The first night at Winter Garden, the walk-in closet alone was larger than the place I once called home.
I had dreamed of a place like this.
So why did it feel so empty?
Sleep never came.
I lay in the cradle, and when I turned my head I saw Marianne, her own bed beside mine. She had cried herself to sleep, but her body hadn't gotten the message — small tremors still rippled through her every few moments, a sharp breath catching in her throat as though her lungs kept searching for tears that had already run dry. Every so often, a broken sob slipped from her sleeping mouth.
My own mind wouldn't settle either. Something in my chest ached at the sight of her — that specific, helpless ache of watching someone close to you come apart. I couldn't tell if it was because she was this body's mother, or because I'd built her, once, as a tribute to my grandmother. Marianne's devotion to her son Arthur had been my way of honoring the woman who'd anchored my sister and me through everything. My former life, I reminded myself. Everything about that word still felt like a wound I hadn't finished discovering.
Sleep eluded me anyway. Every time I closed my eyes, the day replayed itself: the screams, the glint of steel, the blood. Heads rolling. Limbs strewn. Crimson pooling into the dirt. No film, no story from my world had ever come close to the visceral terror of living it. My young body trembled beneath the weight of memories that belonged, technically, to someone else.
Technically to me.
Questions circled without landing. What had happened to Grandma when she heard the news? My sister? Were Blake and Natalie and the rest of that pack in chains, or did their wealth still shield them from justice?
Beneath all of it sat the deeper wound: my own rebirth. I'd been cursed to wear the skin of the story's antagonist — a role that came pre-loaded with a death sentence. If I'd been reborn as the heroine instead, even the change of sex would have been a fair trade for the survival the plot guaranteed. Instead I was standing inside a story I'd already written the ending to, and this body — this exact body — was the one my own hand had signed it with.
The bitter irony of it burned. I had built this world, line by line, crafted this nightmare with my own bare hands. Now I had to live inside it — and if I wanted to keep living, there was a door I could not let open. Marianne's grief could not be allowed to deepen into what I knew it became. I wouldn't let her hand be the one that ended her. Because her death was the first domino, and dominoes don't stop at one.
Bereft of his mother's love, abandoned by a father who no longer cared, he would fall to the cruelty of his father's other wives and their children — trapped in a nightmare of neglect and malice, a grim echo of Cinderella, only far more bitter.
If that moment came to pass, Arthur would start small. That was how the Beast Atrocity Arc always began in my draft — the first arc that would eventually shape the monster he became. It never looked like much at first: carrier birds dead in the household mews, puppies gone missing from the kennels that were meant to grow into Wolfhard hunting dogs, other small creatures vanishing without a trace. He would inflict on them the same pain that had been inflicted on him, and slowly, cruelty by quiet cruelty, he would lose all remorse for life. Nothing that anyone would ever trace back to a grieving child.
And small cruelties don't stay small. I knew exactly which door that led to, because I'd built the house.
I had written it. Now I had to unwrite it.
⟨CALMING PROTOCOLS ACTIVATED.⟩
⟨STRESS LEVELS CRITICAL.⟩
⟨INITIATING NEURAL PACIFICATION.⟩
Then came a voice I never thought I'd hear again. A melody.
Hmm. Hmmmm. Hmm. Hmmmm.
Grandma's lullaby — soft, familiar, wrapping around me like a hand on the back of my neck as it filled the darkness.
She used to hum this whenever Maeve cried through the night, missing our parents. She never told her to stop crying. Instead she would stroke her hair and hum that same soft, wordless melody until the sobs faded into quiet breaths. Somehow it always soothed us both, and before long we'd drift off to sleep in the sound of it.
How...how do you know that song, Pando—
My eyes grew heavy before I could finish the thought. My fragile new body surrendered to sleep, carried under by a stolen lullaby.
---
The next day, at Grael's command, the empire's finest healers came to Winter Garden.
First was a priest of the Holy Church, who knelt at my side and began to pray.
O First Light that birthed existence, hear my plea. Mend the wounds no eyes can see, restore broken flesh, calm weary minds, strengthen fading spirits. Let pain become peace, despair become hope, weakness become renewed strength. May your gentle grace flow through every vein like a healing river, driving away sickness, curses, and darkness. Erase suffering. Rewrite mortality. Let your radiance reclaim what darkness has stolen.
Gold mana circuits ignited beneath my skin like constellations catching fire. Time seemed to slow as a pillar of radiant light swallowed me — and when it faded, I felt completely restored, even the fatigue of a sleepless night burned away. A faint shimmer lingered in the air as the light dispersed.
