Far away, in a secluded corner of the Kingdom of Thaloria, where folk rarely, if ever, dared to tread, lay the cursed stretch of land known to all as Vethkara.
There, brooding atop a jagged hill, stood the mansion of Duke Drazeil.
It was a towering edifice of dark gothic stone, ancient and deliberate, the kind of structure that had not been built so much as willed into existence by something that wanted to be feared. Its silhouette alone was enough to chill the blood of any traveller foolish enough to glance its way. Most didn't glance twice.
Most knew better.
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His Grace had been very clear.
Complete seclusion. No visitors. No interruptions. No one was to approach his chambers under any circumstances, and anyone with sense had taken that instruction at face value and stayed well away.
Eloise did not always have sense.
She had worked in Vethkara for three years. Three years of learning which silences were safe and which ones weren't. Three years of watching Ulric's face for the small tells that meant not today and don't push it and for the love of everything, turn around and walk away.
She was good at reading those tells.
She was choosing to ignore them today.
Because somewhere underneath all the fear and the good sense she had accumulated in three years of service, she genuinely cared about her Duke. Not in the way the other attendants did, performatively, strategically, with one eye always on what caring might get them. Just genuinely. Quietly. In a way she had never said out loud.
She had brought him blood every evening for three years without being asked. Had learned exactly the temperature he preferred. Had memorised the particular way the air in his corridor changed when he was in a mood that meant everyone else should find somewhere else to be.
She knew what this silence meant.
She knocked anyway.
"Your Grace?" She kept her voice light. "You haven't left your room in 17 days now. I've brought you something."
Silence.
"Your Grace, are you in there?"
More silence. The kind that pressed back.
"I'm coming in," she announced, because she had already committed to this and there was no elegant way to retreat now.
Because she cared. And caring, in Vethkara, was the most dangerous thing you could do.
She pushed the door open.
The first thing she registered was his silhouette: tall, broad-shouldered, the kind of physical presence that made the air in a room rearrange itself. For one unguarded moment her eyes moved over him with frank appreciation.
That was the last mistake she would ever make.
She looked at his eyes.
Both irises had gone red.
Full, complete, bleeding red, not a trace of emerald left.
Oh, she thought. Ulric was right.
Duke Drazeil carried two irises, one blood-red, one deep emerald, and in his better moments the emerald held. But when both bled to red, it meant something specific. It meant the part of him that tolerated the presence of other living things had gone very quiet.
And if they ever went black;
Well. Everyone in Vethkara had a private understanding about what to do if his eyes ever went black. It involved leaving. Quickly. Without looking back.
She had once asked Ulric whether His Grace's eyes had ever returned to green, fully green, both of them, the way they presumably once were. Ulric had looked at her for a long moment.
"No," he had said. "Not since the incident."
He had not elaborated. She had not asked.
Now Eloise stood in the doorway with a tray in her hands and both irises burning at her and the glass trembling against the tray because her hands were shaking that badly.
"Your Grace, I brought you some b—"
She felt herself leave the floor.
His hand closed around her throat before she finished the sentence, one movement, no warning, the tray clattering somewhere below her as her feet stopped finding anything to stand on. She clawed at his grip the way people always did. Uselessly. The way she had watched others do and had privately believed she would never be foolish enough to replicate.
"Pl—please," she managed. "Don't — please —"
His other hand moved.
It was quick. He was always quick. That was the one mercy Duke Drazeil offered, though mercy was not what he would have called it.
"That," he said, to the room and no one in particular, "is what disobedience costs."
Eloise's body hit the floor.
Drazeil looked down at his hand. Blood ran between his fingers, warm and dark. He raised it slowly and drank with the unhurried ease of someone savouring something they had been looking forward to.
He felt better immediately.
That was the thing about killing, not the blood specifically, but the act itself. The specific satisfaction of something that had been building finally finding its release. He had been waiting 17 days for someone to disobey him. Waiting with a patience that was less virtue and more a very controlled form of anticipation. He had known someone would come. They always did.
He had simply needed to know who.
"Ulric."
He didn't raise his voice. He never needed to.
Ulric appeared within seconds, moving with the inhuman speed that came naturally to those who had served in Vethkara long enough. He took in the scene with the practiced calm of someone who had taken in similar scenes many times before, then dropped to one knee.
"My Grace. You called."
"Clean this up," Drazeil said, flexing his hand slowly. "And prepare a bath."
"At once, Your Grace."
"Well, well, well."
The voice came from the window, or rather, from the figure now leaning against the window frame with the easy confidence of someone who had never once been told they weren't welcome somewhere and had simply decided to take that as a universal truth.
Thaddeus.
"Isn't it a little early to be ripping hearts out?" he said, in the particular singsong tone he used when he was enjoying himself at someone else's expense. Which was most of the time.
"What are you doing here," Drazeil said. It was not a question.
"Visiting my best friend." Thaddeus pushed off the window frame and strolled into the room, stepping around Eloise without looking down. "And I have information. Important information. The kind that requires a proper setting." He looked pointedly around the room. "This is not a proper setting."
"Then leave," Drazeil said, licking the last of the blood from his fingers.
