——Flickers in the Night, the Walls Breathe——
The night was quiet.
But not still—its silence held weight, as if the darkness were listening.
Where torches should have marked the paths, shadows simply chose not to move. The trees did not stand—they slithered in place, their shapes blurred as though seen through water. Overhead, the stars hung like open eyes, blinking slow and uncertain, as if they too beheld something they could not name.
The forest of Erl'twig had not returned to rest. It had only shifted its weight—like a predator circling, waiting for the moment to strike.
Mist clung to the village like the last breath of something long forgotten, curling through alleys, sliding under doorframes, coiling around thresholds with patient intent. In their beds, the villagers stirred in uneasy silence, whispering dreams that were not their own.
And above it all, constellations flickered where no map had ever charted them—new arrangements burning for moments at a time, as if written in tongues of light, whispering to any soul foolish enough to gaze too long.
The fire at the Crusader camp had long since surrendered to embers, its last warmth clinging to the air like a fading memory. Arkeia sat apart from the others, armor unfastened but not cast aside—the plates parted just enough to suggest a skin not yet shed. Her eyes caught the emberlight, steady but far from calm. Around her, the men slept in untroubled breaths. She could not. Not with the scent of untruth drifting through the wind like incense from a shrine to the wrong god.
Across the glade, the cottage loomed—too pristine for the hour, too deliberate for the woods it occupied. Its geometry was almost correct, yet not: corners drawn too sharply, walls smoothed past the patience of any mortal hand. It wore the shape of a home the way a mask wears the shape of a face—convincing only until one notices the absence beneath. The roof drank no dew. The chimney did not breathe.
She rose without word or warning. No clink of metal, no whisper of fabric—only the precision of a sun-priest's grace honed into divine silence. Her feet kissed the earth; the forest inclined its boughs but did not rustle.
The cottage door yielded at her approach, opening without complaint. No hinges sighed. No timber groaned. It did not resist.
The house wanted her inside.
Within, the hallway stretched impossibly forward—longer than the cottage's frame could contain, as though space itself had drawn a deeper breath to receive her. Candlelight trembled along warped walls, its glow breaking into uneven rhythms, and the shadows leaned at angles the flames never cast. The woodgrain drifted in the wrong direction, curling against her steps, each line flowing as if grown in some other world. Corners inclined ever so slightly inward, as though eavesdropping.
She passed the first room.
Vharn lay tangled in blankets embroidered with constellations awaiting their birth—patterns belonging to skies no mortal had charted. His lips shaped a lullaby, each word sliding into the air with a strange, deliberate care:
"Sleep now, little star-gnawed king…
Let your fur ripple through the veil…"
From somewhere within the bedclothes came a purr that belonged to no earthly beast. The sound was the friction of two dimensions brushing against one another—warm and resonant, yet threaded with dreamstatic and the slow pull of entropy. A shiver ran through Arkeia's sun-blessed bones, settling deep into the marrow.
As she moved past, the melody shifted, lilting into a sing-song tone:
"Little princess with the radiant eyes,
Don't linger long where shadow lies…"
After a pause, his voice dropped into a low, knowing chuckle, offered to the unseen:
"They always linger…"
His laughter carried warmth and welcome, yet it coiled beneath her skin like the echo of something awaiting its moment to happen.
Her breath thinned, and her steps carried her onward.
The second door stood ajar—just enough for scent and sound to spill into the hallway. Light bled through the gap in slow, golden pulses, the way a heartbeat glows when seen through translucent flesh, each throb carrying a rhythm that felt deliberate rather than natural.
She drifted closer.
Balfazar and Caelinda were within, wrapped in a haze of shifting half-light. The shadows moved in counterpoint to the flame—slow, deliberate—like they were deciding which of the two to favor. The glow clung to them with the hesitation of something unsure if it should illuminate or conceal.
The angle allowed no full view, yet sight was unnecessary; the air between them was already speaking in a language older than voices.
Caelinda's voice slipped through the seam—velvet-draped, deliberate, every syllable set like a stone in a mosaic of intent:
"You enjoy your games of cat and mouse, don't you…"
The hush of silk followed, the faint exhalation of fabric shifting over skin, as if her movement was meant as much for his ear as his eyes.
Balfazar's reply came smooth, unhurried, steeped in certainty and edged with a smile Arkeia could hear even without seeing it:
"Only when the prey is brilliant."
Her stride slowed.
