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Chapter Text

The River Remembers

Personal Field Log – Assigned Reaper: T. |
Sandomierz Region
Archive Entry Fragment | Black Plague Period

2 June 1351 Somewhere along the Vistula, south of Krakow

The river was thick with bodies again.

They drifted like discarded dolls – limbs askew, mouths open in mute hymns. The villagers no longer bother to bury their dead. The ground is too hard. The fear too soft.

A man stood knee-deep in the current, weeping as he pushed his wife’s corpse out toward the middle, whispering a prayer he had likely made up. His soul had already begun to fray, even before his death. I saw him two days ago, still among the living.

Now, I carry both of them.

The water is dark here. It remembers everything.

4 June 1351 Wieliczka – edge of the salt mines

They say salt preserves. The priests smear it on the foreheads of the dead now, desperate to stop the rot. It doesn’t work.

A young boy died underground today. He was still clutching a tiny wooden figure – a lion. His mother died yesterday, and I don’t think he knew it. He waited there, in the dark, until his fever came.

He asked if I was an angel.

I told him no.

He smiled anyway, and leaned his head on my chest when I carried him across.

My coat still smells of salt and sweat. I will remember him for a little while longer.

7 June 1351 Near Tarnow – roadshire shrine

There is a small stone shrine dedicated to Saint Florian, patron of firefighters and floods. Someone left a loaf of black bread there. A token. Or a bribe.

No one prays to the saints anymore. They pray to anything that listens.

I passed a woman on the road. She crossed herself when she saw me, though I was masked. She saw something in my walk, perhaps. In my silence. It is hard to be subtle when Death clings to your heels.

She muttered “Czarna Smierc” under her breath.
Black Death.

They name the plague like it’s a creature. A punishment. A god.

They are not wrong.

9 June 1351 Forest path between Bochnia and Niepolomice

The trees whispered today. Not in the wind. Not in sound. But in feeling – that sharp, ancient pressure that settles on the back of your neck when something old is near.

I stopped walking. I never stop walking.

And for the briefest moment, I thought someone was calling me.

Not by my title. Not by my function.

By name.

But no one was there. Just the wind, the branches, the scent of burning herbs somewhere far off.

I wonder if memory can leak – if something from before this form seeps in. I was told it could not.

I was told I was nothing before this.

11 June 1351 Ruined chapel near Opatow

They sealed the church from the inside. Nailed it shut with the sick still within.

One soul clung to the stained glass. He left bloody prints on the figure of the Virgin Mary. I think he was a novice – too young to have taken vows, too kind to curse the ones who locked him in. He went quietly, humming the tune of a psalm.

I stayed a moment longer than I should have. I watched the last candle burn out through the cracks in the wood.

The dark came quickly.

It always does now.

12 June 1351 Near a well in a village I did not learn the name of

There was a girl.

She should not have seen me.

No one sees me unless they are dying – or already gone. But she did. She looked directly at me. Right into the glass of my mask. No flinch. No prayer. Just a steady gaze.

She was fetching water. Singing a song in Polish, one I did not recognize besides the word “wilcza”. Wolven, I think. Her voice was not remarkable, but it unsettled me.

She looked at me as if she knew me.

And worse… I looked at her, and felt the same.

I passed her without speaking. I am not permitted to speak to the living unless they are crossing.

But after I left, I realized my hands were trembling.

That should not happen.

14 June 1351 Midnight, along the forest roads

The other Reapers are uneasy.

I saw one today – Drustan, I think – hovering near a monastery. He didn’t speak. We rarely do. Our kind does not really trade in conversation, only in silence.

But I could feel it: something has shifted.
The veil between life and death is thinning faster than usual. Not just because of the plague. Not just because of the death toll.

Something is pulling.

As if there’s a hand somewhere, behind the tapestry of this world, tugging on a single golden thread.

I fear I may be tied to that thread.

15 June 1351 Between dreams and memory

I dreamt again.

Reapers do not dream. That is what they told us. What I believed.

But I did. I saw a field of poppies. A woman laughing, barefoot, hair caught in the wind like smoke. I reached for her hand – and she whispered a name I cannot remember.

Except…

My chest ached when I woke. A raw, hollow place just behind my “ribs”. Like someone had scooped part of me out and left only a longing I don’t understand.

I do not know what this means.

I do not remember ever being loved.

I do not…

…Scheisse.

16 June 1351 South of Krakow, before the rain

I passed the girl again.

The same one.

She was mending something outside her cottage. A dress, I think. She did not see me this time, or at least pretended not to. But I saw her glance. A flicker of knowing. Of awareness.

The song she was humming was the same one from my dream.

That is not possible.

Unless dreams are not lies. Unless… something is bleeding through.

I shouldn’t care.

I shouldn’t feel this.

I am not a man. Just a vessel. A function.

But I feel.

And I fear I have felt it before.

17 June 1351 Entry locked and sealed by order of the High Wardens
A note in older script appears faintly beneath the page:

“She always finds you.
           Even when you forget.
                   Especially when you forget.”

Chapter Text

The Weight of Names I.

Personal Field Log – Assigned Reaper: T. |
Sandomierz Region
Archive Entry Fragment | Black Plague Period

28 June 1351 Fog covered path between Busko and Nowy Korczyn

The world is growing quiet.

Not in the way it dies – I know that sound well – but quiet in the way it waits. There is an expectation in the trees, in the air. Like a held breath.

I crossed five souls this morning. Two children, one priest, and a pair of lovers who drank poison rather than watch the other rot. They died with their fingers still knotted together.

None of them saw me. That is normal. That is how it should be.

I do not like to be seen.
If I am seen, it means something is unraveling.

30 June 1351 Woods beyond the salt trail, dusk

The other reapers have gone deeper into silence.

They linger in the shadows longer. They avoid my path. One of them – I did not recognize their shape – hissed something at me through the veil as we crossed near a field of mass graves.

I only caught fragments:
“She finds you… again… again…”

I said nothing. I do not trade in riddles.

Neither do other reapers.

But when I reached the graves, I found a single figure still kneeling over the edge. Alive.

She was praying.

No – talking. Conversing with the dirt as if someone beneath it could hear her. Her hands were stained, not just with soil, but with ink and herbs. A local healer, perhaps. Or a grave witch.

She looked up. It was her.

And again – she saw me.

Not the shape. Not the mask.

Me.

1 July 1351 Ruins of a village outside Wislica

The smell of death is different here.

It is older. Not just rot and fire – but something deeper. Regret, maybe. I found a shrine split in half, the saint’s face cracked clean down the middle. No one had taken the bodies away. They had simply… left.

Among the fallen, I found a small wooden figure tucked into a girl’s hand – a horse. Well-worn, carved with care. Her soul was already gone, but I stayed longer than I should have.

There was something familiar in the way her hand curled around it.

Something that felt familiar.

Like if I held onto something so dearly once.

3 July 1351 Beside the Vistula, north of Sandomierz

There is a bench beneath a gnarled tree that overlooks the river. I sat there.

Reapers do not sit. We move, we carry. We pass through. Never sit.

But I sat.

I watched the water. It glowed like pewter in the dying sun. This light felt known to me. Like something I watched often, long ago.

I thought of her again. The girl.

Not her name – I do not know it. Only her shape, her voice. Her stillness in the middle of so much ruin.

There is something about her that does not fray under time like the rest of this world.

That unnerves me.

5 July 1351 Old crossroads, half-buried under weeds and offerings

Someone left a bone charm tied with a red string. Slavic warding magic. It will not work.

Nothing stops Death. Only delays it.

But I paused longer than I meant to. The crossroads feel sacred in a way no church does. Something about standing between directions – between fates – always makes the veil thinner.

I heard a voice there.

Not hers. Not mine.

“Will you break her again?”

I turned. No one stood there. Not even a soul.

But the earth felt warm beneath my boots. And for a moment, I thought I smelled smoke and honey.

6 July 1351 Moonless night, lost trail

The sky held no stars tonight.

I wandered off the path – not by mistake, not entirely. There was something pulling me east. Toward something familiar I should not know.

I reached a meadow where the air felt wrong. Still. Weighted.

At its center stood a woman.

She did not move when I approached. Her dress was plain. Her hands were stained with some dark substance. Blood? Could be. It was hard to tell in the dark.

She did not look at me. She simply said:

“You came too late, this time.”

And vanished.

No soul remained.

No body.

Only a ring of crushed yarrow beneath my boots.

8 July 1351 Scattered entry, ink blurred by moisture

I woke from a dream I should not have.

The bed was not mine. The arms around me were warm. Her voice in my ear – soft, warm, laughing. Not words I remember, but I remember the familiarity.

Then fire.

Then screams.

Then silence.

I woke in the mud by the Vistula, mask soaked, breathing hard.

Reapers do not sleep.
Reapers do not dream.

So what does that make me?

10 July 1351 Rain-soaked village near a monastery gate

She was there again.

This time tending to a child who could barely breathe. She fed him something from a folded cloth – crushed petals and clove, I think. The kind of remedy a healer might whisper over when priests refuse to enter.

She met my eyes.

No fear. No awe.

Just… exhaustion. Recognition.

She did not speak. Neither did I.

But she stayed still long enough that I wanted to.

11 July 1351 Entry XXXXXX – margins torn, dried leaves tucked between the pages

The veil is wrong.

Too thin. Too near. I feel things I should not. I write things I do not remember writing. And I cannot stop thinking about her.

Who is she?
WHY does her voice follow me in dreams?

WHY does her face feel like the only truth I know?




There are no answers in these pages yet. Only echoes.

But something is coming.

Something old.

And it wears her smile.

Chapter Text

Her voice like ash II.

Personal Field Log – Assigned Reaper: T. |
Sandomierz Region
Archive Entry Fragment | Black Plague Period

16 July 1351 The girl has spoken to me

I cannot explain why this feels like blasphemy.

Not because it is forbidden – it is not. Grim reapers are not bound by mortal laws of silence. We may speak to the living if the moment calls for it. But seldom does it. Most see us only in the hour of Death. They scream, pray, clutch their crosses or their children. Some curse us. Some mistake us for angels.

And yet she saw me and said:

“You again.”

Casually. Like she’d found a familiar pebble on the road.

I had lingered near the old well by the poppy field. Too long. I knew it, but I told myself it was a coincidence. I collect here. I pass through. I am not watching her. I am not waiting.

I am a liar.

She was sitting on the edge of the well, skirt dusted with pollen, hair pinned up poorly – little strands had fallen loose and clung to her cheeks in the heat. She didn’t flinch when she saw me. Just blinked.

“You again,” she repeated. Her Polish was rural, soft, the kind that sang even when she wasn’t trying. “You’re following me, aren’t you?”

The instinct to vanish flared up like fire behind my “ribs”. But I didn’t move.

I wanted to. I should have.

Instead, I stood there like a broken pillar, words clawing their way up through centuries of dust.

“No,” I said at last. My voice rasped. It startled me. “Not following.”

She raised a brow. “You look like a man who’s lost.”

That word. Man. As if I am one.

As if the thing behind this mask has not walked across ten empires. As if my hands have not buried lovers and strangers alike in a thousand pits.

“I… do not know what I am.” I admitted.

That made her quiet.

The wind shifted. Poppies bowed in the field. The wood of the well creaked softly under her weight.

“Then you’re like the rest of us,” she said finally. “A little lost. A little late.”

She tapped the stone beside her. An invitation.

“Sit, ghost.”

I should have walked away.

I sat.

═════════════════════════════════════════════

She did not ask what I was. She did not ask why I wore the beaked mask, though it gleamed dully in the sun, stitched with silver thread and blackened glass lenses. She didn’t ask why my cloak did not rustle, though the wind passed right through it.

She just… sat with me.

“I’m Julia.”

The name made my ears ring.

Like the distant peel of a bell underwater.
Like the moment a dream breaks and you wake with your chest open.

I should have told her mine.

Instead, I asked, “Why do you come here?”

“To be alone,” she said. Then added, as an afterthought, “I didn’t think I’d be interrupted by a phantom in a bird mask, but I suppose that’s what I get for asking the saints for company.”

There was no fear in her. Only curiosity.

She looked at me sideways, chewing a sprig of bitter dock. Her fingers were stained green, her skin ruddy from the sun.

“You don’t eat, do you?” she asked.

I shook my head.

She reached into the folds of her apron and pulled out a small cloth. When she unwrapped it, the scent of old bread rose in the air – coarse, black, cracked with dryness.

She held it toward me.

“I know you’re not hungry,” she said. “But it’s rude to sit with someone and not share something. My grandmother would pinch my ear for it.”

I didn’t reach.

Still, she placed it gently on the stone between us.

The sun dipped a little lower.

Birds called from the trees behind the chapel ruins. The world was falling apart, and yet she fed me.

“Do you have a name?” she asked after a moment.

I froze.

My tongue caught on it, as if my own name were a wound I’d forgotten to dress.

“Todd,” I said. I do not know why. I haven’t used it in centuries.

She smiled. A small thing. Barely a twitch of her lips.

“Strange name for around here.”

“I am not from around here,” I said.

She glanced at me knowingly. “No, I suppose you’re not.”

We sat in silence for a while.

Not the uncomfortable kind. Not the sort you feel the need to fill.

The sort that grows when two things recognize each other, without understanding why.

At one point, she whispered a prayer under her breath. I didn’t recognize the saint’s name. Her lips barely moved.

I think it was for me.

17 July 1351 I dreamed.

Not of the dead. Not of the cries that echo between worlds when I walk the liminal spaces.

I dreamed of her voice.

It was speaking a name – mine, perhaps. Or hers. Or something older. I couldn’t tell. The syllables melted in my head when I awoke. But it stayed with me. The tone. The ache.

Again, grim reapers do not dream.

18 July 1351 I returned to the well.

She was not there.

I waited hours. I watched the sky turn pink, then bruise to purple. I do not know why I stayed. Reapers are not made to wait.

We come.
We take.
We go.

But I sat with my knees drawn up, mask tilted skyward, wondering if mortals understood more than we did.

Eventually, a child passed by – barefoot, dragging a doll. He glanced my way, but did not see me. He could, although, feel my presence, I think. He looked away quickly.

I did not move.

I waited until the stars came.

Chapter Text

Her hair like smoke III.

Personal Field Log – Assigned Reaper: T. |
Sandomierz Region
Archive Entry Fragment | Black Plague Period

23 July 1351 Somewhere along the Vistula

She greeted me at the stream again.

I arrived before her, not on purpose. Not really. I had passed near the chapel where two old women now lie on their final beds – one clutching her son’s shirt, the other whispering psalms through rotten teeth. Both will go by dusk.

I had time.

I stood by the stone where she usually sits. Waited without a word. My scythe slung behind me. The wind smelled of mildew and nettle.

Then her footsteps – light, uncertain, like she was hoping for me and pretending she wasn’t.

“You again,” she said.

I nodded once.

She did not sit. Instead, she watched me. “You’re always near, aren’t you?”

“I am not far.” I replied. The truth. Or close to it.

She looked toward the water, arms wrapped around herself. “Sometimes I think… if I talk long enough, you’ll answer properly.”

I tilted my head.

“Not in riddles. Not like some spirit acting in a play.” She smiled at her own thought, then sighed. “But I guess ghosts don’t really talk, do they?”

“Some do.”

“You don’t.”

“Perhaps I am listening.”

“Are you?”

“…Ja.”

The word slipped out before I could stop it. She turned to me, right eyebrow lifting. “That sounded different.”

“German.”

“Oh.” She paused. “Were you German? Before?”

My tongue felt heavy behind the mask. I lied again. “I don’t remember.”

28 July 1351 Nearby the village

The blacksmith’s wife bled out in the early hours. An accident. She was cooking for the children.

They tried to stop it with boiled nettle and iron powder. I watched from the rafters as her husband whispered a dozen prayers. It made no difference, the blood didn’t stop. She passed just before the cock crowed, with one hand gripping the edge of linen.

She saw me, only at the end.

The recognition flickered, but she did not scream. Only stared.

There was nothing remarkable about her death. No lingering regrets, no stubborn ghost. Just a soul quiet as dust, ready to go. I guided her gently.

Still, after the crossing, I lingered. Not because I had to – because Julia lives less than thirty steps from that house.

I stood beneath her window in the fog. Her shutters were closed. I told myself I was only passing through. That it was the fastest route back to the woods. That I didn’t slow my stride.

A lie.

1 August 1351 Vistula, again

She has a rhythm.

Up before the sun, before the roosters, even. The fire in her hearth glows steady by the time the dew settles. I’ve seen her hand emerge from behind the curtain, reach for the ledge, scatter crumbs for that mangy cat with the missing eye.

Then the shawl. Then the door.

Then the stone – the one beside the rye field. She places her palm on it each morning like a prayer. It’s never long. Three second. Perhaps four. Then she moved on.

No one else notices. No one watches her.

Except me.

And it’s not because I’m curious. It’s because she sees me. That makes her different.

That makes her… worth observing.

That’s all.

4 August 1351 Head village

She went to the village square today.

I didn’t follow. I was just… passing by. There were rumors of a sick woman, and where sickness gathers, souls loosen. I had to be near.

She bartered for flour and onions. Smiled at the baker’s daughter. Gave the beggar her last coin.

She speaks so easily to others. As if none of them are marked. As if the world is not collapsing beneath the weight of rot and breathless graves. As if she cannot die.

And yet – I see the shadow around her like a memory waiting to resurface. She does not wear it like the others. It clings, but does not bite.

Drustan, one of the other reapers, once told me the soul remembers more than the flesh ever will.

I think she knows me.
Not here. Not now.
But somewhere.

And I…
I feel her name lodged behind my ribs like a name I once bled for.

7 August 1351 Forest near the village

She waved at me today.

I didn’t expect it. I had only just stepped from behind the treeline, my scythe hidden in the folds of my coat. She was kneeling, collecting mushrooms by the rooted birch. Her braid was looped twice around her neck, sleeves rolled past the elbow.

She saw me, stood, and smiled.
Raised her hand.

I stared for too long.

Then – hesitantly, mechanically – I raised my gloved hand in return. Her smile grew brighter. And something in my chest twisted.

“Morning, ghost,” she called.

She still thinks I’m a spirit. Some echo tied to the village. A doctor who died during the first wave of plague. She’s created her own logic around it, filled in the blanks I never answered. I’ve let her.

It’s better this way.

She shouldn’t know.

9 August 1351 I haven’t left the village in quite a while.

We spoke again.

It was by the chapel ruins – her favorite place, for reasons she hasn’t shared. She calls it “peaceful,” though most mortals avoid it. Perhaps she doesn’t feel what I do there. The weight of sorrow soaked into the stones. The sound of bells that no longer ring – rusty and forgotten.

She sat on the broken step with her knees pulled up. I stood beneath the arch.

“I had a dream about you,” she said. No fear, only certainty.

I didn’t answer.

“You were wearing something else. Not the mask. You looked different, but I knew it was you, even without a face to bare.”

My fingers clenched under the leather. I didn’t ask for the details.

She leaned her chin on her hands. “We were in a river. You said something I didn’t understand. A name, I think.”

I didn’t breathe.

“Ghosts don’t dream, do they?” she asked.

“I wouldn’t know.” I said. My voice was lower than I meant.

She only laughed. “Well, if you ever figure it out, tell me.”

10 August 1351 …

I watched her from the ridge.

I told myself it was a coincidence. That I was headed north, that I needed to cross the hills, that it was efficient.

But I slowed when I saw her kneeling by the stream, washing linens against the rocks. She hums when she works. The same melody as before.

When she rose, she wiped her forehead with her sleeve and whispered something into the breeze. I couldn’t hear it, but I wanted to. I ached to.

What is this?

What has she done to me?

I am not meant to ache. I am not meant to want.

12 August 1351 Outside her house

She touched me.

Only briefly. Just her fingers against the thick black leather of my sleeve. But it happened.

She approached without fear. Her face tilted in that soft, curious way she has. “You’re not cold,” she said, brows furrowed. “Ghosts are supposed to be cold.”

I didn’t move.

She looked up at me, eyes searching through the reflection of my mask. “Maybe you’re something else.”

I should have denied it. I should have walked away, and-

“Ich weiß es nicht.”

She blinked. “What does that mean?”

“I don’t know.”

A beat passed between us.

Neither of us moved.

Then she smiled – smiled – and said, “That’s fair.”

14 August 1351

I know her schedule.

I know that she sleeps on her right side. That she rubs her temple when she’s thinking. That she has a small scar on her left eyebrow, shaped like a hook.

I know she reads aloud to herself when no one else is around.

I know she favors river paths instead of roads, even when they’re longer. I know she lights two candles before bed – one near her door, one on the sill.

I know these things because I have seen them.

Because I do not look away.

Because I cannot.

And yet, I tell myself:

I am not following her.

I am only… near.

That is all.

That is all.

16 August 1351

I should stop doing this.

This… proximity.

She is not mine.

I am not meant to linger. I was not made to yearn. My place is in the silence between heartbeats. In the last breath. In the space between the soul and then end.

Not in her world.

Not in her mornings.

And yet she sees me.
Only her.

Why…?
Why her?

Why does her voice settle in my chest like a hymn?
Why does my name does not matter when she just calls me a “ghost”?

Why do I feel alive near the living?

Why does her warmth… hurt?


I know her routine now.

I do not follow it.

I merely pass through it.

Again and again.

Again and again.

Again and again.

Again. And again.

And again.

Chapter Text

The Shape of Warmth IV.

Personal Field Log – Assigned Reaper: T. |
Sandomierz Region
Archive Entry Fragment | Black Plague Period

18 August 1351 Before the dusk, her home.

I touched her hair.

No, worse–I asked to.

She sat on the crooked wooden step of her house, sighing into her knees. I meant only to linger nearby, hidden in the half-shadow of the fence. But she saw me. She always sees me. I think I hate that.

“Do you know how to braid hair?” she asked, lifting the thick curtain of her hair and giving me the most ridiculous smile.

I do not know how to braid. Or at least–I didn’t. I watched her try a dozen times in the past week. I’ve watched her fingers, the way they twist and loop, the way she hums to herself. I have watched her too much.

I told her yes.
And she turned her back to me.

Her trust is appalling. If she knew what sat inside this shape, this costume of dust and smoke, she would run. She would scream. She would set herself ablaze before letting me come near.

And yet, she sat. Waiting.

I knelt behind her. My gloves are not meant for this kind of thing – delicate things. Her hair smelled like summer soil and elderflower. It caught on my knuckles, wove between my fingers like silk. She made a little noise when I tugged too tight. I muttered an apology. She only leaned into it.

I don’t remember how long I took.

I don’t remember me taking deep breaths, but I did. Had to.

When I finished, she turned her face to me – not fully, just enough that I could see her lashes, low and still, and the corner of her mouth, curled up. Not quite a smile. Not quite safe.

Her hand drifted backward and brushed mine. She didn’t pull away.

She said, “Thank you, ghost.”

And I–
I wanted to press my forehead to her nape.
I wanted to bury myself in her pulse.
In that sweet, sweet – so agonizingly sweet breath.



I left.

19 August 1351 Late, too late. By the candlelight

She invited me to sit beside her on her bed.

It was not a command. It was worse. It was gentle.

Her voice was soft and sleepy. She had been organizing dried herbs by lantern glow, and I had–somehow–drifted close enough to watch the flickering firelight kiss the line of her neck. She said, “You’re always so far away.”

She patted the blanket next to her. I said nothing, I simply obeyed.
I don’t know why I did that.
I should not have done that.

We didn’t speak for a while. Her shoulder brushed mine. She asked, “Do you miss being alive?”

I said, “I don’t remember being.”

That made her sad.

She reached for my gloved hand, slowly, like approaching a wounded dog. When her fingers touched my glove, she paused.

“Always so lukewarm,” she whispered. “Never warm, never cold… Perfect.”

If she knew what was beneath it, she would not reach again.

But she did. She held it anyway.

Her thumb moved, small and thoughtful, across the back of my palm. I watched it like it was the moon. I watched it like it was an omen.

Her breathing slowed.

And I–
I almost did something unspeakable.
I almost leaned in.
I almost let my head fall against hers.
I almost pressed my mask to her temple and breathed in her warmth like it could make me alive.

Instead, I tore my hand away.

She didn’t flinch. She only looked at me.
So gently.
Too gently.

I don’t know what she sees when she looks at me like that. It isn’t a ghost.

I think she’s starting to assume.

And I think it might ruin me.

23 August 1351 The hill overlooking the stream

We picked fruit today.

A small thing. A pointless thing. She said the world doesn’t stop just because of the plague. She handed me a basket, I followed.

She talked endlessly–about her father’s dog, about how once she thought that death could be predicted by counting the spots on a ladybug. She told me her favorite month was April, because everything wakes up.

I barely listened.

I watched her mouth move, yes. Her lips stained purple from the berries. Her hair came loose again, and she let it fall over her shoulder. She looked up at me once and laughed.

“You’re staring.”

I didn’t deny it.

I think I slowly remember to tell the truth around her. I don’t want to lie.

When her fingers brushed mine as she passed the basket, I saw her pause. I saw her choose not to pull away.

“Does it hurt?” she asked.

I blinked. “What?”

“Being stuck like this.”

I said nothing.
Her hand lingered.

“Can you feel this?” she whispered.

I nodded. Slowly.

She was quiet after that. And yet… her hand remained on mine for a long time.

Too long.

I don’t understand what this is.
But I want more of it.
I want to remember how it feels when she touches me.
I want to feel her forever.


24 August 1351 The air is thick

She was restless tonight. Couldn’t sleep, or wouldn’t. Said the night was “too loud,” though all I heard was the soft groan of timber, the shiver of wind against the shutters. I offered her silence. I sat in the corner like I always do, pretending to keep to myself, pretending not to look at her lips when she yawns.

But she crossed the room to me. Barefoot. In that long shift that clung to her legs when she moved.

“I don’t want to be alone,” she said.

“Then don’t be.” I replied, and cursed myself immediately.

She knelt beside me first. Then–Gods help me–she climbed into my lap like it was the most natural thing. She even murmured, “You’re delicate for a ghost,” and nestled against me. Her head rested over my collarbone, right beneath my throat.

My arms went rigid. I didn’t know what to do with them. I didn’t know what to do with myself.

Her weight was slight, but her presence was crushing. She smelled like honey and old paper and something that made my non-existent bones ache. Something familiar.

Her fingers played with the edge of my collar. My gloves trembled against her thighs. I said nothing, didn’t move. I hoped she’d fall asleep.

She didn’t.

Instead, she tilted her head up and stared at my mask–her face illuminated by the moonlight through the window shutters cracks. “It’s unfair,” she whispered. “I don’t even know what you look like.”

I tried to answer. I tried to say anything, but my throat was ash.

Her hand lifted.
She touched the side of my mask.

Then her fingers slipped under the edge–just barely–right beneath my jaw, where the strap feeds through the brass clasp.

“May I…?”

Her voice was so soft, so deadly. I should have stopped her, I should have disappeared. But I was frozen.

Her fingertips grazed my skin.

Not skin. Not really. There’s nothing human under there. Only shape, only shadow. Memory made flesh. I do not bleed, and yet I bled in that moment.

But before she could undo it–

–I caught her wrist.

Gently.

I didn’t mean to. It was a reflex. My hand closed around hers as though I could take the moment and hold it still.

She looked at me, startled, but not afraid.

“I’m sorry, Julia.” I said.

That was all.

She held my gaze–if you can call it that–and nodded. Her hand slipped back down to my chest, resting there. Not angry. Not embarrassed. Just… quiet.

Then she curled back into me.

And I held her close.

Carefully. As though she were made of light.

She fell asleep like that.

I did not move for hours. I think I forgot how.

I cannot be this. I cannot have this. And yet– how cruel, how tender, how human the ache is.

I said her name once under my breath before I left again, barely more than vapor in the wind.

Julia.

A curse.
A prayer.
A name that tastes like the end of me.

Chapter Text

Even Ghosts can Burn V.

Personal Field Log – Assigned Reaper: T. |
Sandomierz Region
Archive Entry Fragment | Black Plague Period

27 August 1351

I’ve started bringing her books. Not my own, of course–no volume bound in Death’s archives would suit her–but ones I find while drifting. Lost, forgotten, ink-faded things left behind in cracked abbeys or abandoned manors. Some she recognizes. Others she pretends to, and I let her. She does this thing–she presses her fingertips against the margins, as if trying to feel the letters underneath her skin. The pulse of the writer through parchment. I envy the paper.

Today she read aloud from one of them. Her voice stumbled on Latin verses, clumsy but unafraid. She sat cross-legged, hair mussed from sleep, and sunlight spilled across her lap like honey drops. She looked so alive.

“As a ghost, do you ever get lonely?” she asked me.

I meant to lie. I always mean to lie. But my voice rasped like torn linen:
“Ja.”

She didn’t smile at that. She only looked at me–really looked–like she might see through the leather and beak and blackened dust if she stared long enough. I had to turn away. My hands curled around the hem of my coat’s sleeves like a guilty man caught praying.

She reached out–only to brush my sleeve, but I felt it like fire through frost.

29 August 1351

She’s begun coughing. Just a little.

She waved it off when I tilted my head. “Dust,” she said. “Old books, old rooms.”

Yes. Maybe. Still…

Still.

This morning she pressed a daisy into my hand and told me, “You’re not as frightening as you perceive yourself to be.”

I didn’t have an answer for that. Not a proper one. I held the flower. I did not crush it, I kept it gently tucked in my satchel until it wilted.

Later, I found her at the river, barefoot in the silt, her skirt hitched above her knees, humming the song she always hums. Wolven. Again. She dared me to come closer, playfully splashing the water in my direction.

