Chapter 29 #2
Something crossed Nesilhan's face — not quite pain, not quite the ease of old affection, something suspended between them.
"Last I heard the same," she said. "He's been wandering the outer fae territories for years now.
Zoran was never good at staying anywhere that felt too much like home.
" A pause. "If word reaches him, he'll come. "
"We'll try the fae channels," Cevdet said simply, and left it there. He knew when to stop pulling on a thread.
The tension in the hall shifted — not dissolved, but complicated. The Shadow Court delegation wasn't invaders. They were mourners. Family, however fractured.
I stepped forward before the politics could swallow the grief entirely. "I want to see my father."
Gün Ata's chambers smelled of incense and dying light. I stopped in the doorway. Hakan's hand was at the small of my back, steady and warm, and he said nothing — just held it there until I could breathe again.
They'd laid him on his bed in ceremonial white and gold, hands folded, hair combed. Someone had performed these small kindnesses while I was a realm away watching my beloved learn to embrace his darkness. I hadn't been here.
Hakan stood at the threshold but didn't follow when I crossed the room. He understood, somehow, that this was a conversation between a daughter and the absence where her father used to be.
I sat on the edge of the bed. Took his hand. The skin felt like parchment — dry, impossibly thin, the warmth bleeding out of it minute by minute.
"You lied to me," I whispered. "You said you were fighting. You said you were too stubborn to die."
Nothing.
"You named him a Light Lord. You were supposed to see us married. You were supposed to hold your grandchildren and tell them stories about when you were young and the world was whole and—"
My voice shattered, I swallowed my tears.
I pressed my forehead against his chest. There was no heartbeat. No warmth. No divine light flickering beneath the surface, that familiar golden pulse I'd felt every time he'd held me since I was born. Just silence. Just absence. Just the terrible, yawning nothing where my father used to live.
I wept until my ribs ached, until the ceremonial white was soaked through, until the grief had wrung me out and left me hollow.
When I finally lifted my head, the room was darker than when I'd entered.
The enchanted sconces on the walls had dimmed further — the palace mourning alongside me, the Light Court's magic recognising its creator was gone.
The funeral began at sunset. It was the Light Farewell — the funeral rite of a divine god.
No living being had performed it. The priests worked from texts so old the pages had to be handled with enchanted gloves, chanting in a dialect of Old Light that hadn't been spoken in a thousand years.
They built the pyre in the Eternal Courtyard — a structure of white crystal and golden wood, sanctified by seven priests representing the seven Light Court factions.
Each lord placed a token of their allegiance at the pyre's base: Serkan's was a blade of forged light.
Cevdet's, an ancient scroll. Volkan laid a commander's standard.
The others followed, each offering a piece of their power to honor the god who'd sustained them all.
The entire court filled the courtyard — thousands of beings in white and gold, their faces lit by the guttering remains of divine magic.
Silence pressed down like a physical weight.
For the first time in three millennia, the Palace of Light held no god.
The air itself felt thinner, as if the world had forgotten how to breathe.
Hakan's hand held mine throughout. His grip was solid, present, his thumb drawing slow circles against my palm — the same rhythm that had grounded me since we were young, the same anchor in every storm. Sarp stood at my other side, close enough that his arm brushed mine.
Kaan and Nesilhan held their position at the front of the courtyard, directly across from Serkan — equals in station, shadow facing light across a dead god's pyre.
The symbolism was not lost on anyone. Whispers hissed through the crowd: the Shadow Lord himself came to pay respects.
His wife was once House Lumina. Two shadow lords stand where gods stood.
Near the back, pale and contained, Elif stood with Milan beside her, and neither of them moved.
The divine fire consumed my father's body without heat.
Golden flame, brighter than anything the dimming palace could produce, roaring upward in a pillar that pierced the twilight sky.
The crowd gasped. Some wept. Some fell to their knees.
I felt the warmth of it against my face and watched it eat the man who'd been my entire world and felt something fundamental rearrange itself inside me — something that had been soft becoming stone, something that had believed in simple things choosing, finally, to stop.
Hakan's hand held mine. His grip was solid, his thumb drawing slow circles against my palm.
The heat from the pyre pressed against my skin. The incense thickened. The grief was a physical weight on my chest and suddenly the courtyard was too bright, too loud, too full of people performing sorrow while my father burned.
"I need water," I said. My voice came out thin. "I'm dizzy."
Hakan's eyes searched my face. "I'll be right back. Don't move."
He released my hand. I felt the absence immediately — the cold where his warmth had been.
