that I have forgotten how to love truly? Have I been performing love for so long—smiling when I am empty, laughing when I am hollow—that I no longer know the difference?

Or is it her? Did she love me out of loneliness? Out of gratitude? Out of the need to belong in a world that had no place for her? Did she say the words because she meant them, or because she was afraid of being alone?

He did not know. He could not know. And the not-knowing was a torture that exceeded anything the Dreaming could devise.

He did not speak of it. Not for days. Not for weeks. He carried the doubt like a stone in his chest, heavy and sharp, pressing against his heart with every breath, and he smiled—because Lilia Vanrouge always smiled, because the mask was older than most civilizations, because he had been performing for so long he no longer knew where the performance ended and the person began.

But Silver noticed. Silver always noticed.

It was in the small things. The way Lilia's hand lingered on the cocoon a moment too long, as if he were waiting for something that never came. The way his smile flickered when he thought no one was looking, the corners of his mouth twitching downward before he caught them and pulled them back up. The way he hummed the lullaby—still the lullaby, always the lullaby—but the melody had changed, minor key shifting to something darker, more uncertain, as if the song itself had lost faith in its own ending.

It was three weeks later when Malleus came to the tower.

The king stood in the doorway, his presence filling the room the way a storm fills the sky—inevitable, overwhelming, charged with the electricity of unspoken things. He was older now, the youthful sharpness of his features settling into the carved granite of kingship, but his eyes were the same: ancient, lonely, haunted by a guilt that time had not diminished.

"Lilia," he said. "You tried the First Law."

It was not a question. Malleus had read the same texts. He had known Lilia would find it. And he had seen the aftermath—the way the general had retreated into himself, the way the light in his eyes had dimmed, the way he moved through the days like a ghost haunting its own life.

Lilia did not turn from the cocoon. "Yes."

"And it failed."

"Yes."

Malleus stepped into the room. His boots were silent on the stone, but the air pressure shifted with his approach, the gravity of his magic bending the space around him. "The words of the First Queen are ten thousand years old, Lilia. Magic evolves. The Overblot is a distortion the First Queen could never have anticipated. The law may not apply—"

"Magic does not evolve, Malleus." Lilia's voice was quiet, emptied of the fury that had fueled his earlier outbursts, stripped down to a raw, bleeding honesty that was somehow worse. "Magic is the bedrock. It does not change. The laws of the soul do not change. The same force that holds the stars in their courses and the tides to the moon holds the Law of the First Queen. If the kiss failed, it is because the condition was not met."

"That is not true," Malleus said fiercely, and he crossed the remaining distance between them, his hand reaching out as if to grip Lilia's shoulder. "She loves you. I have seen it. The way she looked at you, the way she spoke to you—there is no doubt in my mind that her love was true."

"Then perhaps mine was not," Lilia said, and the words fell from his lips like stones dropped into a well—heavy, final, disappearing into the dark without an echo.

Malleus's hand stopped an inch from Lilia's shoulder. He stared at the general's back, at the rigid line of his spine, at the tension in his shoulders, and he felt the ground shift beneath his feet, the last shreds of his certainty crumbling into dust.

"That is impossible," Malleus whispered. "I have seen you with her. I have seen the way you—"

"You have seen what I show the world," Lilia interrupted, and there was no self-pity in his voice, only a cold, clinical detachment that was more frightening than any display of emotion. "You have seen the mask. The smile. The carefully calibrated warmth. I have been performing for so long, Malleus, that I no longer know if what is beneath the mask is real or simply another layer of performance. Perhaps I loved the idea of her. Perhaps I loved the feeling of being loved, after so many centuries of emptiness. Perhaps I was so desperate for connection that I convinced myself the feeling was true, when it was merely... sufficient."

"No," Malleus said, and his voice cracked on the word. "No, Lilia. You raised me. You taught me what love looks like. You held me when I cried, and you sang to me when I was afraid, and you never—not once—asked for anything in return. That is not the act of a man who does not know how to love truly."

Lilia finally turned. His eyes were dry, but they were hollow—two dark pits in a face that had lost its vitality, its spark, its reason to go on. "I loved you because you were my duty," he said. "I loved Silver because he was my redemption. I loved her because she was my last chance. And perhaps—perhaps that is not the same as true love. Perhaps true love is not born from need. Perhaps it is born from abundance, from the overflow of a heart so full it has no choice but to give. And my heart has been empty for a very long time."

Malleus felt the words land in his chest like physical blows. Each one was a nail, driving deeper, piercing through the careful walls he had built around his own grief. Because Lilia was not just describing himself—he was describing Malleus. The same emptiness. The same need. The same desperate, grasping hunger for connection that had driven the Overblot in the first place.

"Is that what you believe?" Malleus asked, and his voice was barely a whisper, thin and fragile as spun glass. "That your love is not true?"

"I do not know what I believe," Lilia said. "I know that I kissed her, and the glass did not break. I know that the oldest law in existence looked into my heart and found it wanting. And I know—" His voice broke. He turned away, pressing his hand against the cocoon, his fingers splaying over the glass as if trying to reach through it, to feel the warmth of your skin one more time. "I know that I would give my life for her and the child. I would tear my own soul to pieces and scatter them to the winds if it would bring her back. And I do not know if that is love, or if it is simply the desperation of a man who has nothing left to lose."

The room fell silent. The moonlight shifted, the shadows lengthening, and in the quiet, the slow, labored pulse of your heartbeat was the only sound—the rhythm of a life in suspension, waiting for an answer that might never come.

Malleus stood behind Lilia, and for the first time in his long life, he had no words. No arguments, no reassurances, no desperate pleas for forgiveness. There was only the truth: he had done this. He had broken the general, shattered the man who had been his father in all but blood, and no amount of apology or penance could ever undo the damage.

"I am sorry," Malleus said, and the words were inadequate—they were so pathetically, laughably inadequate that he almost laughed, would have laughed if the sound would not have shattered him. "I am sorry, Lilia. I am so sorry."

Lilia did not respond. He simply pressed his forehead against the cocoon and closed his eyes, and the doubt—insidious, relentless, ineradicable—whispered in the dark.

True love's kiss shatters the glass. And yours did not.

The Confrontation

The years ground on. Sixty. Seventy. Eighty.

Lilia did not stop searching. He could not. The doubt had become a companion now, a second shadow that followed him everywhere, a voice that spoke in the silence between heartbeats. Every avenue he explored, every ritual he attempted, every desperate, half-mad scheme he conceived was shadowed by the question: What if you are not enough? What if you were never enough?

But he kept going, because the alternative was to sit in the tower and listen to the doubt, and that was a death sentence he was not yet ready to accept.

Silver aged. His hair turned from spun silver to dull iron, his movements slowed, his naps grew longer and more frequent. He was still beautiful—still kind, still gentle, still the boy who had been raised on lullabies and love—but he was fading, the way all humans faded, and each time Lilia looked at him, he felt the grief of a loss that had not yet happened.

Malleus ruled. He ruled well—justly, wisely, with a firmness that belied the hollow space inside him. He did not marry. He could not. The court pressed him for an heir, and the council whispered about duty and legacy, but he refused every match with a quiet, immovable finalality that no one dared challenge twice. He told himself it was because he had no heart left to give. He told himself it was because the kingdom needed a king who was present, not a husband distracted by the ghosts of his failures. But the truth was simpler and more devastating: he did not trust himself to love again. The last time he had loved, he had nearly destroyed the world. And so he ruled alone, and the throne beside him remained empty, and the hollow space inside him grew.

But he never forgot. He never stopped going to the tower. And every time he saw Lilia sitting beside the cocoon, his hand pressed to the glass, his eyes fixed on your frozen face, the guilt inside him grew—a tumor, a parasite, a living thing that fed on his sorrow and grew stronger with each passing year.

The confrontation, when it came, was not planned. It was the result of a hundred small collisions, a hundred moments of tension that had been building for decades, like tectonic plates grinding against each other, the pressure mounting, the fault line weakening, until the earthquake was inevitable.

It happened in the hundred and twelfth year.

Lilia was in the medical wing—he had been there all night, having returned from a week-long journey to the Northern Reaches where he had sought the counsel of a hermit sorceress who claimed to know the secrets of the Dreaming. The sorceress had been a fraud. Her spells had been nonsense, her knowledge derivative, her "ancient wisdom" lifted from a book Lilia himself had written three centuries ago.

He was exhausted. He was heartsick. The Withering was beginning to show—a slight thinning of his hair, a faint tremor in his left hand, a loss of appetite that no amount of culinary experimentation could remedy. He sat beside the cocoon, his head bowed, his hands in his lap, and he felt the doubt pressing against the walls of his mind, insistent, relentless, whispering:

You are running out of time. You are running out of hope. And the kiss did not work.

Malleus entered the room. He had not announced himself, had not knocked—perhaps because he knew Lilia would not have responded, perhaps because he could not bear the formalities anymore, the careful, measured distance they had maintained for over a century.

"You were gone for a week," Malleus said. His voice was carefully neutral, but there was an edge beneath it—the edge of a man who had been watching someone he loved destroy themselves and had finally reached the limit of his endurance.

"I was searching," Lilia said, not looking up.

"You are always searching." Malleus stepped closer, his boots loud in the quiet room. "And you never find anything. Have you considered the possibility that there is nothing to find?"

The words were a spark. Lilia's head snapped up, his red eyes narrowing, and the exhaustion in his face was eclipsed—momentarily—by a flash of the old fire, the old fury, the old razor-edge anger that had been simmering beneath the surface for a century.

"Have you considered the possibility," Lilia said, his voice low and dangerous, "that I do not require your permission to search?"

"I am not asking for your permission," Malleus said, and his own temper flared—the dragon's fire, the Draconia rage, the burning, terrible impatience of a king who had watched his guardian wither for a century and could not bear it anymore. "I am asking you to stop. I am asking you to rest. I am asking you to let go of this obsession before it kills you."

"Obsession?" Lilia rose from his chair, his small frame seeming to expand, the glamour flickering, his true form flashing beneath—the ancient, terrifying general of the Blackthorn Plains, the creature who had held the line when the world was ending. "You call it obsession? She is my wife, Malleus. She is carrying my child. And you—you who put her in that glass—you dare to tell me to let go?"