This was not affection—it was a rite. A private theatre between two beings who had once worn divinity like raiment, shed it without regret, and carried in their marrow the memory of what it was to be worshipped without condition.
Caelinda moved again. The sound shifted—cloth grazing skin with a whisper too precise to be accidental. Her hand reached for him, fingers brushing the edge of his chest with the confidence of someone touching something both familiar and sacred. The contact lingered, firm enough to claim belonging, yet soft enough to carry reverence.
Balfazar did not speak, yet the atmosphere bent toward him. The candlelight quivered, as if pausing mid-breath. The shadows leaned in. His own breath deepened—not drawn in haste, but with the slow inevitability of tide pulling toward shore. Even from the hall, Arkeia felt the pressure change, a subtle distortion in the air that made her ears ring and her pulse slow.
Caelinda sank lower in one unbroken movement, each shift of her weight deliberate, the silken sigh of fabric following her descent. It was the kind of kneeling that was less submission than it was alignment—placing herself precisely where she belonged in the order of things.
Her voice returned, now softer, folding in on itself like smoke curling back into the flame:
"She's listening, you know…"
A pause thickened the air between words.
"I would expect no less."
Arkeia's hand hovered above her sword hilt, her fingers flexing once before stilling.
The air in the hallway was heavy—layered with the perfume of sacred oils and the resinous ghost of incense. Yet beneath those crafted scents ran something rawer, almost metallic, faintly electric. It prickled at the roof of her mouth and tightened the back of her throat. It was the scent of something alive without flesh—a residue of devotion distilled past worship into something older, sharper, and entirely possessive.
It clung to her skin as she moved to pass the door, its presence lingering like a whisper pressed against the nape of her neck.
She turned down the hall to continue.
And paused—mid-step, as though the air itself had closed a hand around her.
Aethon's door stayed shut, yet something inside shifted—too subtle for the ear, too deliberate for chance. A chuckle seeped through the wood, dry as dust and sly as a knife's whisper. It carried the weight of private amusement, as though he savored a joke spoken in a language meant for him alone. The sound crawled over her senses with a precision no scream could match, each note a quiet trespass. It pressed into the grain of the door and seeped outward like the ghost of a touch, carrying the suggestion of something obscene and impossible—half-memory, half-provocation.
Through that hushed barrier, she caught it—barely more than a murmur, blurred by distance yet sharp enough to reach her:
"I carry fine wine, brother."
She lingered, held in place by the invisible reach of it, until the fine hairs at her nape rose in silent protest.
Then—a breath of sound, farther down the hall, thin as silk sliding across stone.
She turned sharply.
At the far end stood Galeel, caught in a spill of moonlight warped by the glass, its pale distortion sliding over him like water over carved stone. He stood barefoot, bare-chested, his wings drawn in close—folded around him like cloaks of ash, their edges feathered with a fatigue older than the night.
In his arms, he held Elissa. Her body trembled as though she were waking from a nightmare borrowed from someone else's mind. Candlelight pooled across her skin, slick with a fevered sheen. Her lips moved in the fractured rhythm of a dream's language—words shaped but never fully born. Her eyes were open, though anchored to no place that could be named.
Then, without warning, Elissa turned.
Her neck moved slowly, dreamlike, as though the motion itself had to be remembered before it could be completed. Her gaze met Arkeia's.
"Rez'xanth," she breathed.
And then, softer—almost a prayer, almost a warning:
"The Dyad…"
Her focus drifted past Arkeia, following something invisible down the hallway, as if her vision had caught the trailing hem of a prophecy unraveling itself.
Time hesitated.
Arkeia's breath matched it.
She and Galeel locked eyes.
"Leave…" he murmured, voice low as a confession meant for the walls. A sigh followed—long, worn, final. "While you can…"
His face was hollow of expression, yet far from empty. Behind the quiet mask lay the ache of something ancient—something that mourned without knowing the name of what it had lost. It was the look of a man remembering the absence of memory.
He blinked once, slow as the turning of an hourglass. For an instant, she thought he might say more.
Then he shifted, stepping backward into Elissa's room with the careful precision of one returning a relic to its altar. The door closed with reverent quiet, sealing the moment away as though it had never belonged to her at all.
A faint gust slid past her in the hall, though no wind stirred. It was not air, but the corridor itself exhaling.
Arkeia stood alone.