"You wound me." Thaddeus pressed a hand to his chest. "Every time." He watched Ulric move efficiently around the room, then tilted his head at the body on the floor. "You know, that heart is going to waste. I could use it. Witch magic, a few spells —"
He said the word deliberately. Clearly. With the specific placement of someone testing the temperature of something.
Witch.
The temperature in the room dropped.
Drazeil's eyes moved to him slowly. Thaddeus held his gaze with the cheerful fearlessness of someone who knew, with absolute certainty, that he was not going to be killed today. They were cousins. The last family Drazeil believed himself to have. Drazeil might end most things that irritated him, but he would not end this.
Probably.
"Ulric," Drazeil said, eyes still on Thaddeus. "Take him to the parlour. Give him whatever we have."
"The good stock or the —"
"Whatever we have."
Thaddeus laughed. "Truly the most gracious host in all of Thaloria." He pressed a hand to his chest in a mock bow, and then he was gone, teleported, the space where he had been standing simply empty.
"Insufferable," Drazeil said, to no one.
He crossed the room and sat, one leg crossed over the other, two fingers pressed to his temple. The room was quiet now except for Ulric's efficient movements behind him.
It started two weeks ago.
He had been in the middle of something, he couldn't even remember what now, which was itself unusual because Drazeil forgot nothing, when it happened for the first time.
A flash. Silver. Gone before he could turn his head.
He stood very still for a long moment afterward, waiting. Nothing came. The room was exactly as it had always been; dark, quiet, undisturbed. He looked at the space where the silver had been and found only air.
He had dismissed it.
The second time happened that same night. He was sitting in his chair, two fingers pressed to his temple, and for just a fraction of a second, less than a breath, he saw her.
Not clearly. Never clearly.
Just curly hair. Dark and wild and entirely out of place in the stone interior of Vethkara. And then nothing.
He had stood up. Checked the room. Checked the corridor. Stood in the doorway of his own chambers like a man who had heard something he couldn't account for and was not willing to admit that to himself.
Nothing.
The third time was worse.
He had been feeding; routine, functional, nothing he needed to think about, when something passed through his senses like smoke through a gap in stone. Not a scent exactly. Not a sound. Something older than both. Something that bypassed every rational faculty he possessed and went directly to the part of him that was ancient and instinctual and had been dormant for so long he had assumed it was dead.
It smelled like magic.
Witch magic.
He had stopped feeding immediately. Stood in the centre of the room with his jaw tight and his eyes bleeding red and something cold moving through his chest where warmth had not lived for a very long time.
And with the magic came something else. An image, clearer than anything before it. Silver eyes, bright as the moon, belonging to a face he had never seen and yet felt with a certainty that had no rational explanation.
Witch.
The word rose from somewhere deep, not thought so much as felt, the way you felt something you had been trying not to feel finally surfaced despite everything. And with it came the anger. Immediate. Absolute. The specific fury that only one thing in all of Thaloria and beyond had ever been able to produce in him.
He hated Witches.
He had very good reasons for that.
And yet something that smelled like witch magic had gotten inside Vethkara, inside his mind, inside his senses, without him knowing how or when or from which direction. Without triggering a single one of the wards he had spent centuries building. Without announcing itself or asking permission.
It had simply arrived.
Just like the silver eyes that kept appearing at the edges of his vision. Just like the dark curling hair. Just like the sensation that something had shifted in the world two weeks ago and settled into a configuration he hadn't agreed to and couldn't locate well enough to dismantle.
He had not left his chambers in 17 days.
Not because he was hiding. Drazeil did not hide from things.
He was waiting. Sitting very still with the patience of something centuries old, watching the edges of his own perception for the next time it happened. Cataloguing. Building a picture from fragments he didn't yet have enough of.
Something had come into his World.
He didn't know what it was yet.
But he was going to find out.
And when he did —
His left hand closed slowly into a fist on the arm of his chair.
When he did, he was going to make very certain it never happened again.
He had sent Thaddeus out over the past two weeks to make enquiries; about the eastern quarter, about Callinis, about the rumour that had been travelling. Thaddeus had returned with more than expected and had relayed word back during Drazeil's seclusion and he was sure he was here with more.
Now Drazeil sat with two problems he hadn't started the fortnight with.
One had a name and an address and would be dealt with tomorrow evening.
The other had silver eyes and no explanation at all.
"Your Grace," Ulric said from the doorway. "Your bath is ready."
Drazeil stood. He crossed to the bathing chamber without a word, already removing his shirt, his mind still turning over the same thing it had been turning over for days.
Silver eyes.
He submerged himself in the water and stared at the ceiling; old stone, ancient cracks, torchlight moving across it in patterns he had memorised across centuries. He knew this ceiling the way you knew something you had stared at during the worst moments of your life.
After a long moment, his hand moved to his chest.
He pressed his palm flat against it.
Nothing beat beneath it. Not in the way it once had; not with warmth, not with anything that resembled feeling.
"A body without a heart is just an empty vessel; a heart without a soul is nothing but a quiet loneliness."
His jaw tightened.
He thought about the girl with silver eyes and witch magic and a feeling he had no language for.
He moved his hand away.
And didn't think about it again.
Or tried not to.