Orion watched in silence as she veered off the path, cutting through knee-deep snow like a woman on a mission. He didn’t follow; he only turned slightly to keep her in view, crimson eyes tracking how she tested the unfinished platform with clinical care. When she removed her hood and let the wind bite at her ears, he said nothing, though the gesture didn’t escape his notice. Most blightborn concealed themselves. This one did not. Or no longer chose to. A statement, perhaps. Or a risk.

Orion had made a different choice once, long ago, when the truth of what he’d become had still felt like a foreign infection lodged in his marrow. He’d hidden it. Not out of shame, but for strategy. For safety. For others. He had worn gloves long after he no longer needed warmth. Dimmed the red in his eyes with tinctures and rituals that left him aching and raw. Held his breath through the mutters of demon and traitor as if he’d chosen this. As if he’d chosen to die.

Even now, with the truth unhidden, the instinct remained. Stillness instead of confrontation. Silence instead of declaration. Masks, always.

But Céline had removed her hood.

When she returned to his side, snow clinging to her boots, her voice was steadier than before.

“ Doctor Moreau, practitioner of the medical arts. Though I find the full title rather stuffy and am open to continuing on a first name basis…should it please ‘My Lord’.”

“Doctor Moreau,” he repeated, voice smooth, though his brow arched faintly at the full formality. “Well. That does out-stuff ‘Advisor to the Prince.’” His tone didn’t change when she teased, no chuckle, no scoff, but there was something subtle in the shift of his gaze and an earned faint exhale, the closest he came to amusement.

“‘My Lord’ belongs to men who polish their ego with titles,” he said, brushing snow from his sleeve with a gloved hand. “Call me Orion. Unless you’d prefer the pretense.” He paused, studying the platform she’d tested. Its warped planks groaned under the wind’s insistence, a metaphor he didn’t bother to voice. Then, he started walking again, slowly, giving her time to match his pace.

“If your mind’s as sharp as you say,” he added, “you’ll probably be speaking with the prince before long. He tends to notice when someone’s serious about staying. Although….” He hesitated, unsure of whether to mention recent events or not.

“Tensions are… high at the moment,” Orion continued, “A noblewoman and her handmaiden were attacked not far from here. One of the guards was killed during the confrontation.” He could’ve said princess. It wouldn’t have been untrue. But names had weight, and titles were heavier still. Best to keep it light for now. Céline didn’t need this sort of intrigue clouding her first set of steps into new parts of Dawnhaven. And if she knew who he meant, she’d show it either way.

He let the silence hold after his last words, watching her for a breath longer than politeness warranted. Snow drifted lazily from the eaves of the buildings above, the quiet settling again like a blanket that neither of them had asked for.

“You said you’re a doctor,” he repeated, the words neither praise nor indictment. “Intentions are currency here. Until they’re not. Until a child’s fever breaks into delirium, or a soldier bleeds out under your hands, and suddenly your miracles start to smell like heresy.” He tilted his head, the movement slow, predatory. “They’ll forgive a human healer for failure. But you? They’ll call it corruption. A flaw in the fabric of your…” He gestured vaguely at her. “…condition.”

He stopped at the edge of a narrow alley where a low wall offered brief shelter from the wind.

“They’ll need you here,” he said, softer now, almost rueful. “Right up until the moment they decide they need someone to blame a lot more. The prince’s favour might shield you until it doesn’t. Politics, Doctor, is a fickle patron, you may come to find.” His gaze drifted to a nearby building’s skeletal frame visible beyond the alley. It was a work in progress, a clinic, as an attempt to bridge the gap between the people here and the incidents that were bound to occur.

“You’ll build your walls, stock your shelves, suture their wounds. And one day, you’ll stand at a threshold: your oath, or your life. There’s no clear third path. So, do you still step forward then? Or do you disappear into the snow?”

He didn’t expect an answer right away. Most blightborn, or people really, didn’t have one for the kind of questions he liked to pose every so often. Not a real and well-thought-out one anyway.

Years ago, mainly out of curiosity, he'd asked the same question to a healer in Aurelia who’d sworn she'd stand her ground when the fear came. And she had—right up until the torches reached her doorstep. Then, like so many before her, she’d vanished into the night and left others to clean the blood off the cobblestones.

Orion hadn't blamed her.
Not exactly.
But the town had.
And there’d been consequences.

