Voices swam through the darkness like fish through murky water—distant, distorted, barely recognizable as human speech.
"—blood loss is severe—"
"—infection may have already—"
"—move him carefully, His Grace won't tolerate—"
James felt himself being lifted, hands gripping his arms and legs with professional efficiency but no particular gentleness. Pain lanced through his side, sharp enough to drag him partially toward consciousness. Pain lanced through his side, sharp enough to drag him partially toward consciousness. He tried to speak, to demand they put him down, to insist he could walk on his own, but his tongue felt thick and useless in his mouth, a swollen thing that filled his throat like cotton soaked in copper. A woman's voice broke through, though it seemed to come from very far away, as if she were calling to him from the bottom of a well. Then a gruffer familiar voice, the head physician, words clipped with urgency and authority.
"—is it safe to move him from the Palace—"
"—known order to treat at Celosia Estate—"
"—carriage ride could be treacherous—"
"—clean yourself first and meet us—"
The world tilted sickeningly. He was moving—being carried on a stretcher, he realized dimly, body swaying with each step like a ship on troubled waters. Torchlight flickered across his closed eyelids, painting the inside of his skull in shades of orange and red that pulsed in time with his heartbeat—too fast, too irregular, struggling against the weight of blood loss and exhaustion.
A cool, slender hand touched his forehead, fingers trailing across his sweat-dampened skin with a gentleness that seemed at odds with the urgency around him. The touch lingered for a heartbeat, two, before disappearing as suddenly as it had come. He wanted to open his eyes, to see whose hand offered that brief comfort, but his eyelids were weighted with lead, refusing to obey.
The physicians were arguing above him, their voices rising and falling like tides, as he felt himself jostled into the up and down of a carriage.
"—madness to ride in that condition—"
"—typical of the Marquess—"
"—surprised he didn't die in the saddle—"
He wanted to tell them he'd considered it. That dying in the saddle would have been cleaner, simpler, less complicated than whatever political nightmare awaited him in recovery. But the darkness was pulling at him again, dragging him down into depths where words had no meaning and pain was a distant, abstract concept.
The carriage wheels sang against stone, a lullaby of iron and wood that should have been soothing but instead felt ominous, like a funeral march played at half-speed. James let himself sink into that darkness, let consciousness slip away like water through open fingers, because holding on hurt too much and required strength he no longer possessed.
᯽
The carriage jolted over uneven cobblestones, and consciousness flickered back like a candle in wind—brief, uncertain, threatening to gutter out at any moment. James registered voices through the fog that suggested crisis management rather than routine medical care.
Each jolt sent fresh agony radiating through his side, his shoulder, his ribs—wounds that shouldn't all hurt simultaneously. James felt himself being lifted, hands gripping his arms and legs with professional efficiency but no particular gentleness as he was carried and slid onto something soft.
"I will not leave him—" Seraphina's voice, sharp with defiance, cutting through the murk like a blade through silk. "I am his betrothed, I have every right t—"
"You have no rights here beyond what I grant you, my lady, and I grant you none." The head physician's tone carried absolute authority, the kind that came from decades of making life-or-death decisions in moments of crisis. "What I'm about to examine is not for... this requires medical privacy. His lordship would not want you to see—"
"I don't care what he would want, he's dying—"
"Which is precisely why I need you gone." His voice dropped to something harder, colder, edged with steel beneath the professional courtesy. "Leave. Now. Or I will have you removed by the guards, and damn the scandal it creates."
A tense silence stretched like wire pulled taut, vibrating with unspoken threat and stubborn resistance. Then the rustle of skirts—silk against linen, the whisper of expensive fabric moving with reluctant haste. Footsteps retreating, each one echoing James's heartbeat: too fast, too loud, too uneven.
"You cannot—" Seraphina's protest, fainter now, coming from beyond a doorway.
"I can and I will. For his protection and yours. Now go."
The sound of a door closing with more force than necessary, the heavy oak thudding into its frame like the sealing of a tomb. James tried to open his eyes, to intervene, to tell them Seraphina could stay, but his body refused to obey. He was trapped in his own flesh, aware but powerless, consciousness floating somewhere between waking and sleeping, anchored to neither.
"Finally," the head physician muttered, his voice closer now, directly above James's prone form. "Let me see the damage properly. Remove his shirt—carefully, the wounds are extensive."
