The firelight danced.
The shadows leaned in.
And Balfazar's smile lingered like a promise.
⸻
The night was quiet.
But not still.
Where torches should have lit paths, darkness simply chose not to move. The trees blurred and slithered. The stars hung like open eyes—blinking slowly, uncertainly—as if they too were witnessing something they could not name.
The forest of Erl'twig had not returned to rest. It had merely shifted position, like a predator circling its prey.
Mist clung to the village like forgotten breath, curling between rooftops and under thresholds. The villagers slumbered in uneasy silence, murmuring dreams not their own.
And above it all, constellations flickered where they should not have existed—new arrangements whispering in tongues of light.
The fire at the Crusader camp had long since died down to coals, its warmth barely clinging to the air. Arkeia sat alone, her armor unfastened but not discarded, the plates gently parted like a skin not fully shed. Her eyes reflected the dying embers—quiet, but far from calm. Her men slept, unbothered. She could not. Not with the scent of untruth so thick upon the wind.
Across the glade, Mistress Yew's cottage loomed too pristine, its geometry just slightly off. The corners too sharp. The walls too smooth. It wore the shape of a home, but only in the way a mask resembles a face. The roof did not gather dew. The chimney did not breathe.
She rose. No order. No sound. Just movement—a sun-priest's grace sharpened into divine silence. Her feet kissed the earth. The forest bowed but did not rustle.
The cottage door opened without complaint. No hinges squealed. No wood groaned. The house wanted her inside.
Inside, the hallway stretched ahead—longer than it had been from the outside. Candlelight flickered on warped walls. The woodgrain moved subtly in the wrong direction. Shadows bent at angles not supported by flame.
She passed the first room.
Vharn lay tangled in blankets embroidered with constellations that hadn't yet formed. His lips moved in lullaby:
"Sleep now, little star-gnawed king…
Let your fur ripple through the veil…"
A soft answer followed—a purr that was not of this world. It sounded like two dimensions rubbing against each other. Warm, but wrong. A cosmic purring, woven with dreamstatic and entropy. Even Arkeia's sun-blessed bones shuddered at its hum.
As she passed, his song shifted, soft and sing-song:
"Little princess with the radiant eyes,
Don't linger long where shadow lies…"
And then, with a low chuckle, he added to no one in particular:
"They always linger…"
He laughed—quietly, warmly, and without reason. The sound curled under her skin like the echo of something that hadn't happened yet.
She moved on.
The second door was cracked open—just enough for scent and sound to escape. Inside, the air pulsed gold.
She stepped near.
Balfazar and Caelinda. Cloaked in flickering half-light.
She could not see them, but she didn't need to.
Caelinda's voice drifted through the seam of the door, velvet-wrapped and dipped in suggestion:
"You enjoy your games of cat and mouse, don't you…"
A rustle of silks. A faint breath.
Then his voice—Balfazar's—smooth and charmed:
"Only when the prey is brilliant."
She froze.
It was not affection.
It was a performance—between beings who had worn and discarded divinity like theatre robes. Between those who remembered what it was to be worshipped.
Then, almost too perfectly timed to be coincidence, Caelinda moved. There was a sound—a shift in cloth, a body leaned forward. Her voice softened, curling intimately.
"She's listening, you know…"
A pause.
"She always does."
Her hand—Arkeia knew—brushed against Balfazar's skin then. A deliberate gesture. Not territorial. Foundational. As if reaffirming an unshakable truth.
Arkeia's hand hovered near her blade.
The air here was thick with scented oil and incense, but beneath it lay something deeper—something unperfumed, ancient, and carnal. Not lust, but devotion fermented into madness.
She turned down the hall to continue, but paused.
Aethon's door was closed, yet something stirred within. A faint chuckle—dry and sly, as if amused by a joke only he could hear. It scraped against her senses more than any scream would have. It echoed through the wood like the memory of something lewd and impossible.
She lingered just long enough to feel the hair at her nape rise.
Then, a whisper of sound—farther down the hall.
She turned sharply.
At the far end stood Galeel, lit by moonlight warped through the window. Barefoot. Bare-chested. His wings folded like cloaks of ash. In his arms, he held Elissa, who trembled as though waking from a nightmare not her own.
Her skin glistened with sweat. Her lips murmured broken things. Her eyes were open, but not fully here.
Then, suddenly—Elissa turned.
Her neck moved slowly, dreamlike—toward Arkeia. Their gazes met.
"Rez'xanth," she whispered.
Then, softer still—almost reverent:
"The Dyad…"
And then her gaze drifted past her, as if following the thread of a dream unraveling into prophecy.
Time slowed.
Arkeia and Galeel locked eyes.
No words.
His expression was hollow—but not empty. Behind the stillness, she saw the ache of something ancient. Something mourning what it could no longer remember. He blinked slowly, as if awakening from a lifetime that no longer belonged to him.
Then, silently, he turned and stepped into Elissa's room, shutting the door behind him with reverent quiet.
A faint gust moved past her in the hall, but there was no source. Just the corridor exhaling.
Arkeia stood alone.
The hallway seemed to breathe behind her. The candlelight flickered once—sideways. The shadows reoriented as if watching her go.
She approached the front door.
Her fingers met the knob—it was warm, trembling faintly. Not from heat, but from memory. A soft hum vibrated through the wood, as if the door remembered her presence from another life… and was reluctant to let her go.
The door resisted—not locked, but hesitant. The air thickened. A hush fell across the hallway like a waiting breath.
Then, without a sound, it opened.
Too smooth.
Too easily.
Like a mouth letting go of a name it had long clung to.
As she stepped across the threshold, she heard it.
A voice. Familiar.
Soft.
"Arkeia, child…" came her grandmother's voice—gentle, warm, full of memory.
She froze.
"You shouldn't walk alone in places like this… not when the veil is so thin…"
The voice crackled, glitched.
And then shifted—warping, unraveling into something layered, distorted, no longer hers:
"…Come back, little priestess…"
The voice came from inside the cottage.
From beneath her skin.
From the walls.
She didn't turn. She stepped forward.
The night air struck her like absolution.
And when she glanced back, just once, the hallway behind her looked longer.
The shadows deeper.
And the door shut on its own.
⸻
She returned to her camp beneath the cover of the trees. No one stirred.
The Crusaders dreamed of suns and victories.
But their commander sat alone by the embers, her hands wrapped around nothing, her sword driven into the earth like a question without a mark.
The stars had not moved.
And in their stillness, they whispered:
He's playing with you.
And Arkeia—though she would never say it aloud—knew:
She had wandered not through a cottage, but through thresholds—
Between rooms and shadows.
Between prayers and premonitions.