I told her, “You would not like what you’d see if I did.”

She didn’t flinch. Only smiled–not her usual grin, but something slower, sadder. Disappointed. “Maybe I would.”

I almost stepped forward.
Swept her in my arms.

Almost.

31 August 1351

Her fever broke midday. Or so she said.

This morning she was flushed, pale-lipped and swaying on her feet. I hovered–foolishly, like the scent of ash on wind, not close enough to stop her fall but close enough to ache for her. She wouldn’t sit still. Wouldn’t eat, then ate too fast. Told me she was fine, but her hands trembled when she braided her hair. I offered to do it, again.

She laughed. “You’re getting good at this,” she said, guiding my gloved fingers. Her hair was soft. Softer than sin. I twined the strands the way she showed me, trying not to breathe, not to think, not to feel.

When I finished, she leaned her weight against my shoulder. She smelled of herbs, she always does now. She likes sorting them, it keeps her occupied. Like a sweet decay. “You’re gentle with me nowadays,” she murmured. “For someone who was trying so hard to scare me away, not too long ago.”

I think I said her name at loud. I don’t remember how I said it–whether it was reverent or ruined. She looked up, eyes glazed with heat, but her smile boomed warm.

“You’re the only one who lingers.”

Gods, damn me, I leaned down.

We did not kiss. But we could have.

I think that’s worse.

2 September 1351

She almost took the mask.

We were on the floor by her hearth, legs tangled awkwardly–her idea, a strange one at that. The floor was cold. She laughed, coughing only once this time, and curled into my lap like she belonged there. Her breath fogged the leather of my coat.

Her hand found the ties at my collar. Slow. Careful. Testing.

“I want to see you,” she whispered.

I took her wrists, gently.

“Meine kleine Hexe, I want to be seen.” I whispered back.

But I didn’t let her untie them, not yet. I cannot bear what she might find beneath.

Instead, I lifted her hands and held them to my “jaw”, if you can call it that. Above the mask, above the curse that I am. She closed her eyes and leaned forward–not to kiss me, no, not quite–but to rest her forehead against the base of my throat.

“The more time passes, the warmer you feel,” she said.

I do not.

But I let her believe it.

4 September 1351

I held her today.

It was raining. Not heavily–just enough to wash away the street’s rot with the slight of petrichor. I brought her a new shawl, found in a widow’s home after I carried her soul through the veil. I cleaned it. I folded it. I held it out to Julia like an offering. Like once she did with me, with a piece of black bread. She didn’t even ask where it came from. She just took it, smiled, and pressed her cheek to my chest.

I could feel her. The warmth of her skin and the wet of her hair. I could see her. Hear the hitch in her breath. Her fingers curled into my coat and she whispered, “Stay.”

And I did.

We sat on the bench behind her cottage. She curled her legs over mine, shivering, and I anchored her to me like I had a right to. I am no anchor. I am the tide.

She was burning again. The fever had returned, faint and flickering. I could feel it pulsing through her bones even though I’m not made to feel.

I told myself it was nothing. That the air was muggy. That she’d simply exhausted herself again with her constant running-about and singing and breathing.

But Death knows the taste of coming silence.

And she–

No. Not yet.

7 September 1351

She’s better.

I don’t know how.

This morning, she ran to me. Ran. Barefoot, grinning like she’d outraced time itself. “I’m okay! See?” she announced before I could say anything. “Not today.”

I stared at her too long. She asked if I was happy.

I told her, “More than you know.”

She twirled for me in the dying field beside the house. Her cough was gone. Her eyes were clear. Even her touch, when she placed her hand on my chest and said, “You feel like a storm today.”

“Do storms scare you, Mein Herz?” I asked.

“Not if they stay.”

So I stayed.

She made us tea, though I do not drink. She told me stories about her childhood. She leaned her head on my arm.

I should have been suspicious. I should have known. But I let her lie there, speaking of nothing and everything, and I pretended that her breath wouldn’t vanish into stillness.

She asked if I ever regretted not living.

I said I didn’t know.

But now I do.

I regret not being real for her.

Chapter Text

Opening Gambit VI.

The veil between realms was thin that evening, and The Purgatory rippled like dark water beneath a breath of wind. Smoke coiled in the stillness. Time itself felt brittle.

Drustan stood at the edge of it all – poised as ever in his long, black coat, silver-threaded and immaculate, like a shadow stitched into form. In one hand, he held a steaming porcelain cup of something that smelled like burnt cloves. His other hand was tucked behind his back, watching the landscape shift, but his mind was elsewhere.

“Found her,” came a voice behind him – sing-song, smug.

Drustan didn’t turn. “I assumed as much.”

Lini emerged from the fog with a hop, holding an ethereal shape in their arms – a quiet soul, pale and curling like mist.

Julia.

Her soul glowed faintly in Lini’s arms, not golden nor damned – just unfinished. Unresolved.

“She was just standing there,” Lini went on, dangling upside down in the air now, hair hanging like smoke. “Didn’t run, didn’t cry. Kinda boring, honestly. But I felt it. The pull. It was his, Drustan.”

Drustan finally sipped from his cup.

“I know.”

Lini righted themselves and hovered beside him, feet never touching ground. They peered at him sideways. “You’re not even a little surprised?”

“No.”

“He was brooding like a crushed poet. Didn’t even notice me. I think he’s breaking.”

“He’s already broken,” Drustan said gently, voice calm as glass.

Lini blew out a puff of grey steam and leaned into him as if they could feel slumber. “So? What do we do now? Do we tell him we know?”

Drustan let the silence settle like dust.

“No,” he replied. “We invite him for a game.”

---
Later.

In a nowhere room – a void stitched together from pieces of broken time – a chessboard has been set.

White pieces gleamed. Polished. Waiting.

Black pieces waited too, duller, shadow-forged, edges worn from use.

Todd sat before them, shoulders slumped. He hadn’t removed his plague mask. He never did anymore. His posture was that of a man who crawled through every corner of grief and then kept walking long after his legs gave out.

Drustan sat across from him, smiling in that way only he could – composed, amused, unreadable.

“Black again?” Todd muttered.

“You always play black,” Drustan replied smoothly, adjusting a rook with one long finger. “You like it that way.”

Lini was curled atop a stone column nearby, munching on something that looked suspiciously like a glowing apricot. Gods know where they found it. They weren’t watching the board – they were watching Todd.

They all were.

The game began.

Pawn to e4. Knight to f6. Bishop sweep. Castle early.

Silence stretched long between every move.

“You’ve been… quiet,” Drustan said casually, moving his queen like a scalpel. Precise. “For someone who’s just lost the girl.”

Todd didn’t answer.

“You could say something. Break the tension.”

“There’s nothing to say.”

“Oh, come on now. I find that hard to believe.”

Another move. Another pause.

Todd stared at the pieces.

“I killed her,” he said.

Drustan didn’t flinch. “You reap the dead. You didn’t kill her.”

“I chose her.”

Lini’s chewing slowed.

Drustan leaned forward slightly, folding his hands and scoffing. “Chose her? You don't get to choose. You do as you're told.”

Todd didn’t look up. He moved a pawn one square forward.

“She asked me once… if I was only a ghost.”

“Mm.”

“I should’ve told her the truth. That I was worse. A ghost with purpose.”

Drustan gave a thoughtful nod, as if they were discussing the weather.

“She died, and I…” Todd’s voice trembled. “I couldn’t let her go. I should have. I always should have. But this time I… I did something.”

The pieces stood between them like witnesses.

“What did you do?” Drustan asked gently, though he already had an idea.

Todd’s next words came out like a confession dragged from centuries of silence.

“I cursed her,” he whispered. “So she would be reborn. Again. And again. Human each time, mortal, trapped. Until I find her.”

The board stood still. Even Lini had stopped moving, which was a rare sight to witness.

Drustan exhaled slowly.

“You made her… yours,” he said at last.

Todd finally looked up, voice sharp now – wounded. “No. I made her survive.”

“And what if she doesn’t want to?” Lini asked softly.

Todd had no answer.

Drustan leaned back, hands steepled, gazing at the board. His eyes lingered on the white king.

“Selfish. Callous. Are you human, Todd? To be so?” Drustan scoffed. “You’ve changed the rules of the game,” he continued. “But you haven’t won.”

Todd stared down at his black pieces, fingers tightening around a bishop.

“She’ll live,” he said. “I’ll make sure of it.”

“You’ll find her,” Drustan said calmly. “Yes. But love has a cost, old friend. It’s the only thing the universe taxes at full price.”

The next move hung in the air.

Drustan reached forward – then stopped.

He smiled faintly.

“I suppose,” he said, rising from his chair, “we’ll finish this later.”

Todd blinked. “But the board–“

“Enough.” Drustan’s eyes flicked to him like moonlight cutting through a storm. “I’ve heard enough, Todd. Let us continue when you’re ready to conquer the board.”

Only Drustan knew the game would never end.

Because as long as Todd kept chasing her soul…

…it couldn’t.

Chapter Text

The Hollow Echo VII.

The Purgatory lays still again.

A bleached fog rolled between realms like half-snatched breath, silent and full of memory. Todd had not moved from his place since the game ended–or rather, since it was abandoned. The chessboard remained untouched on the black marble table, the pieces mid-play, the black king backed into a corner but not toppled.

Somewhere across the grey, a clock ticked without hands. Or perhaps it only sounded like one.

Todd sat hunched, cloaked in silence. He had stopped counting time. He only noticed the lack of it.

It was Julia’s voice that broke the quiet.

“You’re always brooding,” she said.

He turned sharply. No one. Just the hollow corridor of a realm that no longer required breathing. And yet–there it was again. That voice.

“I liked it better when you talked to me. Even when you pretended not to care.”

He closed his eyes. The fog curled tighter around his limbs. He didn’t remember standing, but now he was, hand grazing the wall like he might fall through it. She had sounded so near.

“Julia?” he rasped. His voice cracked around her name.

No answer.

A beat. Then, laughter–light, girlish, and warm like wine. Echoing down the hallway.

Todd staggered forward.

Behind him, high above the steps, Drustan watched from the overlook. One leg crossed over the other, elbow resting lazily on the obsidian banister. Lini sat perched like a sparrow beside him, nibbling on a candied chestnut pulled from some pocket of mortal indulgence. They spoke low.

“He’s hearing her now,” Lini said between chews.

“I expected as much,” Drustan replied. His gaze remained on Todd, unblinking. “Loss digs in like frost under the skin. The deeper the bond, the sicker the dog. The louder the echo.”

Lini clicked their tongue. “Echo? That’s more than an echo. He’s talking to shadows.”

Drustan didn’t respond. His silver eyes narrowed instead, catching the slight tremble in Todd’s shoulder as he turned down another corridor, speaking softly to no one.

Todd found her in the mirror first.

He had paused by the standing glass in the atrium of memory, half-hidden behind a stone pillar. It had never reflected anything but the realm itself–shimmering fog, dark robes, fractured light.

But now, her silhouette shimmered.

At first, it was only a blur, like heat off summer roads. Then her face swam into view. Her skin was pale, cheeks still faintly flushed from fever. Her hair was loose, falling over her shoulders the way he used to braid it. Her eyes sparkled the same as when she had teased him for having sharp responses.

He stepped closer. The mirror pulsed.

“Hello, ghost,” she whispered.

He stopped breathing. Something hot and wet welled behind his eyes, but it never fell. He touched the glass, and if felt cold.

“You’re not here,” he said.

She tilted her head. “Does that matter?”

He didn’t answer. He just stared.

She smiled and leaned against the inside of the mirror, arms folded lazily. “You never told me why you wore the mask.”

He blinked slowly. “I thought it would frighten you.”

Julia laughed. “It would. But you’re nothing without it, right? That’s also a reason.”

He shut his eyes again. “No, I–“

When he opened them, the mirror was empty.

Later, in the Hall of Silence, Todd sat alone on a bench carved from something darker than night. He hadn’t remembered walking here, either.

A voice spoke from behind his shoulder.

“She liked when you let her read to you. Even if you didn’t understand the story.”

His heart lurched. She sat beside him. Her presence warm, too warm for this realm.

He stared forward. “I remember.”

“She said you smelled like pine resin and dried leaves. And she liked that pathetic nicknames you used for her. Even when you were pretending it was a joke.”

His fingers twitched against his knee.

“You’re not her,” he said.

Julia looked sideways at him, her image crisp and full. Too full. A smirk plastered on her lips. “Maybe. Maybe not. How would you know?” She leaned closer. Too close. “Did you pay enough attention? Did you actually ever manage to see her?” She dipped her head and laughed loudly. Too loud. “You did not.”

He swallowed hard. “I cursed her.”

The words hung heavy in the space between them.

“I cursed her soul,” he said again, hoarser now. “I didn’t let her vanish into peace. I–I made it so she returns. She will. Will she?” His voice trembled. “Will she?”

But she was gone again. A blink, and only fog remained.

“I told you,” Lini muttered. “He’s cracking.”

Drustan didn’t disagree. They stood beside the eternal mirror, the one Todd had just left behind.

“He made the choice,” Lini continued, flicking sugar from their sleeves. “He had a soul in love. That’s not allowed, right? Love like that?”

“No,” Drustan said simply. “Not for us.”

“He cursed her. Just now. We watched it take root.”

Drustan nodded once. “Her death was the catalyst. Her soul should have passed. He bound it instead. Twisted the thread mid-flight.”

“Reckless,” Lini murmured. “But elegant.”

Drustan allowed a rare, almost imperceptible smile. “Desperate men make strange artists.”

They looked down again. Todd had returned to the bench. His mask was discarded beside him now. He cradled it in his hands like a child’s skull. His eyes were distant, lips parted like he was about to ask a question.

“She was warm,” he whispered to no one. “Even at the end. Even when the fever burned her hollow.”

His voice shook.

“I thought she was getting better. I believed it.”

Then silence.

Lini leaned their chin into their palm. “How long do you think it’ll take?”

“For what?”

“For him to realize this is only the beginning.”

Drustan didn’t answer immediately.

He glanced at the chessboard set nearby, untouched. The black king stood upright. The white bishop had been knocked off the board, just barely. Still unfinished.

He whispered, “What a mutt.”

Lini raised a brow. “What?”

“Nothing.”

The hallucinations deepened that night.

Todd wandered into the Lacrimarium, a place even reapers rarely visited. The trees bore no leaves, only threads of hair, skin and memory. When the wind stirred, it carried sighs instead of birdsong.

She sat under a twisted ash tree.

This time, she looked ill again. But not dying.

Just flushed. Fevered. Like she had during her last good day.

Her hands were warm, resting on his cheeks. He didn’t remember kneeling, but her touch was so clear, he couldn’t breathe.

“I dreamed of you once,” she whispered.

He closed his eyes. “Don’t.”

“You were walking through mud. You looked lost.”

“Please don’t.”

“I was barefoot. But I followed you, even then.”

He reached for her wrists. His hands passed through mist.

From afar, Drustan turned away.

“She is gone,” he said quietly. “But he still hears her.”

Lini hummed. “So what happens now?”

Drustan walked toward the chessboard. He lifted the black queen, rolled it once in his palm, and placed it back.

“Now?” he said.

A pause.

“Now we wait. The century is long.”

Chapter Text

The Mourner’s Mirage VIII.

The fog never lifted from the garden, and the statues had long since forgotten the names of those they mourned. Time slipped oddly here, folding into itself like bruised petals, and the air hung thick with the perfume of half-remembered grief. There were no birds, no wind–only the weight of what was once called love, and what now calcified into obsession.

Todd stood in the dead center of the Lacrimarium, where the earth never softened. It was here he often came to grieve her. Julia. His Julia. Except now she lived in flashes–reflected in pond water, breathing in mirrors, whispering from the bark of rotting trees. She was everywhere and nowhere.

Her voice lingered even when he tried not to listen.

“You let me die.”

“You promised we’d find peace.”

“Why won’t you look at me?”

He would scream back, sometimes. He would grab his own head, gnash teeth against the phantom noise and beg it to stop. But it never did. And now, her voice had grown… sweeter. Warmer. Alive. And her face–oh, how it had returned. She touched him now. She kissed him now. She knew his name, spoke it oh so sweet.

But it wasn’t Julia.

Drustan knew. He watched from afar, perched on the edge of the garden like a crow on cathedral stone. His robe rustled without wind, the fabric heavier with knowing. Behind him, Lini paced. Agitated. Electric.

“We must interfere,” Lini snarled. “We’ve watched long enough. He’s unraveling like thread through a butcher’s fingers.”

“Unraveling is sometimes a necessary shedding,” Drustan replied, his voice cool as winter light. “What emerges from it… is truer than what went in.”

Lini scoffed. “Don’t you hide behind riddles now, you sanctimonious prick. He’s not shedding, he’s drowning. That woman–whatever she is–has her claws in him. And you know it.”

Drustan’s gaze didn’t shift. “Of course I know.”

“Then why won’t you stop it?!” Lini shouted. “Is this another one of your grotesque lessons? Must he burn until ash sings for your sick amusement?”

“No,” Drustan said calmly. “But some flames are meant to touch the soul. And souls must learn their shape in the dark.”

Lini stared at him like they might strike him. Their fists clenched. “You’re a coward.”

Drustan smiled faintly. “No. I’m patient.”

Todd, meanwhile, no longer wandered alone.

She came to him more often now. Julia. She called herself Julia. She looked just like her–same dark lashes, same slightly crooked tusks, same voice, only silkier, huskier. She smiled more. She seemed more confident. More… hungry.

“I’ve missed you,” she whispered, running her fingers along his jaw. “Why did you stay away so long?”

“I thought you were dead…” Todd murmured, his throat raw.

“I was. You pulled me back.” She took his hand and pressed it to her chest. There was warmth, a pulse. “Don’t you feel it? I’m here. With you.”

He closed his eyes.

He didn’t question it.

Because it hurt too much to.

Aluena wore Julia’s face like a stolen mask–but her eyes gave her away in flickers. Not always. Sometimes. Enough to unsettle the dying part of Todd that still held on to logic.

But it didn’t matter. When she kissed him, he forgot. When she climbed into his arms, when she whispered against his mouth that she forgave him, that she wanted him–nothing else remained. Only sensation.

Only salvation.

That night, the fog thickened like breath on cold glass. The stars blinked out. Todd lay beneath a dead willow, hallucinating or dreaming–he didn’t know. He thought of Julia’s hair. How it used to smell like herbs. How her breath always tasted like spring water, even if he had no idea how she tasted like.

Then she was there.

Aluena.

Naked, or nearly so, clothed in shadow and longing. Her skin shimmered like dusk on a blade. She straddled him, and he didn’t resist. Couldn’t.

“I want to feel you,” she said against his neck, her voice barely more than steam.

“You… forgive me?” Todd asked, broken.

“I always did.” She kissed the corner of his mouth. “You punished yourself enough. Let me heal you.”

Her fingers traced the edge of his ribs, where bone threatened to pierce skin. She breathed into his mouth like she was giving him life. Her thighs were warm around his waist. He let himself go slack beneath her.

“I need you,” he murmured. “I… need to feel whole again.”

She guided his hand to her body, moaning softly as his touch moved across her hip, her stomach, the swell of her breasts. The breath between them grew shallow. She arched into him, and he swore her skin suddenly felt much colder.

Then she sank onto him–slowly, reverently–as if claiming something that always belonged to her.

Todd gasped. The sensation overwhelmed him. It was too much. Too soft. Too alive. No.

It felt freezing.

His fingers gripped her waist, almost unsure.
This… was Julia. Right?
Who else, if not her?
Who else, if not his sweet Julia?

“You feel… so good,” he said, almost weeping.

Her lips found his ear. “Say my name.”

“Julia,” he moaned. “Julia… My Julia…”

And she smiled. Not Julia’s smile. But he didn’t see it.

Lini watched from a distance. They had followed the fog, burning through bramble and rot, until they found them–Todd and the imposter.

They couldn’t scream. Couldn’t stop it. The sight of him–vulnerable, trembling, utterly lost–being used by that thing twisted their stomach into salt.

“This is sick,” they whispered. “You let this happen, Drustan.”

But the reaper had vanished. Or perhaps never followed them at all.

Lini fell to their knees.

“Damn you,” they whispered. “Damn you both.”

Afterward, Todd lay in the dirt, hair tangled in moss, body still trembling. Aluena curled beside him, tracing lazy patterns on his chest.

“I want to stay here forever,” she whispered.

He smiled faintly, eyes closed. “Then we will.”

“You won’t leave me again?”

“Never.”

A single tear fell from the corner of his eye.

Far above them, the moon cracked like an egg. No one noticed.

In the Camera Saxa Tacita, Drustan stood before an ancient mirror. It reflected nothing.

“You broke him,” Lini’s voice echoed from the threshold.

He did not turn.

“He broke himself,” Drustan answered.

Lini crossed the room, fury burning in their eyes. “She’s not Julia. You know it. I know it. And he’s being devoured.”

Drustan finally turned.

“She is the echo of what he desires. And desire… always wears a mask.”

Lini spat at his feet. “Your riddles are filth. You could have stopped this.”

Drustan stepped closer, placing a cold hand on their shoulder. “And deny him the truth? No. He must walk through the fire. Let it melt what’s false.”

“By the time he learns,” Lini said, trembling, “there’ll be nothing left of him to salvage, for all we know.”

Drustan nodded solemnly. “And that… is the risk of love.”

Chapter Text

The Sin of Forgetting IX.

The stone corridors felt colder than usual.

They whispered. Mocked. Echoed.

Footsteps rang hollow through the underground Camera Saxa Tacita – chamber of quiet stone – the sanctum of those who dared wield Death like a scepter. Todd did not walk as he once had, long strides laced with silent authority. Now his steps were erratic. Off-beat. A madness simmered behind his eyes, like thunder beneath still waters.

It had only been hours since Lini had scolded him.

“You let her touch you–!” they had hissed. “You let her crawl into your grief and rot you from the inside, and you just let her–!”

He couldn’t answer. He couldn’t breathe. The memory of Julia’s laugh had been replaced by another voice–syrupy, saccharine, false. A mimicry. A joke. A sin.
And he had called that sin Julia.

Now, bile scorched the back of his throat as her name passed through his mind again.
Not Julia. Never Julia.

Aluena.

She had draped herself in Julia’s softness. Spoke in that same fluttery lilt. Wore the same curve of cheek, the same tilt of head, the same weight of silence when she looked at him from across a room.
He had believed.

He had let her into his arms. Into his mouth. Into the hollow Julia had left behind.

Lini had watched it unfold in silence, all this time. Until it was too late. Until Todd stumbled out of that cursed illusion with her scent still staining his skin, drunk on borrowed warmth. Only then had they shattered the mirror with their voice.

“You touched her like she was Julia. And you knew. Some part of you knew. You just didn’t want to admit you could be this fucking weak.”

He hadn’t denied it.
Because Lini was right.

Now, the silence pressed in around him like a wet cloth – suffocating. He stopped before Aluena’s chamber.

He stood for a long while in front of her door, gloved hand hovering above the cold stone. He didn’t need to knock. She’d feel him coming. She always did.

When he entered, she was seated by a mirror.
Almost seemed like she always was.

It even looked like the same mirror where she had not so long ago taken his hands whispered, “Don’t look away. You remember me, don’t you?”

She turned, a pleased smile curling on her lips. “Darling,” she greeted, voice like velvet. “You’ve come back. I wondered how long you’d stay away.”

His mask was gone. His face was bare. And so were his eyes – bloodshot, glassy, wide.

He did not speak at first.

The air around him began to warp.

Aluena’s smile twitched, just barely.

“You knew,” he whispered, low. “You knew.”

She rose, slowly, the silk of her robe hissing against the floor like a snake.

“I gave you peace,” she said, unfazed. “I gave you what she never could – presence. A touch, a moan, warmth. You begged for it with every silence you uttered.”

“You deceived me.”

“I gave you relief.”

“I gave you my love!” Todd bellowed, voice erupting like thunder, rattling the shelves. “And you dressed yourself in the skin of someone you aren’t.”

He advanced.

“You wanted to believe I was her,” Aluena said, chin tilting up defiantly. “You needed it. You couldn’t bear the silence she left behind.”

“I would’ve borne it FOREVER if it meant staying faithful!”

“Then perhaps you loved her memory, not her.”

The slap cracked through the room like a whip. His hand lingered in the air for a moment longer after the strike, chest heaving.

Aluena stumbled, stunned – not by pain, but by his fury.
Todd trembled, shaking down to the bones. Not from guilt. Not anymore.

From rage.

“I should unmake you where you stand,” he spat. “Unweave every thread that binds you to this plane. You preyed on my grief. My curse.”

She laughed, blood at the corner of her mouth.

“And yet you came.”

He didn’t strike again.
Instead, he turned – back straight, trembling fists clenched. Voice cold as frost:

“When Julia finally returns… if you ever so much as breathe her name again – I will destroy you. Without hesitation. Without mercy. Without mourning.”

Her smile dropped. He saw fear, just for a flicker, in those violet eyes.

“You cannot stop fate, Todd,” she said, quieter now. “She will die again. And again. And you will be alone.”

He paused in the doorway.

“I’d rather suffer a thousand years of silence… than spend another second in your lie.”

Lini found him later, sitting at the edge of the Veil, the border between the realms of the living and the dead. His scythe lay beside, buried in ash. Souls whispered like wind through the black fields. He had been there for hours, unmoving.

“Are you just going to sit here now?” they asked, though their voice was gentler than before. “Letting time pass? Letting her fade?”

Todd didn’t answer.
His eyes were fixed ahead, glassy. He looked hollow.

“She’s gone,” he said after a long time. “But she’ll return. I’ll wait.”

Lini knelt beside him, their long robes brushing the ash.

“She won’t remember you.”

“I know.”

“She’ll live again. Love again. Maybe die before you can reach her.”

“I’ll still wait.”

Lini looked at him, the last embers of their anger flickering in the cold wind. They had wanted to scream again, to rip him apart with words – but what was the point? The damage had been done. And now… now he looked like a man staring at his own grave.

“She’ll be a stranger to you,” Lini whispered.

“She always was, Lini.” He replied.

And then he stood, lifted the scythe in one hand.

“I’m going back to work.”

Lini blinked. “What?”

“I let the world slip too long.” He looked out toward the mortal plane. “They’ve been dying, I need to reap. I have things to fix.”

“After everything, you’re just going to–?”

“Yes.”

His face was blank. His voice was hollow.
Julia’s death had broken him.

Aluena’s lie had stripped away the pieces.
What remained was something colder. Something sharpened into grief’s cruel edge.

“I’ll reap. I’ll wait. And when I find her… when she opens her eyes again in some far-off century…” He gripped the scythe tighter. “I’ll try again.”

Lini looked at him, heart aching, brow tight. Then shook their head and stood.

“You’re a damn fool, Todd.”

He didn’t disagree.

Far behind him, Drustan stood in the shadows of the corridor, arms folded, eyes unreadable – as per usual. He had said nothing through it all. He’d watched. Waited.

Lini approached him, fury simmering again. “And you just stood there, huh? You let him rot.”

Drustan exhaled slowly. “He had to see it himself.”

“He nearly lost himself. That manipulative snake–“

“And he found himself again. In the ashes.” Drustan’s voice was quiet. “Sometimes the mirror must shatter to reveal the real face.”

Lini sneered. “You’re a cruel bastard.”

Drustan’s lip twitched – not quite a smile, not quite an apology.

“Perhaps,” he said. “But you forget… I was once the kind one.”

And so Todd walked alone once more.

Cloaked in black, scythe on his back, mask returned to his face. The souls did not weep, nor did they bow. Surrounded him in solemn silence. Even the dying seemed to sense the frost in his wake.

He spoke no words to the living. Took no pauses between reaps. He became a shadow again.

But every soul he carried…
Every hand he guided through the Veil…
Every eye he closed….

He thought of her.

Somewhere, someday – she would be born again. And when she looked up at the sky and wondered why the shadows seemed to follow her…
He would be there. Waiting.

Not to steal.
Not to lie.
Not to weep.

But to love.

Even if she never remembered.
Even if he had to try for a thousand years.

He would wait.

He will wait.

Chapter Text

When the Bells Wept X.

The road to the chapel was wrong from the first step.

The mud clung to Drustan’s boots as though it didn’t want him to pass. No wind, no rustle of branches, no stray insect noise. Even for a dead-souls night, this was too quiet. The kind of quiet that felt watched.

The building itself emerged from the mist in jagged silhouette. Small, hunched stone walls. A leaning bell tower with its cross skewed like a snapped bone. One side of the roof had burned away, leaving blackened rafters like ribs exposed to the sky. The doorway sagged inward, its frame cracked, wood splintered where something had struck – hard, and more than once.

He had expected another small-town skirmish. Losers awaiting their fate. A clean sweep of souls before moving on. That was the work. That was all it ever was.

Until he took the first step toward the threshold, and the air thickened.

The scent hit him – wet earth, cold stone… and copper. Underneath it, the faint bitterness of something once sweet, burned away. His grip on the scythe shifted automatically, fingers tightening on the smooth haft.

He crossed into shadow.

The chapel’s air was still. Heavy. Pews overturned, cracked in two. Candles sat in their sconces like amputated fingers, wax pooled and hardened mid-drip. Above the altar, the crucifix had been torn down – or smashed – its Christ face-down among splinters, head sheared from shoulders.

The dead lay everywhere.
Priests in torn vestments. Women with their hair clotted dark. Children in linen that hung loose over slack limbs. Faces caught mid-expression – eyes wide, lips frozen in gasps or protests that had never finished.

