The air hung still, as though the room itself feared to draw breath between them. Beyond, the faint flutter of curtains, the sigh of the fire, the soft rhythm of a body breathing—unnoticed by them both—marked the chamber's hidden witness.
behind them, August stirred.
At first it was no more than a tremor of his lashes, the faintest rustle of linen. Their voices—sharp, charged, clashing like steel—had threaded through his slumber, drawing him reluctantly upward from its depth.
Slowly, painfully, his smoke-grey eyes parted. Through the haze of weakness he saw Elias's broad back, the unyielding stance of a guardian. And beyond that wall of flesh and defiance, a voice he knew with aching certainty
"Everin".
Anger rose in him like fire breaking through ice. His breath quickened, his teeth clenched, and though every bone in his body ached, he pushed himself upright against the pillows. The act wrung sweat from his brow, yet fury bore him higher than frailty.
When his voice came, it cut through the chamber like a blade unsheathed. "How dare you."
Both men froze, their quarrel torn by that fragile, furious sound. They turned—Elias with restraint, Everin with a guilty start.
"How dare you step into my chamber," August continued, his voice harsh with effort, trembling yet commanding. His smoke-grey gaze, fever-bright, burned on Everin.
Everin faltered. His arrogance drained, guilt replacing it, raw and heavy. His lips parted, desperate. "August—I… I will change. I swear it. I am not the same man I was—"
"Do not give me that stare," August hissed, his hand trembling faintly as he lifted it in dismissal. "It does not ease what you did. Elias—" He turned, summoning what strength he could muster. "Cast him out. I will not suffer this bastard's face before me."
The words struck Everin like a scourge. His breath caught, tears clinging traitorously to the corners of his eyes. He reached, pleading, his voice breaking. "Please. I will change. I beg you. Do not banish me like that."
But August's fury was iron. "no plea will soften my command. Leave."
Elias's emerald gaze gleamed with a kind of cold triumph. He stepped closer, knuckles cracking like distant thunder, his shadow spilling over Everin once more. "You heard him. What he said, I am still asking politely. Leave… or my hands will do what words cannot."
Everin's resolve shattered, pride giving way to anguish. He made a pouted face, tears trembling but unfallen. His voice broke in a whisper, stubborn even in defeat. "I cannot leave… not unless you forgives me."
But forgiveness did not come. August leaned back against his pillows, weary but unbending, his silence harsher than any rebuke. His storm-grey eyes closed briefly, as if the very sight of Everin wearied his soul.
And so they stood: Elias, the immovable sentinel; Everin, the desperate supplicant, clinging to tears like a drowning man to driftwood; August, frail yet resolute, enthroned in the citadel of his bed.
The chamber itself seemed to thrum with their unspoken war, every shadow steeped in tension. Outside, the manor carried on in ignorant splendor—servant's moving in corridors, sunlight spilling across marble, as maid's bearing trays of wine For Guest.
But here, within these four walls, a fracture widened between blood and loyalty, between guilt and forgiveness, between a cousin's desperation and a patient's wrath.
It was not swords that struck here, nor armies that clashed, but hearts colliding with the violence of storms. And the echo of it would linger far longer than steel.
August would have risen had his body obeyed him, but his limbs betrayed him with that cruel pallor of weakness which mocked his very spirit. The fire of defiance within him refused to dim, though it flickered against the pale lantern-glow like a candle warring against the storm. His smoke-grey eyes—eyes that once could silence men by gaze alone—now burned faintly, hollowed by fever, yet still fierce with the vestiges of his will. He clenched his teeth, that small and stubborn fortress of pride, and forced words past lips grown dry with pain.
"Get out," he rasped, voice strained but sharpened with steel, "before I lose my patience."
The chamber received those words as though it too bore witness to a battlefield. The tapestries that lined the walls stirred faintly with the breath of an unseen draft, their embroidered hunts and woven triumphs ghosting over August's frail outline as if mocking the contrast. The high windows, and a filtered strand of light tcreep across the oaken floorboards. The shadows stretched long, reaching like silent conspirators toward the foot of his bed, where Everin stood unmoving.
The cousin's figure, half-shrouded in that uncertain light, possessed the obstinacy of one rooted not by chance but by intent. His countenance was set between sweetness and anger—an unsettling mask that revealed no willingness to bend. Elias, who was standing before Everin tall and unyielding, had placed himself like a sentinel carved in flesh; broad-shouldered and unwavering, his stance defied intrusion, though the air itself thickened with the press of Everin's presence.
"Did you not hear me?"
August pressed again, his voice rising with what strength remained, though the effort seemed to tear at the threads of his breath. His body quivered beneath sheets, pale hands clenched in futile revolt against the tremor that betrayed him. How he despised that weakness—how he loathed the fragility that denied him the power to strike or even rise. His pride, the last weapon unbroken, flashed through his narrowed gaze.
Yet Everin did not yield. The silence that followed stretched taut, trembling in the air.
Beyond the chamber, faint noises from the manor corridors drifted inward: the muffled clang of distant armour, the low hush of passing servants, the whisper of wind creeping through the long stone halls. Within, all seemed suspended between defiance and surrender.
August's lips parted once more, his words dragged forth by sheer will. "I said—leave."
And though his voice faltered, though his strength waned, the chamber itself seemed to bow beneath the command, for the fragile man in the bed still carried within him the echo of authority, that even fever could not extinguish.
Everin, thwarted in his design, quivered with a fury ill-suited to the softness of his features. His lips pressed together, then broke open with a tremor, and before Elias could thrust him aside, the hinges of the chamber door groaned and yielded. A sliver of pale light trickled in, carrying with it the figure of Lady Katherine.
