The King's Chambers, Veilside
The Glass Citadel shimmered like a frozen storm caught mid-breath. At its peak, nestled within ribs of starlit crystal, the King's chambers flickered with illusionary light: fireless golden flames, shifting silks that danced on phantom breezes, walls veined with living opal.
Caderyn stood before the arched window, unmoving. His reflection shimmered in the curved glass—a tall figure draped in auric robes, his long golden hair braided down his spine like spun sunlight. His face was cut from marble and myth: high cheekbones, a strong brow, a mouth made more for command than kindness. But it was his eyes that unsettled even his own courtiers—molten copper, glowing faintly from within, as if the forge of the old gods still burned behind them.
When the knock came, he didn't turn.
A servant bowed at the threshold. "My King. He arrives."
"Let him through."
The shadows peeled back. No door opened. Morien stepped forward from the dark itself—tall, angular, robed in many greys that never settled into one shade. His face was gaunt, lips colorless, eyes unreadable.
Caderyn did not greet him.
"Report," he said, voice smooth and flat as glass.
Morien inclined his head, mockingly slight. "As expected, the Queen relinquished her power, if not her post, with no fuss. No blood. No theatrics. Quite disappointing. But elegant, in her way."
He moved toward the table, tracing one long finger along its crystalline edge.
"The girl accepted the burden with less hesitation than I imagined. Wickham, as ever, turned the solemn into farce. And at the Threadborne's side… stood the Huntsman."
Caderyn still didn't move. Only his hand tightened around the stem of the goblet he held.
"Not beside Isolde," Morien added softly, carefully watching the King. "Not behind. Beside the girl."
The goblet cracked with a sound like splintered bone. Wine—a deep shade like heartblood—spilled down the King's fingers, dripping from his knuckles in slow, deliberate trails. His jaw was clenched, the line of his mouth taut with the effort not to snarl. One eye twitched—a flicker of something unguarded breaking through his cultivated calm. His hand trembled once before he stilled it with visible control, fury burning behind his copper eyes. A low exhale hissed from his nose as if cooling molten rage. The broken stem of the goblet dissolved in his grasp, but the stain on his palm remained, vivid and accusing.
"I admit," said Morien lightly, watching the King's reaction with thinly-veiled glee, "I hadn't expected your storm to drift so far downwind."
Caderyn's eyes flashed, a molten flare of copper burning through his expression. For a moment, his rage surged hot and untempered—how dare this witless worm mock him so brazenly, here, in the sanctum of his own chambers? He imagined a dozen ways to destroy Morien utterly in excruciating detail—crushed beneath the weight of glamour, unravelled thread by thread, or flayed in silence by his own reflection.
But the moment passed. He exhaled once, sharply. The treacherous worm was useful. For the moment.
Caderyn smoothed the fury from his face with sovereign precision, folding it behind a mask of indifference. He turned his head slightly, and when he spoke, his voice was pleasant as polished steel.
"How did the Unseelie react?" Caderyn said, flicking wine from his fingers. The goblet dissolved into mist.
"They were... disquieted." Morien's tone sobered. "She was offered the crown and refused it. There was no challenge. No duel. Only mercy. That, in itself, unsettled them."
He paused.
"Some of the older ones—those who no longer change their shape, who remember the old wars—have begun to whisper. They say she does not wear power, she is it. That she shines not like flame, but like memory. Not a queen, but a myth made flesh."
Caderyn's jaw clenched.
He remembered a time when he too, was made myth.
Morien leaned in, voice cool as snowfall. "She is not what you expected. She is becoming something else entirely."
"What of the gates?" Caderyn asked. He had turned now, facing the mirror wall—but not looking into it. Staring through.
"More are stabilizing. Some never should have. The threads were deliberately frayed. But Harrowmere…" Morien exhaled. "That should have stayed lost."
"It hasn't?"
"No. The girl stabilized it. The Huntsman protected the breach."
Caderyn's hands curled into loose fists.
Morien tilted his head. "She's mending what you meddled with. That makes her dangerous."
The silence stretched until it bent. Caderyn spoke to no one, or to himself.
"I tried to save the world from forgetting. I tore open heaven for them. And now… they forget me."