This had not been an accident. This was the work of hands that had meant every wound.

He walked the central aisle, the scythe’s blade trailing along the stone. The scrape rang far too loud in the silence, each note ricocheting off the walls and back into his skull.

An old priest slumped near the first now, eyes glassy with disbelief that hadn’t faded. A young man sprawled further on, one arm stretched toward the altar as if reaching for something that wasn’t there – or had never been.

When Drustan’s gloved hand brushed the edge of an upturned pew, the first flicker came.

He expected the usual stillness of Death, the strange peace that hung over every reaping ground. Instead, the air here pressed against his chest like a weight, and something inside him recoiled.

The dread came without warning.

It wasn’t the sight of the dead. It was the feeling – the sense that he had walked into a place where every wall knew his name. The stones themselves seemed to lean toward him, listening.

It was still the same pew. But it wasn’t overturned. It was upright, polished, worn smooth by years of hands resting along it. Warm sunlight spilled across the grain, casting little red and blue shapes from a stained-glass window above. Voices – dozens of them – rose together, chanting in a language he didn’t know and somehow understood.

He knew the smell – wood polish and beeswax candles. He knew the feel of the seat beneath him.

He blinked. The wood was cold, splintered under his touch again.

He reached the altar. The pile of dead was waist-high, limbs tangled, clothing ripped. Candle soot streaked a nun’s cheek above the bruise that purpled her throat. A rosary lay coiled in her hair.

The air stirred. Not wind. Words.

“Kind one…”
“You failed them…”
“Yours to save… yours to lose…”

The sound wasn’t in the air alone – it was inside him, curling through bone and thought.

His throat worked. “Not real,” he rasped, though the words came out like a lie.

The voices swelled. Some angry, some aching, some almost gentle, which was worse.

“Look at them…”
“Once, you would have wept…”
“Once, you were ours.”

The shadows between the pews lengthened. Stretched. Reached. The air darkened without losing light.

Then the second flicker hit.

The altar was whole. No pile of bodies. No soot. A tall man in white vestments stood there, smiling at someone – at him – as he approached with a book in his hands. The hall was filled, every pew holding villagers dressed in their best. He smelled bread baking somewhere just beyond the doors. The air was warm, almost too warm, with the press of bodies.

The man at the altar spoke words Drustan couldn’t hear, but the rhythm was familiar – blessing, prayer, promise.

He blinked. The man was gone. The altar was blood-slick and cracked.

The bodies stirred.
Not in any human way – not breath, not heartbeat – but eyes shifted toward him. Dead, yet watching. Mouths opened soundlessly, and he still heard them.

Hands – invisible but crushing – gripped his arms and dragged him toward the heap. He felt the damp of skin, the slack weight of heads brushing his shoulder.

And through it all, the words pulsed:

“Kind one…”
“Too late…”
“You failed them…”

He tried to wrench away, but his knees struck stone. The scythe clattered beside him, echoing too loud, like a scream.

The third flicker hit like a blow.

He blinked hard. The church was cold and silent, and the altar before him was smeared with dark rust of dried blood. His boots stuck slightly as he stepped back – wax or blood, he couldn’t tell.

Something scraped beside him.

He spun, scythe raised.

At the far end of the nave, a figure stood – a woman in robes, face hidden in shadow. In his mind’s eye, the figure smiled. Not kind. Not cruel. Just… knowing.

“You came back,” the woman said. The voice was wrong – too deep, too many echoes. “We waited.”

Drustan’s throat tightened.
He took a step back. The shadow-figure took a step forward. Light from the fractured stained glass fell across his face for a heartbeat – and the woman’s eyes were pure white, reflecting nothing.

“You–“ Drustan started, but the word died.

The shadow burst apart, dissolving into dozens of pale doves that filled the air with the frantic sound of beating wings. The rush of air chilled his skin, and when the birds vanished into rafters, the woman was gone.

He realized then that he was gripping the scythe so tightly his knuckles ached.

The dread became suffocating. He could feel eyes on him – not from the dead on the floor, but from the walls, the beams, the air itself. As if this place had memory of him.

His breath came faster.
Not fear, he told himself. Grim reapers do not feel fear. But this was something else – recognition without understanding.

He needed to leave.

Drustan turned sharply, striding toward the doors, but with every step, the nave seemed to stretch. The exit felt further away, the shadows deeper, the air thicker.

And then a hand brushed his sleeve.

He looked down.
A boy – no more than ten – stood beside him, looking up with wide, shining eyes. “You left us.” the boy said softly. His voice was as gentle as a lullaby.

Drustan staggered back, knocking into a pew. When he looked again, the boy was gone. Only a corpse remained in that spot, mouth still open in that silent scream.

The chanting started again – louder now, layered, a hundred tongues rolling over the same unrecognizable phrase. His vision swarm. The walls seemed the breathe.

Something was wrong with him. The sensation wasn’t like mortal panic – this was deeper, lodged in whatever core made him what he was. He felt the urge to run and the equal urge to kneel, to let the chanting swallow him whole.

“Drustan?”

It came from far away, like a call through water.

Boots on stone. A second voice, sharper. “Oh… hells.”

Todd appeared first in the doorway, dark coat outlined against the moonlight. His eyes took in the ruin, then Drustan’s posture, and the guarded caution slid into his face.

Lini darted past him, their own boots scattering bits of glass. They dropped to their knees beside Drustan. “Hey. Look at me. Come back.”

Slowly, his head lifted. His hair clung damp to his temples, though no rain had fallen. His eyes were darker than they’d ever seen – not his usual silver, not working-reaper-dark. This was deeper. Heavier. Human?

Lini moved closer, their small frame taut with something between concern and suspicion. “You’re pale,” they said, voice quieter now. “Even for you.”

“I thought it was just another job,” he murmured. “It… isn’t…”

Todd stepped forward. “Then what is it?”

“Familiar,” Drustan said. His gaze drifted back toward the altar. “Wrong, but… familiar.”

Lini glanced at Todd. “Familiar how?”

A ghost of a smile twisted his mouth – humorless, resigned. “I was once the kind one.” The words landed in the room like stones dropped in still water.

It took both of them to get him upright. His movements were slow, deliberate, as though too fast might break him further. Todd handed him the scythe. His fingers curled around the haft, but the grip was loose, unsure.

They stepped into the night. Rain had begun to fall, dotting the stones with dark spots. The chapel loomed behind them, its broken cross a jagged silhouette.

“Some other time. We’ll reap some other time, Drustan.” Lini spoke.

Drustan didn’t look back. But his free hand was clenched so tightly at his side that the leather of his glove creaked.

He never spoke of it again.

From that night on, something in him was gone.
He still reaped.
Still walked the roads and crossed thresholds.
Still claimed the dead.
But the warmth – whatever fraction of it he’d once had – never returned.

Chapter Text

Ephemera of The Forsaken XI.

The veil between realms was thinner in the western quarter of the city. Todd felt it as he walked, his long stride cutting through narrow, frost-bitten streets that reeked of smoke and damp straw. The air tasted metallic, tinged with the faint copper bite of a soul about to slip loose from flesh. His duties called – finally, a distraction that did not speak in her voice, that did not laugh like her. He had been chasing one after another these past days, reaping in silence, burying himself in work like a man digging his own grave.

And yet…

The murmuring at the edges of his hearing. Not Julia’s, this time. Deeper. Amused. Patient.

He slowed, turning his masked face toward the shadow that lengthened beside the half-collapsed granary.

Drustan stood there, hands folded behind his back, a perfectly carved statue of control. He was dressed in the same immaculate black, frost gathering in the creases like it obeyed him, rather than the season. His gaze was steady, one brow lifted the barest fraction, as though Todd had arrived perfectly on cue.

“You’ve been busy.” Drustan said. Not a question, nor a praise. Just an observation laid like bait.

Todd’s jaw flexed beneath the beak of his mask. “And you’ve been watching.”

A flicker of a smirk. “Someone ought to.”

The exchange hung in the air, brittle as the frozen puddles underfoot. Neither moved. Passerby – none of whom could see them – drifted through, their mortal chatter muffled.

“You’re wasting your stare.” Todd said at last, and brushed past him.

“Then humor me,” Drustan replied, falling into step with him. “A game. Tonight.”

Todd didn’t answer.

“I’ll bring the board,” Drustan added. “And Lini. They’re… eager.”

From somewhere behind a snow-dusted barrel, Lini’s voice piped up, bright as if they’ve been waiting for their cue. “I heard that. And yes, I am. Someone has to keep you two from boring each other to undeath.”

Todd didn’t turn, didn’t slow. “I’m working.”

“You’ll still be working when the century rots away,” Drustan said. “You could afford an hour or two.”

Todd’s steps faltered – half an inch, enough for Drustan to notice. Todd hated that he’d noticed.

The library smelled of dust and parchment, heavy with the weight of time. The curtains were drawn tight against the muted light of the outside Veil, sealing the place in a kind of artificial twilight. A board stood ready on the oak table near the fireplace.

Drustan was already seated. His posture was elegant and measured, as if even the act of resting in a chair was an art form. He regarded Todd with that faint, unreadable smile – one that never reached his eyes.

“Thought you wouldn’t show up,” Drustan’s voice was smooth, rich and carefully inflected. “I started wondering if the great reaper decided that victory might be too much to stomach today.”

Todd stepped into the room without a word, boots thudding on the marble floor. The weight of his long coat moved with him, a shadow given shape. His mask caught the fireplace flicker for a moment, the dark glass lenses rendering him illegible.

Drustan set the pieces with deliberate precision, as though every placement was a sermon. Lini perched on the edge of the table chewing on something that smelled faintly of roasted chestnuts.

“Black or white?” Drustan asked.

Todd didn’t answer, just sat and reached for the black pieces. His hands were steady, but his shoulders were tight under his coat. The man’s mind wandered despite himself – flashes of mortal fields, recent souls he had taken. He remembered a boy clutching his mother’s shawl as he crossed the threshold. A woman who begged not for herself, but for her cat to be spared a lonely death. Faces blurred together, but the voice – Julia’s voice – lingered. He shoved it back where it belonged.

Drustan opened with a pawn. He let the silence hang until it stretched taut. “I have also been wondering,” he said at last, “if you still remember how to play. Or has… everything made you forget the shape of strategy?”

The words landed with unhurried softness, a surgeon’s touch on a deep wound.

Todd’s head tilted ever so slightly. “Careful,” he said, his voice lowering, “you might cut yourself trying to poke around in something sharp.”

Lini snorted, breaking a piece of one of the roasted chestnuts in half with their teeth. “Is this the part where you two compare who has the bigger blade? Because I’ll bet on Todd. He’s got the temper for it.”

Drustan’s eyes slid toward them without moving his head. “Temper,” he echoed, “is the surest way to lose a game. People who let anger guide them tend to forget the board entirely.”

Todd’s next move was sharper than necessary. The clatter of the piece echoed too loudly in the narrow space.

Drustan tilted his head. “A heavy hand today. Does the game trouble you?”

“The game does not trouble me.” Todd said, though his voice was lower now, rougher.

“Mm.” Drustan tapped the edge of a pawn. “Then something else does.”

It was a knife slipped between ribs – subtle, dawdling.

Todd said nothing, but the pause was enough.

Drustan’s eyes sharpened. “Another mortal woman, perhaps? Another one who can see you when others cannot?”

The world seemed to narrow to the board. Todd’s fingers flexed. “Watch your words.”

“I am only observing,” Drustan said mildly. “A reaper’s duties are… difficult enough without distractions. Particularly those that end… predictably.”

The smirk was back.

Lini’s laugh was quiet but cutting. “You’re asking for it, Drustan.”

“Perhaps I am.”

Todd’s next breath was slow, deliberate. He reached for a pawn, then stopped. His hand hovered over the board, fingers curling until the glove’s leather cracked.

Lini kicked their heels idly. “So, Dusty… you ever going to play him without all this… ‘psychological warfare’?”

Drustan moved his bishop. “This is the game.”

“Could’ve fooled me.” Lini said, popping another chestnut in their mouth.

Todd moved without looking up. “You’re wasting both our time.”

“That’s my choice to make,” Drustan said smoothly. “The question is – why do you keep letting me?”

Todd’s grip on his rook tightened. “Because you haven’t learned to shut the fuck up.”

“Oh, I learn plenty,” Drustan said, leaning back. “Like how you’ve been pretending your work is enough to keep your mind… occupied.”

Todd’s next move was sharp, knocking one of Drustan’s pawns clean off the board.

“And?”

“And I wonder,” Drustan said, “if that’s all it takes to keep you from listening to the ghosts that aren’t there.”

Lini stopped chewing. Their eyes flicked between them.

Todd set his rook down with a quiet click. “You don’t want to finish that sentence.”

“Ah,” Drustan said, the faintest curl of satisfaction in his tone. “So we’ve reached the part where you threaten me.”

Todd moved his knight. Drustan countered with maddening calm. The pieces danced before them.

“You think this is about a game,” Todd said quietly. “You set the pieces, you watch for the slip. You want me to ballet in your little arena so you can measure how far I’ve fallen.”

Drustan’s smirk deepened a fraction. “Fallen? Such a heavy word. I’d say… ‘changed.’”

Todd’s hand slammed down on the board. The pieces rattled, a few toppling over in place. “You don’t get to name what happened to me.”

Then Drustan said, almost lazily, “It’s just curious. How you linger near mortals longer these days. How you… watch them.”

Todd’s hand froze midair.

“Not for duty,” Drustan went on. “Not even for pity. Something else.”

The piece in Todd’s hand clattered onto the board harder than necessary.

“And yet…” Drustan’s smirk deepened, mockingly, “…no matter how many centuries will pass, you’ll still–“

The table jolted as Todd’s gloved hand swept across it, sending the chess pieces scattering to the floor. The sound was sharp in the quiet, little clinks and rolls echoing off the walls.

Drustan didn’t flinch.

Todd leaned across the table, his height casting Drustan into shadow. His voice was low, almost conversational, but edged like a blade. “You think you’re clever. But you’re not half as dangerous as I am. So if you want to keep your nose where it is – don’t put it in my grief.”

Drustan didn’t flinch. He simply regarded him with the same quiet interest he might give a hawk circling overhead. “And yet you speak as if you already know the ending of this game.”

“I do. It was over before it even began.” Todd said, straightening.

Lini whistled. “Well. That escalated.” They hopped down from the table, brushing a pawn off their sleeve. “You two should take this on the road. Sell tickets.”

Todd turned to go, but Drustan’s voice followed him, calm as ever. “Until next time, Todd.”

He didn’t answer.

Todd’s steps carried him far from the alcove, the air shifting with each corridor. Somewhere between the echo of his boots and the distant murmur of unseen halls, he found himself crossing paths with Drustan again – by design, it felt.

Drustan was leaning against a stone arch, arms crossed, as though he’d been waiting. “You left before I could congratulate you,” he said. “You played well… until you stopped playing.”

Todd’s jaw tightened. “Do you ever tire of your own voice?”

“No,” Drustan replied. “It serves me too well.”

Lini appeared from nowhere, perching on the arch’s ledge. “Round two already?”

Todd stopped in front of Drustan, close enough that the air between them seemed to hum. “One day,” he said, “your games will end in something more than words.”

“I look forward to it.” Drustan said softly.

For a moment, they stood locked in a silent war that had no board and no pieces – only the knowledge that the other was playing all the same.

When Todd finally walked away, Lini glanced at Drustan. “You’re really enjoying this, huh?”

Drustan’s smirk deepened. “More than I should.”

Chapter Text

All Tomorrows Left Unlit XII.

Personal Field Log – Assigned Reaper: T. |
Teutonic Prussia (Warmian-Masurian) Region
Archive Entry Fragment | The Battle of Grunwald Period

15 July 1410

The stench of blood clung to the fields like a second fog. I could hardly see the horizon due to all the smoke, but my work did not require sight – only presence. They died quickly here, some so young that their final breath was still warm when I reached them. Metal had torn them open. Horses screamed. Men clawed at their own stomachs to hold in what spilled.

I moved among them as one moves through reeds in a river – parting, collecting, passing on. The old ones went quietly, their eyes dull. The young ones tried to bargain, curse, or pray. None of it mattered. I touched them, and they went where all souls must go.

The Grunwald field will feed the earth for centuries. I’ve seen slaughter before, but today… today is a banquet for Death.

And yet, all the while, the work was mechanical. The hand moved, the scythe swung. The souls slipped into shadow.

But I was not there. Not truly. I was somewhere else entirely.

Julia.

Will she come back?

I cannot tell if the emptiness is worse than the unraveling that came before. My mind is steady now, clear as ice. But that clarity only reflects what is missing.

She’s not here.

The world feels hollow.

16 July 1410

The field is quieter now, though still littered with those who clung to life overnight. Crows have arrived in black waves, their wings cutting through the smoke. Beautiful creatures. I take the last of the stragglers.

A boy – barely sixteen – tries to tell me his name before I touch him. I do not listen. It will not matter to me tomorrow.

This is how I keep the world bearable – I let it pass through me without catching hold.

Once, I would have lingered. Once, I would have thought of my sweet Julia even in the middle of this horror and told myself she softened me. Now, I suspect that softness has been ripped out with her absence. I do not mourn here. I do not rage. I simply work.

18 July 1410

The battle is finished. The last of the dead have been gathered. I will move on.

I dreamt of her last night – not the soft, warm presence I remember, but the echo of her laughter, as though she stood behind a wall I could not break.

I was enough to wake me in anger. Not the frantic, gnawing rage of months past. A quieter, older kind.

If she returns, she returns. If not… I tell myself the Earth will turn, and I will keep moving.

I tell myself I am not waiting.

I tell myself I am tired.

Lini found Drustan exactly where they’ve expected him – at the edge of the Veil’s cliff, boots planted in the crumbling earth, hands folded behind his back like some saint carved in stone. The wind caught his coat, snapping it around him in pale ribbons of shadow. He didn’t turn when they approached, though the sound of their footsteps was loud against the loose grit.

“I saw her,” they blurted out before the wind could snatch the words away. “Julia. She left the Purgatory.”

The name was meant to be a match dropped onto dry leaves, but Drustan did not ignite. He kept his eyes on the horizon, where the black seam of the fog bit into the bruised sky.

“You saw her,” he repeated, his voice so even it almost sounded like disinterest.

“Yes,” Lini pressed, pacing a half-circle around him, forcing him to either meet their gaze or keep staring past them into the abyss. “I followed her until she crossed. Her tether is gone. She’s gone. And you know what that means–“

“It means,” Drustan interrupted smoothly, “that one thread has been cut. Nothing more.”

“Nothing more?” Their laugh was sharp, like glass underfoot. “Dusty, you’ve been watching them dance around each other for years. Decades, even. He cursed her soul. He tied it to this world in that ridiculous, selfish way of his, and now – now she’s out there somewhere. In flesh again. And you’re telling me this is ‘nothing more’?”

Finally, he looked at them. His eyes were calm in a way that made them itch. “What I’m telling you, little Lini, is that if you run to Todd with this news, you may as well cut the rest of the threads yourself. He will follow the pull without question.  But I–“ he shifted his weight, and the coat whispered around his legs–“I want to see if the pull works without anyone’s meddling.”

Lini’s brows furrowed. “You want to watch him stumble blind into it?”

“I want to watch him choose,” Drustan corrected.

“He’s not in any state to choose! You’ve seen him. You’ve seen the way he–“ they gestured vaguely, struggling for words–“he doesn’t speak, he doesn’t stop working, he’s… fading, Drustan. And you want to play another one your observational games?”

“It’s not a game.” His voice had the weight of stone. “It is a measure. You’ve never seen a tethered soul meet its anchor without a hand guiding them, have you? Neither have I. Most would interfere – they cannot help themselves. But I–“ He tapped a gloved finger against his temple. “I can.”

Lini’s mouth twisted. “You mean you will. Because you think you’re the only one clever enough to keep your hands clean while everyone else stumbles in the blood.”

He smiled faintly at that, though it was humorless. “Observation does not equal cruelty.”

They barked a short, bitter laugh. “It will be if he breaks.”

“Then we will know the limits of the tether,” Drustan said simply. “Either it draws him across whatever years or miles separate them, or it does not. That knowledge is worth more than his temporary comfort.”

“Temporary comfort?” Lini threw their arms wide in exasperation. “Drus, he’s hanging by threads so thin–thinner than spider silk!” He’s already lost himself once – Aluena saw to that – and you’re gambling whether or not he can survive long enough to ‘prove a theory’.”

Drustan’s gaze didn’t waver. “I do not gamble.”

“You do. You’re gambling with him, and the worst part is you don’t even think of it that way. You call it discipline, or patience, or whatever other saintly nonsense you wrap around your pathetic calculations.” They stepped closer, voice dropping. “What happens if he doesn’t survive long enough to meet her again? What happens if your precious experiment makes him disappear?”

A gust of wind tore across the cliff, pulling at their hair and coats, bending Lini forward slightly as if nature itself leaned into the confrontation.

“If the tether fails,” Drustan said quietly, “then it fails. And we will learn something valuable.”

Lini stared at him, their mouth half-open, incredulous. “You’re monstrous.”

“No,” he said, almost gently. “I am patient.”

They wanted to shove him. They wanted to shake the calm from him, to splinter that marble mask.
“Patience,” they said, voice shaking, “is watching the tide wear away a stone. You’re carving it away yourself, one deliberate cut at a time.”

Drustan inclined his head, accepting the barb as though it was a compliment. “If you tell him, you will interfere with what must play out. And then all of this–“ he gestured vaguely toward the fog, as though the smoke was the ledger in which all reaper debts were written–“will be meaningless.”

Lini’s fists clenched. “You think I care about meaning right now?”

“I think,” Drustan murmured, “that you care more than you want to admit. You want to see him whole again. If the tether is as strong as I suspect, it will lead him back to her, and he will be… perhaps not whole, but functioning. Without us guiding his steps.”

“And if you’re wrong?” they shot back.

“Then I will have been wrong in silence,” Drustan said, “instead of in meddling.”

Lini shook their head, disgusted. “You speak like your little world will still keep turning if he collapses.”

“It will.”

There was no cruelty in the way he said it. No triumph. That, more than anything, made Lini want to strike him.

For a moment, both of them stood in silence except for the fog’s relentless breathing. Then Lini said, more quietly, “If he falls apart, I will not forgive you.”

“I do not ask you to,” Drustan replied.

And that was the end of it – or at least, the end of what Lini could stomach before their temper drove them to throw him off the cliff. They turned on their heel, their boots grinding into the gravel, and let the wind swallow their muttered curses.

Drustan stayed exactly where he was, unmoving, watching the black seam of the fog as though it might, at any moment, reveal the outcome he was waiting for.

[Journal Entry]
Date unknown.

The air feels wrong. It keeps folding over itself like wet cloth, heavy and cold in the corners of the room, but warm where I sit. My hand looks like it belongs to someone else tonight – the fingers too long, the knuckles too sharp. I keep flexing them and they make no sound, no creak. Just ache. They should not ache.

Something brushed past me earlier, though I am certain no one was there. A shadow with no body, I turned to follow it and the wall seemed closer than it should be, as though it had been leaning in to listen. The lamp flickered – once – and my reflection in the glass did not flicker with it.

I think I have been reaping too long. Or perhaps I have been sleeping too long. Wandering. I found damp footprints on the floorboards when I rose from my chair, though my boots were dry.

The air smells different. It’s thinner, as if someone opened a window I cannot see. I keep feeling as though something is wrong, but the feeling slips from me as soon as it appears. The quiet is loud enough for my knuckles to ache as if they wore bruises. It drives me insane.

And every so often, from the edge of my sight, I think I see a fraction of her.

Her.

Right. I have not written her name tonight.

I am
not sure if I should

[The last pages are drowned in black ink, as if the pen has bled out in its grip – only fragments of words can still be seen beneath the stain.]

Chapter Text

The Weight of the Veil XIII.
Kraków, Winter of 1432


The rain had come sometime before dawn, washing the courtyard stones until they glistened like slabs of black glass. Julia sat by the narrow window of her chamber, staring down at the rivulets that wound between the cobbles. The air smelled of wet earth and woodsmoke, the faint murmur of the household waking just beyond her door. She was still in her night gown, the linen creased from sleep she had not truly had.

Behind her, the soft scrape of slippers announced one of her handmaids.

“My lady,” said Dobrawa, bowing her head slightly. “Your mother requests you join her for the morning meal. Your father is already waiting.”

Julia did not move. “And what else has my father decided while I was sleeping?”

Dobrawa hesitated. She was young, barely older than Julia herself, and unused to answering questions that edged toward insolence. “My lady, I only know there will be guests this afternoon. A scribe from the cathedral is expected.”

Julia laughed once, sharp as breaking glass. “A scribe. To write letters sealing my future, no doubt.” She rose, her gown brushing the floor, and Dobrawa instinctively stepped back. “Fetch the red gown. If my father insists on parading me before half the city, I might as well be dressed for the slaughter.”

Dobrawa obeyed without question, moving to the carved chest against the wall. The gown was heavy velvet, its hem embroidered with golden thread in the shape of curling vines. Julia stood still as Dobrawa dressed her, tightening the laces until she could barely draw breath.

When she descended to the hall, the smell of bread and smoked meats was thick in the air. The long table gleamed with pewter dishes, and her father sat at its head, a cup of warmed mead in his hand.

“Ah, my daughter,” he said, voice booming despite the quiet of the hour. “You’ve taken your time.”

Her father, a figure of deliberate stillness. Władysław Kieniewicz – a man whose face has been carved by years of negotiation and command – was not one for wasted words. He leaned back in the high-backed chair, his fingers drumming lightly against the carved lion heads at the armrest.

Julia’s mother, seated beside him, cast her a warning glance. She was pale this morning, her hands folded tightly in her lap.

“I was told there will be guests,” Julia said, taking her place opposite her father. “Will you save me the trouble and simply tell me which noble house I am to be traded to?”

Her father’s eyes narrowed. He was a tall man, his hair streaked with iron grey, the rings on his fingers catching the firelight. “You speak as though we are sending you to market. This is no trade, Julia. It is an alliance – one that will secure our position for generations.”

“An alliance that costs me everything.”

“Costs you nothing,” he corrected, his tone hardening. “The son of Lord Grabowski is an honorable match. His family holds lands that–“

“I do not care for his lands,” she cut in. “Nor for his name.”

A silence followed, broken only by the faint hiss of the hearth. Her mother’s gaze had dropped to her cup, and Julia could see the familiar tremor in her fingers.

“You will learn to care,” her father said finally. “As your mother did.” A beat of silence passed. “You will receive him today.” His tone was as level as the blade of a well-honed sword.

Julia stared at him. “Why today?” Her voice was low, but the edge in it was sharp enough to slice the air.

Her mother shifted in her chair. “Because the Grabowski envoy has already been received by the council,” she said gently, “and it would be unwise to delay. We have… little choice.”

“I have a choice,” Julia said, each word clipped. “You just prefer to pretend I do not.”

Her father’s dark gaze fixed on her, heavy as iron. “You will not embarrass this house with defiance. This is not the time for childish–“

“Childish?” Julia’s laugh was brittle. “I am twenty-two years old, Father, and I am to be bartered like a bolt of silk. I think my protest is the least childish thing I could offer.”

Silence fell. The only sound was the faint hiss of a log collapsing in the hearth.

From the shadows by the wall, one of her handmaids, Zofia, glanced nervously between them. Dobrawa lingered in the doorway with an armful of folded linens, clearly hoping to slip away unseen. Julia caught her eye and nodded once – a silent command to stay. She would need allies later, when the air in the hall grew too thick to breathe.

Her father rose slowly, each movement deliberate. He was not a man of sudden gestures; he preferred the slow press of inevitability.

“Tomorrow,” he changed the date, but still stamped the word into stone. “You will receive him. You will smile. And you will remember what is owed to your bloodline.”

Julia swallowed the retort burning on her tongue. She did not lower her gaze – but she did not speak.

Later, in the warmth of her chambers, she let the anger come loose. Dobrawa knelt by the brazier, coaxing the coals back to life, while Zofia brushed the tangles from Julia’s long dark hair.

“He is an old man, this Grabowski?” Zofia asked quietly. She was bolder than most servants, but even she kept her voice low, as though the stone walls might carry her words back to the great hall.

Julia’s lips tightened. “Not old. Older than me, certainly. I hear he has had two wives before me.”

Zofia’s hands paused mid-stroke. “And… what became of them, my lady?”

Julia glanced at her in the mirror’s warped reflection. “One died in childbirth. The other… I do not know. Perhaps she envied the first.”

The handmaids exchanged uneasy glances.

Julia rose and went to the windows. The slight frost traced spiderweb patterns across the glass, catching the faint light of the moon. Below, the courtyard lay silent, the snow undisturbed save for the narrow path carved by the night watch.

“They speak of alliances and power,” she murmured, “but they forget power without choice is just another kind of prison.” She turned, the candlelight catching the glint of defiance in her eyes. “Let them bring him. I will meet him. And I will find the chink in his armor.”

Dobrawa frowned. “And if there is none?”

Julia’s smile was thin. “Then I will make one.”

The next morning came wrapped in a veil of fog. Julia lingered in the solar long after the hour her mother had told her to dress, sipping slowly from a cup of hot spiced wine while Dobrawa fussed over the gown laid out on the bed.

Her mother entered without knocking, the skirts of her gown sweeping over the rushes. Lady Kieniewicz’s beauty was the kind that made people forget her will was harder than her husband’s. She closed the door behind her.

“You will wear the sapphire gown,” she said without preamble.

