The ruins of the House of Hollow Names still echoed behind her—glass dust in her lungs, memories clinging like cobwebs. Aurora stood at the edge of the rift it left behind, the obsidian needle now embedded in her palm like a forgotten promise.
The thread-road had unraveled, revealing a new path: a forest frozen in twilight.
The Woods of Stillheart.
Every tree was petrified mid-motion—branches locked like twisted hands, leaves caught as if the wind had stopped mid-breath. The ground crunched under her feet, not with snow or soil, but with broken lullabies—shattered notes that chimed faintly when stepped on. Somewhere deep within this wood, she felt it: a pull like gravity, heartstrings woven across time.
Someone was waiting.
She passed a pond that didn't ripple. A sky that didn't shift. And finally reached the clearing.
There, beneath a crown of dead roses, was the statue of a prince.
He stood frozen, one hand outstretched, his lips parted as if whispering her name. His armor was rusted and wrapped in thorns, and vines of gold coiled around his limbs—alive, shifting, tightening every time she blinked.
But his eyes… they were open.
They watched her.
Even stone could not stop him from seeing.
Aurora stepped closer.
"You were the one who was supposed to save me," she said softly.
His stone lips curled into the faintest frown. His mouth moved—but no sound came. Then something shifted in the clearing.
A pulse beneath her feet.
The vines recoiled.
The prince moved.
Cracks spidered across his surface as if the stone were merely a shell. He stepped forward, limbs stiff from centuries. The vines hissed and snapped, retreating into the earth. As the stone crumbled, what emerged was not a man of light.
But of shadows.
His hair was black as a moonless sky, and his skin shimmered like dark marble. His eyes—haunted and deep—were violet, like Elara's. But there was no cruelty in them. Only sorrow.
"You're awake," he rasped.
His voice was music dipped in mourning.
"Who are you?" Aurora asked.
He hesitated. Then bowed.
"I was your dream prince. The one they wrote into the curse. A boy stitched from longing and loneliness. They called me Lysander."
"Then why didn't you wake me?" she whispered. "Why did I sleep for a hundred years?"
He looked away.
"Because I fell asleep first."
She blinked.
"What?"
Lysander raised his hand. A mirror shimmered into the air between them—different from the others. This one was silver and soft, almost liquid. Within it, a memory played.
It was Aurora, as a child, curled in bed beneath starlight. Lysander sat beside her, a shadow-boy born of dreams, reading from a book of fairy tales.
"Every night," he said. "I read to you. Protected you from the nightmares. Loved you the way no one else did."
"You were real?" Aurora asked.
"Real enough. Real in your dreams. I was meant to stay there, to keep you asleep and content. But I made a mistake."
The memory shifted.
Now Lysander stood in a circle of dream-fire, fighting shadows that wore her face.
"Elara tried to twist your dreams. Make you forget the world. Make you sleep forever. I tried to fight her."
His voice broke.
"But I lost."
The fire consumed him.
"She cursed me. Trapped me in stillness. Replaced me with silence. That's why you never woke. Because your prince… was gone."
Aurora looked at him—at the boy who was never truly alive and never truly gone.
"You're still part of the curse," she said.
He nodded.
"So are you."
They stood in the clearing, twin victims of a fairy tale never meant to end.
Then Lysander reached into his chest—and pulled out a shard of black glass.
"This is the true heart of the curse," he said. "Your name is carved into it. Alongside hers."
He handed it to her.
It was cold. And when she held it, it screamed.
Not a sound—but a memory. A thousand voices crying her name. Begging her to wake. To remember. To break free.
She clutched the shard.
"What happens if I shatter it?"
Lysander looked at her with eyes full of grief and hope.
"Then the curse ends."
"And what happens to you?"
He didn't answer.
Because he didn't have to.
She already knew.
That night, beneath the hollow moon, Aurora and Lysander sat together for the first time in a century. She told him about the House. The other Auroras. Elara. And he listened, his presence a balm she hadn't realized she needed.
But when the dawn failed to rise—when the sky remained locked in twilight—they both knew:
The end wasn't breaking the curse.
The end was facing the one who wrote it.
And so they stood.
Two figments.
Two forgotten souls.
Threadbreaker and Sleepless Prince.
And began the final part of their journey.