Night settled permanently over Castle Opes, bringing with it a biting cold that seemed to seep directly into the bone. In the courtyard, illuminated only by the uncertain reddish glow of the wall torches, the silence had become an almost unbearable weight.
Wilder remained kneeling in the damp gravel for a few moments more, his chest racked by the last lingering echoes of a muffled sob. Then, with a monumental effort that seemed to drain every last drop of his physical strength, the captain pressed his hands into the dirt and slowly pushed himself back to his feet. The polished plate armor produced a dull metallic clatter as he straightened up, but his figure no longer exuded the imposing aura of moments before: his shoulders were slightly stooped, and his face appeared hollowed out, marked by the indelible trail of those sudden tears.
Wilder adjusted his heavy dark cloak with slightly trembling fingers. He raised his eyes to Hayjin, meeting the boy's gaze with frightening gravity.
"Listen to me... you must listen to me, Hayjin," Wilder said, his voice reduced to a raspy whisper stripped of any hint of martial authority. "Don't take it as a cliché. Don't take it as a provocation. What I told you... I swear on my very life, it is the absolute truth. Get away from this place before the vise closes around you for good."
"If you care about your life and the lives of the people you want to protect... make sure you listen to me. Get out."
Hayjin stood frozen, short of breath, unable to articulate any response. The weight of those words hung over his head like an axe ready to fall. He couldn't utter a single syllable; his tongue felt glued to the roof of his mouth, paralyzed by a mixture of disbelief and dull terror.
Without waiting for an answer, Wilder slowly turned and walked with heavy steps toward the royal palace's side entrance. Every single step the captain took echoed off the stone with the labored cadence of a condemned man.
Crossing the threshold into the building, the warm air inside brought no relief to the commander. As soon as he was shielded from the eyes of the outer sentries, in a dim alcove along the side corridor, Wilder came to a sudden halt.
An intense tremor swept through his arms. He leaned his back against the cold stone wall, sliding down a few inches as he brought his right hand to his chest, clutching tightly at the tunic beneath his armor. His heart hammered erratically, suffocated by a grip of panic and a visceral tension that stole his breath. His eyes stared wide into the shadowy void, frantically trying to gulp down air that never seemed to be enough.
"Wilder."
The voice cut through the air abruptly detached, devoid of any emotional inflection.
The captain jolted, snapping his head up. Hidden among the shadows of the adjacent archway, the slender and elegant figure of Sage Arkon slowly stepped forward. The old man watched him with pale, piercing eyes, hands folded over his jade rosary, his usual calm and imperturbable expression carved into his weathered face.
"S-Sage Arkon..." Wilder stammered, instinctively trying to straighten his posture and regain a shred of composure, even while keeping his hand over his aching chest.
"Come with me for a moment," Arkon said in a quiet, even tone, making no reference to the emotional breakdown he had just witnessed. "We have urgent matters to discuss in my quarters."
Wilder swallowed hard. He looked at the elder for a moment that felt like an eternity, then slowly bowed his head in obedience and followed him through the gloom of the corridor, vanishing toward the Council tower.
Back in the outer courtyard, Hayjin had been left completely alone. The night wind howled fiercely through the castle battlements, making the torch flames flicker and casting misshapen, shifting shadows across the damp gravel. The boy stood petrified, staring at the exact spot where Wilder had disappeared. His ears rang; his brain replayed Wilder's words on loop his tears, his blind desperation, his plea to run.
"Run... run where? And from whom?"
His mind was a shapeless tangle of frayed thoughts, dormant fears, and agonizingly sharp fragments of memories. And now, Wilder's words. The tears of a man he believed invincible. The warning to flee.
Suddenly, the wall of cynicism, paranoia, and rage that Hayjin had meticulously built around his heart crumbled to ash. The unbearable weight of his previous deaths, the brutal memory of the blade slicing his throat, the constant terror for Zhilian and Isabelle's lives, the devastating solitude of bearing the weight of time alone, and the utter inability to find a way out converged into a single, terrifying tipping point.
Hayjin was seized by a sudden, overwhelming wave of grief.