Julia set the cup down. “The red one will do.”

“It will not,” her mother replied, moving to the bed and lifting the sapphire gown with careful hands. “The Grabowskis are known for their fondness of finery. This will please him.”

Julia gave her a long, steady look. “And if I wore sackcloth? Would he still come?”

Her mother’s hands stilled. She sighed, setting the gown back down. “My child… I wish there was another way. But this is the path that had been chosen for us all. Refuse him, and you risk far more than your own comfort.”

Julia stepped closer, her voice low. “Then say it plainly. Refuse him, and I risk your influence. Your alliances. Your seat at the table.”

Lady Kieniewicz’s eyes softened – but she did not deny it.

The hall outside her chamber hummed with movement – servants carrying trays, voices low and hushed, the scent of beeswax polish clinging to the wood. Julia stepped into it reluctantly, her mother gliding beside her, already composed and smiling as if there were no battle raging behind her daughter’s breastbone.

“You will smile,” her mother murmured without turning her head, “and you will lower your gaze when he enters. A woman’s charm lies not in rebellion, but in grace.”

Julia’s mouth tightened. “And if grace fails me?”

“Then you must force it,” her mother replied coolly. “The man who holds your hand will not tolerate insolence. Neither will your father.”

Her hands curled into fists within the fold of her gown. She said nothing.

At the far end of the corridor, her father waited in dark fur-lined robe, his figure tall, broad, commanding, his eyes sharp as steel. He did not smile at Julia, but he nodded once in approval as though she was some well-groomed horse.

“You will meet Lord Grabowski with composure,” he said, his tone flat as a decree carved into stone. “This arrangement is our strength. His lands reach across Radom. Together, our names will stand above all others. You will not shame us.”

Julia bowed her head only because it was expected. But the corners of her mouth trembled with the effort not to speak. Her silence was a dam, and behind it roared the truth she longed to throw at him – that she was not his bargaining chip, not a pawn to be shoved across a board for his ambition.

They led her into the great hall, where the high ceiling arched like the ribs of a cathedral and banners bearing their crest – red and silver – hung from stone pillars. Sunlight poured through narrow windows, glinting off the polished floor. At the table sat a man, richly dressed in a black doublet sewn with tiny pearls, his hair the color of chestnuts, neatly brushed, his posture calculated.

Lord Grabowski.

Lord Aleksander.

He rose as they entered, bowing to her father first, then offering Julia a smile that seemed as rehearsed as her mother’s. “Lady Julia,” he said. His voice was deep, smooth, unhurried. “It honors me to finally look upon you, whose beauty I have been told surpasses words.”

Julia felt the weight of her father’s stare pressing into the side of her face. She curtsied stiffly, her eyes fixed on the floorboards. “My Lord.”

They sat. Servants poured wine, set platters of roasted fowl and fresh bread upon the table. Her parents spoke first, filling the air with laughter and promises, recounting their lineage and alliances as if tallying accounts. Aleksander listened, nodding at intervals, his gaze sliding often toward Julia.

When finally the moment came where courtesy demanded he speak to her directly, Julia forced herself to meet his eyes. They were brown, warm in hue but cold in depth.

“I hope you will find Sandomierz to your liking,” he said, sipping from his goblet. “The rivers are plentiful. The orchards sweet. My sisters will be eager to welcome you.”

“I have never been to Sandomierz,” Julia said.

“Then it will be a pleasure for me to show you,” he replied, with the faintest hint of triumph, as though the matter were already sealed.

Her father chuckled approvingly. “She has been too long sheltered. It is time she learned the breadth of our world.”

Julia’s hand tightened around her goblet. She wanted to say that she had seen the breadth of the world – its narrow corridors, its locked chambers, its walls that closed tighter each year around her. She wanted to spit the truth in Aleksander’s face: that she would sooner marry the grave than him. But her mother’s foot brushed hers beneath the table, a subtle warning.

Aleksander leaned slightly closer. “You will find me a patient man, Lady Julia. I value loyalty above all else. Obedience, too. A wife who honors her husband ensures peace in the household.”

Julia’s throat felt as if it was closing. She glanced at her father, who raised his brow expectantly, urging her to respond.

“Peace,” she whispered. “Yes, my lord.”

The words tasted like ashes.

After the meal, she retreated to the garden with her handmaids under the pretense of needing air. The roses there were rotting, dusted with snow, yet their scent lingered heavy and sweet. She paced the gravel path, her gown dragging, her hands restless.

“Did you see him?” One of the handmaids murmured, barely able to contain her excitement. “So handsome, my lady!”

Julia stopped so suddenly the girl nearly walked into her. Her eyes burned as she turned to them. “Do you think me blind? Do you think handsomeness is a balm for chains?”

The handmaids fell silent, lowering their gazes, their smiles fading. Julia pressed a trembling hand to her temple. “Forgive me,” she muttered, though her voice cracked with fury. “Forgive me.”

She looked up at the sky. The clouds moved lazily, careless of her turmoil. Somewhere beyond them, she thought bitterly, death itself still walked – perhaps laughing at her plight, perhaps waiting. A memory stirred within her, a shadow of something lost: a broad figure, faceless, yet haunting. A shiver ran through her, unbidden.

She turned back to the roses and crushed one in her palm until the thorns pierced her skin. The blood welled bright against her pale fingers.

Better red than gold, she thought.

Chapter Text

Anamnsesis of Desire XIV.

Todd had not moved in hours. The chamber in which he lingered was a hollow thing, a seam of the Veil that quivered with stale air and dark walls without depth. His mask hung low, his gaunt form stilled, though his hands trembled in silence at his knees. Then – suddenly – he rose, abrupt and too quickly, as if pulled by a string.

He could feel it.

The air shifted. Something in the unbreathing fog of the Veil had changed. A thread, once slack, had been pulled taut and bound around him. His limbs ached with it, his chest burned with it, though he had no lungs to draw the fire.

She had returned.

He staggered forward, first unsteady, then quicker, almost frantic. Each step sounded too loud in the emptiness, a clatter against the silence. His voice came out before he could still it.

“She’s here.” His tone was almost a laugh, a choked laugh, broken and wild. “She’s–she’s back.”

The black corridors stretched on without end, until at last he found them; Drustan seated as per usual, unnervingly calm, and Lini nearby, a restless presence perched on the rim of stone, their fingers tapping, tapping, tapping.

Todd strode to them with a rush of words.

“She returned – do you hear me? Her soul, her breath, her very being – it crossed, it–it left the Purgatory, it’s burning in flesh again! I felt it, I-I feel it still, like fire clawing through me. She is alive!”

He looked at them with a desperate eagerness, waiting, needing.

Lini was the first to shift. Their head tilted slowly, their lips parting just a little as though they were tasting his words. Then, almost too carefully, they gasped.

“You… you felt it?” Their voice was soft, heavy with feigned awe. “Truly? Then… then she must be–“

“Yes!” Todd cut them off, the urgency bleeding from him in torrents. His masked face bent closer, looming, trembling. “Yes, she is. I know it – I would not mistake her presence, not hers. I am not mad, not broken beyond knowing her. Say it, Lini, say it! She is here again, is she not?”

Lini’s eyes darted – once toward Drustan, then back to Todd.

But Drustan did not speak.

He only watched.

Seated, still, his hands steepled before his lips, his face unreadable. The silence stretched.

Todd’s breathless words slowed, stumbled. His towering figure faltered, his gaze flickering.

“You… you knew.” The realization pressed itself out of him like a stone ground through flesh. “You knew before I did.”

At this, Drustan’s lips curled into something thin, something meant to resemble a smile, but not formed by joy. It was the shape of amusement carved into nothingness.

“You–“ Todd’s voice cracked, sharp, shaking. He surged forward, seizing Drustan by the collar, dragging him up, the black fabric folding beneath his fist. “You knew! You knew, and you said nothing. You let me… You left me to drown in emptiness while she – while she returned–“

Drustan’s face did not flinch. His eyes held no fear, no strain, no shifting. Only the faint, simmering amusement remained.

“Release me, Todd.” His voice was steady, without sharpness, but with pressure. Like a note plucked from an instrument that could not go out of tune.

Lini startled, leaping up from their perch, hands raised. “Todd, wait, wait – don’t–“

Todd’s head snapped toward them, mask gleaming, eyes hollow. The glare he cast silenced them instantly, a warning that froze them in place. They did not step closer.

Todd’s hand quivered against Drustan’s collar, his whole body rigid, as though torn between ripping the elder apart or collapsing into his arms.

Drustan only leaned a little closer, voice dropping low, low enough it seemed the Veil itself bent to hear it.

“You cling too hard to threads that will choke you. Do you not wonder why I did not tell you?”

The words made Todd’s grip tighten, then falter, then break. With a ragged cry he released Drustan, shoving him back and stumbling away. His form seemed larger than the chamber, a storm pacing, fists clenching at his sides.

“You will not keep me from her,” Todd spat. “Not you, not Lini, not any of you. She is mine to find, mine to guard. I will not be mocked. I will not be made a fool.”

With that, he turned and tore away into the dark of the Veil, his steps echoing until they were gone.

The silence he left behind lingered long.

Lini sank back against the stone, exhaling slowly. Their fingers drummed again, nervous, sharp. Finally, they turned toward Drustan, their voice thin and bitter.

“Happy? You let him break. You won’t even say where she truly is.”

Drustan’s head tilted at their words. A strange stillness came over him, though the faint smile returned, carved deeper, less fitting.

“Where is the joy,” he murmured, “in robbing him of the chase?”

Lini stared, unblinking, their lips parting but no words coming forth.

Drustan leaned back in his chair, fingers pressing together once more, his glaze lost somewhere. His eyes gleamed with something far worse than calm.

As if bordering on insanity.

I ought not to be here.
I tell myself this as though the words carry any weight, as though the hollow breath that rasps behind the beak of my mask can shame me into retreat. Yet here I stand, here I remain, anchored in this chamber as my bones themselves have been nailed into the flagstones.

The hour is late. All Kraków has fallen into silence but for the occasional bark of a dog or the creak of wood in protest against the summer night’s damp. Behind these walls, the great house holds its breath. Tomorrow there will be a wedding, tomorrow she will cease to belong to herself. And still – still – my feet have carried me here, through stone halls, through shuttered corridors, until I have found her again.

Julia lies upon the bed.
The moon threads itself through the shutters, striping her face, her hair, her small frame caught in restless sleep. She is dressed still in the garments they pressed upon her, though loosened now for the night: a linen shift, delicate at the shoulders, thin enough that the rise and fall of her breath becomes visible beneath it. Her hair, unbound from the evening’s braids, spills across the pillow like a river of shadow.

I drink her in as though sight alone might keep her, as though memorizing the curve of her cheek will prevent what must come at dawn, She is to be given to him, to Aleksander – broad-shouldered, smooth-tongued, a man whose hands will close over hers like manacles. She will bow her head, she will smile as they have instructed, she will say yes because no is forbidden her.

The thought makes my chest seize.

It is not fair. She does not belong to him.
She belongs–
Ah. Even now I cannot complete the thought without trembling.

The chamber is close. Warm, too warm for a creature such as I. Yet I do not move, do not stir. I linger beside her bed as though stationed here, a sentinel at once reverent and profane. Her breathing is light, fragile, each exhale a delicate thread of glass. I catch myself matching her rhythm – when she inhales, I force my lungs to follow; when she exhales, I release. If I close my eyes, I can almost pretend I am beside her as a man, not looming as a phantom. Almost.

My hand shakes as I reach for her. I do not touch–not yet. I hover above her, fingers splayed, drinking in the heat that radiates from her skin. It licks at me, unbearable in its sweetness. I ache. The space between us is agony.

Finally, with a coward’s audacity, I let my gloved fingers settle around her hand.
So small. So alive.

I think of how easily I could break it, those slender bones no thicker than twigs. The thought sickens me even as it thrills. Her pulse thrums faintly beneath the thin skin, each beat a reminder that she exists here, now, within reach. Not yet stolen from me by Aleksander, nor by the plague, nor by Fate itself.

I squeeze her hand, lightly at first, then harder as if pressure might fuse us together. She stirs faintly, lashes fluttering, but does not wake. My entire frame stiffens. For a moment I nearly flee, nearly cast her hand away as though it had burned me. But the fear of losing contact is greater than the fear of discovery. I remain.

Her warmth seeps into me, and I am starved for it.

I lift her hand – slowly, reverently – toward my mask. The beak dips low, the leather brushing against her knuckles. It is not enough. Nothing could be enough. My breath rattles within the confines of my prison, fogging the iron rim. I press her hand to the side of the mask, then – madness overtaking hesitation – I guide her slender fingers beneath it.

At once the air changes.

Her skin meets mine, bare against the cold, inhuman pallor of my cheek. Heat floods me. My lungs seize and I drag a ragged breath that hisses like a blade through the hollow of the mask. Her fingers lie limp, unconscious, unknowing, but to me it is everything.

I have not felt human touch. Ever.

The shock is unbearable. It is exquisite.

My breath grows erratic, heavy, reverberating within the beak. I know I should release her. I know I should place her hand back at the side, bow my head, retreat, but my body betrays me – I clutch her hand tighter, pressing it harder against my skin, my jaw, my mouth. Every shallow line of her palm scorches me.

The mask grows damp from my breath. I am shaking.

I should not.
I must not.
And yet–

I tilt my head, drawing her hand against my lips, letting the fabric of my cowl slide until her skin grazes the corner of my mouth. I cannot kiss her – she would wake, she would know. But the taste of her salt, faint and human, slips against me.

Madness. This is madness.

My heart pounds, though it should not. I feel it as if I was human once. Nonsense. The ache seizes my chest now, raw and violent. Every breath is a staggered gasp, every sound in the chamber amplified – the creak of wood, the flutter of curtains, the rhythm of her pulse.

I am aroused.
There is no point in cloaking it from myself. My entire frame trembles with it, a hunger I cannot name, cannot still. To hold her hand, to feel her warmth against my skin – it should not be enough, but it threatens to undo me entirely.

What am I to do?

I lean over her, closer, until the length of me casts her in shadow. She stirs, breath catching, and I freeze. Her lips part slightly, a soft murmur escaping – my name? No. A dream’s nonsense. Yet the sound lances me like a spear.

I want her to wake. I want her to see me, to know it is I who keeps vigil. And yet I dread it, for she would recoil, she would hate me for this trespass.

The mask feels suffocating. My chest heaves. I press her hand harder to my face, as though to brand myself with her.

Tomorrow, they will take her from me. Tomorrow, she will walk in white and swear herself to another. Tomorrow, I shall lose her.

The thought births a growl deep in my throat. The room tilts, the shadows whirl. I nearly imagine myself tearing her from this bed, carrying her far from this cursed city, binding her to as she ought to be. But no – I cannot. My chains are invisible yet absolute.

Still I linger.

Her breath brushes my wrist. My thumb traces the soft pad of her palm, the slight curl of her fingers against my cheek. It feels like a prayer, like desecration.

What is the difference anymore?

I lower her hand at last, with a reverence that borders on despair. Lay it gently upon her breast where her heart beats steady and oblivious. My own breath rattles like wind through a crypt.

I stand over her for long minutes – hours perhaps. Watching. Memorizing. Wanting. Each heartbeat a hammer in my ears, each shallow rise of her chest a torment. I do not blink. I do not breathe unless she does. I belong to her rhythm entirely.

And in the hollow of my mind, a single truth blooms monstrous and bright:
Even if she belongs to another, I branded her mine.

Tomorrow will break me.

Chapter Text

The Cacophony of Ruin XV.

The chamber smelled of roses, crushed into oils, pressed into garlands, drowning her senses in sweetness that made her head swim. Servants moved about like pale moths in the flickering light of the tapers, fastening jewels, smoothing silks, braiding hair. Julia sat upon the carved oak chair that had been set before the mirror of polished metal, though she could scarcely bring herself to look upon it.

Her gown – God save her – was heavy as a shroud. A crimson thing, wrought of velvet and damask, the sleeves falling to her knees in wide, pendulous folds lined with ermine. The skirts were full, stiff with silken embroidery, golden thread stitched in the likeness of vines and lilies. Upon her brow they had placed a wreath of fresh blossoms, woven tight by the hands of maidens – pale pink roses, daisies, sprigs of rosemary and rue, all mingled so that their fragrance clung to her hair. She could feel the cool stems pressing against her scalp like a crown of thorns, mocking in its beauty.

She stared at her reflection, unblinking, and found herself startled by the sight. The girl in the mirror looked like a stranger: pale as porcelain, her dark eyes shadowed with weariness. The gown transformed her into something solemn and ceremonial, yet her spirit felt raw and unadorned, as though no finery could disguise the dread gnawing at her chest.

“Hold still, my lady,” murmured one of the women as she adjusted the fall of Julia’s sleeve.

Julia did not answer. She felt as though she had no voice left.

The necklace lay waiting too, a gift from Lord Grabowski’s kin: a collar of gold links bearing a single heavy pendant set with garnet. It gleamed ominously in the morning light. When the maid clasped it around Julia’s throat, she shivered. The weight of it seemed greater than its metal – it was the weight of her own purchase, the measure of her father’s bargain.

When Lord Kieniewicz entered, the women bent and scurried away, leaving Julia with only her father’s shadow looming across the chamber. He was dressed for the day’s solemnity – fur-lined cloak, chain of office, a sword at his side though no battle threatened him. His expression was not softened by paternal pride. Instead, he studied her as one might inspect a pig or a horse before presenting it for sale.

“You look presentable,” he said at last. His voice was calm, without affection. “See that you do not falter. The alliance with Grabowski is a step that secures your future – and mine. You will not shame this house.”

Julia lowered her gaze. “Yes, Father.”

He circled her chair once, considering, sighing. “He is a man of influence, Julia. He has lands, coin. You need to honor him, as is your duty. What you feel is irrelevant. The union is a necessity.”

The words pressed into her like nails. What you feel is irrelevant. They echoed, sinking deeper than the garnet necklace ever could. She wanted to protest, to beg, to weep openly as she had in the silence of her bedchamber these past nights. Yet before her father she remained still, for she knew his temper and the cruelty that flickered behind his eyes.

Lord Kieniewicz laid a hand upon her shoulder. It was not gentle. “Do not forget yourself, child. Today you cease to be mine. You will belong to Grabowski’s house. That is the fate I have set before you.”

Her lips parted, but no words came. He was already turning away. His cloak swirled behind him as he left, the echo of his boots fading down the corridor, leaving Julia in stifling silence.

The ceremony was held in the great hall, cleared and bedecked with banners of red and white. Nobles gathered, their laughter and polite remarks filling the air, though Julia heard none of it clearly. The music of lutes drifted from the gallery, lilting and hollow.

She walked between her handmaids, her veil trailing, the wreath of flowers upon her head. The petals brushed her forehead as though mocking her softness. She felt like a lamb being led to slaughter, though the onlookers smiled at her, their faces blurring in the haze of her fear.

Lord Grabowski stood at the dais, awaiting her. His beard neatly trimmed, his eyes sharp and appraising. He bowed courteously, yet there was no warmth in his gaze – only possession. Julia felt her knees weaken.

The vows passed as though in a dream. The priest intoned solemn words, binding words, words that closed around her like a lock snapping shut. She heard her own voice reply, though it sounded detached, distant. She wondered if the saints pitied her, or if Heaven turned its gaze away.

At last came the kiss.

Grabowski lifted her veil, and Julia’s breath caught. His hand was firm upon her chin, tilting her face up to his. When his lips pressed to hers, she felt a shudder ripple through her whole body. It was not affection, nor tenderness, but conquest. The hall cheered politely, but in Julia’s chest something crumpled.

She tasted iron, though there was no blood. Her eyes stung, and behind them flashed something strange – a vision, or a memory not her own. For a heartbeat she saw a figure: tall, cloaked in black, a mask like a bird’s beak obscuring its face. It was reaching for her hand, its touch burning with impossible sorrow.

She gasped and staggered, but the vision vanished as swiftly as it came. Only Lord Grabowski’s hand remained, firm at her waist.

“Steady, my lady,” he murmured, though the words carried no kindness.

Julia nodded faintly, her heart racing.

What had she seen?
Why had her soul leapt at that shadow?

She could not answer, only tremble as the feast began and the guests raised their goblets in cheer.

The banquet stretched long into the evening. Platters of venison, roasted swan, and gilded fruits adorned the tables, but Julia tasted little. She sat at Grabowski’s side, her hands folded tightly in her lap, while her husband spoke with vigor to his companions of politics, of land disputes, of hunts and battles. Rarely did he glance at her, save to rest a proprietary hand upon hers to remind all present that she was his.

Her head swam with the music, the heat, the weight of her gown. She forced herself to smile faintly when addressed, to nod when spoken to, but her spirit felt strange, wandering. At times the flicker of torchlight seemed to take on a form, and she thought again of the shadowed figure. A shiver coursed through her.

Who was he? Why did her heart ache with a yearning she could not name?

Julia excused herself early from the hall, pleading weariness. In the resting chamber she cast off her crown of flowers and pressed her freezing hand to her face, the scent of roses and herbs still clinging to her hair. She did not weep – the tears had long since dried. Instead, she stood still, her eyes wide in the dark, listening to the muffled cheer of the feast beyond the walls.

She dreaded what the morrow would bring.

18 July 1433

The veil is silent tonight, though I hear it breathe. It is a silence that presses against my skull, and still my hand moves, scratching words into paper I loathe for failing me. What quill, what ink, what pitiful script could capture her? And yet I try, for I am left with nothing but the attempt.

Julia.

She wore red. I had not thought it possible for a mortal to bear the weight of such a color, yet she did. Crimson velvet, wide sleeves falling like wings; silk damask that shivered with each step as though the fabric trembled for her. The flower wreath upon her brow seemed an insult – too fresh, too sweet, too unknowing of decay, mocking me with what she is condemned to forget. Around her throat gleamed a necklace, gifted by the Grabowskis, chains disguised as gold.

Her eyes – God, her eyes – lowered in dread, though none saw. She smiled when bidden, yet her lips quivered like a candle guttering in the wind. I have seen countless brides, countless weddings in these black centuries, but never did I feel my ribs strain so tight against my chest. For she is mine, and yet… not mine. Not in this life. Not in this cursed turning of the wheel.

I am too late.

I should have come sooner. Should have broken through the Veil, should have torn open the sky to reach her. Instead I stood hidden, a coward clothed in shadow, watching as her father – that monstrous merchant of flesh – bartered her like cattle. Lord Kieniewicz, swollen with greed, smiling as though he had done a noble deed. May his marrow rot. And Grabowski – vile hound in borrowed silks. I could hear the wetness of his mouth when he kissed her. My Julia, pressed beneath his lips, shuddering, submitting not from love but from duty. The taste of bile stung my own throat as I watched.

If only my hand were not bound. I would have split his chest open and painted the altar red with his entrails. He is not worthy of the soil he treads, much less the lips he has stolen. To think of his hand upon her – verminous paws upon her shoulders, his stinking breath in her hair – I grow mad with disgust.

And yet…

Even as rage sets my hand shaking, her image returns to me. Softens me. The way she blinked, as though recalling something she could not name. That fleeting hesitation when her eyes searched the hall, searching… for what? For whom? Was it me she sought? Some fragment of memory clawing through the fog of her curse?

She was beautiful. She is beautiful. She will always be beautiful, in each cycle, in each fleeting life. That is my torment – to see her reborn in loveliness and to lose her anew. To witness her given away to hands that do not deserve her touch.

I write her name, yet each letter is ash. She is Julia, and yet not mine Julia. She belongs now to Grabowski, as the world would have it. But in truth – she has ever belonged to me.

And so I am undone.

 – T.

He set the quill aside. His hands lingered over the parchment, the ink still glistening wet in the dimness of his chamber. The veil around him pulsed faintly, its walls neither stone nor shadow but something between, something alive that shifted as he breathed.

Todd leaned back, pressing his head into the hollow of his chair. His gloves creaked faintly as his fingers tightened, first into fists, then slackened. He stared into the nothing of the Veil, yet before his eyes there rose again the image he had painted with such desperate words – Julia in her red gown, the wreath of flowers quivering with each reluctant step, her lips pale beneath the weight of another man’s kiss.

His chest ached with it. A hollowness, a hunger.

Slowly, as though compelled, his hand moved lower. He touched himself not with lust but with grief – a movement that was heavy, a futile mimicry of intimacy. In each gesture lay the truth of his yearning – that he could not touch her, could not claim her, could not hold her in this life. He conjured her in his mind as if memory and imagination could stitch together what was denied of him. Her hands, delicate and trembling. Her breath, shuddering. Her eyes, searching.

The act became a ritual of longing, a private sacrament. Each pulse of his body was a prayer, each stifled gasp an invocation. He was not a man indulging desire, but a mourner reaching across the gulf, grasping for a phantom he could never draw near.

At its peak, he clutched the edge of the desk, bowing forward, and the Veil seemed to stir with him, pulsing red for an instant like a wound. In that moment he imagined she was his – not Grabowski’s, not sold, not lost – his.

But as silence returned, the truth settled.

Shame rose like a tide, thick and choking. He looked down at himself, at his trembling hands, and felt the weight of futility. It had meant nothing. Julia remained bound to another, her lips branded by a kiss that was not his. He had sought her through this act as a drowning man clutches at air, but what had he gained? Nothing. Only the reminder of his powerlessness.

He dragged a sleeve across his masked face, as though to wipe away his thoughts.

He felt foolish.

Alone in his chamber, he sat in stillness once more, the ink on his journal drying black, her name gleaming faintly in the last traces of light.

Chapter Text

A Covenant of Flesh XVI.

The chamber was not hers, though she was told it would be.

Julia sat on the edge of the carved oak bed, her hands twisting in her lap. The candlelight shivered in the iron sconces, throwing shadows that crawled across the ceiling like vermin. The air was too warm, heavy with the musk of wax and wine, suffocating as though the walls themselves leaned inward to crush her. She pulled at the sleeves of her night gown, wishing she could fold into herself, vanish, dissolve.

From the moment her father signed her name onto the marriage contract, she had carried the knowledge like a stone pressing down inside her ribcage. That the night would come. That the door would close. That the man who now called himself her husband would demand what he believed was owed.

She pressed her palms against her stomach, as if she could hold herself shut, as if flesh could resist the claim of law. The silk of the sheets caught her eye. Deep crimson, embroidered with gold threads of family sigils – the splendor of nobility meant to sanctify the act, to make it seem less like butchery. They were meant to be beautiful. All she saw was gore.

The door opened.

Aleksander entered without hesitation, already unfastening the heavy collar of his tunic. He did not glance at her first; he moved to the table, lifted the goblet of wine, and drained it. His shoulders were broad, his steps loud against the rushes of the floor. He looked at her at last, and there was no warmth in his eyes – only a quiet hunger, the certainty of ownership.

Julia’s throat tightened. She remembered the priest’s words at the ceremony: “The two shall become one flesh.” She wanted to spit. It was not union. It was consumption.

He approached.

The bed groaned as he sank beside her. The smell of wine clung to him, sour and sweet, the way rotting fruit smells before it draws flies. His hand found her chin, tilting her face upward. She froze. His fingers were damp with sweat.

Julia wished she could close her eyes and never open them again. But even darkness would not shield her – the weight of him was already pressing into her bones.

His breath came hot against her cheek, sour with wine, searing her attempts at escape. His voice rumbled low – not tender words, not whispers of affection, but mutterings of duty, of heirs, of lineage. Words that reduced her body to a vessel, an instrument.

Her skin crawled. She wanted to peel it away, to flee from the shell that had betrayed her.

Aleksander’s fingers fumbled at her gown. She had expected this, yet when the fabric loosened at her shoulders, a cold wave of dread swept over her, drowning her lungs. She clutched at the cloth, desperate to keep it closed, but his hands were heavier. Stronger. He pried. She yielded, not from consent but from futility.

The gown slipped. The air struck her bare skin like knives. She felt exposed not to a husband, but to a predator, a butcher stripping a carcass. Her flesh became strange to her – not hers, not Julia’s, but some pale offering placed on a table.

He kissed her.

It was not tenderness. It was intrusion, a mouth forcing itself where it was not wanted. Julia kept still, the way one keeps still before a striking snake. She thought of the crucifix on the wall, the Christ hanging pale and bleeding. She wanted to ask why He did not look down and see her.

The bed swallowed her.

When he pressed her into it, she thought of graves. Of coffins nailed shut. Of the weight of soil pressing down until ribs snapped.

She stared upward, refusing to look at him. The canopy above was carved with vines and leaves, twisting, curling, suffocating. A single candle guttered in the corner. She fixed her gaze upon it, as if its tiny flame might be an anchor. But even that light trembled, drowning in its own wax.

Her body stiffened, every muscle screaming, yet Aleksander seemed blind to it. He climbed atop her, his weight crushing, his breath reeking of iron and rot. The sheets bunched beneath her fists, silk scraping against her knuckles. She wanted to tear them, shred them into ribbons, anything to ruin this scene of marital triumph. She wanted to vomit, to scream, to claw her way out of her own body. To resist was to invite punishment. But she lay still. She only imagined her soul clawing free, floating above, watching from rafters like a ghost.

From above, it looked like a burial. Aleksander’s shadow covered her as though earth was being shoveled into her casket. The sheets folded around her like shrouds. The air grew thinner and thinner. She imagined choking, her lungs burning, her skin paling until she ceased to be.

He kissed her neck, wet and sloppy, and she thought of a dog gnawing at marrow. His lips trailed lower. Each touch left behind the impression of decay, his mouth painting bruises before they could bloom.

