Xavi dreamed in a silence that smelled of crushed grass and rain-warm earth. The palace walls dissolved; he found himself barefoot on cool soil, in the garden that had once been Josephine's refuge. Moonlight pooled between the hedges and the air tasted like the roses she loved. She sat cross-legged on the grass, a scatter of blossoms at her feet, fingers busy picking petals as if she were making crowns for the stars. When she laughed, the sound slipped into him like a warm spear of light.
"Josephine?" he breathed, and the name unmoored something in his chest. She turned. Her hair fell in loose waves; the moon painted her cheekbones silver. For the first time in months she spoke to him — the sound was clear as glass and impossibly intimate: "X!!!!!!" Her voice had a million of the small, delighted exclamation marks he had missed.
He ran to her and lifted her into his arms as if he could hoist his entire world there. Tears he had kept for winters broke free; he buried his face in her hair. "Shhhh… it's okay, my love," she soothed, small fingers wiping his face as if she had always been his healer. They kissed; breath and heartbeat braided. "I miss you so much. It's hell without you," Xavi said, voice raw.
"I am trying to wake up, but I can't," he whispered to himself, to the dream, to whatever thin thread of her he'd been granted. Josephine's smile was steady, unshaken. "At least I am reaching out to you through dreams now." She slid her palm around his neck and drew him closer. "How are the kids?" she asked, suddenly gentle and curious.
"The twins are fine," he stammered, and listed with a soldier's efficiency the fragments of home that fit into breath: "Orion is deaf in his left ear. Ophelia is… everything — too energetic. Adris—" He hesitated. The weight of the last words tasted different on his tongue. "Adris started learning spells. He… he studies darker magics to be stronger." He laughed without humor. "Ophelia loves Adris. She claps and giggles as if the world began and ended in his pocket."
Josephine let out that small, quiet laugh he remembered so well. "I missed you so much, X," she said.
"I miss you too, my dearest," he answered, and laid his head on her lap as if he'd been a child again.
She took his hands then and squeezed. "Xavi, promise me something."
"Anything for you." He meant it with the marrow of him.
"Our children. The family. Take care of them." Josephine's eyes closed for a moment; worry flecked the edges of her smile. "I will try to connect with you again, my sweet husband." She kissed him once more, light as a promise.
A distant cry pierced the dream — thin, real. "Now your Orion is crying. He's hungry. Wake up, Xavi." Josephine's hand left his cheek. Her lips brushed his forehead. "Wake up." The garden dissolved into wind and a hollow that ached like loss.
Xavi opened his eyes to the chill of his bed and the soft, muffled whimper of his son. Beside him, the chamber was empty and loyal to the moonlight that spilled through curtains. The cry was low — as if someone else held the child and hummed all the way down to him. He rose and moved toward the nursery, heart stuttering between hope and dread.
The door stood ajar. He heard giggling: high, delighted. In the kitchen, the sight arrested him like an incantation. Adris hovered a foot off the ground, concentration engraved on his young face, hands cupped around a floating bottle. He rocked Orion with a current of power, the infant content, sucking at the milk as if it were the only true sun. Ophelia sat on the counter, her small legs swinging, a giggle ballooning out of her whenever the current nudged a feather loose from the air.
"Good morning, Papa," Adris said, earthbound again. He set the bottle to Orion's lips, and the baby stilled, fingers curled, the soft rhythm of feeding sealing the room.
Xavi moved like a man returning to the last bright thing in a ruined hall. He kissed the top of Adris's head, took Orion into his arms, and felt the warm, fierce little life beat against his chest. Around them the family gathered: Queen Olydia, regal and worry-tired; Kendra smoothing hair, fingers of a queen still; Xoni, eyes sharp in the periphery; Anesthesia and her calm; and the lesser lights of retainers who loved them all enough to ache.
Ophelia's hair was already startling — a copper halo that caught the light and made her look as if she were always lit from within. Orion yawned and reached for the world with two small hands; then, impossibly, the twins loosened from gravity altogether and floated, giggling, weightless between the cabinets and the high window that watched the yard like a jealous god.