Everin's eyes, glistening with resentment and desperation, fell at once upon his aunt. And With sudden haste, he stumbled forward, and in that moment the boy's mask of hauteur crumbled into something raw. He flung himself at her as though he were yet a child in need of protection, tears spilling quick as pearls torn from their strand. Raising a trembling finger, he pointed at Elias, his voice pitched with theatrical anguish.
"This beast, Aunt—this brute of iron—he bars me from my cousin! He won't let me see my cousin "August."
Lady Katherine paused, her gloved hand tightening upon the edge of her gown, confusion shading her composure. When had this boy crept in? How long had he lingered unseen inside the chamber, a shadow at the door? Her eyes, sharp with command though tempered with weariness, turned toward Elias.
The guardian did not meet her gaze. Instead, he inclined his head aside, not from cowardice, but in obedience. She herself had given the decree: no soul, save her and her chosen sentinel, was to pass into August's chamber. His averted eyes were not defeat—they were fidelity made visible.
Everin's voice broke the stillness again, stammering, he will not heed me! He turns away, he turns his face away from me as though I were nothing!"
A sigh escaped Lady Katherine, soft yet weighted with an authority that silenced the quivering air. With a deliberate grace, she laid her gloved hand upon Everin's shoulder. Her touch was cool, her words colder still:
"You are no longer a child, Everin. You are a man grown—begin, then, to wear manhood with dignity. Cast off these tears; they ill befit you."
Everin's breath caught, a sound between defiance and wounded pride. But Lady Katherine pressed on, her voice steady, her eyes carrying a solemnity like dusk closing over the day.
"August is poisoned. His body is besieged, and his strength hangs by threads finer than silk. He must have time to recover before he can welcome any visitor. When health returns, you may speak with him. Until then, you must wait."
August, pale upon the bed, heard each syllable. But this time his throat, dry as scorched parchment, betrayed him. A whisper escaped, faint as a sigh torn from his throat
"Water…"
Elias's eyes sharpened at once. He bowed to Lady Katherine with the reverence of one carrying out a holy charge. Without hesitation, he turned and withdrew, his strides purposeful, for he alone bore the solemn duty of guarding not merely August's chamber but every drop that touched his lips, every morsel that passed his tongue.
And so the sentinel departed to fetch the humble element—water—that in that moment gleamed with the weight of salvation.
Elias, whose figure had long stood like an immovable sentinel before Everin, at last departed into the corridor beyond. The sound of the door latching was a soft, decisive toll. It was in that instant that something flickered through Everin's gaze—a spark, fragile yet ravenous, like the wick of a candle suddenly fed. Hope, though misguided, swelled within him. No longer shielded by Elias's towering form, he stepped nearer to the bed, his tread slow, hesitant, yet fevered with longing.
"August…" His voice was but a whisper, the syllables breathed with a tenderness that sat uneasily within the tension of the chamber.
But August's eyes, cool as steel like moonlight, lifted to him. His lips, parched yet edged with merciless strength, parted.
"Get out."
The words, rasped though they were, struck like flung daggers. He hissed them with a venom that no fever could dull, and his slender hand, though trembling upon the coverlet, curled as though to grasp some invisible blade.
Everin faltered, yet did not yield. "Cousin," he murmured, the word thick with suppressed affection and torment, "why must you treat me thus? When all I desire is nearness?" His figure leaned into the half-light, so that his eyes gleamed with that uneasy mixture of sweetness and anger that Katherine had long despaired of deciphering.
Lady Katherine, stationed by the chamber door with the stern poise of a watchful sentinel, at last released a weary sigh. Her head inclined in a slow shake, and the dim light caught upon the veil of her cap, casting fragile shadows across her brow. "You two," she murmured into the heavy air, her words not aimed at either man yet echoing to both, "are like fire and frost—ever locked in ruinous embrace, forever at war, and yet—strangely—never consumed."
"Leave." August's voice broke the stillness once more, hoarse and deliberate. He clenched his teeth as though by doing so he might wrest strength from his very bones. Speaking cost him dear, as if each word was struck upon an anvil of pain; yet he bore it, for he despised the thought of yielding to weakness before Everin.
But Everin remained. His hand, pale against the chamber's dark oak, lingered upon the post of the bed. "You may loathe me, August," he whispered, low as a confession, "yet still I shall not depart. For even your hatred, sharp as it is, binds me closer than the world's fondest love."
August turned his face aside, toward the cold lattice where the light etched its pale geometry across the floorboards. The chamber was heavy with silence again—save for the laboured rhythm of his breath, and Katherine's faint, helpless sighs—as though the room itself waited for a reckoning neither cousin would grant.
Everin's voice broke the silence, roughened by desperation. "August… look at me." The plea trembled in the air, yet August's smoke-grey eyes did not so much as flicker toward him. He held his gaze upon the floorboards, as though the very grain of the wood were more deserving of his attention than the man who once commanded his trust.
Within him, fury burned—a storm caged inside brittle glass. How he loathed the weakness of his own body, the fever-sunk bones that denied him the strength to rise and strike. Were his limbs not weighted with this cruel frailty, he would have torn the silence under with his fists, beaten the wretched sincerity from Everin until blood itself confessed. But instead, he lay unmoving, the restraint of a prisoner locked in chains of his own failing flesh.
His heart thundered against the narrow walls of his chest, like a drum of war muffled by velvet, and still he refused to look. To grant Everin his eyes would be to grant him absolution, and August's rage, hot and unsurrendered, would not yield such mercy.