Julia tried to retreat into her mind. She summoned images of rivers, of gardens, of the faint laughter she used to hear at dusk. But the rivers stank of sewage, the garden withered, the laughter turned to choking coughs. No dream could shield her from the truth pressing against her, sliding inside, tearing open what should never have been touched.

She bit her tongue until she tasted blood. Metallic, sharp. Spilling on her tongue like warm wine. The flavor anchored her, though rather to horror than peace.

The bed creaked. The candle kept guttering. His grunts filled the chamber, beastly, mindless. She could feel each movement as if her body was being pounded into mud, her bones rattling in their sockets.

She wanted to disappear. To evaporate. To leave behind only a husk that could no longer feel.

But she felt everything.

Every thrust was a nail hammered into her. Every gasp was the rasp of a saw. Every drop of sweat that dripped from him onto her skin was oil poured over kindling, waiting to ignite her shame into flames.

Her eyes watered. She did not weep aloud, but the tears slid silently into her hair, soaking the pillow.

Aleksander murmured something, a name perhaps, though it was not hers. His hands gripped her shoulders with bruising force. His nails scratched her, shallow but stinging, marking her like property.

Her mind conjured grotesque images to match the sensations – worms tunneling beneath her flesh where his fingers pressed, rats gnawing inside her where he forced himself. She imagined her body torn open, spilling rot onto the sheets, until the bed became a charnel pit and both of them sank into it.

Time slowed. Each movement stretched into eternity, dragging her deeper into said pit.

When it ended – if it could be called an ending – Aleksander collapsed beside her, panting like a beast sated on slaughter. He mumbled something about heirs, about duty fulfilled, his words slurred with exhaustion and wine.

Julia lay frozen, still staring at the canopy above. Her body ached, sticky, defiled. Her soul felt scraped raw, hollowed out.

The room was too quiet now, except for his snores. The silence roared in her ears.

She slid from the bed as quietly as she could, limbs trembling, knees weak. Her gown clung to her damp skin, stained red, smelling of him. She wanted to tear it apart, to burn it, to bury it deep where no one would ever see.

At the basin in the corner, she poured water over herself, frantic. She scrubbed her skin until it reddened, until it burned. The water clouded, gray with dirt, then darker with blood. She did not stop. Her nails dug trenches into her arms. She wanted to scour herself clean, to strip away the flesh he had touched, to find the Julia that existed before.

But there was no before.

The mirror above the basin reflected a pale face, wide eyes ringed in shadow. A stranger stared back at her. A ghost.

Julia pressed her forehead to the glass, breathing hard. The surface chilled her skin, yet it offered no relief. She whispered to the ghost in the mirror:

“It is done. It is done. It is done.”

But the ghost’s lips did not move.

The chamber reeked. The bed loomed behind her, a red-and-gold coffin waiting for her return. She knew this was only the beginning. That her duty would call her back, again and again, until her body broke or yielded an heir.

She pressed her hands to her stomach, bile rising in her throat. The thought of something growing inside her, spawned from this night, made her gag. She doubled over, retching into the basin until her throat burned raw.

When no more came, she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. The taste lingered, acrid, a reminder that nothing could be purged.

She slid to the floor, curling against the cold stone, wrapping her arms around herself. She wanted to vanish into the cracks. To seep into the stone and be forgotten.

Her eyes fell on the bloodied cloth she had used to scrub herself. Crimson stains bloomed across the linen, spreading like a plague. She stared until the shapes blurred, turning into a field of roses. But the roses only smelled of rot.

Julia pressed her hands over her face. The tears came now, hot, relentless, mingling with the sting of her scrubbed skin.

The chamber swallowed her sobs.

Chapter Text

Three Grim Reapers Walk Into a Graveyard XVII.

Hunger does not quite work the same way for reapers as it does for mortals. We do not waste away. We do not starve to Death. We do not even… need food.
But I am telling you – when you want it, when you smell it, when you see it glinting there in someone’s hand as if it exists only to mock you – hunger becomes worse than flesh ever knew. It becomes something gnawing, biting, vicious.

That was me. Hungry.

And what was it that taunted me that day? Not a roasted pig. Not a loaf of bread warm from a campfire. Not some shining feast in a king’s hall. No. Of course not. It had to be something small, pathetic even: an apple.

One. Apple.

Do you know how long it had been since I’d tasted an apple?

No, really. Take whatever you’re thinking and multiply it by… eternity. Because that’s what it felt like. Eternity.

The apple, it sat in the palm of a stranger, red as blood, shining like sin, catching the dim light that seeped through the mist. I wanted to hiss at it. I wanted to lunge like some starved beast. Instead, I crouched in the mud with my fingers twitching, staring like a thief who had forgotten how to blink.

“Mine,” I whispered to myself, though I knew it did not belong to me yet.

The stranger holding it was tall. Too tall. Towering. Wrapped in robes black as pitch, posture calm, face hidden. Everything about him said grim reaper, same as me. Which meant one crucial thing: I could not simply walk up and ask. We don’t do that. Reapers don’t stroll toward each other and exchange pleasantries like mortals would. That’s a good way to catch a fight, or worse, a curse gnawing at you.

So I squatted there, licking my teeth, watching. Thinking.

Trap. That was the answer. Yes, a trap. Like a clever hunter, like the fox who steals chickens in the night. I rubbed my hands together – quietly, slyly – like a fly about to land on a corpse. My stomach growled though I don’t even have one. That’s how badly I wanted it.

But what sort of a trap does one set for another grim reaper? They don’t fall for mortal tricks. A pitfall? He’d step aside. A rope snare? He’d cut it. A distraction with noise? He’d see through it. No, no, no. It had to be cunning. It had to be deliciously stupid, something so absurd that he’d stumble into it simply because no one would expect such idiocy.

I tore off a strip of my own ragged cloak and stretched it between two crooked branches like a pathetic imitation of a tripwire. Then I scattered dead leaves over it. Not even convincing ones – just… leaves. The kind a blind rat could sniff out. I crouched again and thought, Yes. Perfect. He’ll never suspect it because no one in their right mind would ever use something so bad.

He walked closer. Slow. Graceful. He didn’t so much as crunch the ground. He looked like the sort who always knows exactly where to step, who always wins at chess, who never trips over their own robe. I chewed my lip.

Then – his boot caught the ragged cloth.

I gasped, covering my mouth. He stopped, looked down, tilted his head.

And then. He fell.

Oh, sweet merciful silence, he actually fell. He stumbled like a drunk goat, arms flailing, robes flapping, and the apple – THE APPLE – rolled from his hand.

My trap worked. My idiocy triumphed.

I dove. Literally dove face-first into the dirt like a mad dog. My fingers closed around it, and oh – it was mine. Cold skin, waxy smooth, but mine. My mouth watered like a storm breaking against a stone.

I looked up, grinning, dirt smeared against my chin, apple clutched like treasure. He was sitting in the mud now, robes askew, staring at me with the faintest, faintest twitch of annoyance.

I burst into laughter. Ugly, snorting, doubled-over laughter. “You–you actually fell for it!” I wheezed. “By all that’s rotten, you tripped on rags! Who trips on rags?!”

He said nothing. Not a word. Just adjusted his robes, dusted his sleeves, and stared at me as if weighing my soul.

I clutched the apple tighter. “Don’t look at me like that. Finder’s keepers. That’s the law.” I said, biting into the apple before he could take it from me. Oh, gods above and below, the juice! The crisp snap! I nearly cried.

Still nothing. His silence was heavy, pressing, the kind that makes you aware of your every movement. I squirmed under it, my earlier glee quivering. Maybe I should’ve bolted. Maybe I should’ve vanished into mist before he–

Another voice broke in. Deep. Rough. Not calm like the first, but jagged, cutting.

“Did you seriously just… steal his apple?”

I froze. My head snapped around. And there – lurking near the edge of the clearing – stood another one. Taller, broader, darker. His mask was like a crow’s skull stretched too far, his voice German-lilted, sharp enough to flay skin. His arms were crossed, and he was watching me like a butcher watches a pig.

I swallowed. Hard.

“…Maybe.” I squeaked.

His stare could have split stone.

The first one – the one I’d tripped – finally spoke. His voice was smooth, calm, unnervingly so. “Leave them be, Todd. They are harmless.”

Todd. So that was the brute’s name. He scoffed, muttering in that growl of his. “Harmless until they stick another rag under my foot.”

I puffed my chest. “Hey! Don’t mock the rag! That rag just won me this apple, thank you very much.”

Todd tilted his head, feathers of irritation in his voice. “You risked your existence. For an apple.”

I nodded firmly. “Yes. Correct. Entirely worth it.”

And then, without breaking eye contact, I took another bite.

Crunch. Sweetness. Acid bite. Juice running down my chin. My whole body shivered like I’d been struck by lightning. I closed my eyes and moaned. “Ohhh, yes. This is it. This is heaven. Worth every ounce of humiliation.”

When I opened my eyes again, both of them were still staring.

“…What?” I snapped. “Never seen someone enjoy food before?”

The calm one actually smiled. Subtle, but there. “You are peculiar.”

“Thank you.” I said, mouth full.

Todd muttered something in German under his breath that sounded less like a compliment. He shifted, his mask tilting, watching me chew like I was some kind of rare insect he’d never seen before. Then, in a voice so deep it vibrated the Veil itself, he said:

“…You are small.”

“Excuse me?!” I spat a seed. “That’s your comment? Not ‘congratulations on your flawless victory,’ not ‘enjoy your hard-earned prize,’ just ‘you are small’?”

I hadn’t meant to make friends. I only wanted the apple, but… Somehow, in stealing it, in trapping one and sassing the other, I’d wedged myself into their orbit.

And the apple – oh, it was worth it. Every bite sang in my veins like a hymn. Even as one of them asked sly questions and the other one loomed like a storm cloud, I savored it. I let the juice run down my throat, sticky and sweet, the way memory is sweet when you haven’t had it in ages.

I realized something that day.

That maybe eternity didn’t have to be so lonely.




DO NOT tell them I said that.

I woke with juice still sticky on my chin and the dull ache of sleep cricked into my neck. The dream – no, the memory – still clung to me like cobwebs: the first apple shared between us, the first trap, the first time I realized maybe I didn’t have to be alone.

“Lini.”

The voice tugged me upward. Not harsh, not sharp, just… measured, steady, like someone pulling you back from the edge without ever laying a hand. Drustan. I blinked, squinting through lashes that felt heavy as wet cloth, and found him crouched nearby, the faintest tilt of his head betraying he’d been watching me longer than I’d like.

“You’ve gone and fallen asleep gnawing an apple again.” His words weren’t scolding, but there was something precise about them, as though he was cataloguing the absurdity for later use.

I looked down. Indeed. The half-eaten thing sat in my palm, browned at the bite, damp where I’d drooled on it. Ugh. I made a face and tossed it aside with a grunt. “It’s not my fault. Apples are… soporific.” Big words, makes me sound smart.

Drustan arched a brow, that sly little curve of amusement he never let bloom into a smile. He reached over – not to steal, not to pry, just to brush away a bit of pulp stuck to my cheek with the back of his knuckle. His touch was cool, quick, gone before I could flinch.

“You dream loudly,” he murmured. “Was it a good one?”

I hesitated, staring at him, at the way his eyes seemed to hold shadows and stars both. And I thought: maybe it was.

I yawned wide enough to crack my jaw. “Good enough.”

He didn’t push. Just stood, hands behind his back, and waited until I rose too. For once, the silence felt safe.

Chapter Text

Parasite XVIII.

The first time it moved inside me, I thought something inside had torn.

A sharp pulse, low and deep, like a muscle twitching beneath flesh where no muscle should be. For a breathless second I clutched my skirts, pressed my palm hard against my stomach, willing it still. But the movement came again, a flutter this time – soft, unmistakable, like fingers trailing from the inside out.

I froze.

No. No, God, no.

The room tilted. My vision swam. The realization hit me like cold water poured into my chest, freezing every vein: I was not alone in my body anymore. Something was in me, something that grew, something that would tear me apart when its time came.

I wanted to scream, but my throat seized shut.

For months I have prayed my body would betray itself. I drank the bitter herbs whispered form servant to servant, things no respectable woman was supposed to touch. Mugwort, tansy, black cohosh, whatever I could get my hands on. I starved myself when I could, let the nausea win, pressed my belly against the cold edges of the washbasin hoping to bruise something vital. I welcomed the nights of sweat and coughing, the fever that shook me until I thought my bones might crack.

But still – this.

This thing, this child, this unwanted tether. It clung stubborn as a weed in a cracked wall, feeding off me, refusing to wither.

A kick, sharper now. I pressed my hand against it, desperate to convince myself it was only indigestion, gas, some trick of the gut. But the rhythm was too certain, too alive. It was him – Aleksander – stamped inside me like a brand. His seed growing, his claim swelling my stomach like a grotesque victory.

I doubled over, gagging into my palms, bile stinging my tongue.

I didn’t want this. I never wanted this. I had known from the start what it meant to be married off to him, what duty meant for a woman. But I had prayed – not to God, because God has never listened to me – but to Fate, to chance, to the cruelty of nature, that my body would spare me. That I would bleed it out in silence one night, staining the sheets, and be left hollow and free.

But there would be no freedom.

I was probably about five months gone. More than halfway. No herb, no prayer, no curse could undo what had rooted itself in me. The flutter was not a warning. It was proof.

I pressed my forehead to the cold stone wall, shaking so hard my teeth knocked together. My hands roamed over my stomach, tracing the faint swell beneath fabric I had been pretending was only bloat. It wasn’t bloat. It was Aleksander’s legacy. Aleksander’s triumph.

And mine – my doom.

A child means labor. Labor means blood. Blood means Death. Or worse – life.

I could see both endings too vividly. If Death came, it would not be merciful. I had seen women torn in childbirth, heard their screams echoing through the village night, their faces gray with pain, their eyes rolled back like the dying animals I had once helped slaughter.

But worse still – to live. To survive, broken and emptied, and be forced to nurse it, hold it, raise it. His child. The flesh of the man I despise, feeding at my breast, wailing through the night. A living chain, binding me to him forever.

I clawed at my chest until I left crescent moons of red welts, as if I could tear out the suffocating thought.

I didn’t want it. I didn’t want to be a mother. I didn’t want to feel something inside me that had his face.

Another kick.

I slapped my hand against my stomach, hard enough that it stung.
Stop.
Stop moving.
Stop reminding me you are real.
But the thing inside me stirred again, heedless of my desperation.

Tears burned my eyes, hot and ugly. I sank to the floor, rocking, arms wrapped tight around myself.

I thought of every moment I had neglected my own care, every chance I had given this body to fail – and it betrayed me by surviving. By creating. By harboring this parasite.

The midwives would say it was God’s will. Aleksander would boast of his virility, of his heir growing strong inside my womb. The women of the court would stretch their false smiles, coo about blessings and motherhood, as though this was anything but a curse.

A curse I could not undo.

I whispered to the stone floor, my voice breaking. “I don’t want you.”

It came out raw, torn from the deepest place in me. I pressed my fists to my temples and repeated it, again and again, until the words blurred into sobs.

“I don’t want you. I don’t want you. I don’t–“

But the thing inside me didn’t care. It moved again, stronger now, as if answering me, mocking me.

I wanted to tear it out with my own hands.

The thought came unbidden, a flash of violent clarity: take a blade, press it deep, spill the life before it grows. Better I rot on the floor than bring this into the world.

But my body refused even that rebellion. I had tried herbs, fever, hunger. I had tried despair itself. Still I lived, and still it grew.

Trapped.

That’s what I was.

A vessel. A grave with a heartbeat.

My eyes burned with hatred – for Aleksander, for myself, for God who sat high and fat while I was broken here. But most of all, hatred for the fragile flutter inside me, that unwanted proof of his possession.

I wanted my body back. I wanted to bleed. I wanted freedom, even if it meant Death.

Instead, I sat there, trembling and swollen, the walls pressing close, the air too heavy to breathe, while inside me the child stretched its limbs and grew fat on my misery.

I don’t remember how long I rocked on the cold stone floor. Minutes, hours – time slid away. The only thing real was the hollow thud in my chest and the memory of that movement, that alien hand pressing from inside.

I am not a mother.
I will never be a mother.
I will not.

No matter how many times I whispered it, my body betrayed me yet again with every beat of its heart.

The news struck him like a blade sunk to the hilt.

Julia. Pregnant.

The words alone unraveled him, though no one had spoken them aloud. The knowledge simply was, like rot seeping into the marrow of bones, undeniable and festering. He knew her body well enough – the cadence of her steps, the hush of her breath, the tremor of her hands when she was frightened. Now there was something else inside her, and it was Aleksander’s.

The thought curdled his insides.

Todd paced the fog-stained ground of the in-between, each step a frantic clatter of boots that left no mark. He had weathered centuries of plague screams and battlefield carnage, had carried men and women and children to silence without so much as a ripple in his chest. Yet now, knowing she bore the seed of another man, he felt everything. Rage. Terror. Envy so sharp it was near-murderous.

It was too much. It was too human.

Lini trailed close, their hands lifted, a thin attempt at calm. “Todd,” they said softly, “breathe. Slow. She is still Julia.”

But breath was something he could not command. His chest ached with each phantom inhalation, and he clawed at the fabric of his coat as though he might tear the torment from himself. “I cannot–“ His voice cracked low, guttural. “I cannot bear it. That thing inside her–“

“It is not her fault,” Lini whispered.

Drustan stood at a distance, arms folded, his profile carved like stone. Silent. Watching. For once, he offered nor riddles, no barbs, no cold philosophy. Only stillness. Perhaps even he understood this was not a wound words could probe without killing the man entirely.

Todd stopped moving. His head tilted downward, as if gravity itself had claimed it. His body shook, and then – impossibly – something streaked down the edge of his beaked nose.

A tear.

Lini’s eyes widened. They stepped closer. “Todd…?”

Another tear followed, thick and slow. Black. As though all the night he had swallowed poured out through the fissure of grief. It marked his gloves when he raised a trembling hand to his face, staining the leather like spilled ink.

Lini gasped, a sound sharp with disbelief. “Reapers do not–“

“–cry,” Drustan finished at last, his tone unreadable. His gaze locked on the liquid stain, not with cruelty but with gravity so deep it threatened to crush the moment flat. “And yet he does.”

The tears came faster now, streaking in uneven trails. Each one thudded into silence before vanishing into nothingness. Lini reached out, not daring to touch, hovering near his sleeve like a child afraid of a flame.

“Let it out,” they murmured, their voice breaking. “Don’t choke on it, Todd.”

But as swiftly as it has come, it ended. The torrent ceased. His body gave a shudder, and then the well ran dry. He was left hollow – not the quiet void of his old existence, but a hollow scraped raw, deprived of what little had made him feel alive. His shoulders slumped. His gloved hands hung useless at his sides.

Lini swallowed hard. They had never seen a reaper look so small, so undone, and yet there was nothing human about it. He was not weeping anymore; he was emptied of even that. Their mouth worked around words that would not come. For the first time in all their companionship, they had no jest, no comfort, no thorn to soften the wound. Only silence.

It was Drustan who finally broke it. “Show him.” The reaper said quietly.

Lini stiffened. “Now? He is–“

“Now,” Drustan repeated. His eyes flicked like embers. “The truth waits for no man. Not even for him.”

Reluctantly, Lini reached inside their cloak and pulled forth the scripture. A thin, brittle parchment, written in the jagged hand of Fate herself. The next name. The next destination.

They held it out, their fingers shaking.

Todd looked. And the moment his eyes traced the words, the black void inside him yawned wider.

Aleksander’s lands.

His hands curled into fists, nails biting the leather of his gloves. The mask, back on his head, hid his face, but not the terror that consumed him.

“No,” he whispered, though even as he said it, he knew there was no refusal. Reapers do not choose. They obey.

The scripture trembled in Lini’s hand.

He had to reap.

Chapter Text

The Unbaptized Dirge XIX.

The night had a cruel stillness to it. The kind that clung to every branch, every stone, every breath of the wind, as though even the Earth itself held its voice in dread anticipation. The summons reached them in silence, a pull in the marrow of their shadows. It was not a call they could refuse, nor one they could mistake. A soul was being torn from its tether.

Drustan was the first to move, steady as ever. He rose with a motion so fluid it almost seemed rehearsed, his expression unreadable beneath the hollow cast of his hood. Lini followed reluctantly, tossing the core of a half-eaten pear into the dirt with a bitter sigh. Their steps dragged, yet still they obeyed the summons, as all reapers did. Todd lingered the longest, frozen where he sat, the pull gnawing at him like a hook through the ribs. He knew where it led.

The path wound toward Aleksander’s lands, the air thick with the stench of fear and sweat, muffled screams in the distance carried to them on the night air. The manor loomed against the horizon, torchlight flickering across the stones, yet not one flame seemed warm.

“She is in labor,” Todd said hoarsely, the words barely more than a growl forced through his throat.

No one answered. Drustan’s silence was heavy, deliberate. Lini’s jaw tensed, their eyes fixed anywhere but Todd.

He clenched his fists until the leather of his gloves groaned. “It cannot be her. Not her. Not this way.” His voice cracked into something raw, desperate.

Drustan slowed only enough to glance back, gaze sharp as a blade drawn in the dark. “Do not speak of what you already know.”

The screams grew louder as they reached the gates. Each sound twisted Todd’s gut until he could hardly breathe. He quickened his pace, as though he could reach her before the decree of Fate, as though sheer will could cut through the iron law that bound them. But Drustan’s hand shot out, halting him with infuriating ease.

“You will not enter before your time.” Drustan said, voice flat.

“She is–“ Todd began, but his throat closed, unable to form her name.

Drustan’s hand did not waver. “And she will be as all mortals are. You will do as you were made to do.”

Todd shoved his hand away, steps staggering forward again. His chest heaved, a growl building low in his throat. Unfortunately for him – Drustan moved faster than thought. The strike was not gentle. The crack of palm against mask split the air. Todd reeled back, the force ringing through him like a bell struck in fury.

The silence that followed was worse than the blow. Even Lini froze, mouth half-open as though caught between scolding and sympathy.

Drustan’s voice cut clean through the night. “You will listen.”

Todd’s hands trembled, clenched into fists at his sides. Rage, grief, and helplessness tangled into one seething storm inside him.

“You were too late,” Drustan said. “You are always too late. It is not your place to stop what cannot be stopped.” His gaze was merciless, his tone sharpened to a knife’s edge. “We are here to reap. Not to mourn. Not to meddle. Not to whimper over spilled milk.”

The words stung more than the slap. Todd’s mask hid his expression, but his whole frame shook.

Lini shifted, uncomfortable, their usual mischief gone. Their voice was softer than usual, almost pleading. “Todd… don’t make this harder.”

But he barely heard them. The sound of her cries reached him again, faint through the stone walls, and he felt it in his marrow like a blade twisting. He knew what it meant. He knew what was about to happen.

For a long moment he stood there, rigid, trembling, every muscle screaming to defy Drustan’s decree, to rip through the walls and drag her from Fate itself. But he could not. The law of their kind was iron, and Drustan’s eyes promised punishment harsher than a slap should he dare.

He bowed his head, shoulders quaking as if the weight of the world had been thrown upon him.

Drustan released him without another word and turned toward the manor doors, walking with the same calm inevitability that had carried him through centuries of Death. Lini followed slowly, casting one last, wary look back at Todd.

For the first time in his endless existence, Todd hesitated to move.

I am being split apart.

It begins low, deep, like claws hooking inside me and pulling in opposite directions. Each convulsion feels like fire blooming in my bones, spreading outward, until my skin cannot contain me. My breath rasps, not as air but as knives, dragging up and down my throat.

I dig my nails into the sheets, but the fabric bites back. I feel the fibers unraveling, weaving themselves beneath my fingernails, splitting them at their roots. The cloth burrows under the nail-beds, pushes until the pressure cracks them in jagged halves, red leaking into white, staining the coverlet in threads of blood. My hands are trembling animals – scratching, clawing, tearing not at the sheets but at myself.

The midwives murmur above me, their voices low and practiced, as though I am nothing more than a vessel, a slab of flesh destined for this torment. “Push,” they say, as though the word could summon any will inside me to aid this violation. I do not want this child. I never wanted this child. Yet my body has betrayed me, swallowed all my refusals, and now forces this upon me.

The air is damp, foul with the mingling scents of sweat, copper, and something sour, a rot clinging at the edges. I taste iron every time I try to breathe.

My husband’s seed rots inside me, and this – this thing – tears its way free. It is not my child. It is a curse, a punishment, a devil clawing to be born. I feel it pressing down, splitting me open from the inside. My own body becomes a battlefield, and I am both the soil and the casualty.

Another contraction seizes me. I arch against the mattress, spine bending until it feels like it might snap. My throat releases a sound that isn’t a scream but a raw, guttural tearing – an animal dragged into slaughter. My jaw aches from clenching. My teeth grind against one another until I taste blood on my tongue.

The women press cloths to my brow, whispering prayers I do not hear. They are blurred shadows circling me, faceless figures waiting for the devil’s arrival. One of them holds my wrist down when I try to claw at myself, when the urge overtakes me to dig my nails into my own belly and end it there, end it before it can breathe. But I am restrained. I am held prisoner by my own body.

Another convulsion. My legs are not my own. They tremble violently, as though pulled by strings. My vision blurs black at the edges, heat throbs in my skull, my ears ringing until the world becomes nothing but noise and pain.

“Push,” they repeat, as though the word could peel me open.

I press my head back into the pillow, sweat streaming into my eyes, burning them raw. I can feel my hair matted, sticking to my temples, tangled and damp with filth. Every part of me aches. Every nerve screams. The veins in my neck feel they might burst with the effort.

I am splitting. My body is being carved from the inside out. I feel skin stretch past human limit, flesh groan, muscle tear. The sensation is not birth – it is execution. The devil claws at me, wants the world, and I am the gate that will never close again.

The sheets beneath me are wet. I smell iron and rot. Blood pools, sticky and warm, seeping down my thighs. The fibers of the mattress drink it greedily. I feel each droplet run across raw skin, feel it slick under my hips, burning.

I sob, but no tears fall. There is only rasping breath, choking, the sound of an animal in the last throes.

Something tears inside me – sharp, bright, blinding. I cannot even scream; my voice has fled me. It is pain that feels eternal, stretching across every century, every life, as though this agony was always waiting for me.

The midwives exclaim, voices pitched higher now, urgent. They press harder on me, bark sharper orders, but I cannot obey. My body convulses on its own, my hands twisting into claws, ripping the sheets until my fingertips are slick with blood. I imagine my nails snapping fully, peeling back, leaving bone exposed, and I think: yes, let them tear. Let me come apart piece by piece. Better that than bringing forth what waits inside me.

The devil child claws lower. I feel it pressing at the threshold of my body, a head, shoulders, limbs – all grotesque distortions forcing their way into the world. My hips feel shattered. I hear myself wail – a low, broken sound that doesn’t belong to me.

I am drenched in blood, sweat, filth. Every gasp tastes of copper. Every convulsion steals more of me. I am nothing now but a cage, a bleeding cage.

I hear them say the child is crowning. Their hands reach, tug, grasp. They pull at me, wrench at me, and I want to scream at the to stop, to let it rot inside me rather than bring it forth.

But it does not stop.

The devil claws free.

A tearing that feels like Death itself rips through me, skin, flesh, bone surrendering. I feel something pass, wet, dragging life out of me as it goes. My body convulses one last time, and then – hollow. Empty. Ruined.

The room sways. My vision flickers in and out, black swallowing the torchlight. I hear nothing – not the baby’s shrill, nor its jagged wailing. The silence pierces me worse than any blade. It’s wrong, discordant, like the quiet is laughing at me.

I do not want to see it. I will not look. I will not.

The midwives bustle, voices overlapping, praying to God. My body lies limp, drenched in blood, trembling. I cannot move. My chest is heavy, shallow breaths dragging like weights.

I think: this is what it means to die. To be emptied. To be stripped until there is nothing left.

The last thing I feel is the blood still pouring, warmth spreading across the bed, seeping into the fabric. The fibers drink me as they drank my nails, my hands. I fade into them, disappearing.

At least I do not hear the devil’s wails.

The chamber had quieted.

The midwives, frantic moments ago, now bent their hand, red to the wrists. One sat with her face buried in her palms, rocking. Another pressed a trembling cloth to the still child’s chest, waiting for a breath that would not come. Only silence answered.

Julia lay pale and hollow, her hair plastered to her temples, her lips parted as if she had been about to whisper one final plea. The sheets beneath her were soaked through, the mattress blackened with her blood.

She was gone.

And the child, so small, did not stir. Its cry had never filled the chamber.

Drustan stood nearest the hearth, his hands folded behind his back, his shadow cast long across the wall. He said nothing, his face composed, his eyes like a closed door. Lini hovered near the corner, gaze lowered, chewing at their lip.

Todd did not move at first. His hands trembled at his sides, hidden beneath the folds of his cloak. He knew why they had been called, what their duty demanded, but knowing did not prepare him for the sight of her lying so still, nor for the tiny husk beside her that had never lived.

He stepped forward. His boots sank slightly in the blood-darkened rushes. The midwives, who could not see him, only shivered as a sudden chill pressed against their backs. One of them crossed herself and wept harder.

Todd reached the bedside. His hand, gloved in shadow, extended over Julia’s still chest. Her soul lingered just above her body, pale and faintly luminous, as if it were a candle flame nearly snuffed out. And yet, when he drew closer, it brightened.

She knew him. Even now, even in this ending, she felt him.