Morien, dry as bone, replied: "Perhaps it remembers someone else now."
Caderyn turned. Something burned in his gaze—not fury. Not yet. But hunger.
"I remade the Hunt. I turned it into something worthy of awe. Radiance and ruin. I was not meant to fade."
He laughed once—bitterly.
"Isolde cedes power to a child. A threadless soul with kind eyes and a poet's mouth. And the world applauds her for it."
His voice dropped.
"If Greylene Wyrde cannot be turned..."
He let it hang.
Morien did not blink. "Then perhaps Alaric can?"
Later, alone, Caderyn stood before his bedchamber mirror. The light around him dimmed to gold-dusk. In his hands, he held a feather—dark, long, one edge scorched. A piece of Alaric's old cloak. A relic of when they rode together.
He remembered the way it used to swirl behind him like a living thing—like smoke and stormcloud, wild and unchained. The night they hunted through the Greenwood, the air electric with moonlight and mead-heavy laughter.
Alaric had turned in the saddle, his amber eyes sparking with mischief, his grin the bright slash of a feral god. He had loosed an arrow through a hart mid-leap, then let out a whoop of triumph that echoed through the trees like thunder.
They had feasted after, lying back in the moss with the stars sharp above them, the air still singing with the sound of Alaric's wild laughter. The younger man's head had rested on one arm, the other still smudged with ash from the fire they had built. His dark hair a wild tangle framing his face.
Caderyn remembered the line of his jaw illuminated by firelight, the way his amber eyes still held traces of the hunt's thrill—bright, untamed, impossible to look away from. He'd spoken little that night, but his presence had burned beside Caderyn like a second sun. Caderyn had watched him for a long time, longer than he admitted even to himself, and thought: This is eternity. This is joy.
His grip on the feather tightened, a tremor threading through his fingers. Envy gnawed at his composure, cold and insidious. The girl—barely more than a fledgling—had stolen what Caderyn had held for a thousand years: Alaric's loyalty, his fire, his closeness. What power lay in Greylene Wyrde's grasp that could make the Huntsman choose another path? What softness had she uncovered that Caderyn had never been offered?
He pictured the girl as the reports described her now—no longer pale and threadless, but radiant, touched by Fae blood acknowledged and unfurled. Beautiful, they said. Breathtaking.
But beauty alone was never enough to hold Alaric.
Caderyn's thoughts churned like dark water. What ephemeral grace did this girl possess that had so utterly ensnared his companion's heart? Was it kindness? Hope? Or simply the promise of something new? A flicker of sorrow crossed his face—unseen and unspoken.
Alaric always did know how to play the part—tragic, brooding, noble. The fae prince exiled for sins too poetic to name. And look how they fell for it. Every mortal, every spirit, even some of the damned Unseelie whispering his name like it meant salvation.
They didn't know what he looked like drenched in someone else's blood, smiling like it was mercy. They didn't know what he left behind to become that wandering myth. But oh, how they loved him for it.
And now Greylene Wyrde looks at him like she's the first one who's ever seen past it. As if she's special. As if that look in his eyes means anything more than habit. Let her learn. Let her fall, and fall hard, and find out what everyone he left in his wake did—that loving Alaric Fen is like loving the storm that takes your roof and thanks you for the view.
Let her choke on the same beautiful lie—the one laced in moonlight and sharpened with longing, the one he's whispered to so many before her. Let her believe she's different, chosen, irreplaceable. Let her bask in the warmth of a gaze he's turned on a hundred others, each one thinking they were the sun. And when it burns her, let her feel it down to her bones. Let her scream his name like it ever meant safety. Let her learn, the way he makes them all learn.
Softly, he touched the feather to his cheek.
A voice, a memory, stirred in the quiet: "What would you build, if you could hold fate in your hands?"
Fresh grief lanced through him, raw, unbidden, flashing through eyes the colour of molten copper—burning, blazing, betraying the ache he never dared voice. It hit him like a memory returning too fast, a wound torn open by the mere echo of his name. For a moment, the spite fell away, and only sorrow remained—bone-deep, aching, endless.
He whispered, to no one: "I would have built it for you..."