The sound of fabric being cut away, scissors snipping through fine linen and the leather backing beneath. Bandages peeled back with careful precision, each layer revealing something worse beneath. Then a sharp intake of breath that spoke volumes—surprise, horror, professional concern all wrapped into one involuntary sound.
"Gods preserve us," a younger voice whispered, shakier than it should be for someone in the medical profession. "Those wounds... they're mirrored. Look—the slash across his left ribs, it matches the angle he would have used to strike downward. And this puncture near his shoulder, it's positioned exactly where he drove his blade through that attacker's lung. It's as if—"
"As if every wound he inflicted came back to mark his own flesh," the head physician's finished grimly. "The Curse of the Twin Blades seems to have been aggravated. It looks like Shadow Binding. Rare. Vicious. Expensive to employ."
A pause, heavy with calculation and political understanding. "If word gets out that the Marquess of Celosia can be neutralized with this particular magic, that his own combat prowess becomes his greatest vulnerability..."
"Should we inform the Council? They need to know if there's a magical threat that can—"
"Are you mad?" his response was immediate, harsh, cutting through the younger man's suggestion like an axe through kindling.
"The moment the Council knows about this weakness, half of them will be quietly hiring Shadowcasters to finish what this ambush started. The other half will use the information as leverage. No. We treat this quietly. We document nothing in the official records. And if anyone asks, we say he took wounds in the normal course of battle—multiple opponents, chaotic engagement, wounds from various angles. Nothing about curses or mirroring or shadow magic."
"But the pattern is too precise to be coincidental. Any trained physician would see—"
"Then we ensure no other trained physicians examine him closely." His voice carried the weight of absolute decision like an executioner's blade.
"We say the wounds are healing well but remain sensitive, that we're concerned about infection, that he requires isolation and rest. We create barriers of medical authority and professional discretion. We make it impossible for curious eyes to see what we've seen."
"And if someone demands access? The Council has authority to—"
"The First Prince has greater authority, and he will support this decision once I inform him privately." A sound of instruments being arranged, metal clinking against metal.
"His Grace understands the value of protecting his assets, and the Marquess is perhaps his most valuable asset. No. This curse remains secret. We tell His Grace, we tell no one else, and we pray to whatever gods might be listening that we can heal him before the curse does permanent damage to tissue that cannot regenerate."
"Yes, Sir." The younger voice, subdued now, accepting.
"Good. Now help me with these sutures. The wounds need to be cleaned and closed before the corruption spreads deeper. And send word to the First Prince immediately—coded message, eyes only, maximum discretion. He needs to know what we're facing."
James felt hands on his wounds—practiced, efficient, devoid of gentleness because gentleness was a luxury injured flesh could not afford. The sharp bite of needle through skin, thread pulling tissue together in neat rows. Antiseptic that burned like liquid fire. Bandages wrapped with precision, each layer applied with the methodical care of someone who understood that the difference between life and death often came down to proper wound management.
But it all seemed distant, unimportant. His mind was fracturing again, reality sliding away like water through cupped hands. The voices faded, replaced by older sounds, older pains, memories that surfaced unbidden from depths where he'd buried them decades ago.
The darkness rose to claim him, and the dream, when it came, was not gentle.
᯽
The training yard was painted in the colors of violence—red dust churned to mud by countless feet, sunset bleeding across the sky like a wound, black banners of House Celosia snapping in the evening wind.
James stood in the center, wooden sword clutched in hands too small for its weight, his body a canvas of bruises in shades of purple and black and sickly yellow.
He stood with a wooden sword too heavy for an eight-year-old. His ribs hurt, bruises covered him, and his knuckles were raw.
"Again," the weapons master said, his voice devoid of anything except relentless expectation. He was a scarred veteran who'd lost an eye to a cavalry charge twenty years past and now spent his retirement beating combat discipline into noble children with the same methodical cruelty he'd once applied to breaking enemy formations.
"You dropped your guard on the backswing. In real battle, you'd be dead. Your brothers would be burying whatever pieces the crows left behind."
James wanted to point out that his brothers and the other trainees—older, stronger, sons who mattered—had finished their lessons hours ago and departed for warm baths and warmer dinners. Wanted to scream that he was tired and hurt and hungry and that no child should have to train until their hands bled and their vision swam and their legs shook so badly they could barely stand.
