Before he was a traitor, Faelan was a prince.
The Autumn Court had once been golden, rich with twilight and harvest. Its halls smelled of leaves and honeyed wine, of steel sharpened for war and rites whispered in grove-temples. Faelan was raised in the heart of it—in reverence, in duty.
But the world had changed.
When the Hollow Queen rose, she had not taken the thrones by force.
She had offered peace.
A unification of the fracturing Courts. An end to endless wars between spring and frost, dawn and dusk.
Faelan had believed her.
He had stood before her throne—dark iron wrapped in shimmering veils—and pledged his allegiance with the fire of youth still in his blood.
He had become her weapon.
---
At first, he was blind to the rot.
The Queen spoke of balance, but demanded silence. She promised unity, but practiced erasure. He watched old gods vanish. Books disappear. Courts dissolve.
He told himself it was necessary.
Until the girl arrived.
---
She had no title. No known bloodline. Just a name whispered once in the court registry: Serelith.
He never saw her speak in court. She moved like a shadow between the Hollow Queen's favored priests, always watching, always still. A servant, some said. A foundling. Maybe even a witch.
But Faelan noticed.
How she listened more than she talked.
How the Queen looked at her not as a subject, but as a vessel.
One night, he passed her in the garden—silent paths lit by glowroot and stars. She was staring at the moon as if it were a memory.
She didn't bow. Didn't even look at him.
But for the briefest moment, he felt the raw edge of something buried in her.
And he feared it.
Not because it was dark—but because it was true.
---
The signs began to gather.
The Queen's spells over Serelith—binding ones, layered with runes Faelan had seen only in punishment rites.
Orders to restrict her movements.
Whispers that she might be dangerous.
He confronted the Queen once.
> "She's just a girl," he had said.
> "So was the first fire," the Queen replied. "Before it devoured the world."
---
That night, he found an old record—an erased lineage.
A child born beneath twin moons. A prophecy rewritten by ink that bled.
And he knew.
Serelith was not a prisoner.
She was a threat the Queen could not destroy.
Only control.
---
He left the Autumn Court three nights later, claiming a scouting mission into the Veilwood. But instead, he waited.
And when Serelith ran, he was there.
Not because he knew what she would become.
But because, for the first time, he remembered who he had once been—
And chose to become something else.