What the Prince Owes the Dark
The shadows did not recede when the crowd scattered.
They clung to Blake.
Lumi felt it immediately—the wrongness of the quiet after the square emptied, the way the night pressed closer instead of loosening its grip. Blake leaned heavily against her as they reached the narrow refuge beneath the old aqueduct, breath shallow, skin cold beneath her hands.
At twenty-five, Blake Crowe had bled before.
This was different.
The Dreadsword lay across his knees, dark metal veined with faint, crawling light. It pulsed like a second heart—out of rhythm with his own.
"Don't let it finish," Blake muttered.
"Finish what?" Lumi asked, panic threading her voice.
The truth answered before he could.
The debt.
Lumi's hands shook as she reached for the blade. The moment her fingers brushed the hilt, pain lanced through her—not sharp, but vast. The weight of centuries pressed against her ribs: battles won through obliteration, peace imposed by fear, love buried beneath obedience.
She pulled back with a gasp.
"This thing—"
"Isn't evil," Blake said hoarsely. "It's exacting."
The shadows tightened, crawling up his arms, mapping his veins.
"Blake," Lumi whispered, pressing her forehead to his. "You don't owe it your life."
His mouth curved faintly. "It thinks I do."
The truth surged—angry, insistent.
The blade was forged to end wars by ending choice.
It feeds on surrender.
It rewards certainty.
And Blake—who had hesitated, who had shielded instead of ruled, who had loved instead of commanded—had broken its most sacred expectation.
The Dreadsword whispered now, no longer seductive.
You called me and refused me.
You showed them mercy.
Balance must be restored.
Lumi felt the truth recoil from the blade's certainty.
"No," she said aloud.
The shadows stilled.
Blake looked at her, eyes unfocused. "Lumi… it doesn't care what you say."
"I know," she replied, voice trembling but steady. "It cares what I know."
She reached again—not for the blade, but for Blake.
Truth wrapped around him, not flaring, not burning—remembering. She poured memory into him deliberately: the boy he'd been before the crown, the nights he'd watched the city from the watchhouse roof, the way he had chosen people over victory again and again.
The shadows writhed.
Irrelevant, the blade hissed.
"Relevant," Lumi said fiercely. "Because he was never yours alone."
The truth cut deep now—not at Blake, but at the bond itself. Lumi saw it then: the flaw in the Dreadsword's making. It had been bound to obedience, not to justice. To endings, not to continuance.
"You protect by consuming," Lumi said to the blade. "But that isn't balance. That's hunger pretending to be peace."
The blade screamed.
Not aloud.
Inside Blake's chest.
He arched, a sound tearing from his throat as shadows ripped away from him in violent waves, smashing into the stone walls. Lumi held him through it, truth anchoring him as the bond strained to snap.
Then—stillness.
The Dreadsword dimmed, its pulse slowing, uneven.
Blake sagged fully into Lumi's arms.
For a long moment, the night held its breath.
"You didn't break it," Blake whispered weakly.
"No," Lumi said, tears slipping free. "I reminded it what it never learned."
Footsteps echoed above them.
Guards.
Lots of them.
Serath Vale's voice drifted down through the stone, calm as ever. "You cannot keep defying inevitability, Prince Crowe."
Blake tried to rise. Lumi held him still.
"You've lost control of the blade," Serath continued. "You've lost the city's confidence. And now you hide beneath it like a criminal."
Lumi looked up, fury sharp and clean.
"You taught the city to forget," she called back. "Now it remembers."
A pause.
"Memory fades," Serath replied. "Order remains."
The truth flared—cold, resolute.
He is wrong.
Blake squeezed Lumi's hand. "If they take me—"
"They won't," Lumi said.
Because she felt it then—threads of truth stretching outward through the city, connecting people who remembered the square, the scream, the shadow that refused to let light erase them.
The dark had taken its due.
Now it waited.
Not for obedience.
But for change.