> Recommended Listening:
🎵 "The Way" – Zack Hemsey
(For suspense, restrained emotion, and dark intimacy)
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The scent of pine still clung to Kyrell's skin, but the cold bite of the forest had long faded. The bed beneath him was too soft, too still. Somewhere, distant thunder echoed—or maybe it was just his heartbeat.
He didn't know how he'd gotten here. Only that he had… and that Lucian was close.
Lucian stood by the tall window, his silhouette cut against a wash of misty moonlight. He hadn't moved for some time, watching the way the boy breathed—slow, uneven, alive. That was all that mattered. For now.
He remembered how he'd found him—collapsed in the clearing, his body near-lifeless but trembling as though fighting off a nightmare. Even lifting him had felt like disturbing something sacred. But Kyrell had stirred, barely, at the sound of Lucian's voice. Not in fear. Not in resistance. Just… recognition.
Now, in the hush of Lucian's chamber, that same strange energy simmered between them, thick as shadow.
Kyrell's eyelashes fluttered. Lucian didn't move.
The boy opened his eyes.
"I dreamt of you again," he whispered.
Lucian's breath caught.
"No," he said, stepping forward at last. "You didn't dream."
Kyrell blinked, and for a moment, silence pulsed between them like blood under bruised skin.
"Then what was it?" Kyrell asked. "I saw your face. Heard your voice. But everything else was… gone."
Lucian's voice was low. "You were dying."
Kyrell didn't flinch. He just turned his head slightly toward Lucian, like someone adjusting to an old memory. The boy's voice was barely audible now, but it trembled with strange familiarity.
"You called me back."
Lucian said nothing. There were no words for what he'd done—what he'd risked by taking Kyrell in, by letting himself care. There was only the undeniable truth that something had shifted inside him that night. Something primal. Something irreversible.
Kyrell's gaze shifted to the long, red-streaked curtain fluttering near the window.
"This place…" he said, "It feels like something between a tomb and a prayer."
Lucian gave the faintest smile. "It is both."
Kyrell sat up slowly, wincing as pain lanced through his spine.
Lucian moved toward him, hands instinctively reaching to steady his shoulders.
Kyrell didn't pull away.
"You've been asleep for days," Lucian said. "Whatever you were running from out there… it nearly consumed you."
"I wasn't running," Kyrell murmured. "I was searching."
Lucian stilled. "For what?"
Kyrell's eyes lifted. "You."
Those two syllables undid something deep in Lucian—something ancient and buried under centuries of silence.
"You don't know what you're saying," he said.
"I think I do." Kyrell tilted his head, a ghost of something like curiosity playing on his lips. "And I think you're afraid of it."
Lucian's jaw tightened. "You shouldn't be here."
"But I am."
The words hung between them like prophecy.
Outside, a raven cawed once, harsh and high across the wind. The world beyond the walls stirred—but the chamber remained suspended in its own reality.
Lucian rose, turning his back briefly.
"You don't understand what this place is, or what I am."
"Then tell me."
"You wouldn't believe it."
"I already do."
Lucian turned, his eyes dark with a thousand held-back truths. "You are too human to walk through the doors you've opened, Kyrell. Once you cross, there is no return."
"I crossed the moment you touched me," Kyrell said.
The room fell breathless.
A knock echoed at the door.
Lucian froze, and the moment shattered.
His voice returned cold. "Rest. You'll need your strength."
He turned away again, cape sweeping behind him like shadow bleeding across marble.
Kyrell watched him go.
But he didn't lie back down.
Instead, he whispered the words to the silence, soft as sin:
"I'm already stronger than you think."
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