"I dare because I love you!" Malleus roared, and the walls shook, the windows rattled, the thorns in the garden below twisted and groaned with the force of his outburst. He stepped forward, his green eyes blazing, his fists clenched at his sides, and for a moment—just a moment—he was not a king, he was not a prince, he was a frightened, desperate boy who was losing the only father he had ever known. "I dare because I watched you destroy yourself for a century and I cannot—I cannot—stand by and let you die for a woman who will not wake!"

The silence that followed was absolute.

Lilia stared at Malleus. The words hung in the air between them, and they were the cruelest words either of them had ever spoken—not because they were intended to wound, but because they were true, and truth, in moments like this, was the most devastating weapon of all.

"She will not wake," Malleus continued, his voice dropping to a whisper, his shoulders slumping, the rage draining out of him as quickly as it had come. "I have consulted every mage, every scholar, every seer in the valley and beyond. The curse is absolute. The Dreaming has her, and it will not release her. You are sacrificing yourself for a hope that does not exist, and I am watching you fade, and I cannot—Father, I cannot lose you too."

The word Father was a blade, and it found the gap in Lilia's armor, the one place he had no defense. He recoiled, his face twisting, his hands coming up as if to ward off a blow.

"Do not call me that," Lilia hissed, his voice cracking. "Do not call me that when you are the reason I am losing everything. You were my son—my son—and you have taken my wife, my child, my future. You have left me with nothing but a glass coffin and a doubt that eats me alive from the inside, and you stand there and you ask me to let go?"

"I am asking you to live," Malleus said, and tears were falling now, silent and heavy, tracing silver lines down his pale cheeks. "I am asking you to choose life. I am asking you to remember that you still have a son who loves you, who needs you, who cannot bear to watch you—"

"Choose life?" Lilia laughed, and it was the most terrible sound Malleus had ever heard—bitter, raw, hollow, a laugh that contained no joy, no humor, no warmth. "You ask me to choose life? I have been choosing life for seven hundred years, Malleus. I chose life when Meleanor burned. I chose life when the kingdom fell. I chose life when I found a silver-haired infant in the rubble and decided, against all reason, to raise him as my own. I have been choosing life for so long that I have forgotten what it feels like to want to live. And now—now the only thing that has made me want to live in the past century is lying in that glass, and she is not waking, and the kiss did not work—"

He stopped. The words had escaped before he could catch them, and they hung in the air, exposed and bleeding, and Malleus stared at him with an expression of dawning, horrified comprehension.

"The kiss," Malleus said slowly. "You tried the First Law."

"I tried it," Lilia said, his voice barely a whisper, the fight draining out of him, leaving only the raw, naked wound of his failure. "I kissed her, and the glass did not break. The First Queen's law—the oldest law of our magic—rejected me. And now I do not know if my love is real, or if I have been lying to myself for a century, or if she—" He broke off, his breath hitching, his hands clenching into fists. "If she ever truly loved me at all."

Malleus closed his eyes. The pain in Lilia's voice was a physical thing, a force that pressed against his chest, that made it hard to breathe, hard to think, hard to do anything but feel the weight of what he had done.

He had caused this. Not just the sleep—not just the cocoon, not just the suspension of your life and the child's—but this. The doubt. The corrosive, soul-destroying uncertainty that was eating Lilia alive from the inside. If Malleus had not Overblot, if he had not given in to his loneliness, you would be awake, and Lilia would have told you about the child, and you would have laughed at the Weavers and the superstition and the fear, and you would have named the baby together, and the doubt would never have had the chance to take root.

"Your love is real," Malleus said, opening his eyes, his voice steady and certain despite the tears on his face. "I have seen it. I have felt it. The First Queen's law is ancient, but it is not infallible. The Overblot is a corruption that the First Queen could not have foreseen. The failure of the kiss does not mean your love is false—it means the curse is stronger than any single law can overcome."

"You do not know that," Lilia whispered.

"No," Malleus admitted. "I do not. But I know you. I know the man who raised me, who sang to me in the dark, who gave up everything—his kingdom, his youth, his very identity—to protect a child that was not even his own. That man does not love falsely. That man does not perform. That man is the truest person I have ever known, and I will not let the failure of a ten-thousand-year-old law convince either of us otherwise."

Lilia looked at him. For a long, breathless moment, the two fae stood in the moonlit room, separated by a century of grief and guilt and the unbridgeable chasm of what had been lost, and the silence between them was the silence of two people who loved each other so much it had destroyed them both.

"You broke my heart, Malleus," Lilia said, and the words were quiet, final, irrevocable—not a shout, not a condemnation, but a simple statement of fact, the kind of truth that cannot be argued with or apologized for, only carried. "You broke it, and I do not know how to forgive you. I do not know if I will ever be able to forgive you. And I need you to understand that this is not a punishment. This is simply where I am. This is the landscape of my grief, and you are the earthquake that created it."

Malleus nodded. He could not speak. His throat had closed, his jaw clenched so tight he thought his teeth might crack, and the tears fell silently, and he accepted the words—accepted the truth—because he deserved it, and because Lilia deserved to be heard.

"I will not stop searching," Lilia continued, turning back to the cocoon, his hand finding its familiar place on the glass. "I will not stop trying. And if you truly love me—if you truly want to help—then you will not ask me to stop. You will let me fight this battle the way I have fought every battle in my life: until I cannot fight anymore."

Malleus swallowed. He wiped his face with the back of his hand, a gesture so unkingly, so boyish, that it made Lilia's heart ache with a tenderness he did not want to feel.

"I will not ask you to stop," Malleus said hoarsely. "But I will ask you to let me help. Not because I deserve redemption, but because you deserve to not carry this alone."

Lilia did not respond. He simply pressed his forehead against the cocoon, his eyes closed, and the moonlight fell across his bowed head like a benediction, and the silence between them shifted—not healed, not resolved, but altered, the faintest crack in the wall of grief, the smallest opening for a light that neither of them could yet name.

The Withering

Silver died on a winter night in the one hundred and thirty-seventh year.

It was a gentle death—he simply went to sleep by the fire and did not wake up, his face slack and peaceful, his silver hair fanned across the pillow like frost on a windowpane. Lilia held his hand through the night, his fingers wrapped around his son's cooling palm, his eyes fixed on the rise and fall of Silver's chest that grew slower and slower and finally, imperceptibly, stopped.

He did not weep. He had wept his tears for Silver decades ago, when the first grey hairs had appeared at his temples, when the first lines had etched themselves around his eyes. He had been mourning Silver's mortality since the day he had found him in the wreckage, a squalling, human infant with a curse in his blood and a lifespan that was, to a fae, barely a blink.

He pressed a kiss to Silver's forehead. The skin was cold—so cold, the cold of a world without warmth, the cold that Lilia himself had carried for seven centuries and had thought he would never feel in someone he loved.

"Travel well, my son," he murmured. "Find your mother in the Dreaming. Tell her I am coming."

The funeral was quiet. Malleus stood at Lilia's side, his presence a solid, immovable weight, his hand resting lightly on the general's shoulder. The court of Diasomnia filled the chapel, the fae in their dark finery, their ancient eyes curious and pitying and uncomfortably aware of the figure at the front who stood straight and still and did not cry.

After the funeral, Lilia returned to the tower. He sat in his chair beside the cocoon, his hands in his lap, and he stared at your face—your frozen, fighting face—and he felt the Withering settle into his bones like a second skeleton, rigid and cold and inexorable.

He was dying. Not quickly—not dramatically—but slowly, steadily, the way a candle dies when the wick has been burned to the end and there is nothing left but the fading glow of the last flame. His magic was the first to go. The spells that had once come as easily as breathing took effort; the flames he conjured were weak, flickering things that guttered at the slightest draft. His glamour became harder to maintain, and he began to look as he truly was—ancient, gaunt, his hair a faded, brittle black, his skin like parchment stretched over hollow bones.

But he did not stop. He did not stop reading, researching, trying. He could not do the physically demanding rituals anymore—the travel, the all-night vigils, the complex ceremonial magic—but he could read, and he could think, and he could sit beside your cocoon and pour what remained of his fading magic into the glass, trying to keep the cocoon stable, trying to keep the child alive, trying to hold back the Weavers who he could feel circling in the dark, their hungry gaze fixed on the unanchored soul inside you.

Two hundred years. The Withering accelerated. He could no longer walk the length of the tower without resting; he could no longer hold a book without his hands shaking; he could no longer sing the lullaby without his voice cracking on the high notes.

Malleus came every day. He brought tea—Lilia's blend, the one with the too much sugar—and sat in the chair on the other side of the cocoon, and the two men existed in a silence that was no longer hostile, no longer strained, but simply... present. The silence of two people who had hurt each other beyond repair and had decided to sit in the wreckage together rather than face the emptiness alone.

"I am losing her," Lilia said one evening, his voice a ghost of its former self, a dry, rustling whisper like the last leaves of autumn skittering across stone. "The cocoon. It is beginning to crack. The child's soul—I can feel it, slipping. The Weavers are getting closer."

Malleus looked at him sharply. "Cracking? Why did you not tell me?"

"Because there is nothing you can do," Lilia said. "And because I already know what must be done."

He looked at Malleus, and the king saw something in the ancient general's eyes that he had never seen before: peace. Not the peace of surrender, not the peace of death, but the peace of a man who has finally, after a lifetime of searching, found the answer he was looking for.

"I am going to weave myself into the shell," Lilia said.

The words fell into the silence like stones into water, and the ripples they created spread outward, disturbing the surface of everything they touched.

"No," Malleus said, rising from his chair, his face ashen. "No. There must be another way—"

"There is not," Lilia said, and his voice was steady, the voice of a general giving his final order, the voice of a man who had made his peace with the cost. "The cocoon needs an anchor. A living soul, bound to the glass, providing the energy to maintain the preservation. My grief, my love, my magic—I will pour it all into the shell. It will hold them. It will keep the child safe until she wakes."

"You will die," Malleus said, and his voice was a strangled thing, a sound that had been dragged from the deepest, most vulnerable part of him. "If you pour yourself into the cocoon, you will die."

"I am already dying, Malleus," Lilia said gently. "The Withering is in my blood. I have, perhaps, a century left—a century of slow, painful decline, of watching my body fail and my magic fade and the cocoon crack and the Weavers close in. Or I can choose. I can choose to spend my remaining years as fuel for the fire that will keep them alive. I can make my death mean something."