But he'd learned, in recent brutal months, that explaining was weakness. Protesting was failure. Showing pain only made the training harder, longer, more vicious. So he simply raised his sword again, ignoring the way his arms trembled with exhaustion, ignoring the hot tears that wanted to spill but couldn't—wouldn't—because crying was for children who had the luxury of being loved, and James had forfeited that luxury when he chose to be necessary instead.
"Your father says you told him you'd make yourself necessary," the weapons master continued, circling like a wolf around wounded prey.
"Interesting choice of words for a child. Most boys your age want to be loved, or feared, or admired. But you chose necessary. Do you understand what that means, boy?"
James said nothing, conserving his breath, watching the weapons master's footwork for the tells that would signal an attack. Left foot sliding forward half an inch. Weight shifting to the right. Shoulder dropping slightly before the strike came.
There.
James moved, bringing his sword up to block, but he was too slow—exhausted muscles responding a heartbeat behind his mind's command. The weapons master's blade slammed into his guard with force that sent shockwaves up James's arms, numbing his hands, nearly tearing the sword from his grip.
"Do you know what happens to necessary things, boy?" The weapons master blade whistling through air, each strike harder than the last.
"They get used. Worn down. Ground to dust in service of others. A necessary tool has no value beyond its function. No one weeps when a hammer breaks. No one mourns when a sword shatters."
Another strike, faster, vicious. James twisted away but not quickly enough. The wooden blade caught him across the ribs—the cracked ones, the ones that already hurt—with force that drove the air from his lungs and sent pain exploding through his chest in white-hot waves.
He went down hard, knees hitting the dust, then his hands, then his whole body crumpling sideways. The impact jarred his ribs again and he tasted blood—had bitten his tongue, or maybe his lip, he couldn't tell. The world tilted sickeningly. Red dust filled his vision, his mouth, his lungs. He couldn't breathe. Couldn't think. Couldn't do anything except hurt.
"Get up." The weapons master's voice was relentless, inevitable as sunrise, as pitiless as winter. "Necessary things don't have the luxury of staying down."
James tried. He could hear his own breathing—ragged, wet, wrong-sounding.
"I said get up." The weapons master's boot appeared in James's limited field of vision, close enough to kick, to grind his face deeper into the dust. "
You chose this, boy. That means you don't get to quit when it hurts. You don't get to rest when you're tired. You get up, and you fight, and you bleed, and you survive, because that's what necessary means."
Something in James's chest—something that wasn't his cracked ribs or his laboring lungs—cracked too. A child's desperate hope that maybe someone would see him struggling and offer help.
That maybe his father would appear and decide his youngest son had suffered enough. That maybe someone, anyone, would care that he was eight years old and breaking.
But no one came. No one cared. Because he'd chosen to be necessary, and necessary things didn't need comfort. They just needed to function.
James got up.
He raised his sword. The wooden blade wavered, tip drawing small circles in the air because his hands shook too badly to hold it steady. But he raised it. Because staying down meant being unnecessary, meant being discarded, meant proving that all this pain was for nothing.
"Good," the weapons master said. "Pain is information. Learn from it. The empire doesn't need soft nobles who flinch at discomfort. It needs hard men willing to bleed."
The training continued as stars emerged overhead, as darkness swallowed the red sunset, as the air grew cold enough that James's sweat-soaked clothes clung to his skin like ice.
In the brief moments when the weapons master paused to correct his stance or demonstrate a technique, James wondered if the old soldier was right. If making himself necessary meant grinding himself to dust, piece by piece, year by year, until nothing remained but the function he served.
"Again," the weapons master said, and James—eight years old, bleeding, breaking, becoming necessary—obeyed.
᯽
Then the first convulsion hit.
James arched violently off the table, a raw sound forcing its way out of him.
"Hold him down!" the head physician snapped. "Don't let him tear the sutures—"
Hands pressed him flat as the curse dug deeper. His wounds blazed with pain that transcended the physical—shadow magic burning through nerve endings, rewriting the patterns of damage, making permanent what should have been temporary.
"What's happening to him?" the younger physician's voice, pitched high with panic.
"The curse is settling from that shadow binding. Becoming bound to his body rather than just reflected on it." The head physician's hands moved rapidly, checking pulse points, examining eyes that had rolled back to show only whites. "It's anchoring itself. Dragons damn it, I'd hoped we had more time—"
Outside the closed door, Seraphina heard the commotion—the thud of a body convulsing against wood, the urgent voices, the unmistakable sound of medical crisis. She'd been pacing the hallway, fury and worry warring in her chest, but that sound cut through everything else with the clarity of absolute terror.