He moved through the crowd toward the colonnade where the servants had set refreshments, and I watched him go, and then I was alone at the front of the courtyard with the fire and the silence where my father's heartbeat used to be.
That was when the air changed.
Not dramatically. A thickening. The temperature dropping by a degree, then another, in a way that had nothing to do with the evening breeze. The shadows beneath the eastern archway deepened — not flickered, not shifted. Deepened. As if something had poured more dark into them from behind.
I felt it in my light before I saw it with my eyes. A pressure against my sternum, against the mark, like a hand pressing slowly down on my chest. My magic stirred — not in recognition. In warning. The way an animal's fur rises before it understands what it's smelling.
I turned my head.
He was already there. As if he'd been there all along.
A man — if man was even the right word — dressed in black so precisely cut it made every mourning robe in the courtyard look like an afterthought.
He stood among the crowd of thousands and yet occupied the space differently than everyone around him.
The torchlight didn't behave correctly near him.
The shadows around him didn't move with the fire. They held. Patient. Waiting.
I didn't know who he was. But my body knew what he was. Every cell of light magic I carried was screaming at me to step back, to run, to put distance between myself and whatever ancient thing was wearing that handsome, scarred, terrifying face.
He wasn't looking at the pyre. He was walking toward me.
His stride was unhurried. His expression warm. Sympathetic. He moved through the crowd and no one stopped him, no one questioned him, as if the space simply opened for him out of instinct.
He stopped in front of me. Close enough to touch.
"Child of Light." His voice was smooth. Warm. "Your father was a worthy adversary. The realms are diminished by his passing."
I was so deep in grief I couldn't process what was happening. I saw a stranger in mourning clothes offering condolences, and my manners answered before my mind caught up.
"Thank you," I whispered. "That's — thank you."
He took my hand. Lifted it. Pressed his lips to my knuckles with exquisite gentleness, his burning black eyes never leaving my face.
"You have his light in you," he murmured. "It suits you better than it ever suited him."
Where his mouth touched my skin, the cold went deeper than flesh. My light recoiled. Every instinct I had was screaming — not danger exactly, but wrongness, the vast ancient wrongness of something that had no business touching a daughter of the light.
A hand appeared at my elbow. Steady. Familiar.
Hakan.
He'd come back. A cup of water in one hand, his other settling against my arm like he'd never left. He didn't step between us.
Didn't push the stranger back. Didn't raise his voice or let his shadows so much as flicker.
He looked at the stranger with the polite, distant expression.
"Thank you for your condolences," Hakan said. His voice was even. Measured. "The Princess is overwhelmed. If you'll excuse us."
He guided me backward. One step. Two. His hand on my arm was warm but his fingers were rigid — gripping harder than the gesture required, hard enough that I'd find bruises there tomorrow. The only tell. The only crack in the mask.
The stranger watched us go. His black eyes moved from Hakan's face to mine and back again. Searching. Reading. Looking for something.
Whatever he found, it wasn't enough. Something that might have been frustration moved behind that face — there and gone, quick as a blink.
"Of course," he said. He inclined his head. "My condolences again, Princess. And to you —" His gaze rested on Hakan a beat too long. "— Light Lord."
He said the title the way you'd test the edge of a blade.
Then he stepped back into the deeper shadow beneath the colonnade, and was gone. No flash. No dramatic exit. He simply stopped being there.
Hakan's hand didn't leave my arm. His breathing hadn't changed. His face hadn't moved. To anyone watching, he was a Light Lord guiding his Princess away from a well-wisher.
Only I was close enough to feel his pulse through his grip. It was hammering so fast the beats blurred together.
"Who was that?" I asked.
"Not here." Two words. Quiet. Final.
"Hakan —"
"Not here, Ada."
I looked up at his face. It was perfectly composed. Perfectly still. And behind his eyes — far back, in the place where he kept the things he couldn't afford to show — something was burning.
Around me, one by one, others had begun to notice the absence. A ripple moved through the crowd. Not a sound, not a word, just a collective stilling. Kaan had not turned around. But his shadows had drawn in close and tight around Nesilhan, his jaw clenched so hard the muscle twitched.
Hakan's thumb pressed against the inside of my wrist. Once. Hard. A message through the bond that bypassed language entirely.
*Don't react. Please.*
I didn't react.
But the mark on my sternum was ice cold for the first time since the night it had appeared, and the wrongness of that man's mouth on my knuckles sat on my skin like something I couldn't wash off, and I knew — without knowing how — that whatever had just happened was far worse than a stranger offering condolences at a funeral.