Her soul did not resist. It brushed against him, a feather-light touch, not clinging, not crying out. No protest. Only the weary acceptance of someone who has suffered enough. Todd’s throat aches as though something jagged were lodged there, but he made no sound. He cupped her essence gently, reverently, and guided her forward. She went willingly, slipping into his keeping like water into a vessel.

He lingered a moment longer than he should have, his hand hovering over the bed, before he turned to the other task.

The baby.

It lay swaddled in cloth that was already damp, its features small and unfinished, its lips tinged blue. The midwives wept openly, murmuring prayers that trembled and broke. They pressed fingers to its chest again and again, hoping for movement. There was none.

Todd reached down. The soul here was fainter still, hardly more than a flicker – fragile, as if it had barely entered the world before being swept out again. He had reaped countless infants before, but tonight his hand hesitated.

It felt wrong. Cruel.

The child had not drawn even a breath, and yet he was here to carry it away. He thought, for a moment, of what Julia had endured to bring it forth. Of how she had hated the life inside her, and how she had died birthing it. He wondered if she would want him to linger on it, to give it weight.

Still, the work had to be done.

He gathered the soul, fragile as gossamer, and for an instant it pulsed against his hand. He almost imagines it reaching for Julia. But there was nothing to return to. The midwives bowed their heads, murmuring over the tiny body, unaware of the shadow that had already come to take what they mourned.

Behind him, Drustan shifted slightly, a near-silent gesture of finality. Lini sniffed once, but quickly turned their head away. They did not speak.

Todd held both souls in silence, their weight immeasurable and unbearable at once. Julia’s burned faintly, steady, resigned. The child’s barely flickered.

He opened the way. A shimmer spread before him, black and grey, the Veil pulled aside. Purgatory yawned, deep and still, its currents waiting.

Julia went first, her soul gliding forward without struggle. He thought she looked peaceful – more so than she had ever looked in this life. She did not turn back.

The child followed, a tiny spark vanishing into the great expanse.

The Veil closed. The chamber was left only with sobs, the stink of blood, and three reapers who stood in silence.

Todd lowered his hand, fingers curling into a fist, his mask tilting downward as though the weight of it had become too great. His shoulders trembled once, barely perceptible, before he forced them still.

No words were spoken. None would matter.

They left the chamber as quietly as they had entered, leaving only the living to mourn the dead.

Chapter Text

The Sacred and The Profane XX.

The Veil’s library was a cathedral of silence. Shelves stretched in every direction, endless pillars of tomes and scrolls that never aged, never decayed. The air smelled faintly of ink that never dried, and parchment that never yellowed. Shadows clung to the vaulted ceiling like cobwebs spun by time itself.

At the center table sat Todd. His chair seemed too small for his great frame, but he did not notice, did not move. He folded into himself like a dying star collapsing inward. His mask gleamed faintly in the dimness, but his body was motionless, unreadable.

For a long while, the only sound was the faint scratch of Lini’s quill and the soft rustle of pages as they shuffled through a book stolen from one of the upper shelves. They perched cross-legged on the edge of a chair, their posture restless, eyes darting between words they weren’t really absorbing.

Finally, Todd broke the silence. His voice was low, gravel ground against stone.

“Lini.”

They flinched, dropping the quill. “Mm?”

“Tell me this time.”

The words hung between them, fragile and strange.

“Tell you… what?”

Todd’s hands twitched once on the table, then flattened again. “When she leaves Purgatory. When she returns to flesh. I want to know.”

It was not a demand. Not quite a plea, either. More like something balanced on the hinge of breaking – a weight that could tilt either way.

Lini blinked at him, their lips parting, but no joke came. No remark, no laughter. Their throat bobbed. “…Alright,” they whispered at last. “I will.”

Drustan was across the table, one hand hovering over the chessboard that had been left in stasis. The pieces lay scattered from an abandoned match, both kings standing with no game left in them. He pressed his long fingers into the board, then leaned back. His eyes flickered briefly to Todd, then away again. He said nothing.

The silence swelled.

And then the door creaked.

The light that spilled into the library was wrong. Too bright, too sharp, a white radiance that bled across marble like spilled milk. It cut across the shadows, fractured the quiet.

Aluena entered.

Her boots clicked against the marble, slow, deliberate. She moved with the grace of someone who knew she was being watched, who wanted to be watched. The sway of her hips was practiced, every step rehearsed. Her face was the cruelest parody – Julia’s softness warped into something sharper, her eyes hungry, her smile too curved, too knowing.

She lingered at the threshold for too long, as though savoring the change in air that her presence alone created. Then she stepped inside fully, dragging the light with her.

“Well,” she said sweetly, voice dripping like honey left too long in the sun. “Look at us. A funeral without a corpse.”

Lini froze. Then, as if struck by lightning, they were on their feet, the book in their hands creaking under the force of their grip.

“You–“ their voice cracked like glass. “You have some fucking nerve. She’s not even cold in the soil yet and here you are, slithering–“

They surged forward, but Drustan’s arm shot out like a bar of iron, catching them at the chest. His hand did not waver, even as Lini twisted against him, spitting and snarling.

Aluena ignored them. She never once broke her focus. Her gaze slid past Lini, past Drustan, fixing on Todd.

“You sit so still,” she purred, stepping closer. “Like marble. Like you’re waiting for chains to fall off. Or…” her head tilted, smile widening, “…waiting for me to pick them apart.”

Todd did not lift his head. His mask gleamed faintly, but there was no answer.

Aluena leaned closer, slow as a predator approaching a wounded animal. “You’ll wear yourself out pining for her. You know that, don’t you? She never stays. She never will.” She paused, and her voice fell into a whisper like oil seeping into cloth. “But me–“ she placed her hand on the edge of the table, almost near his own, “I’m here. Always here. Always watching.”

The silence in the room grew unbearable.

And then Drustan moved.

The ever-composed strategist, who rarely raised his voice, rarely betrayed even the smallest crack, suddenly strode forward. His boots struck the marble hard, echoing. He stopped before Aluena, so close her false smile faltered.

He bent his head slightly – and spat.

Right under her heel.

The wet sound cracked across the chamber like a whip.

Aluena’s face froze. For just a fraction of a second, the mask of confidence slipped.

Drustan’s eyes were shards of ice. “You pollute this place,” he said, his voice low. “Even rot has more dignity.”

For once, Aluena had no quip ready. She blinked, a faint twitch tugging at the corner of her mouth, before her smile reformed, brittle and sharp. “Even you lose your polish, Drustan.”

Todd did not move. Did not flinch. He sat as still as stone, letting her words scatter around him as if they were pebbles striking a gravestone.

Lini still writhed against Drustan’s arm, their voice hoarse with fury. “Let me at her–Let me at this bitch. Just one claw to the eye, that’s all I want–“
“No.” Drustan’s voice was iron.

Aluena lingered a little longer, her eyes sweeping Todd’s motionless form, searching for a crack. But she found none.

So she retreated, step by deliberate step, her boots smearing the spit across marble.

And even as the door closed behind her, the air of the library remained poisoned.

4 March 1477

It happened again.
Fucking again.

She’s gone.
Julia’s gone.

And I keep thinking–I can’t stop thinking–I could’ve stopped it this time. That if I hadn’t hesitated, if I’d moved my useless fucking body faster, if I’d just reached for her throat, her wrist, her breath–she wouldn’t have slipped through my hands.

But no. That’s not what we are, is it? That’s not what I am. I’m a thief, not a savior. I take what’s already gone and call it work.

Still. Still. It eats at me. It won’t stop.

5 March 1477

I see her face every time I close my eyes, but it keeps breaking apart. Sometimes it’s Julia. Sometimes it’s Aluena wearing her mouth like a mask. Sometimes it’s no one at all – just empty sockets staring at me.

Fuck. Fuck.

Nothing is solid. The shelves in the Veil feel fake. Lini’s voice skips like it’s being replayed from memory. Drustan looks like a painting someone left too long in the rain.

And me?
I don’t even know if I’m here. My own fucking hands don’t feel real.

6 March 1477

But this time – this time I know she’ll come back. That’s the one goddamn truth left.

This is certain.

She will come back.

She’ll bleed again, breathe again, speak again.

She’ll laugh again.

I write it down because if I don’t, I’ll lose it:
She will return.
She will return.
She will return.

7 March 1477

And yet – what the fuck am I without her?

I feel like I’m rotting inside this coat. Like the mask is hollow and I’m not inside it anymore.

Everything’s wrong.
Even my own body – it doesn’t belong to me. My hands don’t fit. My voice doesn’t sound right.

I’m watching myself from the outside. Like I’m split in half. Like one of me’s alive and the other doesn’t exist. Does that make sense?

8 July 1477

This is her fault.

Julia’s humanity got under my skin like a disease. She touched me once, twice, smiled, and now I’m messed up.

What do I know about grief? About longing? About–about love?

I shouldn’t feel this. I was not made to feel this. And yet here it is, burning through me, eating me alive.

I should be cold. I should be empty. I should be a fucking machine.

But instead–
Instead I’m starving. I’m furious. I want her back so badly it feels like my chest is splitting open.

It doesn’t make sense.
None of it makes sense.

But she will come back. That’s the thread. That’s the only thread left in this whole fucking mess.

xx.xx.147?

I keep trying to tell myself this is punishment. That all of this – the dying, the waiting, the endless fucking circling around her – is my sentence. That I deserve it.

But if it’s punishment, why does it feel like hunger?
Like my ribs are splitting open, as if my lungs are full of teeth.

I don’t want peace.
I don’t want forgiveness.
I want Julia.

That’s all. That’s it. That’s the marrow of everything.

xx.xx.14??

Sometimes I think I’ll devour her if I ever touch her again.

Not with teeth. Not at first.
With hands, with breath, with the whole hollow cavern of me that only she fits into.

But maybe with teeth too. Why not? If I could sink them into her skin, take her into me, she’d never leave. I’d carry her under my tongue, in my blood, in every bone until nothing could pry her loose.

I want to crawl inside her warmth and never come back out.

Just fucking give me my Julia back.

xx.xx.1???

I think about her skin. The warmth of it, the way it flushed, the way it bruised, the way it broke.

I want to feel it again. I want to feel all of it. Every inch. Every imperfection. Every fleeting second of blood moving under it.

I want to press her to me until she breaks.
I want her to scream against me.
I want to swallow every sound she makes.

And if she slips away again, I swear I’ll dig through time, through soil, through centuries until I drag her back into my hands.

x?.??.????

Maybe I’m not supposed to want like this. Maybe this is what’s wrong with me.

Reapers do not yearn. We do not ache, we do not crave.

But here I am, starving like a man left to die. Starving for one woman’s breath, for one flicker of her eyes.

It doesn’t make sense. It’s not supposed to.

And yet it does. Because when she looks at me, even once, I’m not hollow. For that second, I’m alive.

Alive. Imagine that.

??.??.????

If she were here, if she let me – if she opened herself to me without fear – I would worship her entire body until there was nothing left untouched, nothing left unsavoured.

I would start at her feet. The soles first, because they’ve carried her through dirt, through grief, through a world that will never be kind enough to her. I’d kiss them, lick the arch until she twitched, take each toe into my mouth and suck it as though it mattered, as though every part of her deserved devotion. And it does. Even the places she forgets to love about herself – I would love them for her.

I’d climb slowly upward. Her calves, her thighs – I would spread kisses there until she shook. I’d bury myself between her legs, not just to taste the slick sweetness of her, but to prove to myself she is real, alive, warm, trembling under my mouth. I would not stop. I would lick her until she cried my name, until she begged me to pause, and even then I would want more. She would be endless. I could spend eternity just at that altar.

Her stomach, the soft hollow of her navel – I’d kiss, lick, press my teeth against it until she gasped. The gentle swell of her stomach gave her a lush, womanly softness I could never get enough of. Then her breasts. The generous swell of her breasts added to her warmth. Her nipples stiffening under my tongue – I’d suck them until she writhed, until she clawed at me, until the taste of her sweat and her pleasure was all I knew.

And her throat, her lips – Gods, her lips – I would devour them until they bruised purple, until she moaned into my mouth, until she understood there is nothing in existence I want more than the sound of her breaking apart against me.

Her back, her shoulders, even the underside of her arms, the curve of her spine – I would map them all with my tongue. I would drag my mouth across her until she was slick with me, until she shivered from head to toe.

I want to consume her. Not in cruelty, not in hunger alone, but in worship. To lick the salt of her skin, to suck her until she’s left trembling, to bury myself inside her taste until I no longer know where I end and she begins.

I want to drown in her.
I want to die in her.
If she let me – I would never fucking stop. Never.

Chapter Text

God Save the Queen XXI.

The chamber was hushed, lit only by the dim amber glow of lamps along the shelves. Dust hung in the air, unmoved, as though even time hesitated to intrude upon this place.

The chessboard waited between them. Black and white, perfect symmetry, the small armies standing in silence before the war to come.

Drustan was the first to move. He always was. His hand extended like the stroke of a brush across canvas, and a pawn advanced one careful step into the open square. The piece settled with the softest of sounds, yet it echoed through the room like the tolling of a distant bell.

Todd sat unmoving for a long while. The board blurred and swam before him, not from distraction, but from a heaviness that pulled at every thought. When he did reach for a piece, it was a knight. He placed it too early, too sharp an angle for the quiet patience of the opening game. The horse leapt across the board as though straining toward something unreachable.

Drustan’s eyes lingered on him, not mocking, not sharp, but searching. Then he drew a bishop into play, cutting diagonally, dividing the empty spaces like a scythe through a field.

“You’ve been thinking of endings,” he said, softly, not a question but a simple observation.

Todd lowered his gaze. The knight stood awkwardly against the bishop’s clean geometry. His hand hovered, uncertain, then nudged forward a pawn – hesitant, unconvincing.

The silence between them lengthened.

Drustan leaned forward, fingers poised above his queen. He moved her not rashly, but with grace, sweeping her across the ranks in a commanding arc. She stood now in clear sight of the black king, though the distance was still vast.

“Tell me,” Drustan murmured, his voice carrying the rhythm of thought more than conversation. “Would you sacrifice the king to save the queen?”

Todd looked at the king – lonely, shielded only by scattered pawns that meant nothing. The white queen’s presence seemed to loom across the spaces of the board, a fragile brilliance always one step from peril.

He said nothing.

Drustan tilted his head slightly, studying him as one might study the movements of a clock hand. “It does not make sense, does it? The game is not played that way. The king is never given up. But… what if there was a way out? Beyond the game, beyond the rules. What would you do then?”

Todd’s hand hovered again, then fell to a rook. He moved it clumsily, without direction, a hollow echo of strategy.

The air pressed heavier around him. It was not grief, not even fatigue – it was something stranger, as if the act of sitting at the table was draining his being. The pieces swam before his vision; Julia’s face seemed to flicker in the white queen’s crown, the curve of her cheek caught in the polished ivory, the shadow of her eyes in the hollow squares.

His chest tightened. A peculiar sensation stirred in him – something nauseous, wrong, deeply human. Reapers do not fall ill. They did not feel such weakness. Yet it coiled through him, undeniable, making his hand tremble against the edge of the table.

Drustan’s next move was slow, deliberate, the sliding of another pawn, a quiet reinforcement of the queen’s line. He did not look at Todd directly, but his voice carried across the silence like a thread binding them both.

“Strange, is it not, when the board itself begins to feel unsteady? When every move seems to betray its own meaning.”

Todd tried to steady himself, but the sickness worsened. His breath, usually a still and mechanical thing, faltered. The lamplight bent strangely, and the black king seemed to waver where it stood – fragile, exposed, unbearably heavy with expectation.

He pushed back from the table slowly, the legs of the chair scraping lightly against the marble floor. The sound was thin, brittle. He could no longer bear the sight of the board, its perfect arrangement threatening to collapse into chaos if he stared too long.

Drustan did not follow him. He only rested his hands on the edges of the board, watching the unfinished game. His eyes scattered around the board, catching the lamplight with an intensity that seemed both patient and unrelenting.

The board remained where it was – white queen poised in her arc, black king trembling behind the crooked defenses. Neither side had won. Neither side would.

And the sickness in Todd’s chest lingered long after he left the chamber.

The corridor outside the library was still vibrating faintly with the scrape of Todd’s chair. The sound had seemed endless, grating against the floor, as if the whole chamber had protested his leaving. Now silence flooded back in, thick and impenetrable.

Drustan had not moved from the board The lamps burned lower, the queen still gleaming in her poised stance across the squares. His hand hovered above the table, but he never touched the pieces again. His gaze was elsewhere, pulled inward, his thoughts locked in a room no one else could enter.

It was in this silence that Lini appeared.

They came without their usual laughter, without the scent of stolen fruit or the clattering rhythm of mortal trinkets tucked into their pockets. Their step was quiet, uncertain, though they tried to mask it with a quick tilt of their chin, a smile that did not reach their eyes.

“So,” they said lightly, though the word rang brittle. “How did it go with him?”

Drustan did not answer. He did not even look up. His gaze lingered still upon the board, though he was no longer seeing it.

Lini shifted their weight, folding their arms tight across their chest. “He left early again, didn’t he?” They have a short, nervous laugh. “He always does. You push him too hard with that game. Or maybe you don’t push hard enough.”

Only silence met them.

Something restless stirred in Lini’s chest. They crossed the room, circling the table as though the proximity might break Drustan’s trance. Their eyes darted over the pieces.

“You’ve watching him die from the inside out,” Lini said softly. “And you sit there like it’s just another performance. You’re supposed to be his mentor. His… his anchor. But you look at him like he’s a puzzle, like he’s just another one of your damned riddles.”

At that, Drustan finally raised his eyes. His gaze was cold, sharp as cut glass.

“Careful.” His voice had no heat, no humor – only the precise chill of a blade being drawn.

Lini froze, their words caught in their throat.

Drustan leaned back in his chair, folding one long leg over the other. He rested his hand against his jaw as if bored, though the gleam in his eyes betrayed the lie. “You are too young to understand. Too loud. Too eager to fling yourself into fires you cannot hope to extinguish.”

The words struck deeper than Lini expected. They forced a smile, brittle, a flash of teeth that faltered almost immediately. “I’m not a child.”

“You are,” Drustan replied, unblinking. “And worse – you are sentimental. It makes you weak. Do you think your fretting will change him? Do you think your anger will protect him? He is already lost to his own design.”

Lini’s hands curled into fists at their sides. “Then why keep watching him? Why sit across that board and pretend it matters if you think he’s already lost?”

Drustan’s expression darkened. The faintest curve of disdain touched his mouth. “Because unlike you, I know the value of silence. Observation reveals more than meddling ever will.”

Lini stepped back, as though struck. Their throat tightened with words they could not say, questions that twisted like thorns. They had always believed Drustan’s cruelty was tempered with wit, with play, with a kind of secret care hidden beneath riddles. But tonight his cruelty was unadorned. Bare. Cutting.

“Why are you being like this?” Their voice cracked despite them. “Why shut me out?”

Drustan’s gaze lowered again to the board. The game remained frozen, the pieces holding their breath.

“Because you waste my time,” he said, quietly but without softness. “And I have little patience left for wasted things."

The words rang in the chamber like a door slammed shut.

Lini’s chest caved inward. They tried again to laugh, to lift the heaviness, but the sound came out thin, almost childlike. “Right. Of course. I’ll… I’ll leave you to your silence, then.”

Their steps away from the table were uneven, too quick. The echo of them dwindled down the hall, swallowed by the dark.

When the sound had faded completely, the chamber was heavy again. Drustan remained seated, still as stone. His hand drifted once, almost absently, toward the white queen, but he did not touch her. Instead he let it fall back to the table’s edge, his gaze unreadable.

Somewhere far down the corridor, Lini leaned against the cold wall, their head bowed. They pressed the heel of their palm against their eye until color sparked behind their lids, a futile effort to stop the sting there.

Drustan’s words still clung to them like frost: sentimental, weak, wasted.

And though they wanted to curse him, to spit back fire and wit, they could not. Not this time. They could only sit in the silence he had left them with, hollow and small, the sharp edges of loneliness cutting deeper than they had expected.

I did not move.

The hours passed, though they did not pass. Nothing passed. The stones of this chamber remain the same from moment to moment, unchanged. I watch the lines in the mortar, the small pits in the surface of the wall, and they do not shift. My hands rest upon the word of the table, and they too are the same. Always the same. If I close my eyes, I can almost believe time is flowing, that I am still carried by its river. But when I open them, the water is still, black, unmoving.

Julia should be here. That is the thought that gnaws. Julia should be here. I wait, I wait, I wait. My body does not weaken with waiting, yet my mind frays with it. To anticipate something – it hollows me. I wonder if this is how stone feels, waiting for the rain that has soon to rain again.

I tell myself she will come. She will. She must. Perhaps tomorrow. Perhaps the day after. Perhaps in the next breath.

But the chamber is silent.

I press my palm to the table. It feels wrong. Too solid. Too cold. I push my other hand against my chest. Nothing moves there, nothing beats. It is not a body. It is not mine.

How many times have I repeated this thought?
How many times will I repeat it again?

Not mine.
Not mine.
Not mine.

I feel the shape of my hands but they are distant, as though pressed against glass. My body is a garment I cannot remove. My body is a mask I cannot tear away.

I close my eyes. Julia’s face comes, always. Her hair, the warmth of her voice, the light in her. It is a phantom warmth but it is all I have. I tell myself I will hold it until she knocks at the door.

And then – the knock came.

Three strikes. Hollow. Measured. They reverberated through the chamber, shaking the stillness.

I froze. I waited. The sound lingered long after it had ended, echo upon echo, as though the walls repeated it to themselves. For an instant I could not breathe – though I do not breathe. My chest lifted, a reflex, useless, as though a ghost of life had seized me.

I thought: She is here.
I thought: Julia is here.

I rose. My body felt too light, too far from itself. I crossed the chamber, though each step seemed both endless and immediate. My hand touched the iron latch. I pulled the door open.

The corridor lay empty. Shadows stretched long upon the stone. No breath, no figure. Only silence.

I looked down.

It was there.

A parcel, wrapped in silk as black as the void between stars. Its folds were neat, deliberate, reverent. It lay directly upon the threshold, as though placed with care, awaiting me. I knelt, though my legs trembled. My hands reached for it, though I wanted not to touch it. I wanted to retreat, to leave it there until it vanished on its own. But I could not.

I lifted it.

The silk whispered as it slid beneath my fingers. Heavy. Wrong. The weight of it was not the weight of metal alone, but something denser, older. I set it upon the table.

There was parchment tied with twine. My fingers broke the knot. The words were written in a steady hand, elegant, cruel:

“Tenebralis. A blade sacred. Made to unmake a reaper.”

I read the line again. And again. And again.

Tenebralis. Sacred. Unmake. Reaper.
Tenebralis. Sacred. Unmake. Reaper.
Tenebralis. Sacred. Unmake. Reaper.

The words etched themselves into the inside of my skull. They clanged against my thoughts like bells tolling in a ruined church.

I pulled back the silk.

The dagger lay revealed.

Obsidian. Blacker than shadow, blacker than the hollow between worlds. Its edges gleamed faintly, catching the lamplight like teeth. The design was impossible – the blade seemed carved by something not human, its lines too sharp, too cruel, as though the stone had grown this way rather than been shaped by hand. The hilt was patterned with veins of silver so fine they seemed to writhe when I stared at them too long.

It did not look made. It looked born.

I touched it. Cold shot into me, climbing my arm, threading through my chest. My vision bent. For a moment, the chamber was not the chamber. The walls leaned, the air swelled, the lamp flared too bright.

I snatched my hand back. The dagger remained upon the table, innocent, silent, as though it had not reached for me. But it had. It had.

I sat back. My body did not feel like usual. My hands, folded in my lap, seemed not mine. I pressed them together until the bones hurt. Still not mine.

I looked at the dagger again. The longer I gazed, the more I felt it was gazing back. Its point seemed always directed at me, even when I shifted my seat. Its black gleam pulsed faintly, like the breath of a sleeper.

What is this thing?
Who left it?
Why me?

The questions repeated, turned in circles, chewing at themselves until nothing remained.

The parchment still lay beside it. Unmake a reaper. The words made no sense. Nothing unmade us. Nothing unmade me. And yet – here it was. Black as absence, silent as Death, promising something beyond my comprehension.

I leaned closer. My reflection surfaced faintly upon the blade. Pale, distorted, masked in shadow. I did not recognize it. I did not recognize myself.

Perhaps this was the answer. Perhaps this was the way out.

I pressed my fingertips against the table. My hands trembled though they should not tremble. I thought of Julia, again and again. If I could not have her, if I could not follow her, what use was eternity? What use was this endless stone chamber, this hollow body, this waiting without end?

The thought grew heavy in me, swelling until it drowned all else: This dagger could end me. This dagger could free me.

Tenebralis. The words repeated in rhythm with my thoughts. Tenebralis. Tenebralis.

I reached for it again. My fingers brushed the hilt. The cold surged once more, but this time I did not draw back. My hand closed around it. The blade sang. Not with sound, but with vibration – through my bones, my skull, my chest.

My mind split. For a heartbeat, for an eternity, I saw myself not here, but elsewhere – Julia’s hand in mine, Julia’s lips against mine, Julia’s body warm and alive. I saw her eyes, and they looked into me as if nothing separated us, as if the centuries, the curses, the punishments had never been.

Then it was gone.

I dropped the dagger. It struck the table with a hollow note.

I sat back again, breathing though I did not breathe. My hands shook against my knees.

The dagger lay on the table. It gleamed faintly, patient, eternal. Waiting.

I do not know what to do.

But I know it has chosen me.

Chapter Text

Through a Glass, Darkly XXII.

The corridor outside Todd’s chamber was humming with silence when Drustan pulled the hood of his cloak into place. His hand brushed the doorframe once – not as farewell, but as punctuation. A move placed. A piece settled on the board.

He had left the obsidian dagger swaddled in silk upon the threshold, the parchment tucked like a whisper beside it. He did not need to linger to watch Todd’s discovery. That would come. That was inevitable. All things in their time.

His boots carried him down the stairwell, his steps unhurried, his shoulders loose with satisfaction. The shadows swallowed, and he let them.

It was all proceeding according to rhythm.

Until she appeared.

Ursa emerged from the darkness as though carved directly from it – tall, broad-shouldered, as predator’s stillness in her every motion. A black patch sealed her left eye, but the right gleamed sharp and pitiless. The air around her carried the weight of The Wardens, that humorless order who measured obedience in blood and silence.

Drustan paused. He did not bow. But he inclined his head – the smallest concession, the faintest nod of acknowledgement. It was not fear; it was respect, as one might grant to a blade freshly whetted.

“Drustan,” she said. Her voice was smooth but grave, each syllable falling like a stone into water.

“Ursa,” he replied, tone light, as though they had met in passing at a market square and not the hollow underbelly of eternity. “What fortune brings you into this part of the Veil? Surely not for my company.”

Her single eye narrowed faintly. “I have a question.”

“Ah. Then perhaps it is my company, after all.” He smiled faintly, infuriatingly. “Ask.”

Her gaze held his, unblinking. “Do you know where the Tenebralis lies?”

The word curled between them, heavy as a curse.

Drustan tilted his head as though in thought, as though tasting the syllables for the first time. “Tenebralis? A lovely word. It rolls well from the tongue. But I confess, I cannot place it. Some relic, perhaps? A bauble?”

Ursa’s mouth was still, but her silence was heavier than speech.

“You truly do not know?” she asked at last.

He spread his hands, palms open, a gesture of innocence so exaggerated it mocked itself. “I cannot know what I do not know. And alas, my knowledge is vast, but not infinite.”

“Funny,” she said at last, her voice lowering, “because the vault at Caelum Obscura does not close itself. Its veil was left open. Empty. And the blade that was once there is gone.”

For a heartbeat, the corridor seemed to bend around the name. Caelum Obscura – a sanctum older than the Wardens themselves, a place no hand touched without sanction.

Drustan’s smile did not falter. “A veil left open? How careless. Perhaps one of your Wardens misplaced their key.”

Ursa’s jaw tightened, but her voice remained steady. “Careless, yes. And yet… deliberate. Someone carried it out. Someone who knows what it is, and what it can do.”

“Then you must find them,” Drustan said, as though offering friendly advice. “It sound most urgent. Though I warn you – searching shadows for shadows is an occupation most unrewarding.”

She studied him. Her eye moved over his face, his stance, as though she might strip away his words, see the game beneath.

But Drustan was stone and smoke, both at once.

At last she said, “If you see anything. Hear anything. You will inform me.”

“Of course,” he said lightly, bowing the barest fraction. “I would be most remiss not to.”

Her silence lingered, pressing like the weight of an unsheathed blade. Then she stepped back, her cloak sweeping with motion. “Goodnight, Drustan.”

“And to you, Ursa,” he murmured.

She turned, vanishing into the passage.

Drustan lingered only a moment longer. His smile was gone now, his face unreadable. He drew his cloak tighter and continued into the dark, each step careful, precise.

The game had shifted.

And only he knew how many pieces still remained to move.

The dagger lay where it had been left, silk askew, ridiculous in its softness, like a swaddled infant. I had ignored it through the night. Through the long dragging hours where I did nothing but breathe without purpose, without hunger, without sleep. Through the dull ache of existence. But I could not ignore it any longer. It sat at the edge of the table like a waiting thought, daring me to reach for it.

My hands trembled when I touched the cloth. Not from fear, not from weakness, but from a strange anticipation, the way flesh quivers before a storm splits the sky. The silk whispered as I unraveled it, a hiss like a serpent. And then it gleamed.

The Tenebralis.

