Down in the hallway, where moonlight filtered through stained glass in fractured hues of amethyst and gold, a long oak table stood like a ship marooned in silence. Its surface gleamed with the polish of centuries, carved edges whispering of ancestral hands. Upon its spine, three figures lingered—each cloaked not in velvet or ermine, but in dread.
Giles stood at the far end, his head bowed, shoulders stiffened as though mortified into stone. He did not sit. He could not. Some ancient instinct—servant's guilt, perhaps—kept him upright, as if his suffering might be lessened by posture alone.
Across the table, Lirael sat with his spine like a rod of forged gold, his hands folded before him in eerie stillness. The lamplight threw silver halos across his golden hair, which spilled across his shoulder like spilled sunlight trapped in mortal strands. His eyes, those irises forged of pink fire and magenta frost, were darker now—clouded, hollowed by the weight of knowing too much.
Beside him sat Seraphim Virelle, the statesman whose poise had never once trembled before a sovereign or sabre. And yet tonight, the nobleman's brow was drawn into tight furrows, his voice low and lined with haunted thunder.
"August was poisoned?" Lirael asked, though it was not a question—it was the beginning of a ritual, a reckoning shared in quiet pieces.
Seraphim inhaled slowly, and the firelight caught the planes of his cheekbones, shadowing him into the shape of a man carved from unease.
"Because," he said at last, the syllable soft as falling ash, "last evening, within the court's gilded cage, two men were murdered."
Giles stiffened.
Seraphim continued, gaze unfocused, as if chasing ghosts only he could see.
"Two high-ranking officials. Assassinated within hours of each other. One—Septimus Drellwyn—was my friend. A companion of decades. We shared wine at coronations, whispered heresies between state dinners. His loyalty was absolute."
His voice cracked just once. Then he swallowed and steadied it.
"They didn't simply die. They were slaughtered. The Baron was found with his throat opened mid-conversation, while the ink on his guest list still dried. Drellwyn—he was strangled in his study, the books still open on his desk. No struggle. No alarm."
Lirael's fingers curled. His face, so often unreadable, had turned quietly ashen. Even his breath seemed held beneath his ribs.
"But why?" he murmured. "What purpose could such butchery serve?"
Seraphim exhaled as if the very question scorched his lungs. His next words came slowly, as if lifted from the pit of something unspeakable.
"This evening, Katherine…" he began, then stopped, his jaw tightening. "She found a letter. Hidden within the folds of a book she was reading in her private quarters. It had no seal. No crest."
Now Giles raised his head, eyes wide.
"No crest, sir?"
Seraphim nodded. "None. That alone chilled me. For those without crests either fear or seek to conceal their allegiance. And Katherine… she read it before I could stop her."
He looked down then, as though the memory itself were too sharp to behold.
"It was a threat," he said. "Plain. Icy. Deftly penned. And it named a third victim."
Lirael looked up sharply.
"Who?"
Seraphim's jaw clenched. And then, with the air of a man peeling back gauze from a fresh wound, he spoke the name:
"August Everhart D'Rosaye."
The silence after was thick and immediate.
Lirael's breath caught like a wire beneath his ribs. Giles's mouth parted, but no sound emerged. Somewhere beyond the hall, the wind whispered through the eaves, dragging the house deeper into shadow.
"She didn't even finish the letter," Seraphim said, voice low. "Not properly. She dropped it mid-line. Said something about… her blood going cold. About a feeling. A mother's feeling."
His hands clenched on the tabletop, knuckles white.
"And we came," he said. "We did not wait for guards or debate. We did not stop to question the source. We knew it was no jest. Not after what happened in court."
Lirael slowly stood, the lamplight turning his robe into flowing gold. "It was no jest."
Giles, still stiff, dared a whisper. "And yet he—"
"Still lies in torment," Lirael interrupted, the usual music in his tone replaced with ice. "Still clings to breath while the poison tries to take root in his blood."
"He is a child," Seraphim said suddenly, his voice sharp with emotion. "He is a child, and they name him among corpses."
No one spoke. The words lingered, bitter and heavy.
Giles dropped his gaze again, his hands now trembling at his sides. He had failed. Or believed he had. For guilt is a dog that bites its own master, again and again, until there is no flesh left to mourn.
Lirael walked to the window, parted the velvet drape. The moon was thin—a sickle of silver slicing through the cloud-thick night.
"If we had waited a moment longer," he said quietly, "he may have died."
Seraphim sat back in his chair, limbs heavy, expression carved from fatigue. "And yet we know not how the poison entered his blood. Nor when."
The silence cracked again. This time with dread.
Outside, the storm was beginning. Not in thunder or wind, but in the creak of shadows pulling tighter. Somewhere beyond the walls of Blackwood Manor, danger stirred.
But within, they stood like mourners at a vigil—not for the dead, but for the endangered.
And on the table, a single candle guttered. Its flame bent. Its wax wept.
And none of them—none—could promise that August would wake to see it burn again.
The fire in the hearth crackled like the bones of old kings, casting gold-tongued shadows across the crimson tapestry that cloaked the stone walls of the Castellan estate. Books lined the towering shelves in his lordship's study—aged tomes, their spines bent by knowledge too heavy to forget. The windows, high and rain-smeared, bore no witness to the silence inside, nor the quiet storm that brewed between father and son.