"Please," Malleus whispered, and he was on his knees, the King of the Briar Valley on his knees before the withered old general who had raised him, his hands clasped, his eyes streaming. "Please, Lilia. Let me find another way. Give me time—"

"I have given you a century and a half," Lilia said, and there was no accusation in his voice, no bitterness, only a quiet, bone-deep weariness. "And I have no more time to give."

He reached out and laid his withered hand against Malleus's cheek. The touch was light—so impossibly light, the touch of a man who barely had the strength to raise his arm—and Malleus felt the cold of Lilia's skin, the frailty of his bones, the tremor of a body that had held on for too long.

"You were my greatest joy," Lilia said, and his voice cracked on the word joy, splitting it open to reveal the love beneath—the deep, complicated, wounded love that had survived guilt and grief and a century of silence. "You and Silver. You were the reasons I chose to live when every rational part of me wanted to die. Do not let my death undo that choice. Promise me you will go on."

"I cannot," Malleus said, his face pressed against Lilia's palm, his tears falling on the old general's skin. "I cannot promise that. Not without you."

"You can," Lilia said. "And you will. Because I am asking. And because she will need you, when she wakes. She will be alone in a world she does not recognize, carrying a child she did not know she had, and she will need someone to show her that the world is still worth living in. Promise me, Malleus. Promise me you will be there."

Malleus looked at him—looked at the ancient, withered face, at the eyes that had seen the rise and fall of civilizations, at the mouth that had sung lullabies and issued battle commands and whispered words of love in the dark—and he knew that he could not refuse. Not this. Not the last request of the man who had given him everything.

"I promise," he said, and the words were a vow, a binding, a chain that he would carry for the rest of his long, long life.

Lilia smiled. It was the real smile—the one that crinkled his eyes, the one that Lilia Vanrouge had been born with and would die with, the one that no amount of performance or pretense could ever replicate.

"Good boy," he said softly.

He turned to the cocoon. He placed both hands on the glass, and he closed his eyes, and he began to sing.

It was the lullaby. The ancient song, the one you had hummed to Malleus in the briar, the one Lilia had sung to Silver, the one that carried the weight of a love that had survived the extinction of an era. He sang it in the old tongue, the syllables thick with a grief that spanned centuries, and his voice—thin, cracked, barely more than a whisper—filled the tower with a sound so beautiful and so heartbreaking that the thorns in the garden below began to bloom, black and crimson, responding to the surge of magic that was pouring from the old general's body into the glass.

Thorn to the briar, root to the stone, Sleep, my darling, you are not alone. The night is long, but the fire holds, Dream of the dawn, and the dawn unfolds.

The cocoon began to glow. The green light brightened, deepening to an emerald so dark it was almost black, pulsing with the rhythm of Lilia's fading heart. His body grew translucent, his edges blurring, his form becoming indistinguishable from the light. He was pouring himself into the spell—his magic, his memories, his very essence—dissolving into the glass that held you.

The doubt was wrong, he thought, and the realization came to him in the moment of his surrender, clear and bright and undeniable as the dawn. The kiss did not fail because my love was false. It failed because the curse was too strong for any single act of love to break. But love is not a single act. Love is a lifetime. Love is a choice, made again and again, in the dark, in the silence, in the face of impossibility. And I choose her. I choose them. I choose this.

Sleep, my love, he thought, the words echoing in the silence of the chamber, dissolving into the light. I will wait for you in the Dreaming. I will hold the door open until you wake. And when you do—when you finally do—tell our child that their father loved them, from the first moment to the last.

The light flared—a silent supernova that illuminated the tower in a wash of dark emerald—and then it faded.

The cocoon remained, unchanged, glowing with a faint, steady warmth that it had not possessed before. A warmth that felt like a heartbeat. A warmth that felt like a promise.

Lilia Vanrouge was gone.

A small pile of silver ash lay at the base of the crystal, the only testament to a life that had spanned for more than seven centuries and ended on its own terms, in the service of a love that the world had not recognized but that had been true nonetheless.

Malleus knelt in the ash. He did not rise. He did not speak. He simply knelt, his head bowed, his hands open on his knees, and the tears fell silently into the silver dust, and the moonlight watched, and the thorns in the garden bloomed, and the world was colder than it had ever been.

He stayed until the dawn.

The Asphodel Server

The world was white.

Not the blinding, searing white of the Overblot, but a soft, sterile white, the color of hospital sheets and faded bone. You stared at the ceiling for a long moment, trying to remember how to breathe. Your lungs felt heavy, as if they had been filled with water and only partially drained. There was a strange, hollow ache in your chest, a vacancy where something vital used to be.

You turned your head. The room was large and airy, filled with the scent of night-blooming jasmine and old parchment. It was beautiful, opulent in a way that spoke of ancient wealth and careful preservation. But it was wrong. The proportions were wrong. The light was wrong. The silence was wrong.

You tried to sit up, but your muscles screamed in protest, weak and trembling. You fell back against the pillows, gasping, and the sound of your own breath startled you.

A shadow moved in the corner of the room.

You turned your head, your heart pounding, and saw him.

He was standing by the window, silhouetted against the morning light. He was tall—the same impossible height you remembered, the same dark horns curving upward—and for a moment, just a moment, you thought the world had not changed at all.

Then he turned, and the light fell across his face, and the floor dropped out from beneath you.

It was Malleus. The same sharp jaw, the same piercing green eyes, the same air of quiet, brooding intensity. But something was different. His features were unchanged—the fae did not wrinkle, did not weather, did not bow to the erosion of time the way humans did—and yet he was not the same. The difference was in his eyes. They were ancient in a way they had not been before, hollowed by something heavier than years. The green was darker, deeper, like moss growing over a grave. There were no lines on his face, no silver in his hair, but the exhaustion in his gaze was the exhaustion of a man who had been awake for four hundred years and had forgotten how to rest.

"You are awake." His voice was deeper than you remembered, rougher, as if he had spent centuries speaking only in whispers. He took a step toward the bed, then stopped, his hands clenching at his sides. "I... we thought you would never..."

"What happened?" You pushed yourself up again, fighting the weakness in your limbs. "The Overblot. The thorns. I went in, and I..." You trailed off, the memory of the cold, the shadows, the crush of magic sealing around you like a fist coming back in a rush. You looked down at yourself, at the loose, unfamiliar nightgown you were wearing, at the pale, untouched skin of your hands.

You looked at your stomach. It was flat.

The thought that had been flickering in the back of your mind, the one you had barely dared to entertain—the warmth, the possibility, the life—surfaced, and your hand flew to your abdomen.

"The baby," you whispered, your eyes snapping up to Malleus. "There was... I think I was... I felt it, Malleus. I felt it stop."

Malleus closed his eyes. The line of his shoulders tightened, and for a moment, he looked like the boy you had sung to in the briar—lost, terrified, desperate for someone else to carry the weight of his mistakes.

"You were with child," he said quietly. "Approximately eight weeks. The sleep... suspended the development. The child is unharmed. The soul is intact. The growth has resumed."

Relief flooded through you, so intense it made your head spin. The baby was alive. The child Lilia had never known about, the child you had barely dared to hope for, was alive.

But the relief was short-lived. Because Malleus had not opened his eyes, and his jaw was clenched as if he were biting down on glass.

"How long?" you asked, the words coming out strangled. "How long was I asleep?"

Malleus opened his eyes. He looked at you—really looked at you—and the depth of sorrow you saw there was a bottomless pit. It was the grief of a man who had lived a thousand lifetimes and carried the weight of every single one.

"Four hundred years," he said.

The words did not make sense. They were sounds, syllables strung together in an order that your brain refused to process. Four hundred years. That was not a number that applied to human lives. That was a number that applied to mountains, to oceans, to the slow drift of continents.

"No," you said, shaking your head. "No, that's... that's impossible. Lilia. Where is Lilia?"

Malleus did not answer. He took another step toward the bed, and you saw his hands were trembling.

"Where is he?" you demanded, your voice rising, the panic clawing at your throat. "Lilia! LILIA!"

"He is gone." Malleus's voice was a whisper, a fracture in the silence."He chose to end, one hundred years after the sleep. He wove the last of his magic into the cocoon, to ensure you and the child would survive."

The world went white again, but this time it was the white of a void, the white of an erasure. You stared at Malleus, your mouth open, your chest heaving, but no sound came out.

Four hundred years.

Lilia was dead.

Silver was dead.

Everyone you had ever known, ever laughed with, ever loved, was dust in the ground, and you had been sleeping in a glass shell, a monument to a tragedy that the world had long since moved on from.

"Get out," you said. The words were hollow, empty, a breath of air into a vacuum.

"Please," Malleus said, taking a step closer. "Let me explain—"

"GET OUT!" The scream tore from your throat, raw and ragged, and you lunged for him. Your hands, weak and trembling, beat against his chest, his shoulders, his face. You hit him with all the strength you had—which was none, which was nothing, which was the faint flutter of a heart that had been paused for four centuries—and he did not move. He stood there, taking the blows, letting you strike him, his eyes closed, his face a mask of absolute, penitent stillness.

You collapsed against him, your fists bunching in the fabric of his tunic, your body shaking with sobs that would not come. The grief was too big, too vast, too ancient. It was a black hole in the center of your chest, and it was consuming you from the inside out.

He hesitated, then slowly, carefully, raised his arms and wrapped them around you. He held you as you screamed, as you wept, as you cursed him and his loneliness and his selfish, world-ending grief. He held you, and he said nothing, because there was nothing to say.

He was the monster who had stolen your life, and he was the only one left to hold you while you grieved it.

The device was a tablet, sleek and thin, its screen glowing with a soft, blue light. Malleus had placed it on the table beside your bed, his expression carefully neutral, as if he were handling a bomb that might detonate at any moment.

"Idia constructed it," he said, his voice quiet. "Before the end. He called it Project Asphodel. A digital archive. Messages from... from those who knew you. Videos, letters, recordings. They left them for you, in the event that you ever woke."

You stared at the tablet, your throat tight. You did not want to touch it. To touch it was to acknowledge that the people who had made these messages were gone, that their voices were all that remained of them, that you were about to watch your friends grow old and die in the span of an afternoon.

But you had to know.

You picked up the tablet. The interface was simple—a folder icon for each name, arranged alphabetically. Ace. Deuce. Cater. Epel. Jack. Riddle. Ruggie. Sebek. Silver.

And at the bottom, a single, glowing folder, its color a deep, rich red. Lilia.