The priest opened his eyes, rose, and looked at Grael with something close to fear.
"My divine powers can't reach this. Whatever's afflicted him is beyond me." He didn't look at me again. "Forget him ever learning to hold a sword. At this rate he'll be lucky to survive childhood."
Next came a healing mage from one of the Towers, a wand of seastone-blue topaz fused with fine-grained wood raised in one hand — the kind of tool that told you a man could afford to spoil himself in pursuit of his craft. He leveled it at me and let the incantation take his lips:
Κύκλοι τοῦ μάνα, συγχρονίσθητε. Κύτταρα, διαιρεῖσθε. Φλέβες, συνάπτεσθε. Ὀστᾶ, ἀναμορφοῦσθε. Πᾶν τραῦμα γενέσθω λήθη. Αἰωνία Ἀναγέννησις.
[Circuits of mana, synchronize. Cells, divide. Veins, reconnect. Bones, reform. Let every wound become forgotten memory. Eternal Regeneration.]
A magic circle bloomed beneath me, its intricate runes stretching outward in perfect symmetry, and a brilliant chlorophyll-green radiance erupted from its center, engulfing me in warm, life-giving light — as if I'd been transported into the heart of a forest overflowing with vitality.
Eternal Regeneration didn't merely heal. It rewound a body's condition to its healthiest point in the last day — lost limbs restored, fatal wounds erased, death itself argued with and occasionally overruled. It was a legend of a spell, one only a handful of healers alive could cast even once.
The mage's confidence didn't survive the casting. His wand arm dropped. He shook his head slowly, like a man revising everything he thought he knew about his own magic.
"He's alive," he said. "Barely. As if death already claimed him and simply forgot to collect the body."
Last came an alchemist from the Royal Court. He worked with the precision of a seasoned scientist — measuring powders, crushing herbs, pouring shimmering liquids into a glass flask. As the mixture bubbled and changed colors, a fragrant steam rose. After a few final ingredients, the potion settled into a thick amber liquid.
"It's ready," he said, and without giving me a choice, poured it down my throat.
It tasted like medicinal honey at first — thick, carrying the warm sweetness of cinnamon. For one brief moment it was almost pleasant. Then the bitterness struck: a harsh metallic aftertaste that clung to my tongue and refused to fade.
The alchemist folded his arms and watched me closely, waiting for the potion to take effect.
Seconds passed. Then a minute. Minutes became an hour.
Nothing.
His certainty curdled into confusion, then something closer to alarm. He leaned in, examining me from head to toe.
"That's — impossible." He muttered it to himself, checking his own work for a mistake he clearly hadn't made. "It should have worked."
The verdict, when it came, was unanimous and grim. Marianne would never walk again — her body cursed by a magic that shouldn't still exist in this age. As for me: a shattered mana core should have meant death, and yet I lived. A living corpse, they called me, teetering on the edge of an ending that refused to arrive.
The curses woven into our wounds bore the signature of a specter a thousand years dead — the Fallen Demon Lord. But Grael had killed the mage responsible for that curse himself. The mystery of it sat in the room like a held breath, with no one left alive to answer for it.
⟨ANALYZING.⟩
⟨ANALYSIS COMPLETE.⟩
⟨TARGET: CARDIAC ORGAN.⟩
⟨THE HEART'S EXTERIOR NO LONGER EXHIBITS STANDARD CRIMSON COLORATION. IT'S SURFACE HAS BEEN UNIFORMLY SATURATED IN MATTE BLACK — THE RESIDUE OF A SHATTERED MANA CORE ABSORBED BY DARK-AFFINITY SPELLWORK, CONCEALING THE ORGAN'S NATURAL VASCULAR TEXTURE.⟩
⟨STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY AND BIOLOGICAL FUNCTION REMAIN UNCHANGED. RHYTHMIC CONTRACTION CONTINUES WITHOUT INTERRUPTION. PIGMENTATION IS NOT COSMETIC. IT IS PATHOLOGICAL.⟩
I understood, then, what I was looking at. The plot armor I'd written for my antagonist — the dark spell that should have killed him and didn't — had lodged in his chest instead, and over time the curse had rewritten his own heart into something else. A dark core. Still recharging, still years from usable, like a battery someone had forgotten to unplug. Which meant it had been drinking. Every healer, every priest, every spell that had touched me in the last hour hadn't failed. It had been fed to. The curse didn't reject their magic — it consumed it.