It seemed alive, as though it pulsed faintly in my palm, a vein running through shadows. The blade was black – darker than shadow, darker than the void that swallowed stars. No reflection touched it. My own mask, my own ruined form, did not appear upon its edge. It rejected me, and yet I held it, greedy for what it promised.

How long had I waited for such a thing? How long had I wandered half-living, a revenant denies both rest and release? I wanted to press it to my chest, to drive it through the heart that did not beat, to find if there was any thud to silence. But no. No, I wanted it closer, I wanted it personal.

My fingers gripped the hilt until it creaked. Slowly, reverently, I raised it to my throat.

And then the thoughts came – like insects, like maggots stirring beneath skin.

Would I see her? Would I see Julia if I went through with this? Or had I cursed myself too deeply, cursed her too thoroughly, to ever find her again? Would she be there at the gates of whatever existed for me, her hands reaching, her voice calling? Or would she turn her face away, reborn in a life where I was nothing more than a specter that once clung to her?

My throat tightened.

The blade pressed cold to flesh that was not flesh. The edge kissed me, teasing the softness where veins did not sing.

I imagined my skin parting, the black fountain. I imagined warmth running down my chest, dripping onto the floor in great heavy drops that would stain the stone forever. I imagined choking on it, gagging, sputtering like a mortal. I imagined the sweet relief of emptiness.

I wanted it so badly.

My hands shook harder. Not with hesitation, but with hunger. The gnawing need for ending, for finality.

I whispered, hoarse:
“Let it be done.”

And I drew the blade across my throat.

I expected fire. I expected tearing. I expected rush of liquid.

But nothing came.

The blade slid over my skin like it was cutting air. No blood. No pain. Not even a mark.

I staggered, gasped, clawed at myself with free fingers. My throat was smooth, intact, untouched. I slashed again – harder this time, teeth bared behind the mask. Again nothing. No wound, no fracture, not even a whisper of injury.

I pressed harder, harder, until I felt the edge bite against me. It should have opened me like parchment. It should have carved silence into my bones. But the Tenebralis mocked me. It refused.

Something cracked in my chest. A sound – half snob, half snarl – ripped through me.

I screamed. I screamed until my lungs, useless though they were, burned with phantom fire. I screamed for the centuries, for the curse, for the endless waiting. I screamed for Julia. For every moment I have not touched her, not held her, not saved her. I screamed until the chamber itself seemed to quake, and still the blade remained untainted.

Rage seized me.

I threw it.

The Tenebralis whirled across the room in a black arc, slammed against the stone, clattered like broken bones. The silk wrap fluttered after it, pitiful, obscene in its gentleness.

I fell to my knees. My hands clawed at my throat as if I could force the wound open myself, as if nails could do what the sacred blade could not. Nothing. Smooth, unbroken. Eternal.

Eternal.

The word tasted like rot.

I hunched forward, mask scraping against my knees, breath sawing in and out though I did not need it. My chest heaved, body moving with the motions of despair though it had no true heartbeat, no true breath.

Why?

Why give me the blade? Why mock me with hope, with promise, only to deny me release? Who placed it at my door? Who knew that I would reach for it in my lowest hour, who knew that I would bleed for it, only to be denied?

It was not mercy. It was cruelty. The worst kind. The kind that dangled salvation just beyond reach, then snapped it back with a smile unseen.

I could not die.

I could not leave.

I was bound. Bound to her, bound to the curse, bound to this endless shroud of existence. Even a sacred dagger, veiled in myth, refused me.

I dragged myself up, limbs heavy with loathing. My mask felt like a coffin on my face, my robes like burial cloths that refused to rot.

The dagger lay across the chamber, gleaming faintly with that impossible darkness. Watching me. Mocking me.

I turned away, but its presence clung to me like a shadow that would not release.

I whispered, hollow:
“Why not?”

No answer came.

Only the silence, sharp as teeth, settling again into the bones of the room.

Chapter Text

The King in Yellow XXIII.

Footsteps echoed faintly through the Veil – measured, deliberate, as if each strike of heel against unseen ground kept time with some private rhythm. Drustan’s steps. Smooth, patient, without hesitation. Lini recognized them before he appeared.

They had been moving in the opposite direction, head lowered, posture tight with the weight of a silence that had become armor. Silence suited them now; it was better than the venom of words Drustan could not unsay.

Their paths crossed where the Veil bent into a narrow curve of mist, a space too tight to pass without acknowledgement. And of course, Drustan stopped.

He regarded Lini with that faint curve of the lips that was never quite a smile. His gaze skimmed over them in its usual, unsettling way – curious but never warm. His voice broke the quiet, low and almost playful:

“And what about good evening?”

Lini froze. Not because of the greeting itself, but because of what it stood for. A hook disguised as courtesy. The smallest gesture, meant to test how much of them he still owned.

They lifted their head at last, meeting his stare.
“You think I’ll offer you a greeting like some trained pet?” Their tone was quiet, but the words carried sharpness. “Not after the names you threw last time.”

Drustan tilted his head, studying them as though they were a puzzle piece he had misplaced. “So the little barb still lodges, does it?” He said it gently, almost as if amused, but the edge beneath it was deliberate.

“You made sure it would lodge,” Lini replied. Their hands curled against their sides. “You cut me open with it and expected me to bleed prettily for you. But I don’t forget so easily. Not like you’d want me to.”

The silence between them thickened, the Veil holding its breath. Drustan stepped closer – not threatening, not hurried, but close enough that his presence pressed in, cool and suffocating.

“Everything is a game to you,” Lini said, eyes narrowed. “Even this. A greeting. A word. You’ll turn it into another string to pull. And then laugh when I jump. But I’m not your toy, Drustan.” Their voice faltered only slightly at the name, but they forced the words through with sharpness. “Not anymore.”

He let the pause stretch, as though measuring the sound of their defiance. Then, softly: “And yet here you stand, speaking as though my words still bind you.”

Lini’s throat tightened. He was right, of course – every word Drustan had ever given them seemed to echo, to cling like smoke. The dismissal, the cruel naming, had never stopped burning. It had sunk deep, and Lini knew he was aware of it. That was the cruelty of it: he remembered the shape of every wound he carved.

They took a step back, forcing space between them. “Find me again when you’re capable of speaking like something other than a blade disguised as a man. Until then–“ Their voice trembled now, but not from weakness. From the sheer weight of keeping steady. “–stay out of my path.”

Drustan’s mask of amused detachment slipped, just slightly. Not enough to show remorse – he had none – but enough to reveal a flicker of cold calculation. As though he were deciding whether to let this distance remain, or whether to draw them back into his orbit through some subtler cruelty later.

Lini turned from him, spine rigid, breath sharp in their throat. The Veil swallowed their figure as they walked away, refusing to look back.

Drustan watched them go, lips curving again into something indecipherable. To him, even bitterness was a kind of tether. He could afford to wait.

But for Lini, the wound remained raw, and silence felt heavier than any greeting could.

It has been days.
Days since I left the dagger at his door.
Days since I imagined the sound of it splitting his throat.
Days since the neatness of my plan unraveled in silence.

And yet – he walks.

I see him among the others, and it still startles me. Him. Grim, gaunt, deliberate. Not the skulking husk that rots in chambers, not the shadow glued to walls, but upright. Moving. Breathing without hesitation.

And without the mask.

That is the part that unsettles me.
The mask has been his second skin, his shroud, his veil. The bird’s beak hiding every weakness, every tremor. And now – gone.

His face is sharp, narrow, all edged and sternness. The crooked line of his nose catches light in ways that draw the eye, the thin lips pressed as if each word must be earned by suffering. His eyes – half-lidded, bruised with exhaustion – glare through the weight of shadow, and the glasses perched low give him the air of a scholar dissecting the world with contempt. Dark har hangs in loose strands, fuller at the back, untamed but deliberate. The maskless face looks not triumphant, nor broken – something in between. A face halfway through decay, yet more alive than I have ever seen it.

It makes the others avoid him. They don’t know how to bear a man who no longer wears his Death.

And then – he notices me.

“Drustan,” he says. My name on his lips – steady, low, weighted. “A cup of tea?”

It is a trap. I know it instantly. But traps interest me.

The library waits, shelves groaning beneath their endless weight, the air heavy with dust and parchment and the faint, acrid burn of old candles. He gestures me into a chair, one of the high-backed ones that creak as if sharing in some private agony. The teapot between us steams faintly, though I never saw him light flame.

He pours. His hands do not shake. He sets the cup before me with a faint curl at the corner of his mouth. Almost a smirk.

And that – that is what unsettles me most of all.

Todd should not smirk.
Todd should be ash and ruin, draped across the stones, muttering grief into his sleeves.
Todd should be scabbed over with despair because Tenebralis did not do what Tenebralis was meant to do.
Todd should be broken, and sulking, and unmoored.

But here he sits, maskless, tea steaming, lips curved.

I lift the cup because to leave it would be to admit hesitation. The porcelain is hot against my fingers, too hot, as though daring me to drop it. The scent is bitter. Leaves drowned long past the point of gentleness.

He drinks first. Slowly. As though daring me to measure his calm against my suspicion.

The silence tightens.

“So,” I say at last, voice carefully drawn. “You are among us again. No shadows this time. No mask. Why now?”

His eyes flicker, not with hesitation but with something like amusement. “Do I need reason?”

Everything requires reason. Especially him. Especially now.

“You’ve never been one for displays,” I answer. “And yet – here you are. Displaying.”

The smirk sharpens. “Perhaps I tired of hiding. Or perhaps,” and here he leans back slightly, glass catching the candle’s flame, “it is time I remembered how to breathe among my kind.”

The words fall too easily. No crack. No falter.

Suspicion coils in me, heavy, poisonous. Something is wrong. He should not be able to sit here. He should not be capable of pouring tea, of smirking, of balance. He should be wreckage. He should be nothing.

It is always the silence that weighs.
The silence of teacups touching wood, the silence of pages sighing in the library’s dark, the silence of his eyes, heavy-lidded, watching me across the table.

I have played this long enough to know when silence is only silence and when it is something else, when it is an animal crouched, waiting to pounce. And Todd’s silence tonight is teeth in the dark.

He drinks, sets his cup down. The smirk lingers, faint but undeniable, as if he knows something I have not yet seen.
I tilt my head, considering him, and then–

Movement.

A shift in his shoulders. A rustle of robes.
And suddenly the table is split with shadow, because he has drawn the Tenebralis and pressed it against my throat.

Obsidian. Cold.
So sharp the skin seems to recognize its edge before contact.

Ah.
So he has teeth after all.

I do not move. My hands remain where they are, one on porcelain, the other against the wood.
I only look at him, the dagger trembling just enough to betray his breath. His eyes, though – they are steady.

“You surprise me,” I murmur, voice level. “I did not think you’d piece it together so quickly. Smarter than you look.”

The blade presses closer. He says nothing. His jaw is tight, lips set, and I can hear the faint strain of breath through his teeth.

“So you know,” I continue, soft, conversational, as though we were still speaking of tea. “You know that I left it. Wrapped so neatly. Placed so carefully. That little gift at your door.”
I lean fractionally into the blade, just enough to feel its threat. “You even brought it with you. I’m flattered.”

His mouth twists – not quite rage, not quite despair, something bitter caught between. “You thought it would finish me.”

“No,” I answer. “I thought it would test you.”

For a moment he falters. A flicker in the eyes, a question he will not give voice to.
I tilt my head. “Do you truly believe a blade alone can undo us? That obsidian against the throat would be enough? No. You’d need words. The rite. The spell to open the way. Without it, Tenebralis is just… stone.”

The blade trembles now, not with weakness but with the weight of his doubt. His hand lowers, fractionally, then more. The steel withdraws from my neck, and at last he shoves it back into his robes.

The silence returns, heavier now.

His voice breaks through, rough, fraying at the edges. “Why? Why do you keep doing this? Planting daggers, weaving games around me – why? Does it… does it excite you? To watch me break?”

I allow myself a faint curl of the lips. “Because it’s fun.”
And it is the truth.
The simplest truth.

His eyes flash then, some wounded light, some hunger for meaning, for purpose, for anything but cruelty for its own sake. But that is all I give him.

We sit in silence again, the steam of the tea gone cold, the library closing in with its weight of words. I watch him, and he watches me, and the air is as thin as paper between us.

Finally, I sigh. “The dagger,” I say. “Give it back.”

His gaze sharpens.

“I need to put it back where I took it,” I explain. “The place calls for it. The Veil notices absences. I will not let the absence grow too loud.”

He hesitates, breath catching. Then, with visible reluctance, he draws it once more and sets it on the table between us. The silk still clings to it, black on black, a shroud for an execution that never came.

I reach and take it. The weight is familiar, cold, reverent.

But his voice cuts through before I can rise. Low. Cracked. Almost pleading.
“Stop. Stop doing this to me.”

I look at him. His eyes are not furious now. They are hollow, tired, begging for something I cannot give.
“Stop playing with me. Stop making me your game. It’s… inhuman.”

I hold his gaze for a long moment. Let him see nothing in my eyes.

And then I answer, quiet but absolute:
“What you call inhuman, I call truth. We are not men. We are the stillness that comes after men.”

His face tightens at that. I stand, the dagger hidden once more within silk, and the library seems smaller as I turn from him.

Behind me, I hear nothing. Not the scrape of chair, not the breath of words. Only silence.
Silence like a corpse left behind.

Chapter Text

The House That Grief Built XXIV.

I nearly did not recognize him.

Todd sits hunched in the far corner of the chamber, his enormous frame bowed like a broken arch, face bared to the dim. No mask. No polished façade of the plague face. His skin looks so pale, his mouth drawn, and without the beak obscuring it all, he looks–
No. Not human. Never human. But naked in a way that rattles me, as though I am intruding upon something forbidden.

“You,” I breathe, and it’s half an accusation. “Where’s your mask?”

He does not look at me. His hand is limp over his knee, and his nails are dug in so deep I half-expect him to draw blood. When his eyes finally drag upward, they are not the eyes of the towering executioner I know. They are shadows caving in on themselves.

“You asked me once,” he says, voice like gravel sliding down stone, “if I ever slept without it. You were right. I never did.” A hollow pause. “Until last night.”

Something in my chest twists tight. I cross the threshold, cautious but sharp. “Todd, what happened? You look like if a corpse and a reaper had a chil– Sorry. Not a right time.”

He laughs. Or rather tries to, because it cracks in half. “A corpse would envy me.”

Then the words spill out.

The Tenebralis. His hand shaking on the hilt, the rage that boiled out of him like tar. The blade to his throat and the failure of it – the utter, mocking failure, not even a scratch across his flesh. His fury, his despair, his blind turn against Drustan – dagger pressed to his throat, and still the man was calm, taunting, smiling. The revelation: the spell. The empty knowledge that he has been toyed with. Used, as per usual. Moved like a pawn across a board where he will never win.

By the time Todd falls silent, his breathing is ragged. I am no longer cautious, my own nails dig into my palms, and I feel the heat of anger flooding my veins.

“So that’s it,” I whisper, teeth bared. “That’s why he pushed me away. Why he’s been weaving around us, silent and smug. He didn’t want me close because he knew I would see it – this. His games. His leash on you.”

Todd doesn’t answer. His head bows lower, hair falling into his face. He looks like a ruin of himself, like even speaking that much has emptied him.

And me – my fury is wildfire.
The sheer audacity of Drustan. To plant that blade, to coil Todd around it like a strangled vine, to laugh in the face of his collapse. To let me circle blindly, begging for scraps of explanation.

Todd whispers, voice dull, “He said it was fun.”

I want to tear the chamber apart. “Fun?” The word rips from me like poison. “He toys with you like some glass ornament, and calls it fun?”

His silence answers.

I stare at him, at this crumpled titan with no mask, no guard, no shield left between himself and me. And something hardens into resolve.

“No more,” I hiss. “I am done watching him shred you apart piece by piece. If Drustan thinks he can rot us from the inside without consequence, he’s forgotten who else listens. Who else watches.”

Todd’s eyes lift faintly, the barest flicker of interest through the fog. “What do you mean?”

I lean forward. My voice is sharp, low, final.
“I mean I’m taking this to Ursa. If Drustan thinks his clever little games put him above reckoning, then he’s due for a reminder. You may let him play. I will not.”

The silence that follows is heavy, carved from grief and anger alike.

Todd says nothing. His gaze sinks back down, but I can feel it: that small thread of relief pulsing through his ruin, like he wants someone to drag the blade out of his ribs for him.

So I will.

I turn from him, already tasting the fire in my throat, already shaping the words for Ursa.
Drustan’s name will not come out clean. It will drip. It will burn.

This ends with him.

Ursa received them as though nothing in the Veil had shifted. She sat on the high stone chair that was not quite a throne, a coil of dark cloth draped over one shoulder, her dark hair kept neat and tidy, her hands folded with stillness too deliberate to be natural. It was always the same with her: calm as iron. The kind of calm that did not comfort but suffocate.

Lini entered like a storm forced into a too-small vessel, their steps sharp, their jaw set, their fury brimming in every narrowed movement. The chamber swallowed them both, long and echoing, as if waiting to judge which of them would fall silent first.

“Drustan,” Lini said without ceremony, the name spit like broken glass. “He planted the Tenebralis. He put it into Todd’s hands like a gift. He pushed me away because he knew I’d see it, and I did. You can’t ignore this. He’s–“

Ursa cut them short with a flick of her hand. Not even a word, just a gesture. Her voice followed, low and steady:
“I know.”

The air seemed to congeal.

“You–“ Lini faltered, more from shock than hesitation. “You know?”

Ursa inclined her head, her gaze unflinching. “I know that Drustan stole the Tenebralis. I know it left its resting place for a handful of nights. I know it has already been returned.” Her fingers shifted slightly on her lap, as if dusting off an irrelevance. “So why should I care?”

The fury inside Lini sparked white-hot. Their nails bit crescents into their palms. “Because he nearly drove Todd into cutting his own throat with it! Because he twists the Veil to his amusement! Because he toys with all of us like puppets strung to his fingers!”

Ursa did not flinch. Her composure was colder than marble.
“Nearly,” she said. “But not. Do not waste my time with almost. The blade is back where it belongs. The game is finished.”

“Game?” The word tore out of Lini’s chest, half-strangled with disbelief. “He planted a dagger that could end us, and you call it a game? You would let him–“

“Enough.”

The single word cracked the air like a whip.

Ursa rose from her seat, and though she did not raise her voice, her shadow seemed to lengthen across the chamber floor. “Do not presume to dictate what I should tolerate. Do not presume your fury outweighs my judgement.”

Her eyes locked on Lini’s, sharp as a blade at the throat. “Drustan is older than you. Older than Todd. Older than the cracks in the Veil that spat you out. His mind is his own. His sins are his own. And unless you wish to stand in judgement yourself, you will hold your tongue.”

It was a threat. Thinly veiled, deliberate, and lethal.

But Lini did not shrink. Their spine straightened, their lips curling into something between a snarl and a smile. Fear had no place here – fury had burned it out.

“You speak of judgement,” they said, their voice steady in its contempt. “But all I see is a warden’s dog. Teeth bared only when it serves the leash.”

For the first time, Ursa’s eyes narrowed. Not rage, not surprise, but the faintest ghost of something colder.

Lini did not wait for her reply. They turned on their heel, cloak snapping against the chamber air, and walked out. The silence that followed was heavier than any word Ursa might have spoken.

Chapter Text

The Unbearable Stillness of Soul XXV.

The sound of their steps filled the corridor. Measured. Clipped. Louder than they intended, though the stone swallowed sound and returned it as whispers. Lini’s hands curled inside their sleeves, knuckles rigid, as though the fury burning in their chest needed a cage.

Drustan’s door loomed at the far end of the passage. No door truly loomed in the Veil – they all looked the same, carved from the same bone-white stone, lined with the same thin seams of shadow – but this one seemed to carry a weight, a waiting, as if it leaned toward them with anticipation.

They told themselves not to hesitate. Not this time. They would confront him, demand answers, strip away that calm mask of his until he had no choice but to speak plainly.

But as their hand lifted to strike the door, a voice – his voice – slid from within. Smooth, patient, always waiting.

“You came.”

Lini froze.

The door shifted open of its own accord, silent on its hinges, revealing the chamber inside. Drustan was there, of course – he was always exactly where he needed to be – seated at the long, low table that bore the debris of a half-played game of stones. His hands rested loosely against the edge, long fingers tracing invisible patterns, though his eyes were already fixed on them.

He spoke again before they could form a word. “I regret the way I handled things.”

The sentence was quiet, composed, like the drop of a single pebble into still water.

Lini blinked, their breath stuttering in their throat. Regret. The word caught them off guard, snagging against all the fury they had brought here.

“I pushed you aside,” Drustan went on, as though confessing to some minor misstep. “I thought it necessary. Perhaps it wasn’t. Perhaps I misjudged.” His tone never faltered, even, almost soft. “If so… then I regret it.”

It sounded like an apology. It tasted like one. But beneath e smooth cadence, there was something missing – the weight of admission, the shape of sincerity. A shadow where substance should have been.

Lini’s jaw tightened. They had prepared for combat, not… this.

“You–“ Their voice scraped. They had to swallow and start again. “You regret it?”

A faint curve touched his mouth, not quite a smile, not quite not. “Does that surprise you?”

It did. And it didn’t. It was Drustan – everything he said sounded like the truth and a lie at once.

Lini stepped inside, closing the distance until they stood before the table. The air felt heavier here, thick with the residue of his presence. “You threw me aside like I was nothing. Like a nuisance.”

“Perhaps a nuisance.” His eyes never wavered from theirs, calm and unblinking. “But never nothing.”

The words slid into them, slippery, impossible to grasp. They wanted to stay angry, to lash out – but the certainty of his tone made them falter. He sounded like he meant it. And yet some part of them knew: this was Drustan’s way. Always to leave the listener suspended, always to lace comfort with confusion.

“You should have told me.” Lini muttered, clinging to the one solid truth they had. “You should have said something. About the Tenebralis, about Todd.”

Drustan leaned back slightly, his hand brushing over a single stone on the board as though weighing its placement. “And if I had? Would you have stood aside? Or would you have thrown yourself between?”

Their teeth clenched. “You don’t get to decide that for me.”

“No.” He inclined his head, as though conceding a minor point in a game. “But I did. And now I regret it. That is all.”

Again that word. Regret. Not sorry. Not wrong. A word that skirted the edges of meaning, a word that gave nothing away but suggested everything.

Lini hated him for it. And hated themselves for the small, unwelcome shift in their chest – the part of them that wanted to believe, to accept, to let the fury soften just an inch.

Silence stretched between them. The stones on the board gleamed faintly in the dim light, frozen mid-play.

Finally Lini exhaled, sharp through their nose. “Fine.”

The word cost them more than they liked to admit.

Drustan tilted his head slightly, watching them as if measuring some invisible scale. “Fine,” he echoed softly. Then, after a beat, “but I suspect you didn’t come here only for that.”

The fury in their chest flared anew. Yes. That was why they had come. Not to be soothed with hollow regrets. To demand, to expose, to tear away the veil of calm he wrapped around himself.

“There’s another problem.” Lini said, their voice flat, stripped of all softness.

Drustan’s brow lifted a fraction, the closest he came to surprise. “Is there?”

“Yes.”

His hands stilled over the stones. The chamber seemed to lean closer, listening. “Tell me.”

Lini met his gaze, steady now, their anger crystallizing into cold resolve. “Not here. Come with me.”

Drustan did not move at once. His eyes narrowed ever so slightly, studying them as though they were one more piece in his endless game. But then he rose, smooth and unhurried, every line of his body composed.

“As you wish.”

The Purgatory never changed.

It was a place made of neither shadow nor light, but a thin suspension between both – an endless sea of grey, broken only by the slow drift of souls. They floated like motes of ash in a breathless wind, each one slipping through unseen channels, passing silently from life into death.

Order ruled here. Order, and inevitability. Nothing lingered. Nothing resisted. Nothing stopped.

Except for her.

Her soul rested where it had no right to rest. Not drifting, not shifting, not dissolving. Julia’s soul remained still, a pale form curled within itself, its glow dimmed but not extinguished. A century had passed since her last death, and still she lay unmoving.

Lini stood at the edge of the great plane, arms crossed, eyes narrowed, their breath caught in a tightness they dd not want to admit was worry. They had waited, watched, counted the slow tolling of time – the century should have been enough. Reincarnation always came. Always.

But not this time.

Behind them, Drustan lingered. He was not the type to watch quietly, yet he said nothing at first. His gaze lingered on Julia’s unmoving soul as though studying an unfinished puzzle, the kind whose missing pieces could never be found. His presence felt heavier here, as though the Purgatory itself bent slightly under his patience.

Finally, Lini broke the silence.

“It should have happened already.”

Their voice was tight, low, almost bitten off.

Drustan inclined his head, a slow movement. “Yes.”

Lini turned, waiting for him to offer more, but he did not. His eyes remained fixed on the soul, his hands clasped loosely behind his back.

“Then why isn’t it?” Lini pressed. Their words rang out into the still air. “What’s keeping her here? Why is she stuck?”

Drustan’s expression did not change. He studied the still glow before them, calm as ever, but there was something beneath it – a flicker of calculation, of unease so carefully disguised it might have been mistaken for nothing at all.

“She is bound,” he said at last. “By what, or by whom other than Todd… I cannot yet say.”

Lini’s throat tightened. Bound. That word carried to much weight, too much danger.

“Then shouldn’t we–“ They began, but faltered. What could they even suggest? To meddle with it? To force the soul onward? To unravel what tether held it here? Every option tasted wrong.

Drustan, as though reading the unfinished thought, turned his gaze on them. His eyes were sharp, but his voice remained smooth. “We do nothing.”

The words struck like a gavel.

“Nothing?” Lini hissed. “You see this, and you say nothing?”

“What else would you have me say?” He tilted his head slightly, as though the question were not rhetorical but genuine. “Would you have me claim power over the cycle itself? Would you ask me to pry apart the binding of a soul I did not place?”

Lini clenched their fists, furious at his composure. Furious, too, because he was right. To meddle was unthinkable. To leave it was unbearable.

“She should be gone by now…” Lini said again, quieter this time. The words felt hollow in their mouth.

“Yes.”

That single word again, flat and final.

For a long moment, they stood in silence, the unmoving soul before them like a wound that refused to close. Other souls drifted by, but hers did not join them. She was apart, untouched, resisting.

Lini’s anger ebbed slowly, bleeding into unease. They turned their head slightly, watching Drustan from the corner of their eye. He was too calm. Always too calm. But here – in this place, before this stillness – his calm seemed different. Not practiced, not false, but deliberate. As though if he let go of it, even for a moment, something vast and terrible would spill out.

Lini swallowed hard. Their words came hesitant, almost careful. “Do we… tell him?”

The name was not spoken. It didn’t have to be.

Drustan’s head turned slightly, and for a heartbeat Lini thought he would dismiss the question, tell them it was pointless, forbid them from interfering. That would have been easier, expected.

But instead, his lips curved faintly – not into a smile, but into something measured.

“Yes.”

Lini blinked. “Yes?”

Drustan’s gaze returned to the unmoving soul, his tone soft, even. “We tell him. He should know.”

The air shifted in Lini’s chest, surprise loosening something they hadn’t realized had grown tight. They had braced themselves for his refusal, for another wall of calm cruelty. Instead, this – agreement. Unexpected. Almost disarimg.

“You mean it?”

“Would I say it if I did not?” Drustan’s voice carried that familiar slipperiness, but for once it did not feel like a game. It felt… settled. Heavy with meaning he would not articulate.

Lini found themselves staring at him, searching his face for some hidden angle, some cruel trick. But his gaze remained steady, and for once they would not parse him.

A small, bitter laugh escaped their throat. “You keep surprising me.”

“That,” he said, “is the point.”

Silence followed, but it was different now. Less suffocating, less sharp. Still heavy, yes – the Purgatory would never allow anything else – but tempered with something almost like resolve.

The soul of Julia remained unmoving before them, still bound by chains unseen. They could do nothing for it. Not yet.

But at least – at last – Todd would know.

Todd’s voice was already in the air, low and strained, as though they had stepped into the middle of a confession.

“I don’t understand…” He murmured, his hands resting on his knees, fingers flexing, restless without purpose. “She should be gone by now. She should have been reborn. But if she hasn’t…” He trailed off, shaking his head slowly. His glasses caught the light, shadowing his eyes behind the thin, rectangular lenses. “It makes no sense.”

The three of them sat together in a chamber more empty than most – no game-board this time, no scattered stones. Only a low table, bare, and the press of silence that seemed to seep in from the Veil itself.

Todd’s mask, that familiar porcelain beak, no longer hid him. His face was unguarded, sharp and weary in its angles, dark hair loose, strands slipping forward toward his temples. It lent every word a heavier weight, as though spoken without armor.

Drustan leaned back slightly in his chair, studying him. His eyes were shadowed glass. “Then what do you intend to do with that truth?”

The question landed like a blade laid flat on the table – not cutting yet, but gleaming with the promise that it could.

Todd blinked at him, lips parting, then closing again. He frowned, rubbed the bridge of his nose beneath his glasses, as though hoping the gesture would summon clarity. “I don’t know,” he admitted. The words came out rough, unpolished. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. If she’s not moving, then–“ He broke off again, his voice fraying at the edges.

Lini sat rigidly at his side, their jaw tense, eyes darting between them. The weight of Todd’s uncertainty sat heavily in the air.

“You don’t know.” Drustan repeated, his tone flat. His fingers tapped once against the table, then stilled. “You claim to have bound her soul across centuries. You carry the weight of that curse. And now, faced with its first fracture, you have no notion of what to do with it?”

