🎵 Music Suggestion:
"Experience" by Ludovico Einaudi
(A slow unraveling. A beautiful collapse.)
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Kyrell woke first.
Lucian was still beside him, one arm resting lazily across Kyrell's hip, his breath steady and silent. The light in the hidden chamber was dim, fed only by the flickering rune lamp Lucian had lit hours ago. There was no sound from beyond the door.
Yet Kyrell's skin tingled.
Like eyes were watching him.
Like breath was being held too long in lungs that had no right to breathe.
He carefully slid from Lucian's hold, fingers brushing the iron cuffs on the wall—unused, dusted with memory. Lucian had brought him to a room no one else dared remember. But the past remembered them both.
Kyrell dressed in silence and moved to the mirror across the room. The surface looked cracked, but not broken—like a lie no one ever questioned.
And in that fractured glass, he saw it:
A shimmer. A flicker.
Someone watching through the mirror.
Kyrell stepped forward.
And the mirror laughed.
It wasn't sound. It was pressure in the bones. A voice spoken in the marrow.
"Your blood sings too loud, little lamb."
Kyrell reached out—and the mirror went dark.
---
Upstairs, the council chamber buzzed like a hive. Mara stood with her arms crossed, not bothering to hide the gash healing across her throat.
Renak paced behind her, tense.
Elder Varos looked worse than before—withered, as though weeks had passed since the last gathering.
"We need to move now," Mara said coldly. "Lucian won't act. He's compromised."
"He's not compromised," Renak muttered. "He's in love."
"Which is worse," Varos rasped.
A new figure stepped forward from the shadows of the chamber.
Not Damien.
A woman with silver hair like wet silk and eyes veiled by blindfolds laced in bone runes.
"Enough circling," she said. "Bring me the boy."
"Who are you?" Renak growled.
The woman smiled, and her voice lilted like music inside a crypt.
"I'm the truthkeeper. And I've waited long enough."
---
Down in the hidden wing, Lucian woke with a start.
The scent in the room had changed.
It wasn't blood. It wasn't death.
It was betrayal.
Kyrell was gone.
And the mirror was open.
Lucian walked up to it, bare feet silent on the stone floor. The glass rippled when he stood before it—reflecting not his body, but his soul.
And what he saw made him freeze.
Kyrell. Bound. Surrounded. A blade of memory pressed to his throat.
Mara watching.
The veiled woman smiling.
And Damien—
Lucian's vision bled red.
The stone cracked beneath his bare foot.
---
Somewhere above, the council doors flew open with a force that shattered their seals.
Lucian walked in like a god remembered.
And everyone stopped breathing.
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