The throne hall was drowned in silence, thick and suffocating, so heavy that even the torches seemed to shiver, their flames flickering like nervous hearts. The polished marble reflected every shadow, every whisper, turning the grand hall into a cage. Laine stood shackled, black chains glowing like molten iron against his pale, bruised skin. Each breath came ragged, ragged enough to taste the iron of his own blood, yet his spine remained unbent, stubborn as stone.
Whispers slithered through the nobles like venom:
Monster…
A curse in human flesh…
How dare he stand before her…
Every word cut deeper than any blade. Laine wanted to speak, to demand answers, to shout against the injustice—but his throat was dry, parched from the cruelty of betrayal, and his voice seemed stolen from him, carried away by the weight of the court's judgment.
Finally, the Empress spoke. Her voice—once warmth incarnate, once the sound of home—had become a blade of ice:
Take him away. From this moment, he is no prince, no kin, no name. Let the world know him only as a shadow cast out from our blood.
The single word echoed like a death knell, bouncing off marble, crawling into every corner of the hall. Guards surged forward, dragging him across the polished stone, the scrape of his body leaving faint, crimson trails—a memory being forcibly erased. He felt every whisper, every judgment, cutting into him like knives.
Outside, rain hammered against the palace gates, furious and mocking. Lightning split the sky, illuminating the empire in brief, white flashes, each one exposing Laine's bloodied, chained figure. When the heavy doors slammed behind him, the sound was final, unforgiving—a severing of the life he had known, a door closed on the past.
Thrown into the mud, chains biting cruelly into his flesh, Laine lifted his hollow, burning eyes to the storm above. Thunder cracked as if echoing his rage, and inside his chest, something ignited—not despair, not defeat—but a quiet, burning defiance.
"You can bury my name," he whispered to the storm, voice raw, shaking with both pain and fury, "but you cannot bury my will. Even if I rot as a corpse, my shadow… my shadow will rise again."