His eyes drifted past Céline then, following some imagined path beyond the alley walls—one paved not with snow, but with memory. The kind that settled quietly behind his ribs, unspoken but ever present. For a moment, he seemed far away. Still standing beside her, but tethered elsewhere.

Then, with a faint shift of breath, he blinked and looked at her again.

The question, in the end, wasn’t about commitment for him, not as he’d alluded to earlier with the prince’s wish for steady hearts.

Rather, it was about consequences.

Time dissolved as Elara leaned into the wall, its unyielding presence the only tether to the present. Her eyes traced the carving on the opposite wall—Seluna’s figure caught in an eternal pivot, sleeves billowing as though the stone itself had frozen mid-breath. No regal repose here, no aloof divinity. This was a goddess carved by calloused hands, her edges blurred by the desperate touches of both artist and follower. Elara’s throat tightened. How many had clawed at depictions like this one, seeking a deity who moved, who reached? She could almost picture the grooves of Seluna’s outstretched palms gleaming smoother than the surrounding rock, polished by the press of lips and whispered pleas.

Elara’s gaze dropped to the floor beneath it, to the subtle discoloration in the stone already starting to develop where knees had knelt. The temple might be new, but suffering was an old stain, seeping into stone as inexorably as groundwater. She pictured the faithful sinking, uncushioned, their bones grinding against the floors. Pain as penance, she mused, or perhaps proof of earnestness. Katherine would bring a pillow if asked, but that would mean returning to the main hall—to Ramona’s scrutiny, to the owl’s unblinking judgment.

Handmaidens don’t request comforts. They endure.

So, Elara stayed rooted, though she could not stop her mind from wandering once more.

A cold memory surfaced: her mother’s funeral. Not flames, but ice—a shroud of frost-laced linen, a bier of glacial splinters carried seaward by the midnight tide. Elara had stood on the shore, her hand clasped in her father’s, watching the floe fracture under the moon’s glare. No pyre’s heat to thaw her grief, only the endless hiss of waves swallowing what little remained. “The sea returns us to the stars, where we may find Her, the highest of all,” the priest had intoned, but all Elara could hear at the time was the creak of ice surrendering to dark water.

She hadn’t prayed since. Not truly. Rituals, yes—the lighting of votives, the murmured blessings over the princess’s untouched supper. But prayer? That demanded a voice she’d buried beneath service. To kneel here would mean confessing the rot in hiding beneath her obedience: the envy festering whenever Amaya found comfort in the prince, the rage coiled like a serpent when her own needs went unspoken.

Handmaidens don’t beg. They serve.

Her fingers drifted to her throat, nails scraping where her mother’s pendant once lay—a Lunarian opal, lost the night she’d been chosen as Amaya’s attendant. She’d torn it off, then, fearing its frost-blue shimmer, despite her love for the colour and who had given it, would betray her heritage, her simplicity among the court’s throng. Now, the absence ached. What would it cost to admit it aloud? To say what she knew to be true in the depths of her being.



The goddess’s eyes bored into her, unblinking. Start small, her silence seemed to urge. Start true.

But the truth was a dangerous thing for her. She’d learned this when she’d tucked Amaya’s hair behind her ear in the garden, fingertips lingering, a first of many trespasses desires disguised as tenderness.

Handmaidens don’t want. They wait.

Yet the floor beckoned, its spotted patches a testament to others who’d knelt trembling and revealed before their goddess. She imagined the ice floe again, her mother’s body receding into the horizon. What did you pray for that night? She asked the memory. Did you beg Seluna to spare me this life?

Her knees struck stone before courage could falter. Cold seeped through her skirts, sharp as the sea wind she’d cursed as a child. No words came, however, only the scrape of breath, the drum of blood. She pressed her palms to the floor, half-expecting frost to bloom beneath them.

Where to start?

With the unsaid. The undone. Perhaps.

How honest?

As the ice that splits beneath a mourner’s weight.

She closed her eyes. The temple held its breath. Somewhere, waves gnawed at a distant shore, relentless as regret.

Flynn’s name rose first, unbidden as snowfall in a drought. Not Amaya’s. Not her own. His.

