From that day, an edict as hard and cold as castle stone was issued: Prince Xane was forbidden from approaching Princess Ciaza until her fifth year. They grew up in the same vast palace, their lives running on parallel tracks that never touched—siblings in name, strangers in shadow.
That wall of enforced separation held for years. It lasted until the King's terrible, wasting illness finally stole his strength, and Empress Jayline, shouldering the crown's crushing weight, was forced to make a desperate decree.
Alone and vulnerable, young Ciaza felt the world shift around her. And then, he was there. Not as the phantom brother from dark nursery tales, but as her appointed guardian, by the Empress's own strict and urgent command.
Xane approached her, no longer a distant shadow, but a present, unavoidable fact. The boy who had once whispered of breaking her neck was now the one ordered to keep her safe.
---
"Your Royal Highness."
The Head Servant's voice was a filament of sound in the cavernous silence of the study. He dared not speak above a whisper, as if fearing the very words might shatter. "The Princess Ciaza… insists once more on an audience. What shall we tell her?"
Xane did not look up from the state parchment unfurled before him. A slow, deliberate smirk touched his lips. This was not the first request. It was the fourteenth. In forty-eight hours, his little sister had become a relentless, predictable tide, crashing against the gate of his indifference.
Fourteen times.
After a lifetime of enforced separation, the Empress's decree had finally fallen. Ciaza, the beloved princess, was now his ward. His responsibility. His. And instead of the cowed fear or spoiled petulance he might have expected, she had responded with a barrage of wide-eyed, inexhaustible demand. She wanted to see him. To meet the phantom brother who had lived just beyond the glass of her nursery world.
He had denied her every time. Not out of neglect, but with the cold precision of an experiment. He wanted to see the shape of her need. To measure its depth. Was it mere curiosity? A child's whim? Or something more… interesting?
And with each denied audience, her pleas became more inventive, her persistence more acute. A sweet, gnawing hunger on the other side of the door. The satisfaction it bred in him was a dark, quiet thing, warmer than any hearth.
"Where is she?" Xane asked, his voice devoid of the lightness of his ten years. It was a command, cool and flat. He stood, and the servant rushed forward with a midnight-blue cape, lining it with silver thread like captured starlight.
Xane did not wait for assistance; he corrected the fit of his own leather gloves, each finger tugged with an elegance that was both innate and brutally practiced.
He had learned. In the five years since his whispered threat had exiled him from her presence, he had mastered everything else. Manners, politics, the silent language of power. The court that once dismissed him as a bloodless orphan now watched him with wary, calculating eyes. The Grand Tutor spoke of his 'predatory intellect' in hushed tones. Xane had made himself impossible to ignore.
"The Grand Hall, Your Highness. She… she said she would wait."
Xane's smirk deepened. Of course she would.---
He found her not in regal anticipation, but conquered by a force greater than her determination: sleep. The Grand Hall, built for intimidating audiences, seemed to dwarf the small, curled form on the velvet divan.
Ciaza was a spill of silk and golden hair, one tiny fist tucked beneath her cheek. Her breaths were soft, even puffs in the vast quiet.
The Head Servant moved, a breath caught to announce his Prince's presence. Xane's hand lifted, a fractional gesture that froze the man and every other servant in the room. An absolute silence descended, heavy with obedience.
Xane approached not as a prince, but as a hunter drawn to a fawn in a sun-dappled clearing. He did not sit beside her. He knelt. Lowering himself until their faces were on a level, separated only by the whisper of her dreams.
Her warmth radiated toward him. A stray strand of hair, fine as gossamer, danced with each exhalation, brushing the tip of her nose. He watched it for a moment, fascinated. Then, with a knuckle so careful it might have been touching holy relic, he hooked the strand and smoothed it behind the delicate shell of her ear.
He stared. His gaze, usually so shuttered and analytical, traced the curve of her lashes, the part of her lips. He was mapping her, this living, breathing consequence of his own displacement.
Her brow furrowed slightly. A soft sigh escaped her, and with it, a murmured word, woven into the fabric of her dream.
"Brother…"
The word hung in the air between them, fragile and profound. Xane's eyes widened, not with softness, but with a sudden, electrifying realization. It was not curiosity that drove her. It was a claiming. A recognition. She had named him in her sleep, anchoring him to a role he had never sought but now saw the terrifying utility of.
A true smile—not a smirk, but something more unsettling in its warmth—transformed his face. He rose fluidly, his shadow falling over her sleeping form.
He turned to the Head Servant, his voice now crisp with finality."From tomorrow, you will bring her to my study each day after her morning lessons. Inform the Princess that her audience is granted.
Permanently."He let the implication settle like frost. "I will be her guardian in truth. In every way."
With a last, inscrutable glance at the slumbering girl who had just, in her innocence, handed him a new kind of power, Prince Xane left the hall. The game had shifted. She did not just need to see him.
She needed him.
And he would ensure she always would.