You opened Ace's folder first.

His face filled the screen, and the sight of it was a knife to the heart. He was young—seventeen, the same age he had been when you fell asleep. His hair was the same unruly red, his expression the same mix of bravado and anxiety.

"Hey, Prefect," he said, his voice cracking slightly. "So, this is weird, right? Idia says you might not ever see this, but... I dunno. I wanted to try. We're going to get you out. We're working on it. Just... hang in there, okay? Don't give up."

The video ended. The next one was dated five years later. Ace was older, his jaw sharper, his eyes carrying a weight that hadn't been there before. "Still working on it," he said, his smile strained. "Riddle's a doctor now, did you know? He's looking into the magical side of things. We're not giving up on you."

The next one was twenty years later. Ace's hair was streaked with grey, his face lined with age. He was sitting in a comfortable armchair, a drink in his hand. "Hey, Prefect," he said, his voice softer now, worn down by time. "It's been a while. I got married. Can you believe it? She's great. You'd like her. I... I hope you're not in pain. Wherever you are."

The next one was fifty years later. Ace was old. His hair was white, his hands trembling, his eyes filmed with the haze of failing vision. He was lying in a bed, surrounded by beeping machines. He looked into the camera, and his smile was a ghost of the cocky grin you remembered.

"I don't... I don't think I'm going to be making any more of these," he wheezed. "But I wanted to say... it was an honor. Knowing you. Being your friend. You were the best of us. Don't... don't let the world break you, when you wake up."

The video ended.

You sat there, the tablet clutched in your hands, your chest heaving with breaths that wouldn't come. Ace was dead. The boy who had complained about Riddle's rules, who had cheated at magical chess, who had made you laugh until you cried, was gone.

You opened Deuce's folder. Then Riddle's. Then Sebek's. Each one was a miniature life, compressed into minutes of flickering video. You watched them grow, change, suffer, and eventually, fade. You watched Sebek, his hair white and his voice thin, stand at attention before the camera and declare, with his last breath, that his duty to the Young Master was fulfilled.

You watched Silver.

His folder was smaller than the others. He had never been one for words, preferring action to speech. But his videos were the hardest. In the first, he was still a teenager, his eyes heavy with the exhaustion of his curse. "I will protect the Young Master," he said, his voice soft. "I will protect Lilia. And I will wait for you."

In the last video, Silver was an old man. His hair was pure white, his face a map of wrinkles. He was sitting in a chair by a fire, a blanket over his legs, and he looked... at peace.

"I am tired," he said, his voice a whisper. "Father is fading. He is giving his magic to the cocoon, and now he is leaving. I am not afraid. He taught me that death is not the end. It is simply a longer sleep." He paused, his grey eyes gazing into the camera. "I will tell Father you are well. I will wait for you, in the Dreaming. And when you wake... be kind to the Young Master. He has suffered more than anyone knows."

The video ended.

You could not breathe. The room was spinning, the walls closing in, the air too thick to inhale. You were drowning in the grief of four hundred years, the accumulated sorrow of everyone you had loved, and it was too much, too heavy, too vast to survive.

You reached for the last folder. The red one.

Your hands were shaking so badly you nearly dropped the tablet. You took a breath—a ragged, broken thing—and pressed play.

Lilia filled the screen.

He looked exactly as you remembered. Young, round-cheeked, his hair dark and vibrant, his eyes gleaming with the light of a thousand stars. He was sitting in a chair, his hands folded in his lap, and his expression was one of careful, practiced calm.

"Hello, my love," he said, and his voice was the same—light, musical, teasing, with an undercurrent of profound, ancient sorrow. "I am recording this in the year of our Lord 1842, three hundred years after you fell asleep. I am told this is the last message I will leave, and I find myself... at a loss for words. Which, as you know, is a rare occurrence for me."

He smiled, the crinkling-eye smile that had won your heart, and the sight of it was a physical pain in your chest.

"I have not told you the truth," he said, his smile fading. "You carry a child. Our child. You were eight weeks pregnant when the sleep took you. I knew—I could feel the spark, the tiny, stubborn heartbeat—and I did not tell you. I was afraid. The Weavers of the End, the old superstition... I could not risk it. I thought I had time. I thought I would wait for the Hooking Moon, and then I would tell you, and we would laugh at my foolishness, and I would sing the child the songs of the valley."

He paused, his jaw tightening, his composure cracking for the first time.

"I was wrong," he whispered. "I am so sorry. I should have told you. I should have trusted you. But I was a coward, and now you must wake to a world where I am gone, and learn of our child in the same breath that you learn of my death."

"There is something else I must confess. I tried to wake you. I found the First Queen's law—true love's kiss shatters the glass—and I kissed you, and the glass did not break. For three hundred years, I carried the doubt that followed. I did not know if my love was insufficient, or if yours was. I want you to know—I need you to know—that I no longer believe the kiss failed because our love was false. I believe it failed because the curse was too strong for any single act to break. But a lifetime... a lifetime of choosing you, of sitting by your side, of pouring what remains of me into the glass that holds you—that is not a single act. That is a law of its own making. And I hope, when you wake, you will know that you were loved truly. Not perfectly. But truly."

He reached out, as if touching the screen, as if he could reach through the centuries and brush the hair from your face.

"I have picked names," he said, his voice steadying. "If it is a girl, I would call her Lyra. For the music you sang to Malleus, the song that saved him. If it is a boy, I would call him Vesper. For the evening star, the one that guides the lost home."

He leaned back, his eyes glistening, and he began to sing.

It was the lullaby. The ancient song, the one you had hummed in the briar, the one he had sung to Silver's egg, the one that carried the weight of a love that had survived the extinction of an era. He sang it in the old tongue, the syllables thick with a grief that spanned centuries, a love that defied the boundaries of time and flesh.

Thorn to the briar, root to the stone,

Sleep, my darling, you are not alone.

The video glitched, the image stuttering, the song cutting off mid-note. The last frame was Lilia, his hand pressed against the glass of your cocoon, his mouth moving in a wordless farewell.

The screen went black.

You did not scream. You did not weep. You simply sat there, the tablet slipping from your numb fingers and clattering to the floor, and you felt the last thread of your sanity snap.

You were pregnant. You were carrying Lilia's child. He had known, he had loved, he had protected, and he had died without ever telling you, without ever holding the child he had named, without ever hearing you say the words you had never had the chance to say.

And the monster who had caused it all was the one who had brought you the tablet, the one who was standing outside your door, the one who was waiting for a forgiveness you would never, could never, give.

You looked at your stomach. Flat. Unchanged. A life suspended, a ghost of a future that should have been lived four hundred years ago.

"I hate you," you whispered to the empty room, to the king in the hall, to the world that had taken everything from you. "I hate you. I hate you. I hate you."

The Somnambulant

The child was born on a night when the thorns in the garden bloomed black.

It was a difficult birth. Your body, though preserved, had forgotten how to move, how to push, how to endure the primal agony of bringing a life into the world. The healers—ancient fae with eyes like flint and hands like ice—worked in silence, their magic weaving through the air in threads of green and silver.

Malleus stood outside the door. He had not been allowed in. You had screamed at him, a raw, feral sound, when he had tried to enter, and he had retreated as if you had struck him. He stood with his back against the wall, his head bowed, his hands clenched into fists so tight his knuckles were white.

He could hear your cries, and each one was a nail driven into his heart. He deserved it. He knew he deserved it. But the sound of your pain, the pain he had caused, was a torment that exceeded any punishment the universe could devise.

Inside the room, the final push came, and the child emerged into the world.

The healers did not gasp. They did not coo. They simply paused, their ancient eyes widening slightly, and then they went to work, cleaning the infant, wrapping it in soft, dark blankets.

They placed the child in your arms, and you looked down, your breath catching in your throat.

She was beautiful. And she was wrong.

Her skin was pale—not the healthy pallor of a newborn, but the luminous, opalescent white of the cocoon that had held her for four centuries. Her hair was a dark, deep black, the exact shade of Lilia's when he had dropped his glamour. Her eyes, when they opened, were not the unfocused, not the cloudy blue of a human infant. They were large, taking up too much of her face, and they were the color of dark wine—red, but deeper, older, shot through with veins of silver.

She did not cry.

Instead, she hummed.

A low, steady drone, a sound that vibrated in your chest and made the air in the room shimmer. It was the lullaby. The one Lilia had sung on the video, the one you had hummed in the briar. She knew it. She had heard it, not with ears, but with her soul, floating in the Dreaming for four hundred years while her father sang her into existence.

"Lyra," you whispered, your voice breaking. "Your name is Lyra."

The child—Lyra—looked up at you, her ancient, wine-red eyes meeting yours, and she did not smile. She simply hummed, the sound filling the silence, a bridge between the world of the living and the world of the dead.

The Fracture and the Furnace

The sickness came when Lyra was thirty—though she looked no older than ten, the Dreaming having stretched her childhood into an endless, lingering dawn.

It started with a cough, a wet, rattling sound that shook her small frame and left her gasping for breath. Then came the fever, a burning heat that flushed her opalescent skin and made her wine-red eyes glaze with delirium. The healers came, their faces grim, their magic brushing against her skin and finding... nothing. No infection, no toxin, no physical cause.

"It is the Dreaming," the head healer said, his voice low. "The taint of the eternal sleep. It is trying to reclaim her. She is a soul that was never fully anchored, and the call of the void is strong."

The world narrowed to a point. You stood by Lyra's bed, your hand gripping hers, her skin burning against your palm, and the fear was a living thing, a beast that clawed at your throat and stole your breath.

You had lost Lilia. You had lost your friends, your time, your world. You could not lose her. You could not lose the last piece of him.

"Fix it," you demanded, your voice a ragged snarl. "Use your magic, your potions, your ancient rites. Fix her."

"We cannot," the healer said. "The magic of the Dreaming is beyond our reach. It is the domain of the Draconia line, the blood of the valley. Only a thread of that power, willingly given and woven with a soul's anchor, could possibly draw her back."

Malleus.

You turned, ready to scream for him, to drag him to her bedside and force him to undo the damage his bloodline had caused—but he was already there. He was standing in the doorway, his face ashen, his eyes fixed on Lyra's burning form. He had heard everything.

He moved without a word, crossing the room in three long strides and dropping to his knees beside the bed. He reached out, his hands hovering over Lyra's chest, and closed his eyes.