She lunged for the door, hands hitting the wood hard enough to bruise, splitting her delicate skin use to embroidery and book reading. "Let me in! What's happening? Daniel—"
"Stay out!" the head physician roared, his voice carrying a desperation that only heightened her panic. "For the love of all gods, Lady Araminta, stay out! Guards! Restrain her!"
"He's dying, I can hear—let me in, you have no right to keep me from—"
The door was locked. She could hear the bolt sliding home even as she spoke, the physicians securing themselves inside, protecting their secret at the cost of her presence. Seraphina threw her weight against the door, once, twice, shoulder impacting a door that refused to yield.
Pain burst down her arm, but the door did not so much as shudder. As she staggered back for another attempt, the two knights stationed outside moved as one, stepping into her path. One seized her waist, the other her shoulders, their armor cold against her trembling body.
"Miss, you'll get hurt.".
A sound split the world in two. A raw feral animal howl of agony from behind the doors cut them off.
She hammered her fists against the guards' armor, the blows dull, frantic, useless. Tears streamed hot down her cheeks, blurring the hallway. They held firm, but desperation sharpened her. She drove her elbow back, hard, into one's gut.
The breath punched out of him; he doubled slightly, grip faltering. She twisted, wild and half-sobbing, breaking free for a heartbeat before his gauntleted hand reached for her again.
"Let me go!" Her voice cracked into something raw, frayed. "He needs me—he needs me!"
The second guard caught her around the middle, hauling her back as though she weighed nothing. She thrashed like a creature cornered, kicking, twisting, her heel slamming into his shin hard enough that he grunted. She struck again—an elbow, a fist, anything she could weaponize from her shaking body.
She bent forward abruptly, letting her weight drop, throwing the guard off balance. She slammed her fists against the door, skin splitting. Her fingers clawing for purchase, for any weakness. Splinters bit her skin, sharp and merciless.
"Let me in, damn you—let me in!"
"Miss Araminata, stop—!" the guard begged, grabbing and pinning her to the ground. "You can't—"
"I can!" she screamed, head snapping back to slam into his helmet. The metal rang; he cursed, loosening his hold, her head pounding. Another scream from inside. This one dimmer. Fading. Her heart stopped.
Fear stripping away every carefully maintained layer of courtly composure as she finally allowed them to stop her. "Don't you dare die in there, do you hear me? Don't you dare—"
᯽
Inside, the convulsion peaked and broke. James's body went suddenly, terribly still—the kind that could mean unconsciousness or death. The head physician pressed fingers to his throat, searching for a pulse, counting heartbeats that came too slow. "He's still with us," he said finally, relief evident despite his professional restraint. "But barely. The curse is taking more than I anticipated. We need to work faster."
Seraphina had sunk down to sit with her back pressed against the wood. She could hear the physicians moving inside, their voices low and urgent. She could just barely hear James' breathing through the thick door—ragged, irregular, but present. Still alive. Still fighting.
"He's alive," he said. "Barely. We need to work faster."
Outside, Seraphina slid down the door, hands shaking, listening for any sign he was still breathing. When she heard the faint, uneven breaths, she exhaled shakily.
"I'm here," she whispered. "I'm not leaving."
Inside, the head physician worked with grim efficiency, sealing wounds, applying unguents that smelled of bitter herbs and stranger things, wrapping bandages that had been soaked in solutions designed to draw out corruption. The younger physician assisted, his hands steadier now that the immediate crisis had passed.
"Will he survive?" the younger man asked quietly.
The head physician didn't answer immediately. When he finally spoke, his voice carried the weight of decades spent making impossible predictions about patients who defied medical logic.
"If he were anyone else? No. The curse should have killed him on that mountain road. The blood loss alone should have been fatal. The infection should have claimed him during the ride. And this convulsion should have stopped his heart."
"But?"
"But he's the Marquess of Celosia. The Mad Dog. The Beast of the Battlefield. The man who rode through a blizzard with arrows in his back when he was sixteen. Who survived a siege by eating rats and drinking snowmelt when he was twenty. Who has died a dozen times by all reasonable medical assessment and refused to stay dead out of sheer bloody-minded stubbornness."
