The night was shrouded in heavy violet clouds, as if the sky was holding its breath before vomiting secrets buried for centuries.
Lightning split the clouds in silence… no sound, only a faint glow, as though the world itself had been choking for ages.
In one of the endless halls of Valstride Palace, where the walls oozed dampness and the mirrors were cracked as if they refused to reflect any more faces, Lionel stood before a corroded-framed mirror, adjusting the collar of his black shirt embroidered with silver threads, as if preparing for a funeral, not a ceremony.
Behind him, his younger sister Eliana flitted around like a butterfly, her laughter innocent yet painful—like an echo from a time that no longer existed.
"Oh, my big brother is becoming a noble today… Will you forget Eliana after the ceremony?"
He looked at her, and his smile was a shadow of an old one.
"I won't forget you, even if I become a king."
Downstairs, the hall was being prepared for the celebration, but the light there seemed fragile, as if afraid to stretch too far.
The candles flickered and melted quickly, and the music playing in the distance sounded like it came from a music box buried a century ago.
But behind this calm… something crawled in the shadows.
Suddenly, the silence shattered with a sound like iron pounding against bone:
"Where is the traitor?! Where is the son of disgrace?!"
Baron Rutger stormed into the hall, his face like burnt flesh, followed by knights clad in black armor, their faces unseen, but their eyes burned with blind hatred.
"Lionel! Encrypted letters were found in your handwriting—correspondence with traitors outside the kingdom. You… are a traitor!"
Eliana gasped, the flower she was tucking into her hair falling from her hand.
Lionel stepped back, his voice cracked:
"I wrote nothing! I swear it!"
But oaths don't save you when words have been written in your name—even if not by your hand.
Without warning, the knights lunged at him like black fangs striking from a den.
He ran.
His shoes screeched against the cold tiles, and the old paintings on the walls shifted their expressions with every step—condemning, warning… or mocking.
He entered a passage behind a grandfather clock, a spiral staircase that seemed like time itself had turned on it a thousand times.
He reached a cellar below, the air thick, heavy with the scent of myths and graves.
And there…
A decaying wooden door, inscribed in a language older than writing:
"He who enters, let him bid farewell to his form, his soul, and his name."
He opened the door… and faced a strange room:
Its walls breathed. The ground wasn't solid, but pulsed like flesh.
At its center stood a statue of a crow—but not just any crow.
A crow with two twisted horns, as if they had sprouted from a human skull.
On its chest, a silver pendant, blackened with rust, pulsed as if a heart beat within it.
Lionel approached, reaching out his hand…
And when he touched it, the statue's eyes snapped open.
But those were not stone eyes… they were the eyes of something alive… something that did not know sleep.
And in a moment… the shadow swallowed him.
He opened his eyes in a world with no ground—only thick mist that filled everything.
Whispers of screams echoed, as if thousands of mouths were calling his name without moving their lips.
Around him… thousands of versions of himself, all murdered in horrific ways:
One strangled by his own intestines, another flayed, a third being dragged into a sky of eyes… all of them looked like him, and all of them dead.
And at the center…
There she was.
A girl with long gray hair, skin like ash, and eyes that glowed with a cold that didn't belong to this world.
She wore a faded blue dress, stained with old blood, spinning as if dancing at a ball… among his corpses.
She held one of his corpses like a doll, swaying with it as though dancing to a flute yet to be played.
"At last…" she said in a voice that came not from a throat, but from the depths of a dream.
"The real one… has come."
The misty ground trembled…
And the horned crow, from afar, began to scream.
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