"I carry a countdown in my veins."
The sentence arrived with the taste of iron. It was not a metaphor. It hummed under his skin like a borrowed heartbeat, quick, cold, inevitable.
Ryven felt it then — not later, not as a rumor — but like a name pressed to his tongue: short, sharp, final.
He should have been terrified. Instead he smiled. People expect the heir to show fear. He liked keeping them wrong.
——
Ryven moved down the steps like a man who has rehearsed his fall. The torch in his hand threw brittle light; the stone drank it.
Below, the palace heat unstitched itself into damp and rot. The air smelled of old prayers and fresher lies.
No one came to the dungeons by choice. Everyone knew that. They also knew Ryven should have stayed away.
At the corridor's end a cell waited like an accusation. Rusted bars. A low ceiling that wanted to lean in.
And inside — a woman bent like a broken story, hair the color of oil, hands bound by chains that still shamed the light. Gold chains. Holy and ridiculous at once.
Her eyes were a color his mother had once described to him in bedtime fragments: green, the kind that kept its teeth hidden. They still held that color.
That- Ryven thought-was a small cruelty. Even colors could outlast justice.
"Finally," she croaked. "You kept the appointment, little crown."
Her voice was a torn ribbon. It fit the room.
Ryven set the torch on the wall, close enough to make her flinch. Not because he wanted to frighten her — he had learned the economy of fear; it wasted too much of a man — but because he liked the way the light revealed someone's edges. People sharpen under flame.
"You tell me the truth," Ryven said. The words were a blade he chose not to show all at once. "Is the Child of Darkness—"
She laughed. It was a dry thing, like wind through empty bones. "The Child of Darkness is a name with teeth. Names eat men."
She leaned forward as far as the chains allowed, and for a second Ryven could have believed she remembered the taste of sunlight.
Ryven paused, eyes locked on her, mind caught on every word he heard.
Her voice had turned to the edge of a blade, and without thinking, his hand reached for the map. His fingers touched it, discovering it, and he spread it between them, just as she drew a breath.
The map smelled of ink and fear. A red mark glowed on the parchment like a fresh wound — morbrak.
"You want a place and a corpse, boy? Or a lie dressed in a map?"
He had not come for a parlor riddle. He had come because the Six-Winged Council had closed their mouths and opened their fists.
He had come because a sleeping thing had called him by the name his family used when they thought themselves kind.
Her hand — thin, ashamed, amazed — hovered above the map. She traced nothing; her fingers trembled as if tracing a memory on the air.
"Six circles," she said, voice small, and then louder, hysterical, "six wings. One is broken. One is home."
Ryven's throat tightened. The stone in his pocket, forgotten until this moment, warmed like a living thing.
He pressed it without looking. It answered with a tiny, steady pulse — not his heart but something older, older and full of patience.
"Speak plain," he said. Plainness was a currency in which he was almost rich.
She looked at him as if she had been asked to solve a riddle whose solution was a burning house.
"They come in liturgy," she whispered. "And in lullaby. The one who calls — it carries light like a blade. It reads names from skin. It knows you. It knows when you begin to rot."
That should have been nonsense. A madwoman's phrase to send a man back to his warm bed and his forgetful courtiers. But the torch guttered, and in the wavering shadow the gold chains sang an answering note.
He asked the question anyway. "What did you see the night the queen—"
"Shh." She shut him down like a guardian. "Names open doors. We've opened enough of them."
Her fingers moved with a child's precision. She drew not on the spot but around it — circles, then another. Six. Her nail caught paper. A little clean pinprick of red like a promise.
Ryven looked at the puncture. He saw not a mark but a calendar. Months. Weeks.
"You'll die," he said, because facts are sometimes weapons. "You don't have long."
She smiled — not cruel, only weary, the sort of smile carved before the world hardened.
"You don't either, prince." She said his title like an odd coin.
"You carry a clock. You look for a being named the Child of Darkness and hope to kill whatever presses it. But some things do not die because they are not meant to be killed by blades."
He should have stepped back. He did not. He had learned, early, that backing away was a small, agreeable suicide. Instead, he leaned forward.
The torch made her cheekbones hollower; it made her seem younger and more vicious.
"Then tell me who feeds the clock," he said. "Tell me who poisons the line. Tell me why the Six-Winged suffocates my orders."
She tapped the map with a brittle knuckle. "They already whisper it at the table. They trade sons like bread. But names… names are harder to bury. They are like seeds."
A grunt escaped the corridor. Above them, somewhere, the palace hummed with quiet, deliberate life — courtiers polishing their smiles, the Duke's paw on his wine glass, a child learning which foot to lead with when the crowd cheered.
Ryven felt the pulse in his pocket quicken. The stone nudged his fingers, as if to say: time.
He lied then, and with the lie wrapped in half-truths he felt alive. "If the Child of Darkness lives, I will go. I will bring back proof. Or its head."
The woman's laugh cut something new in him: pity, perhaps. "Bring back nothing," she said. "Bring back the truth. That will hurt more."
Ryven folded the map. The crease was a line of intent. He slipped the stone deeper into his palm and felt its heartbeat sync with his own.
For an instant the torchlight found his face and revealed it: not kingly, not noble. Just a thin man standing under a heavy name.
When he climbed, the corridor felt narrower. The palace's warm breath waited to swallow him whole.
He could hear the council's memory already — the clink of rings, the soft, practiced chorus of dissent: He will not last. He cannot rule. Let him go to his death; let us choose a stronger hand.
Ryven stepped back into the world that wanted him to fit a story it had already read.
He tied on the smile his mother had taught him — the one that made people forget the dead clock beneath his ribs.
Outside, the moon looked like a watchful thing with too many teeth.
Somewhere beyond the palace walls, morbrak bled into the night.
Somewhere, a shadow that whispered names stirred and listened.
He had a map. He had a stone. He had minutes.
And for the first time in years, Ryven felt like a man who could steal tomorrow.