[color=gold][@Selune][/color]

[h2][color=goldenrod][u]Aliseth[/u][/COLOR] [b]/[/b] [color=007236][u]Vellion[/u][/COLOR][/h2][hr][COLOR=#C0C0C0]The gates of hell.[/COLOR]
[hr]

Just how long had he truly believed this charade could last?
Not the masquerade of a stolen identity — but the far crueller illusion: a borrowed life.
He had [b]died[/b] already, after all.

Long ago, in the dark of an unnamed forest, surrounded by the laughter of friends — his hunters, his brothers, his family.

He could still see it when he closed his eyes. The night. The moonlight. The screams. The savage attack that tore through them like a storm of fangs and fury. They had been outnumbered, overpowered — helpless. The feral strength of their foes was beyond human, their hunger primal and without mercy. Even now, the memory clawed at his chest and stole what breath he no longer needed to take.

He remembered watching them fall one by one. The blood painting the snow. The glint of red beneath silver light. His own end — teeth, pain, the sound of his heart as it failed him.

It had all been borrowed time since then — every breath, every heartbeat that wasn’t truly his, every desperate, fight-for-survival hour of it. But that had always been his fate: a life bound by cruel twists and cosmic jokes.

He should have known better.
He had been gambling with Lady Luck all his life, and she had always played with loaded dice.
She gave with one hand, only to take with the other — viciously, gleefully.

Fate and fortune had toyed with him since his cursed conception, balancing his life upon the edge of a razor — between hope and despair.
Each fall a little lower, each rise a crueler trick. Surely, there could be no depth beyond this one.

It was a game of gods — or demons — and he was their plaything.
Perhaps they mocked him for their own amusement.
There was no justice in this world.
No light left to warm it.

Who was he now? What had he become?
The face he wore was not his own; the life he stole was not a life at all.
Hunger. Frustration. Fear. Rage. Those were his only companions.

He wanted to run — to flee into the cold — but not before setting fire to everything that had wronged him.

The confidence he wore was no armor.
It was a veil — a brittle mask stretched over the fractures within.
Not protection from the world, but a container, keeping the storm at bay.

Within it churned everything he could not face: fear, doubt, sorrow, loneliness — a vast, hollow ache that would unmake him if ever it broke free.
His confidence was not strength; it was a cage built to contain what would otherwise destroy him.

But now, as he sat in the jail — for once outside the bars — that mask began to crack.
Its undoing came as a whisper carried on the cold wind, a voice from beyond the walls, one his cursed hearing could not ignore.
They were speaking of him.
Not the guard. Not the prisoner. [i]Him.[/i]

She — Princess Amaya — had broken him.

The name struck like a blade through the thin shell of his composure.
And as his confidence fractured, the container within him burst.

Long-buried emotions spilled forth, flooding through every fault line: guilt, regret, jealousy, anguish — each tearing wider the seams that held him together.
He froze beneath the weight of them, trapped in the trembling grip of feelings he had spent years burying.

Outside, the enchantment of the jail began its slow work.
The anti-magic etched into its walls gnawed at him from without as despair devoured him from within.

His disguise — the illusion of Aliseth — melted away like wax in the rain.
Beneath the fading glamour, his true self bled through: Vellion.
The ghost. The liar. The dead man walking.

He could feel it — his magic unravelling, his body rejecting its borrowed skin.
The armor that once fit perfectly now hung too large, clattering as he fought to free himself from its suffocating weight.

Blood began to seep from the cracks and joints, dark and slow, as the wounds of his first death returned — cruel echoes from a night he could never forget.
The pain came back with them, raw and real, and there was no strength left to resist.

He writhed, then screamed — but not for help.
The sound was hollow, breaking apart as quickly as it left his throat.
The world seemed to press in around him, eager to set right what he had defied.
Magic gone. Will gone. Life undone.

Soon, his screams fell to ragged gasps, and his body trembled in silence.
The darkness that gathered around him was thicker than shadow — a deeper night than any beneath the lost sun.
His vision dimmed until only a pale ghost of the world remained.

And then he saw her.
Death. Familiar, patient, inevitable.
No remorse. No apology.
Just the quiet certainty of an old friend.

He managed, barely, a smile — a small, broken thing of acceptance.

In those last moments, his thoughts drifted to Elara — her eyes, her strength, her impossible light.
He remembered their conversation, heavy and honest, and for the first time in years, felt something close to peace.

He was no longer awake, nor asleep.
Trapped between memory and the present, he stood once more in that place.
Sword in hand. Snow at his feet.
An empty temple before him.
A tower of ice behind.

Around him, the red circle in the snow marked his end.
No paths beyond it. No choices left.

Beneath his feet — only darkness and decay.
But beneath hers, there had always been light.

Countless paths stretched before her like constellations, each glowing more brightly than the last.
Compared to her, he had walked forever in shadow.

He looked back, searching the threads of fate for a point where their paths might have crossed again.

No such thread existed.

And as the last remnants of illusion slipped away, so too did Vellion — leaving behind only silence, and the faint echo of what once was.

Yet in that vanishing breath between life and silence, something gentle stirred — not light, not mercy, but remembrance. A thought of laughter, a glimpse of warmth once shared beneath a dying sun. It flickered, fragile and pure, before the dark claimed even that. And though no one would ever speak his name again, no one alive knew it, for the briefest moment, the world seemed to mourn him — as if the shadows themselves wept for what might have been.