"Maybe their powers matured early?" Xoni guessed aloud. The twins' eyelids were closed, faces surrendered. Their skins glowed like lantern-glass, a soft white radiance that made the air tremble.
A guard burst in, breath stuttering. "Your Majesty—your wife's body—she's glowing white," he said. The words struck the room like a crack of winter.
Every eye turned. The twins, still laughing in their levity, angled toward where Josephine's bed lay. Josephine's sleeping body — still, wax-pale, the angelic stillness of someone hovering at the edge of a long night—was surrounded now by a light that pinned the shadows back. In that liminal hour the twins' glow stretched to touch her. Josephine's mouth curved; it was not a smile of waking but something more private, an answer to a secret song.
"She's smiling?" Anesthesia breathed, incredulous.
"Open your eyes, love. Please," Xavi begged aloud, though his voice cracked. He stepped forward and lowered himself beside the bed, as if proximity might be a key. "Josephine, please—" He tried and failed to let the plea be softer.
On the window ledge Kara appeared, descending like some dark, self-contained storm. "Jojo?" she asked, stunned, and for a heartbeat the room stilled under the strangeness of that single syllable.
The twins, guided by something ancient and familial, drifted down and settled onto the lawn. Their bodies relaxed; sleep reasserted itself. But Josephine's body rose a fraction, then sank back toward the mattress like a tide pulled in.
"JOSEPHINE—OPEN YOUR FUCKING EYES!" Xavi roared. The word ripped the air; it was a sound that belonged less to a king and more to a man with his heart split open. The servants started, the guards stiffened, and even the light seemed to recoil.
Kara stepped to Xavi. "Calm—" she began.
"No," he snapped. "She was about to wake up and didn't." His hands trembled — not with fear, but with a kind of controlled, simmering fury. Queen Olydia moved closer and put a hand on his shoulder. He softened for the barest instant, clinging to the anchor of his mother like a drowning man to driftwood.
"Xavi…" she said, voice small.
The room seemed to tilt when the twins' hair changed color before their eyes. Crimson darkened to a deep, living crimson on Orion's head; Ophelia's hair shifted to a velvet plum so rich it looked like dusk made physical. Where the children had been marked before — usually upon the forehead by Josephine's own delicate diamond mark — the mark now sat at their necks, small and administrative as fate itself. Adris crumpled to his knees with a howl that was half grief, half rending pain. His own neck bloomed with a new brand: an infinite sigil burning faintly, the glow of runes and consequence.
"Carry him," Haillie ordered, her voice an animal's bark. Yora scooped Adris up and took him to the privacy of his room; he would not go to school today.
"This is a connection," Kara said in a voice that tried to stitch logic over wonder. "Josephine… she connected them. She marked them."
Xavi's gaze flew from the twins to Josephine. When would she wake? he demanded, though he barely let the question form. Kara's eyes softened in a way that broke him. "It will take more than a year," she said. "I'm sorry."
The blood behind Xavi's eyes thinned into ice. He felt a coldness that was not absence but iron. Adris — his boy — wept as if the world had been remade into something smaller and crueler. Xavi took him into his arms and pressed his forehead to the boy's. The vow that left his mouth was quiet and absolute.
"You and I are going to be the most ruthless, the most heartless father and son for these twins," Xavi said. It was not a boast but a promise carved into the air. "Your aunt wants to replace your mama. Do you want that?"
"No one will ever take Mama's place. Never," Adris answered, voice thin and determined.
"We will be the strongest, most powerful. For Josephine. For your mother. For my wife." Xavi's voice narrowed to a blade's edge. Adris echoed him — "For Mama"— and they clung to each other. Around them, the family watched: wary, mourning, and unsettled by the sharp new geometry of a man rearranged by grief.
Across the palace, in a quieter, darker room, Celeste sat by a window with wet cheeks. Eryndor came to her and settled beside the sill, ancient patience in his posture. She told him in low bursts the brutality that had become their grammar: a forced marriage, a slap that had stung not only skin but dignity, the mark on her body where someone had branded ownership. Eryndor listened with a guardian's heat folded into his bones; he cupped her face, and his fingers moved like a promise.
