Elias emerged from the dim warmth of his chamber, the scent of lavender soap still clinging faintly to his skin. His dark hair, damp and tousled, clung in errant curls to his temple as he rubbed a linen cloth through it with careless haste. Fresh clothes hung over his tall frame—pressed, noble, and uncomfortably pristine—but he paid them no mind. His thoughts, unruly as storm-winds, tugged him elsewhere.
He could not wait any longer.
Not for formality. Not for permission.
Not even for sense.
Though his heart warred with itself—one half yearning to confront, the other afraid of what it might find—he forced the feeling down like wine gone bitter. He would speak to August. Must speak to him. Even if August met him with the same indifferent coldness. Even if he didn't want to talk to Elias at all.
Even if… something inside him whispered that August did.
He dismissed the thought as foolish, a ghost too soft to bear the shape of truth.
His boots echoed as he strode down the corridor, each step swifter than the last. The manor's walls—etched with silent tapestries and watchful portraits—seemed unusually restless, as though the very air had caught fire in its lungs.
Then he saw them.
Maids—three, four, five—hurrying like startled birds, skirts gathered in their fists and faces stricken pale. They moved with an urgency that no routine ever demanded, and all of them were rushing in the same direction.
Toward August's study.
Elias halted, chest tightening.
His brows drew together, confusion sharpening into something colder.
He stepped forward again, quicker now, eyes narrowing as he watched another servant nearly trip over the hem of her apron.
Something was wrong.
Terribly wrong.
And every instinct in him rose like a sword drawn in moonlight.
Without another breath of hesitation, Elias broke into a run.
Elias quickened his pace, the polished floors passing in a blur beneath his boots. The corridor narrowed with each breath, as though the very walls conspired to choke his passage. The closer he drew to August's study, the deeper the foreboding clawed at his spine—an invisible noose tightening with every step.
Then he saw it.
The door—August's door—ajar, a gaping mouth left unguarded.
Wrong.
Something was terribly, savagely wrong.
He stepped through the threshold with caution sharpened like a blade unsheathed.
At first glance, the room lay in eerie stillness—books precisely in their shelves, candlelight flickering with mundane innocence. The desk, so often occupied by the pale lord with smoke-glass eyes, stood empty. Void. Deceptively untouched.
But Elias felt it.
The air was different here.
Heavy. Sour.
It clung to the lungs like the breath of something dying.
He turned—instinct guiding him like a hunter through fog—and then his eyes found them.
Giles knelt upon the carpet, the folds of his coat darkened with sweat and worry. In his lap rested August, limp and ghostly pale, as if carved from marble and left too long in the frost. His chest rose with fragile, uneven breaths, and one trembling hand clutched his abdomen with a grip so tight his knuckles had drained of color.
Giles's voice cracked through the stillness like a lash, commanding the maids with unflinching urgency.
"You—boil the vervain and bellflower, now! And you—summon Lirael at once! No delay!"
The maids, pale and wide-eyed, bowed deeply before scattering like frightened swallows, their heels clattering down the hallway in a frantic chorus.
Elias did not wait.
He rushed to them, his knees hitting the carpet without thought, his hands instinctively reaching for August's wrist, for his breath, for his warmth—anything.
"What in God's name happened?" Elias demanded, his voice roughened with a fury he barely restrained. "What's wrong with him, Giles?"
The old butler lifted his gaze slowly. Grief had carved shadows beneath his eyes, but his composure held—just.
His voice came like a death knell.
"Someone…"
He swallowed, and his hands trembled faintly where they rested beneath August's skull.
"Someone has poisoned the young lord."
The words slammed into Elias like a gunshot. He froze.
Then his jaw clenched—stone grinding against stone—and his eyes flared with a wrath that could burn down kingdoms.
"Poisoned?" he echoed, low and deadly. "How—how the hell did that happen, Giles?"
But the old man's silence spoke louder than any answer.
Giles looked away.
He did not know.