His legs gave out. The boy collapsed to his knees onto the courtyard's cold gravel. He brought both hands to his face, burying his fingers over his eyes as warm tears began to spill past his fingers.
Within seconds, his breath broke. Hayjin burst into uncontrollable, violent sobs a desperate, primal crying that racked his shoulders and choked his throat.
"Enough... just fucking stop..." he whimpered through his sobs, his voice reduced to a childish plea. "I don't understand anything anymore... nothing makes sense..."
"I don't understand shit..." he rasped, his voice shattered by despair. "Nothing... damn it, nothing..."
At that moment of complete emotional collapse, a female figure burst out from the shadows of the portico. Zhilian, who had trailed Hayjin ever since their encounter near the Hall of Sages and had stayed hidden behind a pillar watching over him, saw him fall. Her heart skipped a beat. Caring nothing for secrecy or propriety, the princess sprinted toward him, the skirt of her royal gown rustling against the night air.
"Hayjin!" she gasped, dropping to her knees on the rough gravel right in front of him, heedless of her evening dress. "Hayjin, my God! What's happening to you?! Are you alright?!"
Her hands instinctively sought his shoulders to hold him up, but the boy, completely overwhelmed and stripped of all defense, slumped forward against her. He buried his face into the crook of her neck, his fingers clutching tightly at her velvet cloak.
Zhilian winced at the impact, but immediately wrapped her arms around him, feeling Hayjin's body shudder violently under the force of his relentless weeping.
"I don't get it, Zhilian..." Hayjin sobbed, his words muffled against the fabric of her dress, already soaked with his tears. "I don't understand why... why the fuck is all this happening to me... Why?! Why am I failing this time too?! Why did it have to happen to me?!"
The princess held him tightly, her fingers threaded through his messy hair, holding him close as anxiety and confusion tightened her own throat. She stroked his hair in a slow, steady motion, offering him an anchor in the middle of the storm. "Hayjin... please, talk to me..."
"I... I just wanted to live a quiet, peaceful life!" Hayjin cried out in a broken breath, finally releasing the venom rotting inside him. "I just wanted to finally change! I wanted to stop being a useless nobody, I wanted to do the right thing... but terrible things keep happening to me! All I see is blood, betrayal, death! Horrible things just keep happening! I see danger everywhere I look! And I don't know how to face all of this alone... I can't do this anymore, Zhilian!"
He pulled his face back slightly from her shoulder, looking at her with red, swollen eyes, as lost as a child abandoned in the dark.
"How can I pretend to help anyone else..." he whispered with profound bitterness, "...when I can't even take care of myself?! When I'm just a weakling who breaks down at the first obstacle?!"
A long, suffocating silence fell between them, broken only by the whistling wind and Hayjin's fading sobs.
Zhilian stared at him. For several seconds, she didn't say a word. Her arms slowly loosened their hold on him, but her expression shifted entirely. Surprise and anxiety vanished, replaced by a visceral, aching grief that filled her eyes with crystal-clear tears.
With immense gentleness, Zhilian reached out and took his face in both hands, cupping his cheeks with the warmth of her palms. Tears began to stream down the princess's own face, wetting her lips, yet her gaze remained locked onto Hayjin's with fierce intensity. Her fingers trembled slightly, but her grip was firm; she did not break eye contact for a single second.
"Listen to yourself!" Zhilian demanded, her voice cracking with emotion as she leaned closer. "Look at yourself, Hayjin... Look at what you're doing to yourself! Where the fuck did the Hayjin I know go?!"
Hayjin flinched beneath the warm pressure of her hands.
"Where did that moody, yet funny Hayjin go? The grumpy guy who snapped at me just to hide how much he cared? Where's that stubborn boy I trained with in the forest until our hands bled?! The one who never fucking gave up! The one who tried spells over and over again, dozens of times, even when they failed and he looked like a lost cause?!"
Zhilian brushed a thumb across his cheek to wipe away a tear, holding his face with even greater firmness.