Todd’s eyes snapped up, sharp, defensive – but the fire faltered almost instantly, replaced by the heavy exhaustion that had haunted him since Julia’s last passing. He looked down again, shoulders shrinking. “I don’t. I can’t–“ His voice caught. He forced it through. “I can’t think straight when it comes to her. You know that.”

The admission hung between them, raw in its simplicity.

Drustan’s expression flickered – not enough to call change, but enough to suggest something beneath. Irritation, perhaps. Or disappointment. Or a sharpened interest.

Lini exhaled sharply through their nose, breaking the tension. “Then maybe it’s not for you to decide.”

Both men looked at them.

Lini’s arms folded tight across their chest, their gaze steady now, fierce. “You’ve both been circling this like it’s some game. You”–they shot Drustan a glance sharp enough to cut–“testing, prodding, playing at control. And you”–Todd flinched slightly at the weight of their stare–“lost in your grief. But someone has to make a choice. Some has to decide what comes next.”

The silence deepened.

Drustan’s lips curved faintly, that not-smile he wore when the world bent into an interesting shape. “You sound as though you already have an idea.”

Lini didn’t answer at one. Their jaw flexed, their breath slow, deliberate, as though steadying themselves against the gravity of what they were about to suggest.

Todd shifted, his voice low. “Do you?”

Their silence was its own answer.

Drustan leaned forward slightly, one elbow resting against the table, his hand curled loose beneath his chin. His eyes gleamed with that too-calm patience, the kind that set every nerve on edge.

“Well, then,” he said softly, the words almost purring in the stillness. “Let us hear it.”

Chapter Text

Mission: Implausible XXVI.

You learn a lot about silence when you work among the dead.

The way it breathes. The way it curves around voices like smoke curling through cold air. Silence is not absence – it’s waiting. I’ve learned to hear the waiting.

That’s why I was crouched behind a cracked archway in the Veil’s northern quarter, where the light never quite chooses a color. I wasn’t supposed to be there. Then again, I’m not supposed to do a lot of things.

Ursa’s voice carried through the stillness like a dull blade being drawn from its sheath – even, deliberate, not a trace of hesitation. “…and you’re certain you didn’t notice anything unusual in the last cycle?”

I pressed closer to the wall. The stone hummed faintly against my shoulder, as if the Veil itself wanted to eavesdrop with me.

The reaper she spoke to – tall, forgettable, voice like damp paper – shuffled his boots. “No, Ma’am. Purgatory’s been stable as far as I can tell. The currents hold steady. No interference, no disturbances. Not since…” He trailed off, wisely swallowing the name that wanted to come out.

Julia.

I almost laughed. The cowardice in his silence was almost comforting. At least someone here remembered to be afraid of names.

Ursa didn’t seem amused. “Not since what?” she asked, one brow lifting. The patch over her left eye caught the Veil’s pale shimmer, making her look even more like something carved from law and consequence.

The reaper hesitated, then murmured, “Not since that one human soul lingered longer than expected.”

Ah. So they did realize.

Ursa stepped closer. I could hear the faint scrape of her coat’s buckle, the soft rattle of her scythe’s chain. “Longer than expected,” she repeated. “Do you have any idea why?”

The reaper’s reply came quick, defensive. “No, Ma’am. Thought it might’ve been an aftereffect of the last plague wave – temporal distortion. It happens.”

Ursa made a soft sound – not quite laughter, not quite disdain. “Temporal distortion,” she echoed, as if tasting the words and finding them unripe. “Interesting theory. But incorrect.”

The air shifted then – I swear it did. The way it does when someone dangerous stops pretending to be harmless.

“Do you know what’s funny?” she said, her tone almost conversational. “The veil at Caelum Obscura was left open. The same one where the Tenebralis was stored.”

My breath hitched, and I bit it back quick. The reaper said nothing. I could almost see him shrinking.

Ursa continued, voice low but cutting. “Something went missing from that chamber. Something was returned not long after. And around that same time… a certain human soul ceased to follow its pattern.”

The reaper fumbled for words. “You think those are connected?”

“I don’t think,” she said. “I know.”

Every muscle in my body turned to ice.
She knows.

Ursa shouldn’t have known about Julia’s cycle at all. Only a handful of us ever did – and even we barely spoke of it. But there she was, saying it aloud like it was a riddle she’d already solved.

The reaper tried to keep up. “Then… what do we do?”

Ursa’s reply was a slow, deliberate smile I could hear. “We do nothing yet. We observe. I intend to speak with the Wardens. If decay has reached the Purgatory, they will want to know.”

No. No, no, no.

If the Wardens found out that Julia’s soul was the one behaving differently, that she was being held in the Purgatory – or worse, that Todd had cursed her – they would tear the entire Veil apart to find the cause. They’d unmake him. They’d unmake all of us if they thought the order was compromised.

The reaper murmured something halfheartedly, something about “protocol”, but Ursa silenced him with a flick of her hand. “You are dismissed. This conversation never occurred.”

He vanished, relief dripping from his shadow. I stayed still, barely breathing.

Ursa lingered. She turned slightly, looking toward where the reaper had gone – and then, just for a heartbeat, her head tilted as if she’d heard something else. A whisper that didn’t exist.

Her one good eye scanned the archway – the very wall that hid me.

I didn’t move. Not a twitch.

I’ve survived Drustan’s patience before. I could survive Ursa’s suspicion.

But for that one suspended moment, I could swear she saw me. The way her gaze cut through the air – precise, knowing, dissecting. Then she exhaled slowly, straightened her coat, and walked away into the misted corridor. I waited until her footsteps vanished, until even the Veil stopped holding its breath.

Only then did I allow mine to leave my lungs in a shaking, quiet laugh.

“Of course you’d know,” I muttered under my breath, words bleeding into the dark. “Of course the Wardens’ favorite watchdog would have her nose buried in the wrong grave.”

My pulse still hadn’t slowed. I pressed my back against the wall, staring into the emptiness where she’d stood.

Ursa was dangerous – not because she was cruel, but because she was devout. Her loyalty wasn’t to the balance or the reapers or even Death itself. It was to them – the Wardens. The faceless, voiceless architects who held the strings of the entire order and called it purity.

And now she was sniffing around Julia’s soul – Todd’s Julia – the only thread keeping him from unraveling again.

If she reached the Wardens, it was over.

I flexed my hand, half wishing I could crush the thought the way I would a moth between my fingers.

I couldn’t let her speak to them. Not now. Not ever.

The Purgatory was still stable for the moment, the Veil humming its monotonous lullaby. But I could feel it – the faint tremor beneath the surface, the kind of imbalance that precedes a storm. The decay of order creeping in, slow and soft and unseen.

And Ursa… Ursa was about to light a beacon straight into it.

My chest tightened as I pushed off the wall. I didn’t have a plan yet. That’s Drustan’s job, usually – the scheming, the manipulation, the part where someone gets stabbed emotionally or otherwise. But this time, it couldn’t be him.

This time, it had to be me.

I glanced once more down the corridor she’d vanished into. The faint smell of iron and cold air lingered. Her presence always left that – like steel dragged across stone.

“I’ve played with worse odds,” I told the silence, forcing my voice to steady. “And prettier dogs.”

The Veil didn’t answer. It never does, when you actually need it to.

I slipped through the empty halls, every echo of my steps sounding too loud, too deliberate. The Veil seemed to twist around me – its corridors looping in ways they shouldn’t, the lights dimming in places they never did before.

The decay was everywhere now, like rot beneath fresh paint. You could still pretend everything was fine, but the cracks hummed if you pressed your ear to them.

I reached the edge of the corridor where Ursa’s quarters began. Closed doors, metallic scent. She was long gone. Good.

I leaned against the wall and let myself breathe again, the weight of what I’d overheard still crawling under my skin.

The Wardens. If she went to them, she’d expose everything. Julia’s stillness, Todd’s curse, Drustan’s theft of the Tenebralis – the entire rotten chain. She wouldn’t even need proof. All she had to do was imply corruption, and the Wardens would purge it out of paranoia.

For all their supposed devotion to order, they were the most predictable creatures in existence.

I wanted to laugh. Instead, I whispered, “You really don’t know what you’re digging up, do you, Ursa?”

A faint sound behind me made me freeze – a scraping noise, quick and small. I turned, pulse jumping. Nothing there.
Still, I moved. I’m not stupid. The Veil sometimes listens too closely.

By the time I reached the crossing back into the lower quarters, I already knew what I had to do.

Stop her.

“Guess it’s me versus the Warden’s goodest girl,” I muttered, smirking despite the dread coiled tight in my gut. “Wouldn’t be the first time someone mistook a fool for a threat.”

Still, the thought clung to me like smoke as I slipped deeper into the Veil. Ursa knew.
And if Ursa knew…

The Wardens wouldn’t be far behind.

“…so she knows,” Lini said, pacing, voice sharp and fast like glass under pressure. “She knows something’s off in the Purgatory, and she’s poking around like she’s already got the scent. She even mentioned the veil at Caelum Obscura.”

Todd sat at the edge of the table, elbows braced against his knees, head tilted slightly, like he was still trying to anchor himself in the conversation. The faint shimmer of his glasses caught the candlelight, hiding his eyes. “And she said she’d go to the Wardens,” he murmured. It wasn’t a question.

Lini stopped pacing long enough to meet his gaze. “She said she intends to. I don’t think she’s spoken to them yet.”

Drustan, standing by the far wall with his arms folded, looked as though he’d been carved into stillness. The light from the lamp burned gold across the angles of his face, but his expression was unreadable – a painting left half-finished. He had been silent since Lini began recounting what happened.

Only when their voice trailed off did he speak.
“She’s testing for reaction,” he said softly. “She wants to see who flinches first.”

Todd’s head rose. “And what do we do about that?”

Drustan’s gaze slid to him – sharp, calculating, with that familiar cold gleam that made every word sound deliberate. “We don’t flinch.”

Lini let out a short, humorless laugh. “Brilliant. Let’s just stand still while Ursa digs up the only thing that could ruin all of us. Perfect plan, as always.”

Drustan’s expression didn’t shift. “You should know by now, standing still doesn’t mean doing nothing.”

Lini scowled, running a hand through their hair. “She’s too close, Drustan. If she gets even a whiff of Julia’s name, she’ll drag it to the Wardens. You think they’ll care about who broke the cycle? No. They’ll just tear down the Purgatory and everyone in it until they find something to blame.”

Todd’s jaw tensed, the smallest motion betraying something beneath the surface. He still hadn’t spoken her name, not once since they began. Julia remained suspended between them – an unspoken weight.

“Then she cannot reach them,” Drustan said.

His tone was quiet, but final – the kind of tone that made the air feel narrower.

Lini turned toward him, incredulous. “You think I don’t know that? You think I didn’t try to stop her?”

“I think you’ve bought us time,” Drustan said. His gaze softened, just barely. “And time is more than most get before the Wardens take notice.”

Todd exhaled, long and quiet, almost like a laugh, but without any joy in it. “You make it sound like time’s a coin we can just spend however we like.”

Drustan’s eyes flicked toward him again, and for a heartbeat, something like sympathy moved behind his composure. Then it was gone. “I don’t spend it, Todd. I gamble it.”

Lini groaned. “Of course you do. The Veil’s falling apart and you’re still playing dice with everything that breathes.”

Drustan ignored them. His eyes had gone distant – thinking, calculating, a mind like an unfolding labyrinth. “If Ursa is involved,” he said at last, “then the decay has reached further than I thought. The Wardens must have sent her to investigate a specific disturbance.”

“Julia,” Todd murmured. His voice cracked just slightly around her name, like it had forgotten how to hold it.

Drustan’s eyes met his again – calm, sharp, assessing. “Yes. Julia.”

Lini leaned forward on the table. “You think Ursa’s the reason her soul’s stuck?”

“I think she’s interfering,” Drustan said. “Whether by order or by instinct, it doesn’t matter. If she’s tampering with the Purgatory, she’s holding the soul in stasis – and the Wardens will claim it’s ‘preservation of order.’”

Todd’s hands tightened together until his knuckles whitened. “Then what?”

Drustan tilted his head, eyes half-lidded. “Then she’s made herself the custodian of your mistake.”

Lini shot him a glare. “You call that a mistake?”

He smiled faintly. “Oh, I call it many things. But none of them will help us now.”

The silence that followed was heavy – a kind of slow, creeping suffocation that felt like the Veil itself was listening.

Todd stood, pacing toward the window, though there was nothing to see beyond it but mist. “So she’s keeping Julia from… moving on.” His voice was quieter now, steadier, but not calm – something frayed beneath it. “All this time. And you’re telling me there’s nothing to be done?”

Drustan didn’t answer immediately. He let Todd’s words linger in the room, let them rot a little in the quiet before he spoke.
“Nothing simple,” he said finally. “But I do think there’s something to be done.”

Lini turned, suspicion flaring in their expression. “And what’s that supposed to mean?”

Drustan pushed himself off the wall. The motion was slow, measured, like he was stepping back into a mask he’d worn too long. “Ursa believes she holds the truth. That makes her careless. If I play her long enough, she’ll show me her hand.”

Lini frowned. “You’re talking like this is a game.”

“It is,” Drustan said, his tone barely rising. “Only difference is that the stakes are no longer just ours.”

Todd turned back toward him, expression unreadable behind the faint reflection on his glasses. “And what’s your move, then?”

Drustan looked at him for a long moment, and something in that silence felt wrong – not cruel, but weary. Weary in a way that meant danger.

“My move,” he said, “isn’t pretty.”

Lini’s lips parted, but the look on his face kept them from interrupting.

He stepped closer to the table, voice lowering, soft but certain – the calm before something terrible. “Ursa thinks she’s guarding decay from spreading. She doesn’t realize she’s already become part of it. If the balance wants to rot, it’ll need a sacrifice. I just have to make sure it’s not ours.”

He smiled then – the kind of smile that meant nothing good was coming. “And lucky for us, I’ve never been squeamish about ugly work.”

The light flickered once – or maybe the air just shifted. The Veil always did that when he spoke like this, when something inside him stirred awake.

Lini looked uneasy for the first time. Todd just watched, quiet and distant, like he was trying to memorize a man he no longer recognized.

Drustan met both their gazes, unblinking.
“I’ll handle Ursa,” he said. “But understand this – what comes next will not be clean.”

No one answered.

The silence that followed felt like the world holding its breath before it breaks.

And when Drustan finally turned away, the faintest hint of a grin ghosted across his lips.

“After all,” he murmured, more to himself than to them, “a plan worth making is rarely a beautiful one.”

Chapter Text

I Have No Mouth, and I Must Obey XXVII.


The Purgatorial corridors whisper.
They always do.

The walls here do not breathe, but they hum faintly, as if an echo of a heart had once been built into the stone and left to decay over centuries. I hear it when I walk – the low, continuous tremor that settles in the hollow of my chest. It is not a sound. It is a condition. The air bends to it, and so do I.

I count my steps as I move. It helps.
One, two, three, four – the measure of certainty. The weight of boots on marble that remembers every stride. I have been walking this path for longer than most souls last. Repetition ensures precision, and precision ensures peace. Thought is a byproduct, not a requirement.

Fifty-three steps from my station to the entrance of the lower archives. Another one hundred and twenty until the library doors. Numbers make sense, they never change.

I have never believed in coincidence. Coincidence implies randomness, and randomness is a human concept. We do not operate under such luxuries. Everything that happens here – every echo, every flicker of movement, every silence – occurs because someone willed it. I remind myself of this as I walk.

The air in the hall grows heavier as I approach the library. The lamps here burn with a dull orange, as though filtered through layers of dust. I prefer it this way. Too much light interferes with thought. Shadows make for better company. They are predictable; they stay where I expect them to.

My shift ended a while ago. I remained behind regardless. I do not need rest, but I require quiet – a place devoid of the murmuring of lesser reapers, of the endless cataloguing of souls, of the hiss of ink in ledgers.
The library fulfills that purpose.

The door opens soundlessly. I expected it to. The hinges are charmed to avoid disruption. A good precaution – one of The Wardens values silence above all else.
Inside, the light is not made by flame, but by the slow phosphorescence of aged vellum and bone dust. Shelves rise past sight, filled with volumes bound in material both organic and otherwise. A smell of clean parchment, faint decay, and orderly disuse.

My body relaxes automatically.
That is, it ceases unnecessary readiness. Relaxation is not a term applicable to my condition.

There is symmetry here. Every spine aligned, every title inscribed in a hand I know by pattern. I was among those who catalogued these once, centuries ago, before my assignment changed. I could trace the entire system by memory – left wing for mortal eras, right wing for divine decrees, the center stacks reserved for transitional records. The record of Julia’s reincarnation cycles would fall under Divine Anomalies: Section Four, Subset Three-A. It has not been updated in longer than it should.

I am not supposed to notice that.

Still, I did.

It began as a silence – the wrong kind. Souls pass through, and each leaves a faint numerical trace, a rhythm that flows through the administrative lattice of Purgatory. Julia’s trace has always pulsed at pretty predictable intervals. But now, there is absence. A vacancy where recurrence should exist. Not death, not rest – interruption.

I do not believe in coincidence.

When I mentioned the anomaly to the subordinate reaper earlier, he did not comprehend. His confusion was evident – slight hesitation, delayed response. I dismissed him. His use was limited.

I should have reported directly to the Wardens.
I still might.
That would be the correct procedure.
Yet there is something in the way – an irregularity in my own response that I cannot define. It is not fear. It resembles… unease, though such an emotion should not apply.

I approach the nearest shelf and run my gloved fingers along the spines. The bindings whisper against the fabric.
There is satisfaction in the pattern. Order creates safety. Safety produces compliance. Compliance maintains existence.

My hand stops at a gap between tomes. The slot is narrow, the dust evenly divided – the book removed recently, then replaced by someone meticulous. The catalog should reflect this alteration.
It does not.

A discrepancy.
Noted.

I continue deeper. The floor tiles echo faintly, though they are designed not to. I am not alone.

The realization arrives without emotion. Simply fact. I scan the dim expanse – the table rows, the stair spirals, the stretches of bound silence. Not out of fear. I do not fear. Out of protocol. Unidentified presence requires classification before engagement.

“Identify yourself,” I say into the dim.

Silence replies, then breath. A low hum, amused, rolling from the deeper aisle.

When he steps into view, it is like the light rearranges itself around him. Seated at one of the marble desks beneath a fractured skylight is a figure I recognize immediately, though recognition is not pleasant.

Drustan.

The name surfaces like a classified entry from an index long sealed.
His posture is relaxed – deceptively so. One arm resting on the table, the other absently flipping a page of an open ledger that he does not appear to read. His presence carries with it the particular stillness of those who make idleness into a weapon. Even the air seems reluctant to disturb him.

He is not supposed to be here either.

“Drustan.” My voice is a steady instrument, devoid of inflection. “You do not have clearance for this sector.”

He looks up. His eyes – color indeterminate in this dimness – settle on me with what might be amusement. Or interest. Or calculation. He is difficult to categorize because he does not conform. His reports are consistent, his results acceptable, but his methods remain unquantifiable. The Wardens tolerate him for his efficiency. I do not understand their indulgence.

“I wasn’t aware you were counting clearances tonight,” he says. His tone is conversational, soft, deliberately slow. “You always make this place sound like a crime scene when you talk.”

“I am maintaining protocol.”

“Of course you are.” A faint smile touches his mouth. “Always do.”

He turns another page, the gesture languid. The movement of his hand leaves faint trails of shadow, like a stain of ink that refuses to dry. My gaze flickers once – involuntary – then fixes on the text in front of him.

It is not a ledger.
It is a record book – Divine Anomalies: Section Four, Subset Three-A.

He has the file.
The missing entry.

I register this. No alarm manifests. I merely process.

“That record is restricted,” I say. “Only The Wardens and their direct auxiliaries have authorization.”

He leans back in the chair, watching me. “You’re their left hand, aren’t you? That makes you direct. But me? I’m just a curiosity. Still–“ he closes the book slowly, deliberately, “–it’s funny what falls into curious hands.”

“Return it.”

“Of course,” he murmurs. But he does not move.

For a long moment, the silence becomes dense – palpable. The library’s ambient hum adjusts, shifting subtly towards a lower frequency, as though reacting to our presence. Drustan remains motionless. I remain standing. The symmetry between us is almost perfect – he, all ease and chaos beneath composure; I, calculation shaped into flesh.

“You were going to speak to The Wardens,” he says finally.

“That is my responsibility.”

“About the anomaly.”

I do not answer. Silence is confirmation.

He exhales softly, more an act than a necessity. “Do you think they’ll like hearing it from you?”

“I report deviations. That is procedure.”

“You think it’s just a deviation?”

I hesitate. A misstep. “The records are incomplete.”

“Not incomplete,” he corrects gently. “Interrupted. There’s a difference.”

The light from the skylight fractures further, catching on his hair, outlining him in the faint glow of old illumination charms. He should not look so at ease here – among order, among rules. He disrupts structure merely by existing within it. And yet he does so elegantly.

“You should not have accessed that,” I repeat.

He tilts his head. “You shouldn’t have noticed it was missing.”

A pause.
He smiles faintly when I don’t reply. “Relax, Ursa. I’m not accusing you. I’m just saying – curiosity cuts both ways.”

“I do not experience curiosity.”

“Sure you don’t,” he says, voice low. “You just came here after hours, alone, to stand among old paper and silence because you… what, like the ambiance?”

He says it like a joke. It is not received as one.

“My presence here is inconsequential.”

“Nothing about you is inconsequential. The Wardens made sure of that.”

There is a weight to the words that I do not want to examine. Instead, I focus on procedure. “You will surrender the record. I will return it.”

“And then?”

“I will report your breach.”

“You won’t.”

The stillness between us fractures in the smallest, most imperceptible ways – like cracks forming under ice. I should not react. I do not. But there is something in his tone, a certainty that does not come from arrogance, but from foreknowledge.

He knows something.
Perhaps he knows everything.

“Why?” I ask.

He closes the book and sets it down gently. “Because you know something you shouldn’t, and I think you came here to talk yourself out of doing anything about it.”

I look at him. “You presume too much.”

“I usually do.” He gestures to the chair opposite him. “Sit down, Ursa. We need to talk.”

The words are not an order – not precisely. But they carry weight nonetheless, sinking through the air like a decree from something older than hierarchy.

And for the first time in a very long while, I hesitate before moving.

He says it quietly. Like a man offering peace, not violence.

“Sit down, Ursa.” He repeats.

I do.

Not out of obedience, nor respect – but because there is an efficiency in sitting. Standing prolongs conflict. Sitting brings it closer, compresses it, makes it surgical.

The chair is cold beneath me, the kind of cold that comes from centuries of disuse. Dust does not settle on these surfaces. Nothing natural survives here long enough to leave a trace.

Drustan watches me from across the table, his hands loosely folded over the closed record. He could almost pass for harmless. The expression in his eyes is difficult to read; it bends, like light through warped glass.

“I didn’t come here to accuse you,” he says. “But we both know that what’s happening with the mortal girl – Julia – isn’t the only secret running through this place.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Oh, you do.”

A pause, sharp enough to cut through silence.

He leans forward slightly. The faint illumination from the ceiling halo catches his face – calm, composed, terribly human in a way that I never will be.

“I know about your little human incident.”

The words are not shouted. They are placed. Each syllable deliberate, precise, as though etched into stone.

My mind halts. Thought, so methodical a moment ago, freezes mid-pattern. The soundless hum in the library deepens, as though reacting to a shift in temperature.

“That is irrelevant.”

Drustan smiles faintly – not cruelly, not kindly. The kind of smile one gives when truth has already been unearthed and there is no point burying it again.

“Do you really think so?”

“Yes.”

“Then tell me why you haven’t told The Wardens.”

I do not answer.

He tilts his head. “I can see it in your face – or what passes for one. You’re still trying to calculate the minimal loss. How much truth you can afford before the structure cracks.”

“There is no structure to crack.”

“Of course there is,” he says softly. “You. Her. The one you let die.”

My throat tightens – an involuntary spasm. The words slide through the air like a needle.

He shouldn’t know. No one should.

“Don’t,” I say. It comes out too fast, unmeasured.

Drustan’s gaze sharpens. He smells blood in the air – metaphorical, but real enough.

“She was mortal, wasn’t she?” he continues. “A woman. Young. A scholar, maybe – or a healer? You liked the way she spoke, the way she didn’t look at you with fear.”

“Enough.”

“You never told her what you were. You wanted to, but you didn’t. You convinced yourself it was mercy.”

The air is thinning. Or perhaps I am.

His tone never rises. That’s the cruelty of it – he doesn’t need to. He flays without force, dissects with a surgeon’s calm.

“You watched her die,” he says. “You could’ve intervened. You could’ve offered her the same curse Todd gave his little mortal. But you didn’t. You let her choke on her own lungs because you were afraid of what The Wardens would do to you.”

I press my palms flat on the table. They tremble – imperceptibly, but enough that I know. The tremor climbs through my arms, through the spine that has never truly belonged to me.

“She was not meant to live forever,” I say. “To bind a mortal’s soul is to corrupt the fabric that holds this place together.”

Drustan’s smile doesn’t reach his eyes. “So you did the noble thing. You let her rot.”

“She was dying,” I snap – and the word snap is foreign on my tongue. “The disease was irreversible. She was suffering.”

“And you,” he says, leaning closer, “were learning what it means to suffer.”

The silence collapses between us.

If I could breathe, I would be gasping. If I could sweat, I would be drenched. Instead, I sit in perfect stillness, my voice locked behind a wall of control that is rapidly eroding.

“You think The Wardens would forgive you if they knew?” he continues. “You think they wouldn’t see it as the same sin Todd committed? Attachment, corruption, infection of divine order. They’d carve you out of this existence the same way they would the others.”

I look at him – really look – and there is no malice in his expression. Only accuracy. He is not trying to destroy me. He is merely stating fact, the way one might recite a post-mortem.

“You don’t understand what she was,” I say.

“Then tell me.”

“She was…” The word fractures. “She was ordinary.”

Drustan waits.

“She did not pray. She did not ask for blessings. She never once looked for salvation. She laughed when I appeared before her. Said I looked tired.”

I can almost hear her voice again.

My sweet angel, she’d say.
She did not know how far off she was from the truth, her voice a sound that doesn’t belong in this sterile place. Rough, soft-edged, full of something unquantifiable.

“I was supposed to take her,” I continue. “That night. But she asked me to wait. Just for a little while. Long enough to finish a letter.”

Drustan’s expression doesn’t change.

“So I waited,” I say. “And when she was done, she handed it to me. Asked if I could deliver it, though she knew I couldn’t. It was a letter to herself. A confession she’d never make aloud.”

“What did it say?”

“That she’d been waiting all her life for someone who wasn’t afraid of her dying.”

The words leave me like a wound reopening.

Drustan sits back. His fingers drum once on the table. The sound is quiet, measured.

“And you think that makes you different from Todd?”

“I did not curse her.”

“No. You let her die. The difference is cosmetic.”

My voice lowers, brittle. “You speak as though mercy and cruelty and identical.”

“They are,” he says simply. “You just picked the version that lets you sleep.”

Sleep. I do not sleep. Not really. But I understand what he means.

Drustan rises slowly, his hand brushing the book spine. “You see, Ursa – you and Todd aren’t opposites. You’re reflections. He clung. You abandoned. Both of you broke the same rule.”

He steps closer. His voice softens – dangerously so. “the only reason you still have your post is because no one knows. Yet.”

I can feel my own stillness harden into something defensive, glacial. “You intend to tell them.”

“If I wanted to tell them,” he says, “I already would have.”

“Then why say any of this?”

“Because I need you to understand that none of us are clean. Not me, not you, not Todd. You think you’re The Wardens’ hand, but you’re just their instrument. They’ll turn you on him, on me, on anyone – when it suits them.” He says. “And also because I simply need you.”

“For what?”

His smile is all teeth this time. “For what’s coming.”

He steps back, sweeping his cloak from the chair. The tension eases – not because it dissipates, but because it condenses into something heavier.

“I know you think Julia’s gone because Todd tampered with her curse,” he says, glancing once at the ledger. “But what if I told you it’s not just his doing? What if someone higher up made sure she stayed gone for this century?”

I watch him closely. “You mean The Wardens.”

He doesn’t answer what’s obvious.

“You’ve been their hand so long, you’ve forgotten they have teeth.”

I want to tell him he’s wrong. That I act because order is all that keeps this realm from dissolving into chaos. That I never meant to feel what I felt, never meant to want, never meant to mourn.

But I say nothing.

Drustan straightens. “So, if you were thinking of running to The Wardens about the anomaly – don’t.”

“That sounds like a threat.”

“It’s a mercy. You seem to like that word.”

He turns toward the shelves. His silhouette cuts through the library’s pale light, long and deliberate. Before he reaches the door, he pause.

“You ever wonder,” he says without looking back, “what she’d think of you now? The mortal woman. The one you let go.”

I cannot answer.

“Would she still look at you like you were tired,” he murmurs, “or like you were empty?”

Then he leaves.

The door closes soundlessly behind him.

I stare at the empty space he occupied. The air still holds the shape of his words, heavy, invasive. The book on the table lies where he left it – Divine Anomalies: Section Four, Subset Three-B.

I listen to the faint echo of the heartbeat that does not exist, deep within the walls. It syncs with something old and broken in my chest – something that still remembers the sound of her voice.

She was dying. She asked me to wait, and I did.

It was supposed to be mercy.

But mercy, I am learning, is just cruelty that simply hesitates.