The physician's voice carried something that might have been admiration or exasperation or both. "So yes. Against all logic and medical wisdom, I believe he'll survive. Because men like him don't have the sense to die when they should."
Serphina waited, her hands clasped together so tightly her knuckles went white. She had chosen to stand with him rather than against him. And she would not abandon that choice now, regardless of locked doors or physician's orders or political consequences.
James's consciousness spiraled down into darkness, and the dreams—fever-bright and razor-sharp—rose up to claim him.
The fever tightened its grip, and the dreams twisted darker.
᯽
The scene began to shift, blurring at the edges like a painting left in the rain. The red dust became red mud became red snow. The training yard stretched and warped, expanding impossibly until it was no longer a yard but a battlefield. The weapons master's face flickered, becoming his father's face, becoming Duke Rothwell's face, becoming a skull with empty eye sockets that leaked darkness.
The northern road wound through the pines like a scar, narrow and restless beneath the weight of winter wind. Frost clung to the branches overhead, shedding in delicate bursts whenever a gust pressed through the ravine.
Marquess Celosia rode at the head of his column, his posture straight, his expression as unreadable as the stone crest of a panther on his breastplate.
His escort moved in disciplined silence, horses' hooves thudding like slow funeral drums against the frozen earth. Ahead, the road narrowed into a cleft between two jagged cliffs. A place older than empires. His escort of twelve halted behind him, steel murmuring as hands tightened on hilts.
"Why've the birds stopped?" Lieutenant Corin muttered.
Celosia didn't answer. He felt the absence like pressure between his ribs—a missing heartbeat in the earth itself. His gloved hand rose, palm angled toward the treeline. The road was too quiet. His stallion's ears flicked. The forest held its breath.
"Form up," he said quietly. "Shields high. Someone's here."
James slowly slid his sword from its scabbard. The steel sang, a long, hungry note that shivered against the cliffs and vanished like a prayer swallowed by a pit.
A crow burst from the branches above. Then another. Then the forest erupted.
Sharp and vivid as if thrusted into his brain like broken glass came another. Scenes blurred—battlefields, snow, shifting corridors, Seraphina dying in a dream he couldn't escape, enemies blaming him, shadows whispering that being "necessary" meant being used until nothing was left.
The ballroom was on fire. No—not fire. Something worse. Shadow flame that consumed without heat, leaving only cold absence where warmth should be. James was running, searching, calling her name, but the corridors kept shifting, doors opening onto rooms that shouldn't exist.
"Seraphina!" His voice echoed strangely, swallowed by the unnatural darkness.
He found her in what had once been the throne room. She lay on the marble floor in a pool of blood that looked black in the shadow-light, her green eyes staring at nothing.
"She waited for you," a voice said—Ilyas, emerging from the shadows with that damned smile. "She actually waited. Believed you'd come back. Believed you'd protect her."
The Third Prince knelt beside Seraphina's body, reaching out as if to close her eyes. "Touching, really. Foolish, but touching."
"Don't touch her." James's voice was barely a whisper, his strength failing. "Don't—"
"You made yourself necessary," Ilyas continued, ignoring him completely. "But you forgot that necessary things are tools, Marquess. And tools break. They wear out. They become... unnecessary."
The throne room began to dissolve, melting like wax in flame. Seraphina's body faded first, then the Duke, then Ilyas, until James was alone in an endless void with only his own blood for company.
"She died thinking you'd save her," the darkness whispered in his father's voice. "How disappointingly predictable."
᯽
Around him, bodies lay in the snow—men he'd killed, men he'd failed to save, men whose names he'd never learned. They reached for him with hands that had no flesh, only bone, grasping at his fading form.
"You chose this," they whispered in unison, their voices the wind through empty ribs. "This is what it costs."
James wanted to deny it, to argue, to explain that he'd been eight years old and hadn't understood what he was choosing. But his voice was gone, ground away along with everything else, leaving only function, only purpose, only the necessary violence that defined him.
The battlefield dissolved into darkness, and he fell through it, through time, through memory, through the endless catalogue of wounds and wars and decisions that had brought him here.
Still falling. Still becoming. Still necessary, even as he ceased to exist.
Usefulness. Jeopardy. Consequences. Delicate matters. No matter the cost. Ground to dust. Worn to nothing. Useful until you're not, and then discarded.
He fell through memory and nightmare, the curse burning deeper with every heartbeat.