"Have you ever been in love?" she asked, thrusting the question into the night.
He smiled at her, and the smile had months and wars in it. "Yes. Thousands of years ago, before I became a guardian," he said. There was a wound beneath the recollection, but he hid it in his tone. "I lost her because of the war in Zephyria." He swallowed. "She was taken from me."
Celeste softened. "It hurts," she whispered.
He took her into his arms then, and their lips met — not with the raw, exposing thrust of the young but with the long, exhaled familiarity of two people who had chosen to be each other's refuge. He lifted her as if she were small and dear and placed her gently on the bed Are you sure you want this? He said rubbed her plum ass she nodded as he kissed her deeply while his fingers slipped into her pussy she moan quietly and shyly too Eryndor mouth went to her boobs sucking her nipples lovingly her fingers were in his blue hair he rubbed her clit and took out his cock suck it he said as he pulled her hair into a ponytail she looked at his dick and held it she whispered and took it into her mouth and began to suck his cock slowly Fuck! Eryndor said as she went faster as his hot sperm into her mouth and she swallowed them all ~Good Girl~ he said he lifted her into his arms and slip his dripping hard cock into her wet pussy and lifted both her legs hanging on his arms as he began to pound her and cover her mouth with his shutting her up with a sloppy kiss Hmmm Celine said still kissing him as he filled her with his seeds There we go sweetheart he said as they were both sweating.
By sunrise, Adris left for school though his face remained shadowed. The twins slept through the later morning bustle; Xavi gently withdrew them to a mini bed he had had fashioned in the throne room — a ridiculous, regal cradle that looked like a world in miniature. He gathered the forbidden texts he had allowed only his eyes to touch: spell books wrapped in black leather, tomes whose pages smelled of dust and old thunder. He set them on his lap and read with a smile that was mostly iron.
"Ardere told the girls she brought that they should seduce King Xavi," Princess Jovie said lightly, unaware of the knife beneath the sentence.
Xavi heard, and something like a laugh — thin, cold — escaped him. "Good luck," Kynzie replied with a false cheer. Only Princess Agana looked at him with the kind of pity that stung; she had been forced into alliances by threats and the looming war. Ardere's schemes were like paper boats on an angry sea; they would not survive what was coming.
He sat on his throne and closed his eyes. The air around him thickened, darker as if the room inhaled. When his lids lifted, his irises were black as spilled ink. A smile dragged across his mouth like a shadow. The aura around him condensed, a visible pressure; courtly whispers thought it grandeur. His laughter filled the great hall then, soft and absurd and not quite human. The darkness pooled outward like oil. Even the candles seemed wary.
"Xavi?" Queen Kendra asked, voice bunched with concern.
He inclined his head, but there was no warmth in it. "They will not touch my family," he said, and the words were a promise and a threat tied to the same string. He rose, drifted toward the twin crib where Orion and Ophelia slept and called with the low, new cadence he had taken to: "Dada."
"Dada," the twins answered in small, contented echoes. He kissed each of them, lips pressed to baby cheeks with a tenderness that made the court's blood run cold because it was so sharp and absolute.
Xavi Roman — now a king only in name but something colder and more terrible in truth — pressed his hands flat to his chest as if feeling the new map of himself. Queen Olydia's tears fell quietly as she whispered a prayer that sounded like a hope and a warning all at once. "Josephine," she said, the name like a fuse.
Outside, the gardens held their breath. Inside, the palace rearranged itself around the new rule: a man who would go to any dark geometry to keep his family intact. For now, he was a father and protector, but in the low lines of his face the court already saw a different thing: the burgeon of a ruthless will, honed not by cruelty but by a desperate, iron devotion.
The morning brightened. Children called from corridors. A world that still had light and obligations hummed on, but the echo of that dream clung to Xavi like a second skin. He tucked the heavy tomes closer, listening to the small even breaths of his sleeping children, and promised — aloud, for them and for the woman who lay between life and waking — that nothing would ever take what Josephine had given him.
"For Mama," Adris murmured in his sleep that afternoon, and Xavi answered, voice a blade sheathed in velvet, "Always."