ATRIUM. PALACE CORRIDOR – NIGHT
Two figures walked slowly down the shadow-drenched hall. Their footsteps echoed softly against the tiles. One carried a lantern that flickered, pushing back the cold moonlight.
They moved whisper-soft along the moonlit gallery, the new girl's skirts hitching nervously with every step. Marta, the older maiden, kept one hand on Isla's elbow — not so much for steadiness as to quiet the tremor in the girl's wrist.
"You must learn the palace rules," Marta murmured, more out of habit than pedagogy. Her voice was a thread of caution woven through the cold air.
"First — you bow twice when the royals pass. Even the princes. Especially the princes."
The younger maiden, Isla, barely sixteen, clutched her apron nervously. She nodded too quickly, wide-eyed at every shadow.
"And… if they speak to us? You answer. But short. Never look too long. Never presume."
She stopped. The lantern trembled in her hand.
"Stay away from the crown prince. He loves his silence."
Young Isla nodded, determined to keep herself in check. They continued forward.
"Never refer to the crown prince as the seventh prince. Refer to him as the crown prince."
"How do I know the crown prince?"
"He's a copy of our emperor; he rarely comes out, so you won't have to meet him ninety out of a hundred times. He stays in the palace's underground east wing, so stay away."
Not sure if it was a good thing or bad, Isla nodded again.
"Never whistle inside these halls. Never breathe loud enough to be heard on the stairs. Zero chatter after sundown. If you find anything suspicious, do not — do not touch it. And whatever you do, never go to the ruins of the palace."
Isla swallowed. Moonlight made her pupils huge and black; she looked like a child in a storybook, every line of her face too soft to hold a secret. "Why not the ruins?" she asked, voice so small Marta moved her hand to cover it.
"I also can't answer that."
They turned the corner together — a slow, careful swing into the narrow stretch of corridor that overlooked the great hall. The lattice windows flung moonbeams across the tiles in silver ribbons; the palace seemed to hold its breath there, waiting.
At first there was nothing but the usual hush: distant servants, a bell muffled by stone, the sigh of wind threading through the eaves. Then Marta stopped. Her breath hitched.
There, half in moonlight, half in shadow, lay a figure on the floor of the corridor. At first the girls thought it was a sack of laundry spilled in the night, but then again, that was too ridiculous to be believed.
Isla spoke, voice cracking.
"S-someone is…"
The older maiden shushed her sharply, though her own voice trembled too.
Marta, older, steadier, took a breath and stepped closer. Her face drained of color as the moonlight revealed what the night had hidden, the lantern swaying, shadows warping the figure. Isla's feet refused to move forward, but curiosity pulled at her like an animal on a chain.
The smell reached them first. Metallic. Heavy.
When the lantern light finally spilled across the body—
Marta dropped the lantern. Glass shattered. Flame sputtered out.
Her hand flew to her mouth, her legs frozen in horror. Isla narrowed her eyes, and finally moved closer to behold.
Time seemed to freeze for the two women, and when Marta finally came to—
"MY LORD! THE PRINCE—!!"
It was not the contained, practiced cry of the palace women on duty; it was a raw, animal sound — a call that shattered the careful quiet like a thrown stone.
Her body moved before she thought. "Go! Go tell!" she hissed, the old rule snapping into place. She shoved Isla's arm and bolted down the corridor, the hem of her apron flashing as she ran.
Isla staggered backward, hands trembling over her mouth. The young maiden was left behind. Frozen.
She stood rooted, the world narrowing to one small, impossible image: the body lying in a pool of blood with both eyes gouged out. It was the sort of detail that belonged to dreams or murder scenes, not to her life in the kitchens. The lantern glass lay shattered, but the moonlight remained, cruelly bright.
She whispered to herself, like a prayer gone wrong:
"What is this… what is thi—"
Not from the body. Above. She heard a sound.
Slowly, against her own will, her gaze crept upward—toward the balustrade above the atrium.
And there—
A small pale face.
For a wild second Isla thought it was an attendant, or possibly the murderer. Then the blood in her ears rushed to her brain and she knew — with a cold, impossible clarity — who it was.
Kaelin.
The crown prince she had been told she might never meet.
Kaelin leaned over the balustrade, fingers digging into the cold stone. His hair curtained his face, but his eyes — wide, frantic — locked onto the figure sprawled below.
Aiden.
The atrium stretched vast and empty, pale moonlight painting the marble floor silver. And in the very center of it, like a dropped doll, lay his elder brother.
His ceremonial robe, which he hadn't taken off since the ritual accident, was soaked scarlet, pooling beneath him in a widening stain. His left leg was barefoot. One hand was flung limply to the side, the other clawed against the stone as though he had tried — desperately — to drag himself forward before the end.
