ZARETH
The forgotten tunnels smell like centuries of rot and silence.
I've walked these passages before, maybe once, twice, when I was young enough to think exploring the dead districts held some romantic weight.
They hold nothing except the collapsed bones of what my people used to be.
Carved archways half-swallowed by cave-in debris.
Wall murals worn to ghosts. Pillars that once held ceremonial meaning reduced to stumps jutting from the stone floor like broken teeth.
This is a graveyard. Every inch of it.
My low-light vision catches what the dark hides from Cybele, frescoes of feasting halls that haven't hosted a living soul in over a hundred years.
Names etched into doorframes in old Vrakken script.
Vhalor. Mordath. Serevaan. My ancestors, woven into the architecture of a world they built, lost and left for the corruption to finish.
I keep my steps measured. My awareness fans out in every direction, a habit older than thought.
Cybele trails a half-step behind me. I can hear her breathing, steady and controlled despite the darkness pressing against her eyes like a blindfold.
She's been following the sound of my footsteps with her hand grazing the tunnel wall.
Not complaining. Not asking for light. Just adapting.
Stubborn creature.
The ceiling above us is wrong before I register why. A shift in airflow. A weight distribution that doesn't belong. My body reacts before my mind catches up and I drop, spin, claws extending as the first one drops from the crevice above like a stone.
Gaunt. Fast. Silent. Corruption has hollowed it out until it's more absence than animal, black fluid weeping from the joints, eyes a flat, milky white.
I catch it mid-air by the throat, feel the wet crunch of cartilage under my grip, and slam it into the far wall with enough force that it stops moving before it hits the floor.
The second one is already on me. I turn, rake my claws across its chest in a single fluid tear motion, and when it staggers I drive two fingers into its abdomen and pull. The wet, sucking sound of it is not something I need to think about. It collapses.
Behind me, Cybele makes a sharp, startled sound and presses herself into the corner between two fallen pillars.
I register it peripherally. Good. Stay there.
I'm already moving toward the third. I don't hear the fourth.
It drops from directly above her alcove, and my body pivots but too slowly, I'm too far, the angle is wrong and I know before I even finish the calculation that I won't make it.
Cybele shoves me. Both hands flat against my chest, full weight thrown into the motion with zero hesitation, and I stumble sideways just far enough that the creature's strike misses my throat entirely.
Its claws find her instead. I hear the sound of it, a wet deep drag of tearing and then her sharp, punched-out gasp.
I take the creature's head off with my bare hands.
A white-hot surge of failure floods from my chest outward, burning through every artery.
I stand in the silence with something dead in my hands and look at the woman sliding down the wall with a spreading dark stain across her left shoulder, and I think:
I couldn't protect her.
The prince who was supposed to hold a dying kingdom together. The man who has slaughtered things three times his size without blinking. And this human is bleeding on the floor of my ancestors' tomb because I was three feet away.
I'm beside her before I decided to move.
"Cybele." My voice comes out wrong, somewhat lower than it should, stripped of command. I turn her carefully, and she hisses through her teeth, and the sound of her pain undos me in a way I don't have language for.
"I'm fine. Am I fine?" she says, her skin has already gone ashy. The wound is deep and jagged, not clean, and the darkening edges are ones I recognize. Corruption in the claws. Her human body cannot process this. I know this.
"You're not," I say.
"It's just—"
"It's corruption." The words come out flat, factual, because if I let anything else into my voice right now I will not be able to control what follows it. "Your blood cannot fight it. You will be dead inside the hour if it spreads."
She stares at me. The amber of her eyes is still sharp, still fighting, even as the color drains from her face.
"What do you suggest, Prince."
What I suggest has not been done willingly in my lifetime.
I press my wrist to my mouth, dig my canines in, and open the vein.
Her eyes drop to the blood welling at my wrist, then come back to my face.
There is a long beat of silence that feels like standing at the edge of something with no visible bottom.
"That seems unhygienic—"
"Drink." I growl.
She drinks.
The bond doesn't ask my permission. It doesn't introduce itself slowly or politely.
It arrives all at once, crashing through every wall I've maintained for over a century and suddenly I feel her.
In my marrow. The thrumming of it starts in my chest and radiates outward like heat from a forge, a golden thread, raw and humming, pulling taut between my sternum and hers.
I feel her pain first. The deep, searing drag of the wound. The cold creeping in at the edges of it. Then her heartbeat. Faint. Stuttering. And as my blood reaches it, slowly, stubbornly but stronger.
And beneath all of that: her will. Pure and almost offensive in its ferocity.
She is not ready to die. She is furious at the suggestion of it.
She is thinking about her brother, about the tunnels above, about maps she hasn't finished drawing, this woman is cataloguing reasons to survive while bleeding out on the floor of a dead civilization, and the intimacy of knowing that, of feeling it—
It terrifies me.
It also sends a current through me that I have no name for and no desire to examine.
When she stills, I pull my wrist back. The wound on her shoulder has already begun to close, the corruption retreating from her skin in faint, receding tendrils.
Her breathing evens out. She slumps sideways and I catch her before the thought is fully formed.
I lay her down against the least-destroyed section of wall and do not move away. I should move away. I don't.
The thread between us is constant now, at low-level, unignorable, like a second heartbeat living in a frequency just beneath my own.
I am aware of her in every way. Her scent has changed.
It was human before, now warm and foreign and vaguely irritating in its fragility.
Now it is something else entirely. Rich.
Threaded through with something that smells distinctly, undeniably like mine.
I sit three inches away and hate myself for not moving further. She wakes an hour later.
"You should have left me in the corner," I say, before she can speak.
Cybele blinks at the ceiling. "Good morning to you too."
"You had no weapon. You had no training advantage. What you did was—"
"Save your life?" She pushes herself upright slowly, and I track every micro-expression of pain that crosses her face without meaning to. "You're welcome, by the way."
"It was reckless."
"It worked."
"You are human," I say, and I hear how it sounds, not a slur or dismissal but closer to desperation dressed in contempt. "Your body does not recover the way mine does. The risk you took—"
She stops. Tilts her head. Studies me the way she studies tunnel walls, searching for structure and meaning in the cracks.
"You're worried," she says slowly. "You're actually— worried."
I say nothing.
She looks at the distance between us. At the fact that I have not stood up. At the way my eyes have not left her face since she opened hers.
"Zareth. Can I call you Zareth?" She barrels on without waiting for my reply. “Why’re you hovering?” Her voice has dropped into something quieter.
"I am not—"
"You are. Like some distressed knight standing guard over a fair maiden."
“I’m not a—” I stop. Stand. Put two feet of space between us. It helps nothing. Cybele is quiet. The thread pulls, constant and gold and humming, and I feel her pulse like it belongs to me.
Claiming. Every Vrakken instinct I possess has a single, unified, screaming verdict.
Mine. Protect. Do not let her go back to the surface.
I gaze at the dead city around us and understand, with a clarity that feels very much like dread, that I am already lost.