Olwen
The castle slept.
I didn’t.
Sleep was another thing death had stolen from me, or perhaps gifted.
I didn’t need rest. Didn’t feel fatigue the way I had when I was alive. My body simply... continued.
Hour after hour, through the long dark nights, everyone else slipped into dreams I could no longer reach.
I’d tried, in the early weeks. Closed my eyes. Counted sheep. Done all the things my nurse had taught me when I was a child and couldn’t settle.
Nothing worked. My mind stayed sharp and cold and horribly aware, trapped in a body that refused to shut down.
So I wandered.
The east chamber they’d given me was cavernous and filled with elegant furniture draped in dust cloths.
The bed was massive, a four-poster monstrosity of black wood, its curtains rich velvet, its mattress soft and inviting.
I hadn’t touched it. Hadn’t even sat on it.
What was the point? I’d only lie there, staring at the canopy, counting the hours until dawn.
Better to walk. Better to explore this place I’d chosen.
The corridors of the Black Keep were a labyrinth. Stone hallways that twisted and turned without logic, staircases that led to dead ends, doors that opened onto rooms full of nothing but shadows and dust.
I passed through them like a ghost, barefoot and silent, leaving no trace.
The stone was cool against my feet. The air was drafty, biting, exactly what I needed.
I walked for hours. Lost track of where I was going, let my feet choose the path.
And found myself standing in front of a door.
It was different from the others. Older. The wood was dull with age, the iron bands that held it together rusted to the color of dried blood.
A chain hung across it with thick links and a heavy padlock, the kind of security intended to keep its secret.
But it wasn’t the lock that caught my attention.
It was the cold.
The door was sealed with rusted iron, but cold radiated from the cracks like a hearth.
I touched the lock. Cold spread from my fingers into the metal, ice crystals forming along each link of the chain.
The iron groaned, recognizing kindred touch, but my hands ached with the effort. Pulling heat from iron took more than pulling it from flesh.
The chains fell away.
No flash of light, no thunderclap. The padlock simply clicked open. The door swung inward on hinges that should have screamed with rust but instead moved without resistance.
I stepped through.
The room beyond was circular. It was likely the West Tower, if I’d mapped the castle correctly.
Tall windows lined the curved walls, their glass so thick with grime that the moonlight filtering through was pale and weak.
Dust covered every surface. Cobwebs hung from the ceiling in dense curtains, stirring in the draft from the open door.
No one had been in this room for ages.
I walked to the center of the space. My feet left prints in the dust, the only mark I’d made in weeks that proved I was more than a ghost.
The temperature here was absolute. Deep. The kind of cold that settled into your marrow and made itself comfortable.
Something moved in the shadows.
I stopped. Held very still. Listened.
A soft sound. Almost like... breathing. But not quite. More like the whisper of air through a space that wasn’t meant to hold air.
The rustle of something dry and forgotten shifting in the dark.
Eyes opened in the corner.
Pale green. Luminescent. Glowing with a light that had nothing to do with moonlight or candles or any natural source.
They watched me. I watched them.
And then the creature stood, and I saw what I was looking at.
It was a cat.
Now it was bones and patches of petrified fur, stiff with age and falling out in clumps.
Its ribs showed through its hide, each one distinct, casting shadows on the shadows beneath.
Its skull was visible through the fur on its face, revealing the sharp shape of cheekbones, the hollow sockets, the jaw that should have been covered with flesh and wasn’t.
It was dead. Obviously, undeniably dead.
And it was walking toward me.
I should have run. Any sane person would have, would have scrambled backward through the door and slammed it shut and never returned to this cursed tower.
But I wasn’t a sane person. I wasn’t even, properly speaking, a person at all.
And the cat smelled like me.
Grave-dust and old stone and the absence of warmth. The scent of things that should have ended but didn’t. The perfume of the void.
It stopped at my feet. He regarded me with ancient intelligence.
And then it rubbed its exposed ribcage against my leg.
A purr vibrated through its body. It was a strange sound, a hollow, rattling sound. But it was unmistakably a purr. The sound of contentment. Of welcome.
My knees gave out.
I sank to the dusty floor, and the cat, dead and impossible, crawled into my lap. It curled there like it belonged, like this was where it had always been meant to be.
Its purr intensified. Its bony head rested against my palm when I reached out to touch it.
Tears spilled down my cheeks.
I never felt tears anymore. I only knew I was crying because the creature fixed its gaze on mine and made a noise that hovered between acknowledgement and indifference.
“You’re stuck too,” I whispered. “Aren’t you?”
The cat purred.
“Existing when you shouldn’t. Walking around when you should be at rest.” I stroked its patchy fur, felt the bones beneath. “How long have you been here? How long have you been waiting for someone who understood?”
No answer. Just the rattling purr. Just the weight of its skeletal body against mine.
I buried my face in its dusty fur and cried.
The light came without warning.
One moment I was alone in the dark with my impossible companion. The next, lantern-glow was flooding the tower chamber, yellow and warm.
“What in the name of the old gods—”
I looked up.
The Raven King stood in the doorway.
He was shirtless. Barefoot. His black hair was mussed from sleep, falling across his forehead in disarray.
Loose trousers hung low on his hips, and the lantern in his hand cast flickering shadows across the planes of his chest, lean muscle, pale skin, the dark lines of tattoos I hadn’t noticed before.
He looked human like this. Vulnerable. Not a monster at all, but a man roused from bed by some disturbance, still half-caught in dreams.
But his gaze, still black, still unreadable, fixed on the cat in my lap.
“Lowen,” he said.
The cat lifted its head. A rattle that sounded dangerously like worry.
“He hasn’t let anyone touch him in years.” The Raven King’s voice was strange. Thick. “Not since my mother died.”
I looked down at the skeletal creature purring in my lap. Lowen.
“Your mother’s cat?”
“Her familiar.” He stepped into the room. Stopped a few feet away, like he was afraid to come closer.
“He was meant to die when she did. That’s how familiars work. Their lives are tied to their bonded. But he...”
A muscle worked in his jaw. “He refused. Kept existing. Kept waiting. I sealed this tower because I couldn’t bear to see the room, couldn’t bear to put him down, couldn’t bear to do nothing.”
Lowen purred louder. Pushed his bony head against my palm.
“You locked him away.”
My husband flinched. “I locked the room. There is no locking up a cat.”
“He’s been alone,” I insisted. “All this time.”
“Yes.”
“That’s cruel.”
The words hung between us. I hadn’t meant to accuse him, to judge him, to risk his anger when I was hiding so much.
But the truth had slipped out before I could stop it, and now it sat in the dusty air like a living thing.
The Raven King didn’t flinch. Didn’t look away.
“Yes,” he said again. “It was.”
He crouched beside me and set the lantern on the floor. In the warm light, his face was a study in shadows, the sharp lines softened, the eyes somehow less alien.
He reached out slowly, carefully, and touched Lowen’s matted fur.
The cat tensed. Then relaxed. Then began to purr even louder, leaning into the touch.
“He recognizes you,” the Raven King murmured. “He’s never done that. Not with anyone except my mother.”
I didn’t know what to say. Didn’t know how to explain that the cat recognized me because we were the same.
So I said nothing.