But the worst was his face.
Aiden's features, once sharp with stubborn will, were a ruin. Blood streaked across his cheek, his lips parted faintly as though his last breath had been stolen mid-word. And where his left eye should have been, there was nothing — only a hollow ruin, raw and glistening, veins dangling in grotesque threads. The missing eye was the pair Kaelin had stepped past moments ago.
Kaelin's stomach lurched. Pure, white-hot horror took him. For once, he didn't grin. His lips trembled, breath shallow. It was pure, unfiltered horror — the kind that stripped away the strange playfulness he'd carried all day.
"Aiden…" His voice broke into the silence, soft as a child's cry.
He forgot rules, forgot stairs. There was only Aiden.
He didn't think. He didn't care. Didn't even see the maiden staring up at him.
Without hesitation, Kaelin climbed onto the balustrade. His small frame trembled in the cold air, but he vaulted off — leaping down like a shadow torn free of the moonlight.
Isla's eyes widened drastically as she understood what was happening. She dashed forward, unintentionally, to aid his fall, but—
The fall was brutal. She couldn't catch him.
The world spun in a silver blur before the ground rose up and slammed against him. The leap was shorter than he felt it; the air rushed past his face and the moonlight blurred into a silver smear. He hit the floor with a sickening sound that was too loud — a single crack that tore through the hush like a snapped branch.
Kaelin's scream tore out of him like a thing with its own momentum — thin, animal, and too high for words. It hit the vaulted ceiling and rebounded, a raw note that pulled the breath from his ribs.
He curled around his snapped leg as if the stone could hold him together. His hands trembled so hard his fingers left jagged tracks in the blood on the marble.
Pain lanced through the broken bone — a precise, white-hot bolt — but it was only the first layer. Beneath it, adrenaline uncoiled: his heart pounded as if trying to climb out of his throat. His breath came shallow and fast. Sweat slicked his skin. The world sharpened and thinned at the edges until Aiden was all that existed.
He kept looking because not-looking would be admitting a finality he could not bear. Recognition, denial, and a raw, corroding grief braided together into a single, ugly knot in his chest.
He lay there for a breath and knew, with a small, bitter clarity, that something had broken. The angle of his leg was wrong; the bones had said their own cruel, undeniable word. Technically, he had broken his leg. Technically, that fact had no weight against what he saw.
"Aiden." The name came out wrong — a strangled thing, half-sob, half-demand.
He dragged himself toward his brother on hands that left prints of red. Bone showed white through torn breeches, a cold, horrible fact that should have knocked the air out of him. Yet the blood felt like proof of life — warm, undeniable proof.
He fell across Aiden's ruined shoulder and pressed his cheek to the silk that no longer held an eye where an eye should be. The smell of iron filled his nose.
Aiden's chest moved — ragged, too-small pulls — and everything in Kaelin went taut with ferocious, ridiculous hope. He clutched the other boy's hand as if a tighter hold could stitch flesh back together.
His own fingers were numb with effort and shaking. It felt like trying to hold a small animal that might slip away at any second. He held Aiden's hand and squeezed it, desperate for heat, for proof.
"Ai—" He couldn't finish. The syllable was a plea shaped into sound.
Aiden's mouth worked. For a crooked, holy instant, meaning threaded through the noise: awareness, the faint tilt of recognition, a voice that was a threadbare thing but existed.
"Kae…" Aiden's voice was thin, ragged, but there — a thread of it. Recognition, pleading, love — all knotted into a single syllable.
The single syllable detonated inside Kaelin. He let himself break.
The cry that followed had the ragged edges of someone who had kept everything in and folded for too long and now had none of the formalities left.
He pressed his forehead to Aiden's. He whispered a rush of things he'd never said — promises, apologies, the names of small shared memories — as if words could buy more breaths.
Anger flared, quick and hot. At whoever had done this. At the world that allowed it. At his own uselessness.
It sat on top of the grief and sharpened it, made his hands fumble with frantic energy. The air pulsed, dark and chilling. Fight or die — that was the animal law. But the limb beneath him screamed with every movement. His body betrayed him even while his mind refused to accept losing Aiden.
The corridor answered them. A stampede of feet. The bark of orders. A woman's keening.
Hands reached in: some rough, some gentle, some shoving a maid back. Someone barked for healers. Someone shouted for the king.
The noise hit Kaelin like another tide.
He clung to Aiden's hand, grounding himself to the single warm, trembling thing that was not gone yet.
He let the world crash in around them while he held the only anchor he had.
He whispered the one thing that mattered.
"Brother."
Aiden drew a breath. A shallow one.
And none.
TBC…