"Where is the Hayjin who descended into the darkness of the dungeon and saved my life when I was terrified and thought I was going to die?!" Her voice quavered, yet turned immensely solemn. "You are not weak! And above all... you don't have to face any of this alone!"
"Hayjin. You're not alone... You never were. I will always be right here to face all of this with you. And I won't do it just out of duty as Princess of Opes... I'll do it for you. For the Hayjin I know."
Zhilian's tears fell onto Hayjin's jacket, but her expression glowed with absolute determination.
"I will always be here to face this with you, Hayjin. Always! Because you are one of the most important people in my life!"
The princess smiled through her tears a warm, clear smile that seemed to scatter the darkness of the night.
"Whatever threat is haunting you... whatever enemy hides in this palace or out there... you can always count on me. You can lean on me anytime, at any hour! So... please, don't do this to yourself. Remember... knights never cry, right?"
"Zhilian..." he whispered, his voice reduced to a raspy, cracking thread. He swallowed hard, trying to force down the thick lump tightening his throat. "Tell me the truth. Please... answer me truthfully."
The princess didn't move a muscle, simply gazing at him with tear-filled eyes, her hands still resting gently on his cheeks.
"What... what do you really think of me?" Hayjin asked, his fingers unconsciously brushing against her wrists. "Do you truly view me that way? Tell me without lying, without sugaring the pill just to make me feel better. Why... why did you choose me? Out of all the knights in this realm people trained their whole lives, nobles, weapon masters why did you want me as your personal knight? Why me, Zhilian?"
The question hung suspended in the cold night air, accompanied only by the whistling wind blowing between the ramparts.
Zhilian shook her head softly, letting out a long, shaky breath. Her fingers loosened their grip on his cheeks slightly, but her gaze lost not a fraction of its intensity.
"You want the truth, Hayjin? The honest truth?" she said, her voice though cracked with tears sounding startlingly clear and candid. "Fine. Honestly... I know full well you're not the strongest knight here. You never were. You're not some legendary mage who moves mountains with a word... and to be completely honest, sometimes you're not even the smartest or the one who makes the cleverest move."
Hayjin clenched his jaw, feeling a sharp pang in his chest at those words, but Zhilian didn't give him time to pull away.
"But do you know what you do have, Hayjin? Something almost no one in this castle possesses," she continued, drawing even closer until her warm breath brushed against his lips. "You have an unreal strength of will. And courage... a stubborn, terrifying courage that forces you forward even when your back is against the wall and anyone else would have surrendered. You don't back down. Ever. And that's why I chose you. I didn't want an immaculate bodyguard who follows orders like a puppet. I wanted you, because I know you fight with everything you have."
At those words, Hayjin shut his eyes tight.
A muffled sob, barely held back, lodged in his chest. His crying turned into involuntary twitches of his shoulders, a strained, suffocated tremor that made his jaw shake as he desperately tried not to break down completely. Silent, burning tears continued to trace paths down his cheeks.
"You're lying," Hayjin thought instinctively, his mind consumed by a dark, destructive bitterness. "She's just saying what she thinks I need to hear so I don't collapse. If she really knew who I was... if she knew the truth about me, about what I used to be, how much weakness and selfishness hide behind this mask... she'd never speak like this. If she knew the real Hayjin, she would never look at me with those eyes. She'd despise me."
But then he opened his eyes again. And he saw Zhilian. He saw the tear tracks on her face, the faint trembling of her lips, the sweet, vulnerable curve of her honest smile. He saw the girl kneeling beside him on the cold gravel, holding his face without any fear of showing her own fragility.
And in that precise instant, the darkness in his thoughts receded.
"Even if she were lying... even if she doesn't know who I really am... it doesn't matter," Hayjin told himself, a profound warmth swelling in his chest. "I want to save her. I have to save her at all costs. Because I care about her... I love her dearly, and I won't let anything in the world happen to her."
Despite the tears streaming down her cheeks, Zhilian offered him that smile brimming with affection and pure strength. Hayjin stared at her, frozen by the purity of the gesture and the overwhelming sincerity of her words. The warmth of her hands on his cheeks seemed to melt the icy grip encircling his chest, gradually easing the frantic heaving of his lungs.