Everin stood straight as a lance, cloaked in the muted elegance of his red velvet coat. His golden hair, soft as silk and nearly to his shoulders, curled slightly from the damp of the evening, each lock catching firelight like spun treasure. He looked every inch the noble heir—yet his face, carved in boyish grace and wide-eyed wistfulness, betrayed a heart still untempered by politics.
Lord Valemont Castellan sat like a monument behind his great oak desk, one hand resting on a parchment-strewn surface, the other curled loosely around the stem of a crystal glass untouched. His face—too cold, too handsome—seemed carved from marble, untouched by time or sentiment. His dark eyes were glaciers veiled in velvet, and when they lifted to rest upon his son, the air itself seemed to still in deference.
"You seem distracted, Everin," he said, his voice smooth and firm as polished steel. "Perhaps because you haven't been listening. Or is it that you think the court's affairs are beneath your attention?"
Everin's hands curled tightly at his sides. "Forgive me, Father."
Valemont's gaze lingered before he continued, folding one page beneath another with deliberate calm.
"There has been a… complication." He did not blink.
"Your cousin. "August" He was poisoned."
Everin's entire body jolted—like a harp string pulled taut then snapped. "What…? What do you mean by poisoned?" he whispered, his voice cracking in disbelief. "How—how could that happen?"
A silence bloomed between them—heavy, unspeakable.
Valemont looked into his son's eyes, and something unreadable flickered there. "The details remain uncertain. But what is known is this—we trusted Caldris Rheyne too deeply."
The name, spoken aloud, fell like a stone into a still pond.
Caldris Rheyne.
Everin's throat tightened as his father's words pressed down upon him, but he did not speak the name again. Not now. Not here. Not in this room where even secrets froze mid-breath.
His heart was no longer beating—it was rattling like a bird against a gilded cage.
"I wish to see him," Everin said suddenly, too quickly. "Please—can I visit him."
Valemont's gaze hardened, unflinching. "No. You are to remain here."
"But—"
"You are not to step beyond these gates until the dust of this crisis has settled." His voice was colder now, final. "The court is no longer safe. Alliances are fracturing like old bones. Two nobles are dead. Assassinated. August may be the third, if providence had not intervened. And you, my son—you are not to be the fourth."
Everin stood still, teeth biting into the soft flesh of his inner cheek. His eyes—oceanic and open—burned with unspent grief and unshed tears. He did not speak. He could not. His throat had grown too narrow, strangled by the weight of forbidden worry.
"You may go now," Valemont said quietly, already turning back to his papers.
Everin bowed low—not out of respect, but because his spine could not hold itself upright any longer.
He stepped from the study as though waking from a fever dream, the heavy doors closing behind him with a hush like a curtain falling at the end of a tragedy. The corridor outside smelled of oiled wood and fading roses—his mother's favorite blend. But tonight, even that scent felt stale.
The boy paused beneath one of the tall stained-glass windows. The moonlight painted his face in silvers and shadows, catching in the glossy strands of his curls.
From the breast pocket of his coat, he drew out a folded handkerchief. White. Silk. Embroidered in one corner with silver thread that spelled, in looping script:
August.
He pressed the cloth to his lips, breathing it in, though there was no scent there. Not really. And yet his cheeks flushed as if memory itself had risen to kiss him.
"August…" he murmured, voice barely a breath.
His cousin. So beautiful. So quiet. So impossibly far away now. Poisoned—by hands unknown, for reasons untold. And Everin—what was he now, locked away like a kept thing, reduced to holding embroidered silk and aching without dignity?
His heart beat fast. Not with fury, but with longing. With dread. With obsession. There was something in him that could not be named, only felt.
And it throbbed with every pulse of his breath.
Above, the chandeliers flickered. Somewhere down the hall, a servant's footstep echoed.
But Everin stood still—his fingers tightening around the handkerchief like a boy gripping the edge of a dream already slipping away.
He would see him again.
He had to.
Even if he had to burn down the walls of duty itself to do so.
Everin's footsteps echoed through the marble halls like the hurried rhythm of a hunted heart. His coat flared behind him with each stride, crimson against the cold stone, a comet of desperation streaking toward sanctuary. The moment he reached his chamber door, he fumbled with the key—his fingers shaking, not from cold, but from something far more fevered.
The lock clicked with a sigh of surrender, and he slipped inside, bolting it with swift grace.
Here, the world stilled.
The velvet-draped silence of his room greeted him like a lover too long ignored. Gilded sconces flickered against high walls, and the fire in the hearth whispered low lullabies to no one. He made no sound, save the rustle of silk as he approached the bed—a towering canopy of carved mahogany and midnight blue linen.
He collapsed into its center, as though gravity had finally remembered him.
The handkerchief remained clutched to his face. White silk, faintly wrinkled from too much longing, embroidered with August's name in silver thread. He inhaled once, twice, and again—as if each breath might summon a ghost.
August.
Smoke-grey eyes like dusk on glass. Lips the color of fallen cherries, always too soft, too still. Those long ivory curls, like candlewax poured over snow. And his body—slender, pale, ethereal—as if carved from the mist before sunrise.
Everin closed his eyes.
He ached.
He burned.
The memory of August pressed against the inside of his chest like a secret trying to claw free.
What if… what if a kiss could heal him?
What if his lips—trembling, reverent—could summon August back from the cusp of shadow?
He held the thought like a prayer.
Or a sin.
And in the quiet dark of his chamber, Everin whispered to the night:
"Please… let me see him again."
Even once.
Even broken.