Sarielle wakes with the grace of an old, rotting windmill, bones creaking to life like rusted mechanics. Pain wrestles in as pointed spokes. She winces, shifting, arm rubbed raw by throbbing heat.

Despite the burn's persistent prodding, cold ruminates in her chest. The flighty, lulling warmth that seeped from Fiesi's fingertips and snagged control of her heart's beat, weaved in languid loops between her ribs, has vanished now, and a hole is whittled in its place. That isn't painful exactly, not nearly as much as real holes cut into flesh are, but it's a physical sensation she can't deny. There's an emptiness to it, a sadness. A grief.

Perhaps that feeling isn't entirely supernatural.

Her shoulder blades press against a texture smooth and hard, her spine aching from its assumedly prolonged contact. She's been laid there, curled up against it. Carried there. This isn't the underground passage she last knew. Warm light pours through her eyelids. Fear's lingering teeth snap them open.

Nathan's face greets her.

For just a moment, she could forget who truly watches from behind those black eyes, let herself glide into a delusion where the world is right. Interest sparkles in his gaze, its intensity nothing particularly new. The slight, dazed smile his lips pinch could be preoccupied, not malicious, the smile of a boy looking beyond her and into a harmless daydream that slackens his focus on reality. He lies on his stomach, feet listlessly swaying behind him, chin propped on a fist. His mussed hair curls thicker on one side than the other.

"Hello," he says. One, simple word to shatter the foolish image. A split tongue flicks over his fangs, snatching a taste of the air, like he's debating which piece of her to tear apart first.

She claws herself upright, limbs tangling in their hasty scramble. Her left hand fumbles for her sword. Her feet slam against a shockingly soft floor, and the blade swings to point down at him, tip angled at his nose. Serene smile still in place, he flicks a glance from it to her. Amusement sparks in his eyes.

Blood rushes to the top of her head, and she staggers in the wake of her momentum, arm flying out to the side. More solid hardness catches her, angles too smooth for it to be rock. Insides rattling, she looks to the side and sees white marble, bold and plain. A seat. The throne. He's taken her to the throne room?

Wild, jittery energy courses through her. Her surveying sweep of the room is a series of bouncing glances, soaking in each wall and corner without clarity, the gold trails that decorate the high ceiling blurring into spirals at the edge of her vision. Tiny fires glitter like red stars, light scattered by the chandelier's glass adornment. White walls glow. The double doorway hangs eerily ajar, a gaping maw with nothing beyond it. In contrast to the wreck she's witnessed so far, it's surprisingly intact, enough that her stomach drops with the plunging shock of being pitched off a cliff. Delusions and pretence have no place now, yet this room could make it scarily easy.

All that saves her is the emptiness. The lack of bustle is a void, a sizzling silence that slits her eardrums. Her grip on her sword's hilt tightens.

"Do you like it?" Nathan asks. There's something imploring in his gaze -- familiar, but wrong, and that wrongness makes her skin crawl.

Jaw clenched, she gathers the fragments of a glare. "Where's Fiesi?"

He sits back on his heels, deftly avoiding the blade, then delivers a shrug. "Oh, your father's killer?" A grin slides with his head tilt. "Do you care?"

The weight that slams into her chest is numbing. Her feet trip backwards, struggling to recall how to balance her. The air is liquid, muddling sound and cranking up the laboured volume of her own breathing, her ribs and heart and lungs thumped at in a vague rhythm like out-of-tune piano keys. The music is terrible and grating, suffocating. She's left feeling like torn parchment, edges rough and detached in the wake of a violent slash she wasn't ready for.

Perhaps the issue is the detachment; her body still thinks of him as living. Her fingers tingle with the aftermath warmth of his touch. Just moments ago, she had his hand clasped in hers, his voice murmuring her name like it were a magic incantation, a spell cast that banished all pain away. She told him as much. She promised everything was going to be okay.

She thinks of the sharp determination in Fiesi's eyes, the charging fire. Her head manages a stiff shake.

"You don't get to do that." Her voice quakes, low and rough. "This is no excuse for you to turn me against him. You're the one who..."

She couldn't even be with her father when he died.

If he is dead. She sucks in air through her teeth, sweat slickening her grasp on her hilt. She never saw him die, and so it can't be certain, can it? There's a chance. There has to be a chance.

"How do I know you're not lying?" she shoves out.

"I am not a liar, sweet Sarielle." His fingers balance atop her sword's tip, tapping at the pointed edge, before flicking upwards in a few swaying steps. "Certainly not to you." His hand shifts to gently caress the flat of the blade, laughter twinkling in his eyes.

Discomfort forms a thin, prickling sheen, cold on the back of her neck. Fury and fear swirl and brew a heated concoction. "Then where is Fiesi?"