At that moment, Zhilian's words pierced his chest like an electric shock, clearing away the fog of despair. He realized he had been a fool. A complete, total, irredeemable fool.
In his desperate attempt to carry everything alone, to "protect" Zhilian and the others by hiding the truth, he had only brought himself twice the pain and pushed himself toward the brink.
For hours, for days, he had tried to shoulder the weight of the world by himself, screaming alone in the dark, isolating himself from everyone in a desperate bid to spare Zhilian and the others that agony and danger. And what had he gained? He had only suffered more, driving himself to the edge of insanity and hurting the very person he wanted to protect.
Immediately afterward, a surge of embarrassment washed over him. He felt pathetically weak for breaking down like that, for sobbing like a child right in front of her.
Hayjin took a long, deep breath, regaining his composure with startling speed. He reached up to place his hands over Zhilian's, which were still cupping his cheeks, gently easing them back with a grateful nod before wiping his face with his jacket sleeve.
"You're right..." Hayjin said, his voice still slightly raspy but firm once more, grounded in a new, unshakeable resolve. "I was an idiot. A complete fool for trying to handle everything alone. I just ended up acting like a moron."
He looked Zhilian straight in the eye, offering a small, genuine smile of understanding.
"Thank you, Zhilian... thank you from the bottom of my heart. You don't have to worry anymore, Zhilian. From this moment on... we're going to fix everything. Together."
Before the princess could answer, the sound of swift footsteps on the gravel made them both turn.
Emerging from the shadow of a nearby pillar, where she had stayed hidden listening to the entire conversation, was Isabelle. The young maid was crying as well, deeply moved and emotionally overwhelmed after witnessing Hayjin's vulnerability and the unbreakable bond between him and the princess.
"Hayjin!" Isabelle exclaimed, her voice cracking with tears.
Without waiting for an invitation, she ran toward them and threw herself into Hayjin's arms, wrapping her arms tightly around his neck in a desperate embrace.
"Thank you... thank you for everything!" Isabelle sobbed into his ear. "Don't you dare ever think you're alone again! You can always count on me too, Hayjin! Anytime!"
Hayjin was thrown off for a split second, but then returned Isabelle's hug warmly, holding her close and resting his chin on her shoulder.
"I'm sorry, Isabelle..." Hayjin murmured sincerely. "I apologize for leaving you alone all day today... for acting so distant and paranoid."
Isabelle pulled back slightly, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand and sniffing, a playful smirk teasing her lips.
"Oh, please!" Isabelle teased him, trying to lighten the mood. "What did you think? Did you take me for some helpless little girl who can't handle being alone for a few hours?!"
Hayjin let out a genuine laugh his first after hours of pure nightmare. Zhilian joined in, wiping away the last traces of tears. For the first time since this harrowing day began, the grip of terror seemed to shatter, giving way to a steadfast, unbreakable alliance.
Meanwhile, in the depths of the castle, the atmosphere was of an entirely different nature.
Wilder had been escorted by Arkon into the Council Chamber of the Sages. The grand circular hall, lit only by three heavy wrought-iron candelabras, appeared gloomy and steeped in a spectral silence. The soaring walls lined with ancient tapestries seemed to absorb every sound.
The captain of the Royal Guard stood in the center of the chamber, arms stiff at his sides, his eyes still swollen from weeping fixed on the floor.
On the far side of the massive wooden table, Arkon stood in all his solemnity. But they were not alone.
From the darkest, most impenetrable corner of the room, beyond the reach of the candlelight, a strange figure shrouded in shadow slowly emerged. Not a single feature of its face was visible; a dense, almost tangible blanket of darkness obscured its form, radiating an aura of absolute cold that caused the candelabra flames to hiss.
The shadowy figure took two steps forward, coming to a halt alongside Sage Arkon. When it spoke, its voice belonged to no earthly origin: it was a dual, raspy, resonant sound that vibrated through the stone floor beneath them.
"The time has come, Arkon..." the shrouded figure said with chilling calmness. "Prepare yourself."