The party continued, a blur of color, music, and relentless curiosity.
Chandeliers burned low and warm, gilding the crowd in gold as laughter braided itself with the clink of crystal.
My eyes kept finding Sansir and Veronica as they moved, a duet that felt less performance and more confession.
His steps were precise and hungry, hers an answer written in motion.
When his hand traced the curve of her waist and guided her into a spin that caught every candle flame, the air between them changed.
It seemed less like a ritual and more like a seduction wrapped in ceremony.
Mirabel leaned close, her lips brushing my ear. "I am hiring her to teach me that." Her tone was casual, but her gaze held an edge I had learned to read.
"I will be looking forward to that," I murmured, and I meant it.
Curiosity pulled at the crowd.
Voices came in waves, questions about the wings, about the power that had manifested, about meaning and origin, and the secrets we had not been given.
Whispers of awe and fear rolled through the hall like wind over glass.
We answered in practiced silk and steel, speaking of politics, of shifting tides between nations, of love knotted with strategy, of alliances spun into futures that might yet be.
There was laughter and there were undercurrents of something colder.
Toasts rose and glasses chimed, while eyes measured us with quiet calculation.
For many, tonight had rearranged certainties they had relied on.
Hours narrowed. The music swelled and then thinned. Conversation split into smaller streams until the great clock tolled midnight and the tide of nobles thinned.
Lords bowed their farewells. Foreign emissaries folded into the shadows, unreadable and gone.
The hall emptied until the music was just a last refrain and candles guttered to smudges of light.
Mirabel's hand found mine as we walked the long corridor toward our chambers. Her voice came soft, laced with wonder and fatigue. "So do you have any idea what that was?"
"It is the result of perseverance," I said. "The ritual and the cost of bearing these crowns."
Her gaze locked with mine. "Is that why you waited until the end of the year? Why you refused to act, or to become anything?"
I nodded. "That power you feel is every past queen's knowledge and mastery flowing into you all at once."
Her lips parted. "So that is why the world feels…"
"Slow?" I finished for her. "Yes. For me, it feels the same."
The room had been altered while we were gone. Soft black carpet swallowed our footsteps. Obsidian curtains draped the windows.
Our bed had grown vast, layered in black and white covers stitched with silver that caught the candlelight like distant stars.
Mirabel paused at my old desk and tugged my hand. "They kept that?"
Before I could answer, she let go. I turned and my breath stalled.
Her hair had shifted. Crimson deepened to a near black and then threaded with silver like moonlight through silk.
A faint flush warmed her cheeks. Her breath came slow and deliberate, trembling with an unguarded vulnerability I had rarely been given.
"That is better," she whispered as the door closed behind us.
I caught my reflection in the glass.
My hair bore a new streak of white, a herald of the weight we wore. "So it is like that?" I asked, voice low, equal parts curiosity and something softer.
She formed a smile that held triumph and an almost fragile gratitude. "I have learned to hold it, though I doubt this grace will last long."
Without another word, she stepped out of her dress. The fabric slid from her shoulders with a delicate ease.
She folded it with ritual care and set it on the desk like an offering. Pale undergarments clung to her curves, but it was not cloth that held me.
It was the way she moved. It was like a spell was cast upon me, one that ordered me to drown in her beauty.
"Well?" she asked, teasing and steady. "What are you waiting for?"
I laughed, a rough sound that tasted a little like wonder. "I see you have gone wild."
She snapped her fingers, and the air shivered. My clothes slid away from me as if some courteous hand folded them on the dresser.
Her hands were on my chest then, warm and deliberate, pressing me back onto the bed with a gentle insistence that felt like a command and a benediction at once.
She settled over me, eyes bright with something that was not mere want. It was a claim and a promise folded into a single, fierce look.
"I have waited a long time," she said. Her voice deepened. "One might say I lived like a nun."
I stared. The face I had watched harden into armor now lay bare and soft, every line of pain and stubbornness exposed.
She was vulnerable and fierce in the same breath, and the sight of it cut through something I had kept locked away.
Her bra slipped away like a secret released. She lowered herself until her lips traced slow, sacred paths across my chest.
Each kiss was measured and deliberate, as if she were learning the map of me and promising to remember every ridge and valley.
Her fingers found the waistband of my undergarments, teasing, then pulling them free in the same careful rhythm she had used on my skin.
"I think I have finally lost control," she whispered, breath warm, a confession and an invitation.
In the dim light her hair flared, red and bright again, a violent bloom against the dark.
We moved together until the world narrowed to the press of skin against skin and the sound of our breathing.
There was tenderness threaded through the hunger.
There was sorrow folded into laughter. There was a kind of mourning and a kind of salvation, both laid bare.
Against expectation, the morning came, soft and stubborn.
Gold spilled through the curtains, painting lines across the room and the tangled bodies within it.
I woke to the weight of her against me, to the slow, steady cadence of her breath.
"I have made it this far," I whispered, a line I had been telling myself for months. It felt small and enormous at once.
The sacrifices, the losses, the times I had met death and walked away were all compressed into that single quiet claim.
Danger lingered beyond the thin walls of our chamber. The Golden Authority, my own fragile limits, the shifting tides of fate.
They waited. Yet for this slender dawn, the world felt suspended between what had been and what might be.
I raised my hand to the light. A small mark bloomed on the back of it, faint and intimate.
A sloth curled lazily around my finger, its tiny face a mixture of mockery and disappointment. I had not expected the mark to be so small, or so private.
Mirabel stirred beside me, voice heavy with sleep and something softer. "Something wrong?" she murmured.
I brushed the hair from her face and smiled. "No. Everything is perfect."
She stretched, unconcerned by the morning or by the loose sheets that framed her like a quiet vow.
"It is the start of a new year," she said. Her eyes searched mine. "Are you sure about this?"
I met her steadily. "It is time. I must grow stronger and slaughter those who killed my sister."
She said nothing for a long moment.
Then she returned to me and her lips curved into a teasing smile that made a hollow ache tighten at my ribs.
"Will you miss this face? This body?" she asked, half-joke, half-dare.
I kissed her, a kiss that held promises I could not yet say aloud and apologies I had not learned to give.
"If I didn't know any better, I might think you were trying to get me to stay."
Her eyes saddened, a small piece of light had been lost.
"I do not want to leave," I admitted. "But I have to."
Someone was waiting across the western sea, my old master, the man whose faith in me had never faltered even when I had.
I lifted Mirabel into my arms and spun her. Her laughter poured into the room like sunlight through broken glass.
"Besides," I said, voice low and warm, "we still have time before I go."
Her smile sharpened, equal parts playful and solemn. "Careful, or you will lose track of it."
I pressed my lips to the curve of her shoulder, tasting the sweat and sweetness of her body. "I'm punctual."