"I am sorry," he whispered, and you did not know if he was speaking to you, to Lyra, or to the ghost of Lilia that haunted the room. "I am sorry. I am sorry. I am sorry."

He pressed his hands to her chest.

The magic that erupted from him was not the cold, dark fire of the Overblot. It was the green of the valley in spring, the warm, golden light of the morning sun through the leaves, the deep, resonant hum of the earth itself. It was the magic of the Draconia line, the power of the Dragon Lords, the blood of the mountain and the breath of the storm.

He poured himself into her. You could see it—the life leaving his eyes, the color draining from his skin, the centuries of accumulated power flowing from his fingertips into the burning, fragile vessel of Lyra's body. He was giving her his strength, his vitality, his very essence, the same way Lilia had given his magic to the cocoon.

The same way Lilia had died.

"No," you gasped, your hand reaching out, your fingers closing around his wrist. "Stop! You'll kill yourself!"

He did not stop. He opened his eyes, and the green was darker now, deeper, the exhaustion in them a chasm that had no bottom. But the look he gave you was one of absolute, terrifying peace.

"I will not lose her," he said, his voice a faint, distant echo. "I will not let you lose her."

He pushed harder. The room shook. The windows rattled. The thorns outside the walls began to bloom, black and crimson, the garden responding to the surge of power. Lyra arched off the bed, her mouth opening in a silent scream, and the hum—the lullaby that had been her constant companion—swelled, filling the room, drowning out the sound of your own heartbeat.

Then, silence.

Lyra collapsed against the mattress, her breathing steady, her skin cool, the fever broken. The taint of the Dreaming had been burned away, anchored to the physical world by the sheer, overwhelming force of Malleus's magic.

Malleus slumped forward, his head falling against the edge of the bed, his body limp, his chest barely rising.

You caught him. Your arms wrapped around his shoulders, your hands gripping the fabric of his tunic, and you held him, the weight of him against your chest, the faint, fluttering pulse of his heart against your palm.

He was alive. Barely. The magic he had given was a chunk of his soul, a piece of his immortality, and he would never be the same. The exhaustion in his eyes was permanent now, a shadow that would never fully lift, the green dimmer than it had been, as if the light behind it had been turned down a fraction.

And he had done it without hesitation. He had done it for you. He had done it for the child of the man he had failed, the child who was a living reminder of his greatest sin.

The hatred in your chest cracked. Not broke—cracked. A fissure in the wall you had built, a sliver of light in the dark. You looked at his face, slack and pale, and you saw Lilia. Not the features, not the mannerisms, but the choice. The choice to give everything, to hold the door, to let the fire consume you so that someone else could live.

He is not Lilia, you thought, your grip on him tightening. But he is trying.

You stayed on the floor, holding the King of the Valley, and you wept.

The Weight of the Wreckage

The hatred cracked, but it did not empty.

That was the thing no one warned you about. In the stories, the villain repents, the heroine forgives, and the crack in the wall of grief lets the light pour through, golden and redemptive and total. No one told you that a crack was just a crack—that it did not dissolve the wall, did not dismantle the brick and mortar of four hundred years of loss, did not sweep away the ash. No one told you that you could hold a man in your arms as he lay dying and feel the ferocious, maternal gratitude of a mother whose child has been saved, and still want to claw the skin from his bones for being the reason she needed saving in the first place.

No one told you that you could feel two things at once, and that both of them could be true.

You did not speak of the floor. You did not speak of the way you had caught him, the way your arms had wrapped around his shoulders, the way you had wept into his hair while Lyra slept, fever-broken and breathing, in the bed above you. You filed the moment away in the locked, burning cabinet where you kept the things you could not afford to examine—not because you were ashamed, but because you knew that if you opened that cabinet, even a crack, the grief would rush in and drown what little ground you had managed to stand on.

Malleus did not speak of it either. He woke the next morning in his own bed, alone, the healers having carried him there while you sat vigil at Lyra's side. He came to the nursery at dawn, as was his habit, his steps slower than before, his shoulders carrying a new and permanent hunch, as if the magic he had given Lyra had been a structural column and his body was the building that had lost it.

He stood in the doorway. You stood between him and the bed.

For a long moment, neither of you moved. The silence was a living thing—hostile, territorial, a border dispute waged in the space between the doorframe and the cradle.

"Her fever broke," you said at last, and your voice was flat, a dispatch from a front line, devoid of inflection.

"I know." His voice was rougher than before—the magic had taken something from his throat, some resonance, some depth, leaving it scraped and thin. "I can feel it. The anchor holds."

"Then you can leave."

He flinched. It was a small thing—a tightening around the eyes, a nearly imperceptible drawing-back of the chin—but you saw it, and the sight of it satisfied something vicious and wounded in you, something that wanted him to hurt the way you hurt, something that believed that pain was a currency and he was immeasurably in debt.

He did not leave. He stood there, his hands clasped before him, his gaze lowered, and he waited. He had learned to wait. Four hundred years of waiting had taught him the geometry of patience, the angle at which a man must incline his head when he has no right to lift it.

"The healers say I must monitor the anchor," he said quietly. "If the Dreaming pulls at her again, I will feel it. I must remain close."

"Then remain in the hallway."

He nodded. He turned, his cloak brushing the doorframe, and he left, and you were alone with your daughter and the sound of your own ragged breathing, and the hatred was still there—present, pulsing, alive—but it was no longer alone in the room, and that, you realized with a sickening lurch, was the problem.

The gratitude had moved in. It had not asked permission. It had simply arrived, like a stray cat that slipped through an open window and curled up on the hearth, and no matter how many times you shooed it away, it came back, purring, insistent, indifferent to your objections.

He had saved your daughter. He had poured his own life force into her body, the same way Lilia had poured his into the cocoon, and he had done it without hesitation, without negotiation, without demanding a single thing in return. He had simply fallen to his knees and said I am sorry and I will not let you lose her, and the words had been a blade that cut through the wall of your hatred not because they were beautiful, but because they were true, and truth, as you had learned the hard way, was the one weapon no armor could withstand.

You hated him for it. You hated that he had given you a reason to soften. You hated that every time you looked at Lyra's sleeping face, cool and peaceful and alive, you saw his hands on her chest, the green light pouring from his fingertips, the way he had chosen to burn so that she would not have to. You hated that the monster who had stolen your life had just saved the only piece of it that remained, and you hated most of all that you could no longer look at him and see only a monster.

The hatred, you realized, had been simple. It had been clean. It had been a blade with a single edge, and you had wielded it with precision, and it had kept you alive through the worst of the grief. And now Malleus had gone and complicated it, and you were left holding a weapon that cut in both directions, and every time you swung it, you bled.

The first year was a war of attrition.

You built your days around Lyra—her feedings, her hums, her slow, strange growth—and you built your walls around yourself, higher and thicker than before, reinforced with the mortar of resentment. Malleus existed in the periphery, a dark shape at the edge of your vision, a shadow that crossed the hallway at specific hours, a presence that filled the tower with the low-frequency hum of his diminished but still-vast power.

He did not intrude. He had learned—finally, after four centuries—that presence was not the same as belonging, and that proximity without permission was not devotion but invasion. He brought tea in the morning and left it on the table outside your door. He repaired the window in the nursery that had been sticking, the sound of his magic a quiet, apologetic whisper in the walls. He trimmed the thorns in the garden when they grew too close to Lyra's window, and he did it before dawn, when he thought you were asleep, but you were always awake—you had been awake for four hundred years, it seemed, and sleep was a country you no longer had the passport for.

You drank the tea. You did not thank him. You told yourself the tea was the only reason, that it was merely warm and you were merely cold, and that drinking it was a practical decision, not an emotional one. You told yourself this every morning, and every morning, the lie grew a little thinner, a little more translucent, until you could see the truth beneath it the way you could see the bottom of a stream through clear water: you drank the tea because he had made it for you, and that was the only act of care you were willing to accept, and you were starving for care, and you despised yourself for the hunger.

He never asked for acknowledgment. He never lingered at the door, never sought your gaze, never said more than the bare minimum required for the logistics of shared custody. When you handed Lyra to him for her anchor-treatments—the weekly infusions of his magic that kept the Dreaming at bay—your hands did not touch. You held the child out, and he took her, and the transfer was clinical, efficient, the exchange of a fragile cargo between two parties who had agreed to a ceasefire but not to peace.

But Lyra—Lyra had no patience for ceasefires.

She felt the tension. Of course she did; she was a child of the Dreaming, her soul tuned to frequencies that humans could not hear, and the dissonance between you and Malleus was a sound that made her frown and press her small hands over her ears. She loved you with a fierce, instinctive devotion that was written in the marrow of her bones. But she loved him too—curiously, instinctively, the way a moth loves the flame that could consume it, drawn to the warmth of the magic that had saved her and the quiet, broken man who carried it.

"Mother," she said one evening, her voice a soft, humming echo of the lullaby she never stopped hearing. "Why does the king smell like sadness?"

The question hit you like a slap. You were tucking her into bed, the blankets pulled up to her chin, her wine-red eyes luminous in the candlelight, and the innocence of the question was a blade that slipped between your ribs and found the soft tissue beneath.

"Everyone smells like sadness sometimes," you said, your voice carefully even.

"You do not," Lyra said. "You smell like fire and jas-mine." She pronounced the word carefully, syllable by syllable, as if she were handling something fragile. "He smells like the place where the Dreaming is quiet. The empty place. Why does he live there?"

You opened your mouth, and the answer that came out was not the one you had planned—not the careful, deflecting non-answer you had perfected over months of sidestepping her questions about the king, about the curse, about the father she had never met.

"Because he put himself there," you said, and your voice was rough, cracked, leaking something you had not intended to release. "He did something terrible, and now he is punishing himself for it, and I cannot decide whether the punishment is enough."

Lyra looked at you for a long moment, her ancient-young eyes seeing more than any child should, more than any creature of four centuries' suspension had the right to see. Then she reached up and placed her small, cool palm against your cheek.

"The Dreaming has no punishment," she said, her voice dropping to a whisper, as if she were sharing a secret. "It only has loops. He is not being punished, Mother. He is just going in circles. Someone has to show him the door."

You stared at her. The words were too precise, too knowing, and the suspicion that she was not speaking as a child but as something else—a vessel, a channel, a mouthpiece for the Dreaming itself—made the hair on the back of your neck rise.

