"Smile for them, little witch," Lorian whispered, his lips grazing her ear as the court of corpses turned to watch.
Every creature in the candlelit hall—stitched nobles with grins pulled tight by black thread, servants with hollow sockets where eyes should be, women in masks fused to bone—shifted just enough to look. Their gazes slid over her like cold knives, silent, heavy, hungering.
Sylvera's jaw clenched. Her pulse thrashed against the gag still biting her tongue.
She didn't smile.
He chuckled low in his throat, the sound curling hot against her skin. "Still stubborn. Even now." His fingers tightened on her arm, steering her forward through the corridor that reeked of embalming oils and something sweeter—rot laced with perfume.
The candlelight flickered, throwing broken shadows across damp stone. From the corner of her eye, Sylvera caught movement—slow, jerky.
A noble bowed stiffly, his stitched grin splitting wider, threads fraying with each motion. Farther down, children circled a cracked music box, their veins black as ink, their laughter soft and wrong. One stopped. Curtsied low, head snapping at an angle that shouldn't exist.
'Alive. And not.'
Sylvera kept her eyes forward.
Looking too long at anything in this place felt like letting it in.
Lorian, of course, looked everywhere and nowhere. Pride coiled through his voice when he spoke. "Beautiful, isn't it? No wars. No rebellion. Just… silence."
"This isn't silence," she hissed through the gag, the words breaking raw. "It's… death."
His head tipped, a smirk ghosting his mouth. "Death lasts longer than devotion."
They passed a man in silk, bowing over and over to a blank wall, spine bent like a snapped reed. His back jutted through the fabric in sharp ridges, bone cracking faintly with every dip. He didn't look up. Didn't stop.
"Once," Lorian said softly, "he thought himself clever. A whisper of treason, a deal in the dark." His gaze slid to her, silver eyes gleaming.
"Now, he greets his own shadow until I say otherwise."
Sylvera stared. The bowing. The bones splitting the skin. The endless obedience that wasn't loyalty—it was ruin.
The corridor ended in a spiral staircase twisting down like a spine. With each step, the air thickened—clinging, stinking of embalming fluid and iron. Cold licked her bones. The whispers started faint, then grew. Not from voices. From the walls themselves.
Her name.
She heard it in the stone.
'Sylvera… Sylvera…'
She stumbled once. Lorian's arm locked like iron, pulling her close, his breath warm against her temple. "Careful," he murmured, mock-gentle. "It would be a shame if you broke before I was finished with you."
The stairs ended in a chamber carved from black rock. Candlelight flickered over something gleaming at its heart.
A cage.
Gold filigree twined around its bars like vines strangling a rose. Elegant. Beautiful. And wrong.
Because inside…
They waited.
Women in rotting silks slumped against bars, painted mouths frozen in perfect smiles, jewelled hair dulled with dust. They looked like dolls. Until one moved.
Her head snapped toward Sylvera too fast—sharp enough to crack bone. And then she smiled wider.
Something inside Sylvera iced over.
Lorian released her slowly, almost tenderly, as if savouring the tremor in her bones. "Stay here," he murmured, brushing a curl from her face like a lover instead of a jailer. "Make friends."
The door clanged shut.
The perfume hit first—sweet and heavy, rotting flowers and powdered death. Sylvera sank into the farthest corner, her spine pressed to the gold bars, knees drawn tight.
Across from her, a woman stared. Eyes wide. Glazed. Unblinking.
Another twitched. A brittle motion, like something tugging her strings. Her hand lifted—skin grey, fingers tipped in blackened nails—and reached toward Sylvera.
The stitches across her lips split as she whispered through them, voice cracked and dry:
"He'll hollow you out slow… save your screams… makes the meat sweeter…"
Sylvera froze. Breath strangled her lungs.
The others didn't move. Didn't blink. They sat like broken queens, perfect and ruined, their heads tilting at strange angles—as if listening for something in the dark.
Above, the castle rumbled. Laughter echoed faint and sharp as glass. Music bled down the stone, sickly sweet.
And beneath it all—the whispers. The walls. The heartbeat of old magic thrumming through black rock.
It spoke her name again.
Not a warning.
A promise.
Sylvera shut her eyes.
She couldn't run. She couldn't scream.
So she did the only thing she could.
She began to listen.
To the walls.
To the bones.
To the magic that slept beneath this gilded tomb.
The bones were whispering.
Not a dream—no dream had weight like this. The sound was real, soft as breath and constant as heartbeat, sliding through the dark like wind in a graveyard.
Sylvera lay still, every muscle taut with exhaustion and dread, and turned her head slowly toward the wall of her cage.
What she had thought was wrought iron was something far crueller.
Finger bones.
Pale and polished, jointed and strung together with strips of sinew like threads of rot. They gleamed in the sour light, a lattice of death pretending to be art.
She pressed her ear to the cage.
The cold kissed her skin. And then—a pulse. Slow. Sickening. Like breath against her bones. The visions slammed into her.
First came gold.
