Joselyn managed to get the body of his father down from the tower.
It wasn't easy. The iron hooks clanged like distant bells tolling the hour of death as they were wrenched loose, and every sound carried through the ruins like a scream. Azralyn's body, once regal, once feared, now limp and brittle, swung heavily as it was lowered. His skin had turned a mottled grey-blue, cold as stone, stretched unnaturally over broken bones. His limbs bent at angles no living man should bend, and even the most fleeting glance at his face revealed that whatever soul had once animated it had long since gone. There was nothing of a father in that face. Only ruin. Only silence.
Lucia stood at the base of the tower, silent and still, her face pale beneath streaks of ash. When Joselyn turned to her and told her to leave.
Told her to go to Pyraquartz Hold and inform them of what had become of Paradise. She didn't argue. She didn't plead. She simply nodded, stiffly, her arms rigid at her sides as though she feared that moving would break her completely. Her lips quivered, but she said nothing. They both knew there was nothing left to say.
He remained behind.
Not out of pride, not even out of stubbornness but because there were still faces in the streets, burned beyond recognition, collapsed in heaps like forgotten dolls, limbs twisted, clothing charred to cinders. Some had no faces left at all, only blackened skulls gaping at the smoke-stained sky. He remembered their names. He had laughed with them once. Grown beside them. They deserved more than abandonment.
So he stayed.
And he buried them.
Some were small. Unbearably so. Children whose graves had to be dug shallow, the soil too dense and thick for full depth, their little shoes sticking slightly out from beneath the earth as if even the ground could not bring itself to consume them. Others had been burned so severely he had to guess who they were by the color of their hair, by scraps of familiar fabric fused into their skin, or by the slight curve of a shoulder or hip he remembered seeing during some long-forgotten festival.
Each body weighed more than the last. Not in flesh, but in memory. His arms screamed not from exhaustion but from something deeper, something closer to grief refusing to let go. It was as though the act of digging itself became an anchor. As long as he kept moving the soil, he could keep from collapsing entirely.
He spoke for each of them, though he knew no true prayers. He whispered what fragments he could recall lines Father had once spoken over the grave of a bird, murmured childhood blessings, half-remembered rhymes from the old lullabies and then he let silence take over. The silence was heavier than the words. It felt sacred.
When it was done, five hundred sixteen graves stretched in uneven lines across the blackened outskirts of the city.
Five hundred sixteen souls.
His people.
The final grave he dug was the deepest, placed near a withered grove where the last hibiscus flowers struggled against the ash. He lowered Azralyn into it alone. The broken crown.
Cracked, dirt-caked, a relic now only of loss was set over his chest. With the jagged edge of a ruined sword, Joselyn carved his father's name into a stone and drove it into the soil.
Then he wandered to the ruins of the old stable, half-collapsed and open to the sky. Its rafters were charred, its roof nearly gone, but it was close to the graves. That was enough. He curled up in the blackened hay and wrapped himself in his father's cloak. The scent of smoke clung to it, mixing with dried blood, sweat, and the faintest echo of something once warm and safe. He pressed it to his face like a child refusing to let go of a dream.
He didn't eat. He didn't drink. His lips cracked; his hands blistered and bled, the skin split open by the shovel's rough grip and unwashed rot. Still, he didn't move. The last hibiscus he'd carried.
Its petals half-burnt, its stem crooked, lay beside him, a fragile, dying thing clutched close like a broken heirloom.
The night did not fall so much as sink, a dull and ashen veil draped over the ruins. There was no true darkness anymore. Just the absence of fire, the stillness left behind once the flames had nothing more to consume. Stars hung above him like distant, uncaring watchers. The wind did not blow. The world, for a moment, was paused.
Sleep came not as a descent but a dissociation. Weightless, thoughtless, neither waking nor dreaming. Time became irrelevant. Joselyn floated in it like dust over scorched earth.
Then came the footsteps.
Soft, deliberate. Not loud enough to be wandering survivors, nor frantic enough to be search parties. Three, perhaps four, crunching lightly over brittle debris. They didn't call out. They moved like men who had done this before. Predators, not saviors.