"Where is the door?" you asked, and the question was not really for her.

Lyra closed her eyes and hummed, the low, vibrating drone that was her constant companion, the lullaby that never ended. "You are standing in it," she said. "You just will not open it."

You did not sleep that night. You lay in your bed, staring at the ceiling, Lyra's words circling in your mind like moths around a flame. Someone has to show him the door. You are standing in it. You just will not open it.

The anger rose, hot and familiar, a fire you had been tending for decades—your only warmth, your only companion through the long, empty years. How dare she? How dare this child, this impossible, suspended soul who had never walked the world, who had never felt the crushing weight of waking up alone, who had never watched the man she loved dissolve into silver ash—how dare she suggest that you were the one holding the door shut?

You were the victim. You were the one who had been stolen from, who had been silenced, who had been locked in glass for four centuries while the world moved on without you. You had every right to your hatred. You had earned it. You had paid for it with your husband's life, your friends' deaths, your child's suspended soul, and no one—not Malleus, not the Dreaming, not your own infuriating, prophetic daughter—had the right to ask you to lay it down.

The anger was a fire, and you fed it, and it warmed you, and you did not notice that it was also burning the house down.

The confrontation happened three months later, on a night of pouring rain.

It was not triggered by anything dramatic. There was no single inciting incident, no final straw that broke the camel's back. It was simply the accumulation—a hundred mornings of tea left outside the door, a hundred evenings of Malleus sitting in the garden in the rain because he did not feel he had the right to come inside, a hundred nights of you lying awake, listening to the silence of the tower and the faint, steady hum of Lyra's lullaby and the sound of a man who was dying by inches in the hallway because he believed he deserved it.

You found him in the garden. He was sitting on the stone bench beneath the black-thorned arbor, his cloak soaked through, his hair plastered to his face, his head bowed, his hands open on his knees as if he were catching the rain because it was the only thing that would touch him.

You stood on the terrace, the rain soaking through your nightgown, the cold biting into your skin, and the sight of him—the King of the Briar Valley, the heir of the Draconia line, the most powerful mage of his generation—sitting alone in a storm because he did not believe he was allowed to come inside, cracked something inside you that had been under pressure for a very, very long time.

"Get inside," you said, and your voice was hoarse, stripped raw by the rain and the rage and the thing beneath the rage that you refused to name.

He looked up. His face was a ruin—gaunt, grey, the exhaustion permanent now, the green eyes dimmer than they had been before the saving, before he had poured a piece of his soul into your daughter and never grown it back. Rain streamed down his cheeks like tears, and you did not know if he was crying, and you did not care.

"I do not wish to intrude," he said, and his voice was barely audible above the rain, a sound so small and defeated that it made your chest ache with a ferocity that terrified you.

"You are not intruding," you said, and the words tasted like glass in your mouth, because they were true, and you had been swallowing the truth for so long that it had cut your throat on the way out. "You are dying in my garden, and my daughter can feel it, and she is afraid, and I do not have the energy to be angry at you and worried about you at the same time, so get inside."

He stared at you. The rain fell between you, a curtain of grey, and in the dim light, his eyes were luminous—not with magic, but with something rawer, more dangerous: hope. The smallest, most fragile, most devastating thing in the world.

"Say it again," he whispered, and the request was so quiet you almost missed it, so vulnerable that it made you want to hurt him for daring to ask.

"I will not." You crossed your arms, your jaw set, the last of your defenses locking into place. "I will not say it again. I will say it once: you are allowed inside. Not because I forgive you. Not because I have stopped hating you. Because my daughter needs her anchor, and her anchor is dissolving in the rain, and I am too tired to watch."

He rose. His legs were unsteady, his body listing slightly to the left as if the wind could push him over, and you saw, with a clarity that made your breath catch, how much the saving had cost him. He was not the same man who had Overblot. He was not the same king who had ruled for four hundred years. He was a creature held together by duty and guilt and the fading echo of a lullaby, and he was falling apart, and the only thing keeping him upright was the belief that you needed him to be.

You turned and walked inside. You did not wait to see if he followed. You did not need to; you could feel him behind you, a shadow in the doorway, a presence in the hallway, a warmth that was faint and fragile and terrifyingly close to going out.

You led him to the kitchen. It was a small room, tucked beneath the stairs, and it smelled of burnt sugar and old herbs—the ghost of Lilia's terrible, beloved cooking. You pointed to the chair by the fire, and he sat, his cloak pooling around him like a puddle of ink, and you stood at the counter and made tea because it was the only thing you knew how to do with your hands when they were shaking this badly.

You set the cup in front of him. He looked at it, then at you, and the question in his eyes was so plaintive, so lost, that you had to look away.

"It is not a gift," you said, your voice harsh. "It is fuel. You are no use to Lyra dead."

He nodded. He lifted the cup with both hands, his fingers trembling, and he drank, and the silence between you was not the hostile silence of the hallway or the loaded silence of the doorway but something new: the exhausted, soaked-through silence of two people who have been fighting a war for too long and have forgotten what they were fighting about.

The rain fell. The fire crackled. And in the nursery above, Lyra hummed in her sleep, the lullaby threading through the floorboards, a silver wire connecting the kitchen to the tower, the past to the present, the dead to the living.

"She asked about you," you said, not looking at him, your hands wrapped around your own cup, the heat searing your palms. "Lyra. She asked why you smell like sadness."

Malleus set his cup down slowly, carefully, as if it were made of spun glass. "And what did you tell her?"

"I told her the truth." You looked at him then, and the hatred was still there—it would always be there, a scar on the landscape of your heart, a mountain range that would never erode—but it was not the only geography anymore. There were valleys now, and rivers, and the faint, green shoots of something growing in the ash. "I told her you did something terrible, and now you are punishing yourself, and I cannot decide if the punishment is enough."

His jaw tightened. The firelight carved his features into something stark and angular, all shadow and bone, and for a moment, you saw the boy he had been—the one who had waited in the empty castle, the one who had watched his parents turn to ash, the one who had been so lonely that he had nearly burned the world to keep it from leaving.

"It will never be enough," he said, and his voice was the voice of a man who had spent four hundred years arriving at this conclusion and had found no argument against it. "I know that. I have always known that. There is no punishment that equals what I have taken from you. There is no penance that weighs the same as a life. I could sit in this garden for ten thousand years, and it would not balance the scale."

"Then why do you do it?" The question was out before you could stop it, and it was not accusatory—it was genuinely, nakedly curious, the question of a woman who had watched a man self-destruct for decades and could not understand the engine that drove him. "Why do you make the tea and trim the thorns and sit in the rain? If you believe it will never be enough, why do you keep trying?"

He looked at you, and the answer was in his eyes before it was in his mouth, and it was the simplest, most devastating answer you had ever heard.

"Because it is what Lilia would have done."

The name hit you like a physical blow. You swayed, your hand gripping the edge of the counter, your knuckles white, your breath catching on a sob that you swallowed before it could escape.

Lilia. Of course. Of course it was Lilia. It had always been Lilia. The man who had held the line when the world was ending, who had raised a prince as his own son, who had poured himself into the glass to save his family, who had loved without reservation and sacrificed without hesitation. The standard by which all love was measured, and against which Malleus—who had been raised by that love, who had been shaped by those hands, who had been sung to sleep by that voice—found himself endlessly, impossibly wanting.

"You are not Lilia," you said, and your voice was a whisper, and the words were not a rejection but a boundary, a line drawn in the sand between the man who had died and the man who was still here, the love you had lost and the love that was asking, in its broken, fumbling way, to be seen.

"I know," Malleus said, and the grief in his voice was not for himself but for the fact that he could never be what you needed, that the best he could offer was a shadow of a light that had gone out of the world. "I will never be Lilia. I cannot give you what he gave. I cannot love you the way he loved you—he was better at love than I will ever be, because he practiced it for seven hundred years, and I have only been practicing for four hundred, and I was practicing alone."

He paused, and his hands were shaking again, the tremor that had become permanent, the price of the saving, and he set the cup down before he could drop it.

"But I can make tea," he said, and his voice cracked on the word, splitting it open to reveal the desperate, clumsy sincerity beneath. "I can trim the thorns. I can sit in the rain. I can give my magic to your daughter and my life to this valley and my remaining centuries to the attempt, however inadequate, to be something other than the monster who took everything from you. It is not enough. It will never be enough. But it is what I have, and I am offering it, and I will keep offering it for as long as I exist, because the alternative is to stop, and I have seen what happens when I stop, and I will not be that creature again."

The fire crackled. The rain fell. And you stood in the kitchen of the tower that had been your prison and your sanctuary and your grave, and you looked at the man who had broken your world and was trying, with every clumsy, inadequate, burning-water-and-singed-fingers fiber of his being, to help you build a new one.

You did not forgive him. Not that night. Not for a long time after. But you did something harder and more painful and more honest than forgiveness: you acknowledged him.

"You make terrible tea," you said, and your voice was rough and wet and not quite a joke and not quite not one. "Lilia's was worse, but yours is terrible."

A sound escaped him—something between a laugh and a sob, a noise so raw and unfamiliar that it seemed to startle him. He pressed his hand over his mouth, his shoulders shaking, and the tears came, silent and heavy, mixing with the rainwater still clinging to his face, and he wept in your kitchen, and you did not comfort him, because you were not ready to comfort him, but you did not leave, either.

You sat across from him, your hands around your cup, and you let him cry, and the silence was no longer the silence of two people avoiding each other but the silence of two people sitting in the wreckage together, acknowledging the shape of the hole that had been blown through both their lives.

The hatred did not leave. But it made room—grudgingly, painfully, millimeter by millimeter—for something else to exist alongside it. Not love. Not yet. Just the grudging, exhausted admission that the man sitting across from you was not a monster, not anymore—if he had ever been purely one—but a person, broken and trying, and that the trying mattered, even if the result was charred vegetables and too-sweet tea and a presence that was still, after everything, the only warmth in a tower that had been cold for four hundred years.

You did not hold hands that night. You did not touch. When he finally rose to leave, hours later, the fire burning low and the rain slowing to a drizzle, you said only this:

"Tomorrow. Come inside. Do not leave the tea on the floor. Bring it in, and sit down, and drink it with me."

He stopped in the doorway, his back to you, his silhouette dark against the grey light of the corridor. He did not turn. He did not speak. He simply nodded—a small, desperate, trembling motion, the nod of a man who has been thrown a rope in a bottomless ocean and is terrified that if he moves too fast, it will snap.