Behind her, the hallway seemed to breathe—a slow, deliberate inhale she could feel along the length of her spine. Candlelight wavered once, not from any draft, but with a sideways flicker, as if something unseen had shifted its gaze toward her. Shadows gathered in their corners, then stretched across the walls, subtly reorienting, their lines bending to follow her movements.
She began down the corridor.
The floor yielded under her step, not with the groan of wood, but the muted give of something that felt faintly alive. At the edge of her vision, the seams between wall and ceiling pulsed—soft, shallow ripples, like a great surface restraining the urge to shudder.
A door she passed now had no handle, though she could have sworn it had one before. From behind it came the low susurrus of voices—too faint to distinguish words, yet measured in the cadence of worship.
Farther on, a framed picture hung crooked on the wall. She did not recall seeing it earlier. The image was nothing but a bare horizon beneath a blackened sky—until, as she moved past, a lone silhouette appeared at its center, thin and motionless. She did not turn to see if it followed her.
Another step, and the candle nearest her drew in on itself, its flame collapsing inward until it became a single point of molten light—glimmering like an open eye in the dark.
She reached the front door.
Her fingers met the knob. It was warm, trembling faintly beneath her touch—not with heat, but with memory. A low hum thrummed through the wood, slow and deliberate, like the heartbeat of something that had been listening all along. It felt less a fixture of the house than a living fragment of it—aware, remembering her from another life… reluctant to let her pass without first marking her again.
The door resisted—not locked, but hesitant, as if testing her resolve. The air thickened around her, the silence folding in on itself until it became a single, held breath. Even the shadows seemed to draw taut, leaning toward the threshold.
Then, without a sound, it yielded.
Too smooth.
Too easily.
Like a mouth releasing the taste of a name it had kept pressed beneath its tongue for far too long.
As she crossed the threshold, it came—slipping in from nowhere, yet close enough to brush the inside of her ear.
A voice.
Familiar.
Soft.
"Arkeia, child…"
Her grandmother's voice—gentle, warm, steeped in the weight of remembered summers and firelit stories. It was a sound that should have melted her guard, yet here it rang wrong, as though carried on air too cold for the memory it bore.
She froze.
"You shouldn't walk alone in places like this… not when the veil is so thin…"
The words broke, crackling as if spoken through brittle glass. Then the tone faltered. Beneath it, another resonance bled through—layered, like several mouths shaping the same words in imperfect unison.
The warmth curdled.
"…Come back, little priestess…"
It came from inside the cottage.
From beneath her skin.
From the walls themselves, as if the timber had learned to speak in borrowed voices.
She did not turn. She stepped forward.
The night air met her like absolution—cold, clean, and sharp enough to scrape the breath from her lungs.
She glanced back only once. The hallway behind her stretched impossibly farther than it had before, its vanishing point swallowed in a density of shadow that seemed to breathe.
Then, without a hand upon it, the door closed—quietly, deliberately—sealing whatever dwelled within back into its watchful silence.
⸻
She returned to her camp beneath the cover of the trees.
The path back was silent, yet each step felt measured by something unseen. Halfway across the clearing, the sensation deepened—a pull at the edge of her awareness, like a thread tightening.
She glanced back toward the cottage.
High above, in the distorted glow of a half-lit window, a figure stood framed by warped lamplight. Aethon.
The shadows gripped him so tightly she could not make out the details of his face, yet she felt the weight of his gaze. Then she saw it—slight, deliberate—the curve of a smile.
It was darker than the shadows that held it, a smile that belonged to no human mouth. It did not simply bend lips; it bent the night around him, as if darkness itself had been taught to grin.
She turned away before it could deepen.
The Crusaders lay tangled in their bedrolls, dreaming of suns they would never touch and victories that had never been theirs. Sleep cradled them gently, as though the night had chosen to ignore them.
But their commander did not sleep. She sat alone by the embers, the dim red glow sketching her armor in muted, blood-warm light. Her hands clasped around nothing, fingers pale with the strain of holding a thought too tightly. Her sword stood before her, its blade driven deep into the earth—not as a guard, nor as a challenge, but as a question without a mark, awaiting an answer that would not come.
Above, the stars had not moved. They hung in a sky too still to be natural, as though the firmament itself was holding its breath.
And in that unmoving vault, they whispered:
He's playing with you.
She did not speak it aloud.
But in her bones—where the cold could not reach—she knew. She had not walked through a cottage at all, but through thresholds. Between rooms and shadows. Between prayers half-formed and premonitions never meant for her. Between the world she commanded… and the one that had been waiting for her all along.