Chapter Two
The darkest rot is not the kind
That crawls beneath the skin, but mind
The throne feels different beneath Kael than it ever did in his dreams. Colder. Darker. Uneasy beneath him, crawling in a way that makes it seem alive. Heavy in a way that sinks into his bones.
That heaviness hums through the obsidian veins carved into the armrests, coiling around his skin like a commanding grip. The gnarled spikes of his crown press into his skull—cutting, controlling. It should feel right. But instead, it feels like a costume that doesn’t fit. A lie.
He should feel triumphant. Instead, something stirs beneath his ribs.
A pulse.
Rot—snaking and sour—blooms like a bruise where light can’t reach.
He goes still. Breath locked. Muscles coiling as shadows gather at his feet, circling the wrongness inside him like wolves scenting a wound. Beyond the open doors, the council chambers thunder with laughter, voices teasing and joking, as if the war cost them nothing.
None of them see the quiet crack forming in his body.
None of them notice the corruption stirring.
But he does.
He curls his fingers over the armrest, steadying the tremor that wants to take hold. He has wanted this seat—his family’s throne—longer than he’s wanted anything. Since the day Maldrak ripped it from his father’s hands. Since he first swore he would reclaim it or die trying.
He has it now. But he has something else, too. A secret. A wicked, evil thing curling through his veins.
He may rule Zerynthia—but can he rule himself?
The rot pulses again, answering the question with a creeping, hungry heat. And Kael realizes, with a cold clarity that cuts deeper than any blade, that the battle for his kingdom is over. But the battle for his soul has only just begun.
A brightness scratches at the edges of his mind—a light so radiant and captivating it steals the breath from his lungs. A light he’d know anywhere. In any time, space, or plane. He’d know it. A light that dances in his darkness. A heartbeat that thrums in time with his own.
It pulses toward him, both persistent and tentative.
A question.
My love?
But he shuts it out, closing his mind to it. Because this decaying, rotting thing inside him will be no one else’s burden but his.
Footsteps echo through the halls, frantic and urgent, snapping Kael from his thoughts. For reasons he can’t explain, his pulse quickens at the sound. As if his senses know what his mind doesn’t.
One of the maids pokes her head around the door frame, eyes wide and terrified.
“Your Highness?” she asks, voice shaky but not fragile. Pressing, grave, edged.
“Come in,” he says, already pushing himself to stand, not waiting for her to move.
The old woman steps through the doors, lips pursed, fingers entwined against the apron at her waist in a way that makes her look composed. But the way she moves… is anything but.
She drops into a low bow.
“What is it?” Kael snaps, firmer than he intended, taking another step forward.
The woman doesn’t hesitate. “It’s Princess Nalya, Your Majesty. Come. Quickly,” she rushes out, already spinning on her heel.
Panic lances through his chest.
Horror grips his throat, strangling the breath from his lungs.
And he runs. Before thought has caught up with movement, he runs like he’s charging into battle.
Through the halls.
Up the stairs.
Until the doors to Nalya’s chambers are the only thing between him and his little sister. Him and the battle.
He doesn’t wait.
Doesn’t ask for permission.
He slams his boot into the door like he isn’t the King of Zerynthia, but like he’s a brother entrusted to protect his sister.
The door gives way with a single kick.
And he knows something is wrong before he sees her.
Not the room. Not the silence. But the absence of her.
Like whatever made Nalya Nalya has already begun to slip somewhere he cannot follow.
Like the broken pieces of her have finally given up trying to mend.
Like she held on for as long as she could, until the last part of her finally let go.
Like the world took her apart piece by piece, and never thought to put her back together again.
But nothing can prepare him for what he sees.
His mind rejects it.
Refuses to understand what his eyes are trying to tell him.
Blood stains the rug—dark, spreading, wrong. Too much.
It blooms outwards like ink spilled on parchment. Writing an ending he cannot unread.
It doesn’t stop.
Like something already set in motion long before he walked through the door.
Nalya lies limp across the rug, the skirts of her gown soaking up the crimson, while her eyes blink slowly, fluttering open and closed.
For a heartbeat, Kael doesn’t move.
“Your Majesty… what do we do?” A voice asks, and he hears it like a distant echo.
“Leave,” he breathes, eyes fixed on Nalya’s limp form.
“Your Majesty?” the voice asks again.
Emotion floods him—grief, fury, confusion, anger. All of it, all at once. A collision. “Leave!” he commands, his voice dropping into a lethal growl.
Footsteps scatter, until there is nothing. Only the consuming silence of her. It presses against his ribs like it’s trying to take up space where she used to be.
His legs move without thought, rushing to her.
He drops to his knees, and something inside him knows—before he can name it, before he can fight it—that he is already losing her.
Like he is arriving at the end of something that has already happened.
Because this didn’t begin today. It began the first time Maldrak taught her she did not belong to herself.
His hands shake as he reaches for her.
Not as a king.
Not as a warrior.
But as a boy who once swore he would never let anything hurt her.
A promise made with scraped knees and childish certainty—the kind that never imagined a world where he would fail.
“I can fix this,” he says, voice breaking under the weight of a promise he can no longer keep. “I can—just stay. Stay with me.”
She looks at him then. Fully. And it is worse than anything he has seen on a battlefield. Because she is not asking to be saved. She is asking to be released.
And for the first time in his life, he does not know how to fight it.
He pulls her into his lap and her body sags across his knees.
“No,” he breathes, reaching for the sheet spilling over the side of the bed. “Nalya, please. Stay with me,” he begs.
Her pale blue eyes are trained on him from somewhere distant.