Then he was gone, and you were alone in the kitchen, and the fire was dying, and the lullaby hummed through the floor, and the night was long, but the warmth—faint, fragile, insufficient, real—held.

It held.

And you did not blow it out.

Epilogue: The Second Dawn

The child you had together was born on a night when the thorns in the garden bloomed white.

She was not a Somnambulant. She was not a ghost of the Dreaming. She was a living, breathing, screaming miracle, her skin the color of warm honey, her eyes the bright, clear green of new leaves. She was human and fae, past and future, grief and hope intertwined.

You held her in your arms, in the same room where you had woken from the sleep, in the same bed where you had held Malleus as he lay dying, and you looked at her, and you wept.

Malleus stood beside you, his hand resting on your shoulder, his thumb tracing gentle circles on your skin. The exhaustion in his eyes was still there—it would never fully leave—but it was softened now, edged with a light that you had never seen before. Joy. Simple, unguarded, disbelieving joy.

"What will you name her?" he asked, his voice a whisper.

You looked at the child, then at the portrait that hung on the far wall. Lilia, in his true form, his black hair flowing, his red eyes gleaming, his expression caught between a smile and a sigh. You looked at Lyra, who was standing in the doorway, her wine-red eyes wide with wonder, her small hand clutching the frame of the door as if she were afraid to step inside.

And you looked at the child in your arms—this new life, this second chance, this living proof that the world had not ended, that the dawn had come, that the long night was finally over.

"Aurora," you said, the name tasting like honey and morning light on your tongue. "For the dawn. Because we made it through the dark."

Malleus closed his eyes, a single tear slipping down his cheek. He leaned down, pressing a kiss to your forehead, then to the baby's, his lips warm and trembling.

"Thank you," he whispered. "For staying. For choosing to stay."

You looked at him, at the king who had stolen your life and given it back, at the monster who had become your shelter, at the man who had loved you through the worst of yourself. You reached up, your hand finding his, and you laced your fingers through his.

"I did not get lost," you said, your voice steady, your heart finally, finally at peace. "I simply continued. And it brought me here."

Lyra stepped into the room, her bare feet silent on the stone floor, and she climbed onto the bed beside you, her small hand reaching out to touch the baby's cheek. Aurora gurgled, her green eyes blinking up at her sister, and Lyra smiled—a real smile, not the crinkling mask she had inherited from her father, but a warm, unguarded, utterly human smile.

And in the nursery, the portrait of Lilia seemed to glow in the moonlight, the painted eyes watching the scene with an expression that was no longer caught between a smile and a sigh, but was simply, quietly, profoundly at peace.

Outside, the thorns in the garden began to bloom, their white petals unfurling in the moonlight, and the valley sang a lullaby that had been four hundred years in the making.

The door was open. The warmth was real.

"PLEASE, PLEASE! I'LL DO ANYTHING."

The same routine. The same words. The same desperation. Different victim.

"Just not the stone..." The guy pleaded with me, faced down on the ground begging. His voice began to quiet down. "It's important to us. Our family heirloom...."

As if he knew it was inevitable from the start.

I cocked my gun at him and silently took a breath.

I've grown used to this life. Yet, if Cuphead was here, he would probably the hesitation and shudder in my breath and ask if I want him to do it. He knew all my tells in the back of his head.

"Please."

Gunshots rang out from behind me, clearly from Cuphead. Must be going on a rampage with the guards. The mansion was heavily guarded after all, even if we just snucked in.

"A client of ours told us to tell you your time's up." I said blankly in response.

Aim.

The man's head shot up, his eyes bloodshot and eyes wide as they can be.

"No, WAIT—"

Shoot.

Sometimes, there would be a ringing in my ear. It happens every time I look back with any of the work. Not during the job but afterwards. It's a dull pain, something I've grown accustomed to. So, I try not to think about it and move on with the next job, keeping my mind distracted with Cuphead and his shenanigans.

"You done over there, Mugsy?" The said Cup took a peek from the door left ajar. "The Boss wants the stone by sunrise, ya know."

"Yeah..." I answered, voice even as I took the precious gemstone from the desk and walk away, leaving the corpse bleeding on the floor.

I'm sorry.

I chose this life without much of a choice to begin with and yet I'm just trying to survive as well. A path that has been rocky since the beginning.

"Do you think wishes go somewhere after we make them?" They said out loud while cooking for dinner one night.

"I—What?"

I then sighed, shaking my head at another of their silly pop-up questions, unaware of the smile slipping onto my face. Every time they do something like that, they made me question how'd they come up with this.

"Sorry, did that sound silly?" I saw them glance to me, clearly hearing my sigh. Yet, still wearing a smile that I all too adore.

There it was, that dull ache again and I felt that lump in my throat get even bigger. They were an enigma, and sometimes I wonder if they were aware of what's happening to me.

If they know how much they affected me.

"If there was, it'd be at the pits." I cleared my throat and rolled my eyes as an answer with a smile. "If they did come true, it's cause of luck."

Great, just now I sounded like my idiot brother.

"Hey! You never know." They grinned, bumping a hip with mine. "How could you tell if it came true because you made that wish or because of some coincidental luck? I like to think it gives someone something to hold onto. A little bit of hope."

Hope?

"What would you wish for?" They looked at me with the same smile again on their face.

I opened my mouth, ready to speak, before closing it swallowing the words I wanted to say. I'd rather my thoughts be locked away.

"...Nothing in particular I can think of."

"Seriously? Nothing?"

Not yet. I don't want to admit it.

Because if I were to say it I knew I would admit that there was something more to this relationship and there would be no going back .

'I want to be yours...' I felt my thoughts whispering in my head. The confession remained trapped behind my tongue, unspoken yet impossible to ignore even if it was trapped in the back of my mind.

The weight in my chest grew heavier with every passing second.

Celestials, I love them.

I love them way too much.

How did I let it get this far?

"Um sorry...."

'Where'd he run off to this time?' I clicked my tongue as I looked around. We were up at 21st Walk Street, one street away from the pier when I noticed Cuphead wasn't behind me when I swiveled around to check on him. 'Not again...'

It was then that I met them.

"Um, sorry...." I noticed a toon calling my attention right beside me. I twitched in reflexed before looking to them with slight annoyance.

"Sorry, new to the area..." They said in a nervous tone, holding up a map. "Can you point me to this market? I've asked a few people but they were also unavailable..."

And they were rambling now and I still have to find that stupid brother of mine.

"So, I was wondering...." They must've paused based from my expression because they looked like they were sweating buckets. "On second thought, never mind! You look like a busy man, so I'll just—"

I didn't understand why I did it.

Well, it doesn't look as if Cuphead was gonna appear anytime soon. He was getting better at hiding from me. I sighed and held my hand out. They looked at me as if I grew a second head. I pointed to the map. "Give it here. I'll write it down..."

As I put down the directions, I noticed their intense gaze on me, making me slightly nervous but kept my eyes on the map.

"Thank you, really."

"Hm?" I looked up and saw them smile gently. As if I did something amazing. I was just simply writing down directions.

They must've noticed my confusion when they responded sheepishly. "Well, if it wasn't for you, I'd be lost. So thank you."

I paused from writing for a second, an unfamiliar warmth washing over me. I felt my breath shudder for some reason.

"...It's nothing."

It's nothing? That's all you can say?

When I handed it back to them, they dropped something in my hand. I held it up to see that it was a coupon to a small cafe that I remember seeing from a poster a few months ago.

Strangely enough, it was also by the pier.

"The owner gave me a coupon as a welcome to this town. It's really nice. You should go if you haven't been there yet." They explained as if we were friends.

'Must be nice to relax...'

"Hm..."

"Anyways, thanks for the help! Ciao!" They winked and fled off, running off to most likely the marketplace. I stared off as their figure grew smaller and disappeared in the distance.

I then looked at the coupon again, wondering what to do with it.

It was then a few minutes later, Cuphead appeared, holding up several barbeque sticks and munching on them.

"Whatcha got over there, Mugsy?"

I flinched and spun around to find him peeking over my shoulder with his same old stupid smug grin. Subconsciously, I clutched the small piece of paper to my chest, unaware of how it may look.

"Come on! Hiding from your older brother now?" He tried to snatch the paper but was too slow with one hand holding the barbeque sticks. "Don't tell me is it a phone number?"

"It's not like that." I gritted my teeth as I began dodging his wriggly hands. "Also, you're only older by like 15 minutes, you're not that old!"

"Still older. Come on, tell me~" He said in a sing-song tone.

"Geez! You're as nosy as ever!" I slammed my hand onto his head to stop him from making another step and held the other with the coupon back from him snatching it away. "It's just a thank you gift from some toon cause I gave her directions!"

"And now you're in love?"

"No!"

That's a luxury.

Yet, here we are with them feeding me pasta. We're friends now, apparently. In status, in titles, possibly even on paper if given that option. It's been months since we've admitted to friendship but the lines have been long since blurry.

"Don't put in the tomato sauce yet!" They playfully scolded, gently moving my hands away from two of the plates set before me.

The feeling of their fingertips lingered on my hand as they were pried away, leaving a stubborn warmth and making the knot in the back of my throat appear once again.

"Do you really need to add that?" I questioned as I watched them pour a little bit of olive oil on both of them. "It's such a small detail."

"Coming from a perfectionist?" They teased as they then passed the plates over to me.

"I—Now that's not fair. That just comes with the job." I played along, slightly flustered from the attack. "Not with cooking a meal."

No doubt they knew my secrets. They're aware of the second name that's been long since been a burden to me and my brother.

"The Collectors".

They've seen me with blood stained on my hands. The smell of corpses left on my clothes. But, they never thought to question it when I appeared at their place all rugged and dirtied to the bone. They'd just simply bandage me up and ask me to put my clothes in the wash because I apparently "smell like a rat from the sewers" and then head straight to the kitchen to make tea. Usually, either chamomile or lavender.

Occasionally, peppermint.

But, each time, I noticed their hands when we sat together in the living room as they laid their head on my shoulder, keeping each other company.

So, why haven't they ran away?

I tore myself away from my spiralling, focusing on pouring tomato sauce and parmesan cheese.

"You say "tomayto," I say "tomahto." They stuck out their tongue making me shake my head with a smile.

'I wanna be yours...'

But, I don't want to lose that warmth.

