"I carry a countdown in my veins."
The sentence tasted 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 had rehearsed his fall.
The torch in his hand threw brittle light. The stone drank it.
Below, the palace heat unraveled into damp and rot.
The air smelled of old prayers—and fresher lies.
No one came to the dungeons by choice. Everyone knew that.
And they knew Ryven should have stayed away.
At the corridor's end, a cell waited like an accusation.
Rusted bars. A low ceiling that seemed ready to lean in.
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 in bedtime fragments: green.
The kind that kept its teeth hidden.
They still held that color.
A small cruelty, Ryven thought. 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 to frighten her—he had learned the economy of fear—but because light revealed edges.
People sharpen under flame.
"You tell me the truth," Ryven said.
The words were a blade, only partially revealed.
"Is the Child of Darkness—"
She laughed. Dry, 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.
For a second, Ryven could believe she remembered sunlight.
"You want a place and a corpse, boy? Or a lie dressed in a map?"
He spread the paper between them.
The map smelled of ink and fear.
A red mark glowed like a fresh wound—morbrak.
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.
Her fingers trembled as if tracing a memory in the air.
"Six circles," she said, voice small. Then louder, hysterical,
"Six wings. One broken. One home."
Ryven's throat tightened.
The stone in his pocket, forgotten until now, warmed like a living thing.
He pressed it without looking.
It pulsed—a tiny, steady heartbeat. Not his heart, but something older. Full of patience.
"Speak plain," he said.
Plainness was a currency in which he was almost rich.
She looked at him as if he'd asked her 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 forgetful courtiers.
But the torch guttered.
In the wavering shadow, the gold chains sang an answering note.
He asked anyway.
"What did it say the night the queen—"
"Shh."
She shut him down like a guardian.
"Names open doors. Some doors have teeth."
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 small, 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. Facts are sometimes weapons.
"You don't have long."
She smiled. Not cruel, only weary.
A 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, hoping to kill whatever presses it.
But some things do not die. They are not meant to be killed by blades."
He should have stepped back. He did not.
Backing away was a small, agreeable suicide.
Instead, he leaned forward.
The torch made her cheekbones hollower; younger; more vicious.
"Then tell me who feeds the clock," he said.
"Tell me who poisons the line.
Tell me why the Six-Wing suffocates my orders with gold rings."
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, the palace hummed with quiet, deliberate life.
Courtiers polishing smiles. The Duke's paw on his wine glass.
A child learning which foot to lead when the crowd cheered.
Ryven felt the pulse in his pocket quicken.
The stone nudged his fingers. Time.
He lied. 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.
Its heartbeat synced with his own.
For an instant, the torchlight revealed him.
Not kingly. Not noble.
Just a thin man standing under a heavy name.
Climbing back, 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 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 whispered names. Stirred. 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.