And that, perhaps, was the most terrifying truth of all.
The sound of hurried footfalls stirred the stillness like a sudden wind through cathedral glass.
Lirael stood at the threshold, breathless but composed, his entrance like a quiet storm. His golden robe, stitched in threads reminiscent of starlight and scripture, fluttered behind him as though reluctant to leave the sanctity of stillness. One length of his long blond hair spilled over his shoulder like liquid sun, and his eyes—those curious orbs of magenta and pink, radiant and arresting—shimmered with grave concern.
He crossed the study with purpose, each step silent but reverent, as if approaching an altar desecrated by tragedy. The moment his gaze fell upon August—pale as paper ash, breath snagging in his throat like torn silk—his expression twisted in quiet, smoldering dread.
Kneeling beside him, Lirael pressed two fingers to August's wrist. His touch was gentle, almost priestly. A flicker of tension passed through his brow as he read the sluggish rhythm of August's pulse, as though each beat bore a warning.
"He is weakening," Lirael murmured, voice low and solemn. "Whatever toxin courses through him—it is not mere venom. It is crafted, deliberate. I must brew him an antidote at once."
He glanced to Elias then, rising with a rustle of his robe. His hand came to rest firmly upon the younger man's shoulder—both a reassurance and a command.
"You—take him to his chamber," he said, his tone bearing the edge of urgency wrapped in silk. "Keep him warm. Keep him breathing. I shall not waste a heartbeat more."
And with that, Lirael swept from the room, golden robe trailing like the wings of some divine herald, vanishing into the halls where alchemy and desperation now waited to collide.
"Let him be," Elias said, his voice low but edged with unspoken urgency. Giles, startled by the shift in command, faltered only a breath before yielding.
Elias moved forward, his arms sliding beneath August's frail frame with a reverence that bordered on desperation. The moment he lifted him, August groaned—an aching sound, torn not from the throat but from somewhere deeper, a cavern of pain hollowed by poison.
Then came the horror.
A wet cough ruptured from August's lips, and something thick spilled forth—not bile, but blood, black as spilled ink and glistening like oil under candlelight. It stained his mouth, his skin, Elias's arm. It reeked not of death, but of something more cruel—of magic, of corruption, of a wound that had been festering far too long beneath the surface.
Elias froze. His breath caught. The sight before him was unnatural, like watching a rose wither and bleed all at once. And though his mind still wandered the shadowed halls of amnesia, something in his chest clenched with unbearable knowing.
Why didn't you reach him sooner?
The silent guilt curled sharp in his ribs. His arms held August tighter, as if that might undo the delay, as if proximity could erase the pain.
Behind him, Giles said nothing—but the pallor on the butler's face was telling. Still, he followed as Elias turned and strode through the vast corridors of the manor, the weight of the young lord in his arms both feather-light and unbearably heavy.
The chandeliers above flickered in their golden silence, bearing witness to the procession of grief.
At last, they reached August's chamber. Giles pushed the heavy oak door open, the hinges groaning as if in mourning. The room smelled faintly of lavender and old parchment, but tonight it was thick with something far darker.
Elias stepped through, and Giles, without word, moved swiftly to turn back the sheets, revealing the soft, pale mattress like a shroud waiting to be filled.
Gently, Elias laid August down. The young man's breath came in shallow gasps, his body twitching, his toes curling and kicking at the sheets—struggling, choking on something unseen. Panic had stolen the elegance from his form; he moved not like a prince but like a drowning boy.
Without thinking, Elias sat beside him, placing a firm palm against August's chest.
"Breathe," he whispered, voice barely audible over the rise and fall of the storm within August's lungs. "Breathe, please."
His hand moved in slow, circular motions—trying to coax rhythm back into the chaos, as if warmth could undo the frost creeping through August's veins. And slowly, achingly, August's breathing eased—though only just. It was not peace, but it was reprieve.
Giles stood in the corner, eyes shadowed with a grief too old to speak. The chamber was silent save for the ragged breaths of the sick and the steady, shattering beat of a heart that remembered even what the mind had forgotten.