“Kael,” she whispers.
His name sounds like it doesn’t belong in her mouth anymore. Like she found it somewhere far away and brought it back with her.
“It doesn’t stop,” she whispers. “Even here. Even with you.”
Her voice cracks—not loud, not dramatic. Just… worn thin.
“I thought it would. I thought if I made it back to you, it would stop.”
Her fingers curl weakly in his sleeve.
“But it didn’t.”
A tear slips down her temple.
“They don’t leave, Kael… the memories.”
A breath.
“They’ve just… learned how to live inside me.”
Fear does not grip her the same way it grips Kael. All he sees in her face is acceptance.
“No,” he rasps. “Do not let this darkness win, Nalya. Do not let him win.”
He runs his hands through her hair, wipes the cold sweat from her brow.
A small smile drifts onto her face.
“He already did,” she croaks.
No.
He shakes his head, refusing to accept it.
A shaky breath is ripped from her throat.
“I can’t do it anymore.”
The words settle between them.
Final.
Unarguable.
Kael shakes his head again, tearing strips of fabric from the sheet with his teeth.
He cradles his little sister, fastening the fabric over her bleeding wrists. He swats the blood-soaked letter opener from her side, sending it crashing into the far wall.
“We’ll get you help. We’ll do more,” he promises, clinging to her in the same way she reaches for death.
Two opposing forces.
Neither strong enough to undo the other.
“Please,” he chokes. “Don’t leave me. I just got you back.”
A small, fragile smile touches her lips.
“I’m not back, Kael.” Her eyes flicker—somewhere else. Somewhere far beyond the room. “I’m still there.”
A pause. A breath that trembles like it might break.
“It’s all I see.”
And he knows: it follows her into every moment that should have been different.
She closes her eyes, rasping breaths still moving in and out of her.
Tears spill across her temples more freely now.
“I love you,” he chokes. “I need you— Nalya, you can’t—”
Crimson bleeds through the fabric at her wrists now.
“Our lives aren’t bound anymore. Let me go, Kael.”
He brushes the dark strands from her forehead.
“I can’t,” he admits, and the words sound like confession.
He drops his head to hers.
But rage flares hot and sharp. Uncontainable. Unending.
He tips his head back, and a roar rips from his throat. But it’s interrupted by a sob. The sound tears through him—raw, unguarded. It wracks his body so violently he jolts forward.
“I cannot live in this world, Kael.”
A breath.
“Not with the way it lives in me.”
Like it has rooted itself into her bones and refuses to be anything but this.
She lifts a heavy arm, her palm finding Kael’s stubbled cheek.
“He made this world feel like something I have to survive… even when I’m safe.”
Blood runs in rivers down her forearm, disappearing beneath the sleeve of her gown, the fabric soaked through. Her honey skin is void of warmth, life and light draining from her with every heartbeat.
“I cannot know peace here. Let me have peace.”
Her arm drops. Not by choice, by gravity. Not a moment she can stop. Not one he can catch.
“Please,” she breathes. “Give me this.”
A whimper leaves her.
“I don’t want to be brave anymore.”
He sees it then—the exhaustion. The kind of bone-deep tired that sleep can’t touch.
The kind that soft hands and safe walls can’t undo. The kind that comes from being hollowed out slowly. Piece by piece. Until there is nothing left inside you that feels like it belongs to you.
The way Maldrak swallowed her whole—took the goodness in her and turned it into something fragile. Something punishable. Took the parts of her that were light, and melted them down like metal at a forge, reshaped them until she no longer recognized what she’d become.
Until his voice sounded like her own.
Until his cruelty felt like truth.
Until survival meant becoming smaller. Quieter. Easier to break.
“Just… stay with me.”
Not save me.
Not help me.
Stay.
The simplest request she has ever made of him, and the only one he cannot survive giving.
The word shatters something inside him. Because he understands, in that moment, with a clarity that feels like being carved open, that this is the only thing she has left to ask for.
And perhaps, this is all he has left to give her…
and it feels like both mercy and betrayal all at once.
He cannot make her live in the memory of her torment just so he doesn’t have to live inside his grief for losing her.
His grip falters. Not from weakness. From love. The kind of love that does not hold on, but lets go when holding on would be cruel. The kind of love that does not save—only stays.
He presses his forehead to hers, breath breaking against her skin.
“I’m here,” he whispers. “I’ve got you.”
Her body softens beneath his touch.
For the first time since he found her… she looks at peace. A peace she was never given while she was alive. And it is the most devastating thing he has ever seen.
Kael realizes, with a horror that will live inside him forever, that this is what she needs. Not rescue or survival. Not saving or healing. An end to the war inside her.
A war she never chose.
A war waged on her until there was nothing left but this. Until surrender was the only thing left that felt like control.
A war he cannot win for her, just as another begins to take root inside him.
His fingers move to her wrists, untying the fabric.
He removes them both, pulling them away from her skin, as the river of blood flows freely once more.
He stays.
“Just us,” he promises. “Until the end.”
He does not move.
“I love you, Nalya,” he whispers, pulling her to his chest like he knows this is the last time he’ll do it while she’s breathing.
And slowly—so slowly he almost convinces himself it isn’t happening—the tension leaves her body.
The fight.
The fear.
The girl who used to laugh too loudly and run too fast and believe too easily.
Gone.
Maldrak did not take her life. He took everything that made her want to live it. But the cruelest thing he gave her was a version of herself she could not escape.
He feels it before he sees it—the quiet.
The unbearable, irreversible quiet.
And Kael knows: this is a silence he will carry for the rest of his life.