LOGIN*Ana*Snow falls inside the room.It drifts down in slow, impossible spirals between wooden rafters that shouldn't exist in a desert palace, each flake suspended in silence thick enough to choke on. They kiss my bare skin with tiny deaths. Soft, cold, gone, melting before they can accumulate, leaving trails of shimmering droplets that feel like tears I haven't shed yet.The walls around me wear familiar stones but wrong memories. Stone, yes, the same pale marble veined with hairline cracks I know by heart, but the windows are changed. They stretch too tall, too narrow, pointed at the tip as if spearing the heavens, rimmed in hoarfrost as though this place has always belonged to winter's cruelty rather than Nochten's scorching sun and endless sand.My breath curls upward in small ghosts, rising through the cold to whimper out into voidless white fluff above where a ceiling should be but isn't.I am not alone in this blizzard of alabaster silence.Nicoli stands before me.His posture i
*Johan*The hall should have felt the same. Johan had walked this corridor a thousand times before. During storms that rattled the windows like bones. During celebrations that gilded the walls with laughter. And on sleepless nights when duty was a weight and sunlit mornings when it was a privilege.But tonight was different.Everything was twisted. Altered like the weight of nightmare’s geometry. Its’ truth pressing between his ribs with each hollow step toward the south wing, Nicoli's wing, had transformed familiar into foreign. The safety of red runners beneath his feet felt like walking on sanguine. The same portraits that had watched him for decades now seemed to track his movement with eyes that knew too much.Every flicker of candlelight stretched longer than it should, , reaching for him with fingers of shadow. Every echo of his footfall was swallowed too quickly, as if the stones themselves wanted no memory of his passing. As if the palace was already revolting against him.T
*Johan*“So it’s true.” The words barely escaped Johan's throat. A breath more than a whisper, yet it echoed all the same in the laboratory's stillness as if the walls themselves recoiled from the confession. The vast space seemed to shrink around him, stone and shadow pressing closer, bearing witness to what could not be taken back.He stared down at the parchment again, hoping, absurdly, that the words might shift. Willing the ink to blur and fade. His eyes traced the letters once more, as if reading them differently might change their meaning.But no matter how he wished it, the ink remained stubborn and steady. The word was a permanent stain on the page and each stroke only further held it up with strong thickly lined curls.Poison.Drawn in Master Pierce’s sharp, deliberate hand. No tremor in the lettering. No hesitation in the diagnosis. The kind of certainty that came from triple-checking, from running every test twice, from wanting desperately to be wrong and finding only conf
*Julia*The doors shut behind her with a sound too soft for how loud it felt in her bones.Not a slam. Not even a click.Not a slam. Not even a proper click. Just that faint, traitorous snick. The sealing of a letter no one would ever open, of forty years of service ending with less ceremony than snuffing out a candle.The blue box pressed into the soft flesh of her thigh through layers of skirt, its edges biting like teeth, like memory, like all the sins she'd committed in love's name. Of all she’d done.And for a moment, just one terrible, endless moment, Julia could only stand there. The hall stretched ahead of her like a blade waiting to fall if she dared a single step further.Nervous flames flickered from their sconces across the corridor. Active and anxious, likely disturbed by her presence. Their waxy halos painted dancing shadows on the walls. Shadows that looked like reaching hands attached to names long forgotten. With like accusation, no longer spoken of. And like all the
*Hidi*The parlor was warmer than she expected. Though snow still whispered against the tall windows, hushing down in lazy veils from the gray sky beyond, the room itself held the kind of curated heat that made Hidi’s skin prickle beneath her fur collar. The warmth pressed against her like unwanted intimacy, too close, too controlled. A pale fire murmured in the hearth, flames licking marble with the laziness of a well-fed cat. A slight fog veiled the edges of the long windows like breath against the leaded glass. Blurring the view of the hedge maze beyond into abstract suggestions. The skeletal gardens looked like they'd been drawn by a child's unsteady hand, all sharp angles softened by snow's mercy. The air tasted of steeped rosehips lingered in the air, cut with bright orange peel and something more exotic. Cardamom, perhaps? The spice lingered at the back of her throat, warm and slightly numbing.It was sweet, delicate. It felt controlled. Everything about this room whispered
*Hidi*Hidi took her time dressing.She moved with deliberate slowness, each gesture calculated to contain the fury threatening to detonate beneath her skin. It was a rather daunting task to be honest. For one her size and temperament, she who'd never met a door she couldn't barrel through, a problem she couldn't solve with sheer force. Or a good sharp sword through the chest, it was practically impossible. Or she’d thought so. But somehow, she seemed to muster some hidden reservoir of restraint from within just when the call demanded.Her large fingers, usually so decisive, slightly trembled as the corrected invisible flaws in her seams. The silk thread felt rough against her fingertips, catching on calluses earned from years of sword training her mother had insisted upon. The memory rose unbidden, sharp and blinding as a crisp winter morning in Almony's mountains.She'd been seven. Still growing into her height, all knees and elbows, already taller than most human children her age