The door gave a soft groan as it opened once more, and a gust of hurried breath swept in with the arrival of three maids—each bearing the quiet urgency of storm-sent seraphs.
The first, with sleeves rolled to the elbow, carried a modest porcelain basin cradled within her arms, and a cloth folded neatly beside it. The second held a silver tray, its polished surface trembling beneath a small earthenware bowl brimming with a bitter draught, steam coiling from its rim like sighs from a ghost. The last one—a girl no older than spring's first swallow—clutched a crystal glass of water, unsure if her offering would be needed, yet unwilling to arrive empty-handed in the face of calamity.
Their steps were swift yet reverent, like priestesses approaching a dying altar. None dared speak. Only their eyes—wide, wet with unshed horror—drifted towards the bed where August lay ensnared by some unseen torment, his beauty dimmed like a fading moon in winter fog.
With quiet choreography, they laid their burdens upon the corner table. The tray. The bowl. The cloth. Each item placed not with the casualness of duty, but with the gravity of anointing sacred relics.
And for a moment, they paused—three silhouettes cloaked in candlelight, watching the pale lord of the house wrestle with invisible fire. His form was curled, trembling, breath caught in the cage of his ribs. The fragile rise and fall of his chest, the gleam of sweat tracing his temple, the faintest flicker of defiance still tucked in the corner of his parted lips—all of it struck them silent.
They had seen August proud. They had seen him cold. But never like this.
Never broken.
And as if sensing their gaze, Elias turned his head—his eyes dark, raw, and burning with a storm that had yet to find its thunder.
"Go," he said, his voice low but sharpened by grief. "Prepare the rest. And send word the moment Lirael returns."
They bowed without word or breath, vanishing like shadows into the hallway once more, leaving behind only the echo of their presence—and the scent of rosewater and fear.
Elsewhere, within the quieter veins of the manor—beyond the hushed corridors and the frantic heartbeat of the household—Lirael moved as he always had: with the silent precision of an alchemist waltzing through shadow and light.
In one pale hand, he held an aged leather-bound tome, its corners weathered by time and tincture, its pages dog-eared and blotched with the ghosts of remedies past. His other hand hovered above mortar and flame, coaxing nature's secrets with the reverence of a monk drawing prayers from ash.
The room was heavy with the scent of crushed mint, wild verbena, and something darker—something metallic that bit faintly at the tongue. A ribbon of steam wove upward like an incantation from the bowl before him, where the potion, still warm from the fire, pulsed with life.
It was not merely medicine.
It was war, distilled.
A soft glow clung to the surface of the remedy as he lifted the vessel, holding it as one might cradle a sleeping child. His fingers, long and unadorned, curled around the edges of the bowl with careful devotion. And with the book now closed against his chest—his work complete and the hour pressing—Lirael stepped into the corridor with the quiet velocity of wind threading through forest.
The manor stretched before him like a labyrinth half-woken from a dream, but Lirael knew its bones well. He passed maids bowing out of the way, hall lamps flickering like watching eyes, the very walls seeming to lean forward, listening for the echo of his footfall.
And then he was there—before the chamber door that breathed unease.
Without hesitation, he entered.
The room, thick with fever and flickering light, received him like a beast in mourning. Elias was already at August's side, his jaw set, one hand resting near the limp fingers of the man whose veins still danced with poison.
Without word or ceremony, Lirael moved to the table and placed the bowl upon it. A small clink sounded as porcelain kissed wood—modest, yet it struck the air like the toll of a bell.
Still steaming.
Still alive.
He turned then, and for a brief moment—brief enough to be missed by all but the candleflame—his gaze fell upon August. The pale boy, a prince of ruin and breathless dreams, lay caught between realms.
And Lirael, the bringer of quiet cures, bowed his head slightly—not in submission, but in silent promise.
Whatever specter hunted this house tonight…
…it would not have him.