He did not reach for his dagger. He did not flinch or brace or even pretend to resist. He remained in the hay, motionless, too hollow to care.
"He's breathing," a voice said. A man's, gruff and indifferent.
A second replied, lower still. "Looks young. No collar. Could be worth something. Seems to be in good shape. Bet some'll pay a fine coin for him."
Hands found his arms, rough and practiced. They hauled him up, but his legs gave out at once. He was dragged through the dirt, the hem of his cloak catching on cinders. Behind them, his last hibiscus was crushed underfoot. Its petals ground into ash with the same indifference that now stripped away his name.
They never asked who he was.
Never questioned why he lay in the ruins, or whose blood had dried beneath his fingernails. They didn't see the prince. Didn't see the boy who had once lived in golden halls. They saw only a body. A thing. Something small and silent, unclaimed in the aftermath of tragedy.
They threw him into the caged wagon like old meat.
Inside, five others were already packed within. All older than him. All silent. One girl, perhaps sixteen, trembled as though her body couldn't remember stillness. Her arms were dark with bruises and her hair knotted with filth. A man sat opposite her, draped in once-noble robes now soaked in dried blood, his lip grotesquely swollen. Two more huddled together at the far end, twin echoes of a life lost, clutching each other like they were the last people left who understood.
And then there was the boy. Joselyn's age. Shackled at the wrists, his eyes glassy and rimmed red, though the tears had long dried. When Joselyn was tossed inside, the boy flinched. Not at the noise, but at the reminder that others could still be taken too.
The door shut with the finality of a tomb.
The wagon rumbled forward. The wheels groaned over stone and ash, over broken tiles and the bones of Paradise. Smoke still lingered in the air, wafting through the bars as they passed hollowed gardens, burned homes, and streets where flowers bloomed stubbornly despite the ruin.
No one spoke.
Somewhere ahead, a slaver coughed and spat phlegm onto the road.
"How long till Ferrow's Edge?" one called out from the driver's seat.
"Three days if the roads don't cave," another answered. "Longer if we stop to take more."
"Are we stopping?"
A moment passed before the reply came, low and amused.
"Only if we find fresh ones."
The girl near Joselyn buried her face in her palms, her shoulders shaking without a sound. The boy with the shackles glanced once in Joselyn's direction, opened his mouth as though to speak but closed it again just as quickly. Their fear was palpable, curling around their limbs like vines. A kind of fear so deep it stole language from them.
Joselyn felt none of it.
There was no fear left in him. No anger either. He had seen the golden arches of Paradise collapse. Had dug graves with his bare hands until his nails cracked and bled. He had cradled his father's broken body. Compared to that, these chains, these men, this rolling coffin of iron and rot, felt like nothing more than an afterthought.
He sat still, his hands folded loosely over the broken crown resting in his lap, eyes half-lidded as the world passed in shades of smoke and dusk.
Eventually, the road wound into woods. The trees thickened. The ash thinned. But the scent of death clung to their clothes, their skin, their breath. The slavers said nothing of it.
The man with the bruised face murmured to himself about a daughter. Said she was waiting. Said he'd find her again. His voice broke every third word.
The older boy tried to pick the lock with a stone shard, but his fingers trembled too violently.
The girl vomited in the corner. No one helped. No one scolded. They all simply looked away.
They were cargo.
And by the time the sun fell low behind the trees and campfires sparked to life in a clearing ahead, Joselyn no longer noticed when the wagon stopped. Didn't look up when one of the men exchanged coins and chuckles with another trader at the edge of the fire. More cages were rolled in. More bodies. More silence.
He curled up by the bars, pressed his cheek against cold iron, and watched the firelight dance without interest.
One of the traders paused beside the cage and peered in at him. His eyes narrowed slightly, scanning Joselyn's gaunt face and hollow gaze.
He said nothing.
He moved on.
They didn't recognize royalty. They didn't see a legacy or a threat. They didn't even see a boy.
And in a quiet, ruined place deep inside himself, Joselyn was thankful for that.
The world had moved on.
And so had he.
He was no longer a royal. No longer a prince. Paradise ceased to exist.
What was Joselyn the prince of now?
Nothing.