Lorian—not the thing he was now, but a man. Young. Alive. His hair caught sunlight like spun metal, his eyes bright with laughter as he splashed barefoot through a fountain, clothes soaked, grinning like joy itself was his birthright. Someone held his hand—a shadow she couldn't name. Their voices tangled in laughter. Their lips touched. And the world in that memory bloomed warm, full of music and summer.
Her heart clenched sharp enough to bleed.
Then the gold burned black.
The Fall.
A crown lowered toward his brow—gleaming, ancient, alive. The moment it touched him, the world cracked. Shadows bled from the metal like oil, coiling into his scalp, burrowing under his skin. His eyes rolled white. His mouth opened on a scream the vision refused to carry. Blood wept from his nose, his ears. The courtyard shattered to ash. The fountain froze into grey stone. The sky was drowned in a storm.
And then—
The Empty Shell.
His body stood, draped in velvet and power, beautiful still—but hollow. His eyes sparkled, but with no light behind them. His smile curved, but it held no soul. His hands caressed, but with nothing human left inside.
He walked. He ruled. He killed.
But the man had died screaming beneath a crown that wore him like skin.
The last thing came colder than the rest. The castle itself breathed against her ear—voice thick with grave dirt and centuries:
"Not possessed," it whispered. "Worn. Like a glove."
Sylvera ripped back from the wall, breath tearing her throat raw.
It made sense now—the stillness in his gaze, the hunger beneath his beauty, the mechanical way he smiled and said her name.
He wasn't a man cursed by darkness.
He was darkness wearing a man.
A suit of flesh.
A crown with a corpse inside.
Her stomach knotted. Her mouth went dry.
All this time, she had kissed a dead man's lips.
And something else had kissed her back.
When the door screeched open at noon, Sylvera was ready.
She sat cross-legged in the farthest corner of her cage, spine straight, hands folded like a queen awaiting her execution. The gag was gone now, but her silence was sharper than any curse.
Lorian stumbled in.
Not gliding, not smirking—stumbling, his boots dragging like he'd crawled through hell. His skin was white as marble, slick with sweat, his gaze shadowed with fever. Or madness.
And when he spoke, his voice cracked on the edge of something fragile: "Lyria?"
Sylvera's breath stopped.
He stared at her like a drowning man finding shore. Then he moved—fast, unsteady—falling to his knees, arms crushing her against him in a desperate, shaking hold.
"Thank the stars," he whispered into her hair, his breath ragged. "I thought—I thought they'd taken you—"
His hands gripped like chains.
His body trembled. His voice was a prayer and a plea all at once.
Sylvera froze, stiff as iron, her mind a wildfire of questions.
'This isn't the Lorian I know…
Not the monster who smirked as he dragged me here. Not the king who kissed me like a blade and laughed when I bled. This… this is something else.
'How many faces does he wear?'
'How many are even real?'
'And who in the gods' names is Lyria?'
He pulled back just enough to look at her, his silver eyes wide, fever-bright, breaking. His lips parted—about to speak—
"I'm not her," Sylvera said, her voice low, steady, slicing through the silence like steel. "I'm Sylvera. Who is Lyria?"
Something inside him shifted.
The fever broke into frost.
His expression darkened—not with rage exactly, but with something worse. A storm barely leashed. He didn't answer.
Instead, he crumpled.
His knees buckled, and he collapsed to the floor, unconscious. Sylvera gasped and caught him just in time, lowering him gently.
"Lorian? Lorian!"
His skin was burning hot—unnaturally so. Like a fever born of more than illness.
Panicking, she placed her hands on his chest and summoned her magic, letting her healing power pulse gently into him—just enough to stabilise him, to keep him grounded.
Slowly… his eyes opened.
"Lyria?" he murmured, blinking up at her with a dazed, broken smile. He reached for her, trying to pull her into another embrace.
But this time, Sylvera stopped him.
She held his hand firmly, looked straight into those glassy, haunted eyes, and said, "I'm not Lyria. I'm Sylvera."
She had begun to see him clearly now—not the beautiful lie he wore like a robe, but the thing beneath. And today, she saw the cracks.
Small, subtle things anyone else might miss.
But not her.
Lorian blinked.
The haze behind his eyes seemed to fade—just a little. His gaze slid away from her, as if he suddenly remembered where he was… and who he wasn't supposed to be holding.
He pulled his hands back. Slowly. Almost… ashamed.
"I—never mind," he said flatly, voice stripped of warmth.
Then he turned and walked out of the cage.
Just like that.
No explanation. No apology.
Sylvera sat there, stunned. The air around her still crackled with leftover heat—from his fever, from the magic, from him. Her heart was pounding, her mind screaming with questions. What had just happened? Who was Lyria? Why did his name, once soft on her lips, now taste like ash?
She wrapped her arms around herself, suddenly cold.
The silence he left behind was louder than anything he'd said.
The door to the cage groaned open behind him. He didn't lock it.
He didn't need to.
Sylvera stayed where she was, hands in her lap, gaze fixed on the open doorway. Freedom, it seemed, was just a step away.
But she didn't move. Not yet.
Because something had shifted.
And for the first time, Lorian had walked away unsure.