She didn’t recoil from the realization, and didn’t question it either. If anything, it almost made sense. He was the one she understood least. The one who stood just far enough outside her orbit to feel safe to pray for. He had always been… there, though, hadn’t he? It had been easier to hold him at a distance when he’d existed only in letters and hearsay, in Amaya’s reflective pauses, and the tight-lipped murmurs between palace staff. Elara had allowed herself the indulgence of disdain then. It had required no effort to resent the man who was not present enough to earn Amaya’s loyalty.

But now, flesh and bone and weary eyes, he’d become a crack in her carefully curated indifference. To pray for him was to kneel at that fracture, to fill it with words before her own deceitful heart ruptured entirely. Maybe that’s why it was easier to kneel and think of him. Whatever pain he held was less tangled with hers. His soul was not a mirror to her own but a question mark. She didn’t know what he truly believed behind all that Aurelian might, whether he still prayed despite his goddess’s absence, or if he even thought she was listening.

But Elara still bowed her head in silence.

Let him carry only what he must. Let the rest fall away.

Her fingers curled tighter.

He took my words…and gave them true meaning.
He spoke them, and she listened.
Not because he meant them more. But because he was allowed to speak louder.

Let him not lose the part of himself that still sees her. Not the princess. Not the prophecy. Just… her.
Let that be real. Let it be enough.

And if she gives him the part of her I could never reach,
Let him protect it. Let him be worthy of it.
Let her never look at him the way she looked at me. Like she was already letting go.

She swallowed.

And if I must lose that place, let me mourn it here.
Unnoticed. As is expected of me.

She kept her head bowed, another name surfacing a bit harder than the last.

Aliseth.

He’d offered no grand gestures but only a moment’s clarity—a circle drawn in white dust, his gaze level as he’d given her permission to be anything other than a role. Not as a command, not a plea. More like a reminder that choice, like ice, could cut both ways. She’d buried the words deep, but now they thawed, sharp and sweet as spring melt.

Let him keep his belief in choice.

Let the world not wear it out of him.
Let the road ahead not grind down the man who stood in a circle and made space for me to see myself.

Let him never become the kind of man who gives only so others might take.
Let him never be a root left buried so someone else can bloom.

She remained still, eyes closed, the final whisper of Aliseth’s name lingering like the warmth of his coat, familiar now around her shoulders, but not hers. A kindness she had not truly earned, as far as she was concerned.

Her lips parted, but no sound came. She knew who would come next. Knew the shape of the name that hovered, unsaid, on the back of her tongue. It burned just thinking about it.

Flynn had been a horizon.
Aliseth, a door ajar.
But Amaya was the altar; she would willingly bleed herself dry, in service to her.

Elara’s breath caught, trembling just shy of a sob.

How could she pray for someone whose name was difficult to say now without choking on its syllables, even in thought?
Whose absence she had survived, and yet still mourned?
Whose gaze, even now, made her feel both seen and discarded in the same breath?

But the goddess waited.
And the silence was no longer patient—it pressed in like hands on her shoulders, guiding her to the final truth she’d avoided.

So she let the wound speak, for the internal bleeding to flow.

Let her know peace not tied to prophecy.
Let her know rest not earned by sacrifice.

Let her stop pretending that survival is all she deserves.
Let her choose joy. Let her want it more than anything.
Let her remember how.

Let her not forget me.

If she must love him, let her love him fully.
If she must leave me, let it be for a reason that does not shatter what we once were.

I have served her without question. I have stood beside her in silence.
I would have died for her, even if it meant dying unseen.

Please, let that mean something.

But…most of all…

The goddess’s gaze appeared sharper as shame seared her mind, her throat, not for the prayer itself, but for the selfish tremor beneath its selflessness. Yet the words spilled out still, treasonous, transgressive, and tender.

_{“Let her live. Let her be free.
Even if it is not with me.”}



The knock wasn’t loud, but after so much silence, it echoed like a bell.

Elara jerked upright, lungs seizing as though yanked from the depths of a drowning dream. She did not turn. Her palms lingered on her knees, still warm from prayer, the sacrilegious words now ash in her mouth. When she finally lifted her gaze, it was with the deliberate slowness of one confronting a storm on the horizon. Ramona hovered in the archway, her silhouette smudged by the hall’s torchlight, a woollen shawl clutched in her hands.

It was only then that a voice drifted in from the main hall. His voice.
Flynn.

Elara stilled again, this time like prey sensing movement in a field.

