The first thing Alden registered was air. Clean. Cold. Laced with incense. Not the ash-choked stench of the ruined capital.
His eyes opened to velvet curtains and familiar stone. Not frost. Not blood. His bed was too soft. The silence, too gentle.
He turned his head. The imperial calendar rested on the nightstand — exactly where he'd left it, decades ago.
He grabbed it.
A date from before.
Before the empire burned.
Before the curse.
Before Aurenya vanished.
He stared at it for a long time.
He had done it.
He was back.
Not as he was — broken and hollow — but whole, younger. Not healed, but reshaped. All the pain, all the years spent clawing through the Abyss, had delivered him to this.
A knock at the door.
"Your Highness? Are you awake?"
Elara.
His mother's handmaiden. Loyal. calm and kind old woman.
Alden didn't answer. He stood and pulled the curtain aside.
The capital sprawled beneath him — alive, sunlit. The people moved as if nothing had ever gone wrong. Because nothing had. Not yet.
"The Empress...", Elara's voice cracked behind the door. "She passed quietly. In the night."
Alden walked out without dressing. Past her. Down the halls he knew by heart.
To his mother's chamber.
She looked peaceful. She always had. He touched her cheek once. Cold.
He mourned her silently as he had once before, long ago. There was no fresh grief, only the quiet recognition of a past sorrow already fully processed.
Then he stood up. No tears shedding from his deep dark eyes. He quietly turned, glancing back one last time towards his mother, the last point of affection he would bear in this life.
Now, he had work to do.
He turned, gaze distant. Detached.
This time, he was here to build.
A cage.
For an angel.
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