I don't want to let go.

So, hide it away.

We've shared kisses before. On the cheeks, on the nose, sometimes the occasional forehead. Never on the lips. The thought of it crossed my mind every once and a while, and almost each time I caught myself staring at their lips.

But, I never dared to cross that line. Neither of us did even if we danced dangerously close to it. It was easier that way. Easier to pretend that it was friendship even with the fleeting touches. I thought it would be easier.

Nothing would change.

But, it wasn't.

Because the more I kept silent, the more I felt myself choked up and felt myself missing something entirely. I find myself contemplating what life would be with them.

If I haven't chosen this life.

My mind drifted to a conversation with me and Cuphead had several nights ago. A complete ambush. He was dumb and had rocks for brains but he knew the signs. He was observant as he could be, I'd be surprised if he hadn't noticed.

He was practically begging for me to admit to it.

So, I told him what was going on. The fleeting touches. The warmth and comfort I felt whenever I was with them. The kisses we shared, and the nights we shared after a job.

"Are you kidding me?" His eyes were wide open as he heard this, practically sitting up from his bed watching the bubbles spewing away on my cup and straw with my face turned away not willing to take more of the humiliation after finally admitting it to him.

"And ya haven't told them yet?" He raised a brow, his usual grin slowly fading away from his face from the seriousness of all this. "Mugsy, I've never pegged you to be a player—"

No.

"It's not like that!" I answered, my head spinning to look at him. The words escaped louder than intended, causing him to recoil slightly. Heat rushed to my face as I realized how defensive I'd sounded. I closed my eyes and drew in a slow breath, trying to control my thoughts from spiralling even more.

"It's not..." I muttered, fingers digging into my temple. "There's no way I..."

"Then, what is it?" He pointed to me, making me flinch. "There ain't no way that poor toon isn't practically in love with you after all that shit you guys pulled. And without me there, damn. But, come on, Mugsy..."

"If it's not what you think it is, then what else could it possibly be? Because that ain't what normal friends do."

"...I—"

'I wanna be yours...'

"It's—" Unconsciously, I felt my hands dig even further into my porcelain. If I had gone even more, there's no doubt I would've cracked.

'I want to devote myself to them...'

The more I think, the more their smile appears in my head. The ache felt even heavier than ever, that even breathing felt harder. The days spent began to mix in my thoughts and each moment began to erase the fragile line that we established.

"Mugsy?"

"I don't know." I answered, barely audible.

"Why can't you just admit it..."

"This isn't some fairy tale, Cuphead." I gritted my teeth. "It's ain't some romantic novel where everyone gets a happy sunshine and rainbows ending. We're already involved as it is and I don't—"

I felt myself choking up. "I can't—"

I don't want to lose them.

Not because of us.

Our jobs were dangerous.

We're "The Collectors", by Celestials sake.

He knew that and still kept pushing anyway.

I turned by back from him, dragging my hands down my face in frustration and answered in a barely audible tone.

"I don't want to be selfish..."

The room was now silent, I kept my gaze fixed on the floor as I felt my breathing feel even heavier than before as I came to acknowledge a truth that I was aware of moving forward from the back of my mind, unlocking the door I've so desperately kept hidden for this long.

I heard the bed creak beneath shifting weight, followed by the soft thud of footsteps against the floor. A moment later, I felt the mattress dip behind me as my brother took a seat on the other side of the bed.

"You say that, but they haven't run away." He commented gruffly.

I felt my breath hitched.

"...Don't you think, they already knew what they were getting into?"

"Let me help with the dishes."

They shook their head with a small grin, giving me a thumbs up. "It's fine, you're a guest. And I was the one who asked if you wanted to stay for dinner so it's only right for you to settle down and relax. You've been looking extra tired these days."

They knew.

It's like they always know.

"Oh! I just bought this new teaset! You like blue right?" They paused in realization and clapped their hands together before opening their cupboard and brought a pair of teacups.

Suddenly I couldn't take the pressure anymore. "I also bought some peppermint tea. Since you've been looking tired, I also thought-"

"I love you."

"To-I-w-wait, what?" The teacups went crashing onto the floor as I watch their eyes widen like sauce, completely in shock. They then snapped out of their state, realizing the mess on the floor. "Oh, dear."

I panicked and went to grab the broom and dustpan from the living room. "Shit- I mean I'm sorry. That was rude and just stupid of me. Forget what I-"

"I love you too."

Huh? Did I hear that right?

I slowly turn my head and found them standing just outside of the kitchen. The widest smile stretched across their face, the faintest rosy flush on their cheeks, gazed fixed on me like I just hung each star in the sky.

It was warm enough to make my heart stumble.

It was only then that I became aware of the arms encircling my waist. I glanced down to find them looking at me with a tenderness that stole the breath from my lungs.

"Would it ruin the moment if I said, I've been waiting?" They said with the brightest beam as I slowly wrapped my arms around them and pushed my face gently onto their hair.

I chuckled humorlessly. "No, no it wouldn't."

For a moment, neither of them spoke. The room settled into a comfortable silence, broken only by the quiet sound of breathing and the faint creak of the floorboards.

"Oh dear, A-Are you crying?" They blinked as I squeezed them slightly wanting more of their warmth, but clearly felt drops of liquid against their head.

"No...."

They tilted their head back to look at me, hearing their breath hitched for a few seconds before a small smile slowly appeared in their expression as their hands softly caressed my cheeks. It was there I was aware of the drops trickling down my cheeks as their thumb brushed it away with such gentleness that I couldn't help crying even more.

"Oh you silly...." The muttered softly, unaware of the gap between us thinning. "You really are a softie..."

"I couldn't come up with a speech. No flowers, no chocolate, no nothing." I muttered, shifting my eyes away. I choked up once again. "I couldn't—"

"I know, Mugsy. I know." A quiet chuckle escaped them.

Celestials, that sound really is enough for my heart to just get ripped out of my chest.

"You've still managed to say everything needed."

Celestials, I love them.

"Even if your hands are stained, you know I would still love you, right..." They whispered softly as if it was a secret only for us.

How I love them.

I felt them laugh again softly from my expression and I found my eyes drifting to their lips, noticing the gap between us. The sight of it stirred my thoughts, a yearning that I could no longer ignore ever since.

"...May I kiss you?" My thoughts came out more quietly than I intended as I caught their gaze once more.

The corners of their lips turned up once more filled with warmth.

"...You may."

I took a shaky breath and dived right in. It wasn't perfect. Our noses bumped against each other and I thought I felt our teeth clinked with one another as the kiss grew deeper. I felt them grew wobbly as I went to place a hand against their back so they wouldn't fall.

But it was warm.

And I felt a sense of relief after finally admitting what's been inside. A sense of weight that has been burdening me for a long time.

Finally.

Finally, I was theirs.

The wish that did come true.

'I swear to protect them with all that I have.'

𝙰/𝙽: 𝙶𝚘𝚍𝚜, 𝙸 𝚑𝚊𝚟𝚎 𝚗𝚘 𝚒𝚍𝚎𝚊 𝚠𝚑𝚊𝚝 𝙸'𝚖 𝚍𝚘𝚒𝚗𝚐. 𝙷𝚎 𝚊𝚕𝚠𝚊𝚢𝚜 𝚜𝚎𝚎𝚖𝚜 𝚕𝚒𝚔𝚎 𝚊 𝚢𝚎𝚊𝚛𝚗𝚎𝚛 𝚋𝚞𝚝 𝚊𝚝 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚜𝚊𝚖𝚎 𝚝𝚒𝚖𝚎 𝚑𝚎 𝚠𝚘𝚞𝚕𝚍 𝚋𝚎 𝚠𝚘𝚛𝚛𝚒𝚎𝚍 𝚊𝚋𝚘𝚞𝚝 𝚑𝚒𝚜 𝚋𝚛𝚘𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚛 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚠𝚘𝚛𝚔. 𝙸𝚍𝚔. 𝙸 𝚓𝚞𝚜𝚝 𝚠𝚛𝚘𝚝𝚎 𝚊 𝚚𝚞𝚒𝚌𝚔 𝚘𝚗𝚎𝚜𝚑𝚘𝚝 𝚝𝚑𝚊𝚝 𝙸 𝚍𝚘𝚗'𝚝 𝚔𝚗𝚘𝚠 𝚒𝚏 𝚒𝚝'𝚜 𝚐𝚘𝚘𝚍 𝚌𝚞𝚣 𝙸 𝚘𝚗𝚕𝚢 𝚍𝚒𝚍 𝚘𝚗𝚎 𝚌𝚑𝚎𝚌𝚔 𝚘𝚗 𝚒𝚝 𝚠𝚑𝚎𝚗 𝙸 𝚠𝚊𝚜 𝚍𝚘𝚗𝚎 𝚠𝚛𝚒𝚝𝚒𝚗𝚐. 𝙸'𝚖 𝚘𝚗 𝚖𝚢 𝚙𝚎𝚛𝚒𝚘𝚍 𝚜𝚘 𝚖𝚢 𝚋𝚘𝚍𝚢 𝚒𝚜 𝚘𝚞𝚝 𝚘𝚏 𝚠𝚑𝚊𝚌𝚔 𝚊𝚝 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚖𝚘𝚖𝚎𝚗𝚝 𝚝𝚑𝚊𝚝 𝚖𝚎𝚊𝚗𝚜 𝚒𝚝 𝚖𝚒𝚐𝚑𝚝 𝚋𝚎 𝚊 𝚠𝚑𝚒𝚕𝚎 𝚕𝚘𝚗𝚐𝚎𝚛 𝚏𝚘𝚛 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚌𝚑𝚊𝚙𝚝𝚎𝚛 𝚝𝚘 𝚋𝚎 𝚘𝚞𝚝. 𝚂𝚘𝚛𝚛𝚢 𝚌𝚑𝚊𝚝, 𝚝𝚊𝚔𝚎 𝚝𝚑𝚒𝚜 𝚘𝚗𝚎𝚜𝚑𝚘𝚝 𝚙𝚊𝚛𝚝 𝚘𝚏 𝚊𝚗 𝚊𝚙𝚘𝚕𝚘𝚐𝚢 𝚏𝚘𝚛 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚠𝚊𝚒𝚝.

𝙻𝙸𝙽𝙴 𝙳𝙸𝚅𝙸𝙳𝙴𝚁𝚂: @anitalenia @strangergraphics