Of course.
Of course, he was here.
Temples bring people together for a reason, someone had said. She didn’t remember who now. It didn’t matter. Because whoever it was hadn’t accounted for irony.

Her eyes shifted back to Ramona, who still stood there, shawl in hand, uncertain. Waiting. It was at this time that a bit of movement caught Elara’s eye—nothing dramatic, just the brief gleam of what little light there was on damp skin, the curve of fingers… and webbing?

It was gone a moment later, hidden again as Elara turned her face away. No gloves. That was it. Just cold hands and a forgotten barrier. Elara’s voice, when it came, was quiet but clear.

“Thank you,” she said, the words unadorned, without embellishment, but not empty. “Truly.”

Then, without reaching for the shawl, she shifted, sinking back down beside the wall with a tired sort of grace, her spine finding the curve of stone behind her. She pulled her knees close, arms loosely wrapping around them.

“I imagine he won’t be here long,” she murmured. “And even if he is, it is not to pray.”

A faint, rueful breath escaped her, not quite a sigh.

“I’ll wait. Until he’s gone.”

Thalia stilled.

It wasn’t the name-drop that pricked her composure, but the blade beneath its velvet delivery—a strike honed by rehearsal and sharpened by intent. Lark’s low growl vibrated against her leg, a counterpoint to the woman’s smile. Her fingers curled deeper into the dog’s fur, anchoring herself in the heat of his body even as her posture signalled control. Such verbal barbs had long since lost their sting; now, they merely pricked her patience like thorns snagging fabric.

“I was,” Thalia conceded, flicking snow from her sleeve as if discarding the title itself. “Almost.” She gave the word back to Nyla like a stone she’d been handed—warm from memory, but useless all the same. “But as you suggest, the past holds little sway here.” Her gaze swept Nyla’s face, lingering on the artful drape of her lashes, the too-perfect part of her hair. A performance, this encounter. Every syllable was staged in the way the other wanted and felt powerful standing on.

“Curious,” Thalia continued, regardless, her voice honey-wrapped iron, “you seem awfully well-informed for someone I’m not meant to remember.” She didn’t move, but something in her stance shifted. Less guarded. More grounded. The noblewoman in her straightened. The farmer in her stayed steady. “As for what brings me to Dawnhaven, I’m here because I want to be. Unlike some, I don’t need a throne or its connections to feel useful.”

A pause.

“Nor do I chase men who mistake hesitation for choice.” Her smile flashed, brilliant, the kind that had once disarmed those in higher positions than her. Mainly powerful men, but useful with Nyla’s type as well. The crunch of snow beneath her boot punctuated her advance, subtle, deliberate. Not aggression, but a reclamation of space. Her power.

This stranger’s saccharine inflections, her casual invocation of titles Thalia had shed like an outgrown cloak…it reeked of practiced manipulation. She recognized the breed: performers who waltzed through politics as consorts and confidantes, harvesting secrets with whispered promises and artful sighs. Courtesan, Thalia guessed. A creature groomed to blur the line between pillow talk and interrogation, trading faux intimacy for influence. Her own dalliance with Flynn had been a pageant of restraint—stilted walks through orchards, scripted banter over porcelain teacups, a single kiss permitted beneath the hawk-eyed scrutiny warranted in those types of engagement matters. She had been a prop in his parable of princely duty, never grasping, never demanding. Always waiting.

So when this disguised viper hissed of scorned destinies and squandered favour, as though Thalia had fumbled some coveted trophy…

The smile that curved her mouth was not a kind one.

“Enlighten me,” she said, her voice level, “were you this invested in his past when you were busy being his present?” She let the polysemous barb hover while identifying the exact emotion she felt at the moment:

Not jealousy in the slightest.

To imply she had chased a crown that had never truly been hers to wear, while standing there draped in smug amusement, as if she hadn’t once been the one tucked behind palace doors, veiled in secrecy, and, if Thalia’s instincts were right, discarded just as quickly. It was the gall of it. That’s what it was. She had never chased him. She’d been told to wait, to posture, to smile, and to play the part until the script shifted. So when this woman implied she’d been passed over... well. It could never be envy.

It was contempt.

She tilted her head, hazel eyes glinting. “Though…I suppose everyone needs a story to tell,” she added, feigning a light frown. “Some of us just hope not to be the mere footnote.”