Castlerigg Stone Circle, Keswick
Mist parted for him like it remembered the shape of fear.
Alaric moved uphill with boots silent on the slick moor, the wet grass whispering against the leather of his coat. The long black hem—still damp from the ferry—dragged moss and clay with it, like a funeral veil refusing to lift. Overhead, the sky was a smudged bruise of grey, and the morning sun never showed its face.
His arrival had been quiet. Always was.
The locals at the last inn had looked twice, unsettled by the man who left no footprints and didn't blink when the power flickered. But he paid in coin older than the floorboards, and they didn't ask questions.
They never did.
Now, alone on the moor, Alaric inhaled.
The air here smelled of crushed heather and cold iron. Beneath it, the rot of something that had once been sacred. He'd been tracking that scent for days. It clung to him, thin and oily, like betrayal on silk.
Castlerigg's stones rose from the mist like teeth in a dreaming mouth. Ancient and patient, some believed the circle to predate Stonehenge. Watching.
Alaric circled them once, then stepped inside.
He knelt slowly—his coat folding like wings behind him—and pressed two fingers to the earth. The ritual was simple. A whisper of the Old Tongue. A flick of blood from a fingertip he'd bitten raw with an incisor just a touch sharper than you'd expect.
Lightning twitched in the clouds above, as if remembering its place.
The glamour cracked. It didn't shatter. It stuttered—like breath catching in a throat. And for a moment, the truth bled through.
The spiral pattern carved into the central stone—meant to catch and pass soul energy like a lens—was blackened. Twisted.
Where Unseelie marks should have coiled like threads of remembrance, foreign sigils glowed faintly beneath, pulsing gold. The wrong kind of gold. The Seelie's gold—bloom-bright and hollow, like flattery offered with a knife behind the back.
Alaric hissed between his teeth.
There was no trace of soul-thread. No echo. No death energy at all.
The gate had been emptied. Not disrupted. Not broken.
Funnelled.
He stood, too quickly.
For a moment, his reflection shimmered in the wet stone beside him. Waist-length hair, black as wet ink, hung damp around his shoulders. The amber of his eyes glinted in the low light—strange and feline, unblinking.
He looked like he belonged in the storm. And he did.
The shadows around the circle lengthened at his breath, curling inwards like they wanted to be near him. His coat creaked with the sound of worn leather and hidden runes. A long chain hung from one side of his belt, a key at its end—the old kind, the kind that only opened hidden things that would break a mortal if they saw.
Alaric touched the sigils again.
"They've started early," he murmured. "Bloody fools."
But beneath the anger was something colder—dread, sharp and precise. He had seen what happened when the balance was tampered with. He had helped rebuild from that wreckage. He could not—would not—watch it crumble again.
The return to the Unseelie Court was done without steps. One breath, one blink—
—and the moor faded, replaced by stone halls buried beneath the world.
The Unseelie Court was not a place. It was a feeling.
A corridor made of dusk and root. Columns twisted like tree limbs petrified in grief. The air here smelled of winter and memory. The soulwells lay deeper still, humming beneath the earth, fed by those who passed on in peace.
But tonight, they were quiet. Definitely much too quiet.
Alaric found the Queen in her chamber of mourning. She stood alone beneath a curtain of woven threads, fingers brushing a tapestry that never stilled. Her hair—burnished silver and severe—was bound in dozens of thin braids that marked the centuries of her rule. Her crown had not been worn in an age.
"You've returned," she said, without facing him.
"I found the gate at Castlerigg," he replied. "Or what's left of it."
He told her what he saw. He didn't lie, he didn't raise his voice either. Yet something in his posture—too still, too tight—betrayed the war behind his eyes.
When he finished, the Queen remained still for a long time.
"They're tampering openly now," he added. "Redirecting soulflow. Not just disrupting transitions—they're harvesting."
"And you are certain?" she asked.
Alaric's jaw tensed. "I've seen the symbols. They're no longer hiding it."
The Queen turned to him then. Her face was unreadable—regal, exhausted. But something cracked in her gaze when she said:
"It is not yet our time."
He flinched, visibly. His shoulders squared too quickly, like a soldier bracing against a blow.
"With respect, Your Grace, the Veil is thinning. If they shift too many gates—"
"We do not act in haste," she said sharply. "Not again."
A pause. Then, softer: "You saw the cost last time."
His throat worked around a reply he did not give.
Alaric bowed his head, though it burned.
Aye, he'd seen the cost. He'd paid it in full, bloodied and broken and reborn into something crueler than memory. And still, he would do it again—if it meant keeping his queen and his people safe.
"Keep watch on the northern gates," she said. "And on the girl."
Alaric's voice dropped. "She isn't a girl. Not really."
He felt the echo of Grey's presence like a thread around his ribs—soft, insistent, impossible to ignore. Her kindness had settled the ghost they'd encountered, but it had messed with his head in unexpected ways. No Harrower treated souls like that. Like people. Like their grief deserved gentleness.
The Queen raised a brow. "No. And perhaps she never was."
He left her chamber without another word.
The corridors pulsed around him, the shadows lengthening. When he passed the soulwell, he paused.
He placed one hand against the stone—warmed not by heat, but by memory.
Nothing answered.
And still, he felt it: something slipping. Something coming undone.
To most, Alaric was an anomaly among his kind. Few Fae registered humans as any anything more than a fleeting ripple in time, their brief lives over in as much as a breath. But Alaric was fascinated by them, chose to live among humans many times during his long life. Fought with them, loved them. He has always felt more akin to mortals than he ever did to his own. In the Courts, thoughtless cruelty was such a common thing in the company he kept, that kindness drew him like a moth.
Somewhere, in the back of his mind, a whisper he couldn't silence:
If I fail this time, the balance won't just tip—it will shatter.