And that meant Arthur's eventual affinity for darkness wasn't a twist of fate. It was a body running on borrowed death, growing stronger every time someone tried to save it.
But this was not just any empire — it was a Holy Empire. If anyone traced what was living in my chest back to its source, the kindest ending available to me was the stake, the noose, or the axe. And I very much preferred not to die again. I wanted an ordinary life — to fall in love, to marry, to raise children who never heard the word *demon* applied to their father. I was already a noble, so the modest dream of a first job was already gone, but I could still want the rest of it: land in a quiet place, a house built where none of the novel's problems could find me, a family to grow old beside, grandchildren running through rooms that had never seen a battlefield. The sort of future I had never been allowed to reach before.
Grael delivered the truth to Marianne himself. He knew it would break her further, and he could not shield her from it regardless — his measured words landed like a hammer against glass anyway. He stayed and watched the moment she came apart, her grief unspooling thread by thread under a weight no one's heart was built to carry.
---
Earlier that same day, long before dawn, while the rest of the residence still slept, the sound of steel rang through the training hall.
Zora stood across from Raina. The girl was not training gracefully. She was not, by any honest measure, training well. She was simply refusing to stop.
"Again."
Raina charged. Her dagger cut the air and missed. She stumbled, caught herself, rose.
"Again."
She came at the dummy once more, arms shaking, the blade slipping in hands that had rubbed themselves raw against the hilt hours ago.
"Again."
The dagger had been Ruby's. This wasn't training. It was grief with a weapon in its hand.
Zora finally lifted a palm. "I've seen enough."
Raina lowered the blade — only slightly, breath fogging in the cold hour before sunrise.
"Why are you pushing yourself like this?"
"Because Ruby did." She didn't hesitate.
Silence settled between them, carried on a thin wind. Zora stepped closer.
"No." When Raina looked up, she went on, gentler now. "Your sister became strong because she wanted you to live without ever knowing what that cost her. Ruby wanted you to have a regular life. Everything she did, she did so you'd never have to."
The words landed harder than any blade would have.
Zora rested a hand against the dagger — not taking it, just touching it. "Ruby was an aura user. Her body grew stronger the more she fought, the way aura does. That blade suited her. You're a mana user. Your strength lies somewhere else entirely." She met Raina's eyes. "You need to find your affinity. Fire, water, wind, earth — or if you're lucky, something complex, the way mine answers as healing whenever I call it. Once you find yours, your weapon won't be a dagger anymore."
A pause.
"It'll be a wand."
Raina's grip whitened around the hilt. Tears soaked into the edge of her blindfold. "I won't let it go. It's all I have left of her."
She turned back to the dummy and swung again. Missed. Swung. Missed. Her stance had long since fallen apart — she was barely finding the target anymore, guided more by the sound of her own ragged breathing than by anything her blindfolded eyes could give her — but she didn't stop.
Slash. Slash. Slash.
The dagger kept meeting empty air until dawn broke and the halls filled with the quiet shuffle of waking servants. Raina stood there, chest heaving, palms split open. Zora set a hand on her shoulder.
"Come," she said softly. "Work won't wait for either of us."
Raina sheathed Ruby's dagger without a word, and followed.
---
Raina visited often after that — a small, fierce light in the quiet rhythm of our days. She always came with something she'd made: handcrafted wooden toys, little swords and shields whose rough edges spoke of real effort rather than real skill. Her hands carried new callouses on top of old scars, and I never knew which of them came from Zora's training and which from hours bent over a carving knife. Maybe it didn't matter. Either way, they told the story of someone who'd made peace with pain a long time ago.
Marianne never treated her as anything less than her own daughter. Every visit, she fussed over Raina's latest scrapes, murmuring comfort while Raina's fragile smile did its best to hide the ache underneath it. I could see it anyway — the specific weight of a sister she couldn't quite finish grieving.
Zora watched over her too, in her own quiet way.
"She's talented," she said once, almost to herself. "Ten years, maybe less, and she could take my place."
There was something unspoken riding under the steadiness of her voice — an attachment she'd never admit to out loud.
"She's a mage," Zora added, with the faint exasperation of someone repeating an old argument, "and still she clings to that dagger instead of a wand — a weapon that will never match what she's capable of. Her magic should be the whole of her focus."
And so, under Zora's patient, watchful eye, Raina trained — learning the basics of a magic she hadn't asked for, alongside a discipline of combat that would slowly shape her into something more than the sum of everything she'd lost. It was a delicate balance: one foot in who she was becoming, the other still planted in the ghosts she wasn't ready to leave behind.