"Where he belongs." His voice dances an airy song. "In the dark, decaying." Fangs displayed, he slips sideways into an oddly casual sitting position, arm carelessly thrown over his propped-up knee, tapping his chin. He gazes distantly beyond the throne and ignores the sword swung to jab at his throat. "Staring the corpse of your beloved father in his glassy, lifeless eyes, I would imagine, wondering why he deserves to live." His fingers paint the image in the air with gleeful enthusiasm. He tosses her a sideways glance like they're friends seated together at a tavern, sharing a hidden joke. "It is so very funny to make a Tía doubt his right, to remind him that he is nothing but lowly human at his core. Worthy, yes," he is quick to add, "in some little fanciful way, but still inferior."

His words and his mannerisms together are a show, made to look sloppy yet in truth meticulous in their craft. It's a characteristic Sarielle has seen in a handful of pompous men and women in her time observing the castle's visitors. She imagines those noble buffoons with their flapping, unbuttoned waistcoats and their cleverly tousled hair, clinging to the image, reassuring herself that Shaula is merely another of those tedious people. Nothing more. Nothing to fear, just a person who craves attention, a being who likes to believe she alone can pull the strings.

Those people hate most when others refuse to play the role designed. Shaula demands that Sarielle be afraid, disturbed, even, but she will not be. She lifts her chin and thrusts her sword forward until blood beads at its tip. "You do love the sound of your own voice, don't you?"

Nathan raises an eyebrow at her, curious, perhaps, impressed. What might have been a sense of victory shrivels small in her gut. The blade's sting doesn't seem to bother him. "A voice not used in centuries must exercise when it can." He works his jaw, a brief frown shuttering in. "Awfully squeaky as this voice is. I am tiring of teenagers."

Then stop using it, she wants to demand, but she fears that plea will crack as easily as ice.

It belongs to Nathan, not you.

Her heart squeezes. Refusing to be a scared, grieving girl is a simple thing to think, but near impossible to carry out. She's so, so tired. The fatigue tears at her, murmurs bitter, sluggish waves in amongst her thoughts, trembles her muscles, dredges up all the splattered feelings she doesn't want to feel.

This very room causes memories to flutter before her eyes. Parties, laughter. Holding her father's hand in a quiet corner, nose wrinkled at his bubbling drink, the one that fizzes in her stomach in an embarrassingly pleasing way. Those attention-seeking nobles would crowd this space all the time, always clamouring for the king's attention -- or, when he failed them, his advisor. They all learned fast that Lord Diraldi was not as easy to please, however. It was him who had taught Sarielle again and again how to deal with such people, but neither of them could win against Shaula. Because Shaula doesn't take pride the way human nobles do. Shaula is different. She adapts, she destroys. There is no winning.

And now all that crowds Sarielle are figureless ghosts, and all that is in her hand is a useless blade failing to cut her cursed best friend's neck. She bites her lip, silently choking, wondering why she is the one the stars let stand in this place.

Sixteen years has never felt so shockingly short.

Nathan's thoughtful hum is a string, one that tugs her back into the hollow present she can't escape. "Perhaps, if he were more sensible than I imagine he is, Fiesi would instead come to realise the truth," he remarks, pale fingers combing back his wild hair. "That the Cormé must be purged. Those who live without should not live at all. They have not earned it."

"Then why am I still alive?" she chokes out on instinct. "Why not kill me?"

"Now, that is the age-old question."

With a tap to her blade like a parting handshake, he springs to his feet, unafraid, unshakeable. His feet tug him in a lazy crescent, pacing out a circle's arc around to her other side. Her sword follows him every step of the way. The blade's weight is her only anchor left, the only thing keeping her from crumpling to the floor. She feels like prey: the last deer left amongst its slaughtered herd facing down a wild wolf, brave on shaky legs amongst the corpses of its family. Orphaned, alone. She snatches a razored inhale, wrestling the tears that march their way forth.

"Why not kill you?" he continues eventually, fingers drumming on his thigh amongst dark waves of fire. "Why is this airheaded, fortune-spouting blonde the bane of my existence as of late? What makes this... Sarielle so special?"

He frames her between his gesturing hands. His surveying gaze devours her, black eyes swirling and ablaze, slitted with that metaphorical wolf's hunger. She glares back, blinking away the blur in her vision. Though her fear is great, the cold fingers of the ghosts around her prod at the back of her neck, insisting on anger, demanding something. She has never believed in ghosts until now. Now, it seems impossible for a person to die without whispering their vengeance in the ears of the undeserved living. Her very core trembles like the epicentre of an earthquake.

"Nothing," she says. Her voice sounds hoarse, raw as charred flesh. "I'm not special in the slightest. I just don't know when to give up."

Those would be Dalton's words. This isn't your fight, he'd say. If he won't kill you, then run. Don't engage. Don't be reckless.

Run where? she thinks back, elbowing away that particular ghost, yearning for the true sound of his voice regardless. To whom? I've got nothing left. I'll stand right here. The stars will honour my courage.

The hurtling momentum of the thought thrusts her forward a step, her blade tilting to graze Nathan's chin. She might be nothing but a nuisance to Shaula, but flies too are nuisances. A cloud of flies can buzz so loud they drive one mad. Scarlet blood drips from the little scratch she carves. Not too deep. Nathan has endured enough pain, whether the real him can feel this or not.

He knocks the blade aside, wagging his finger at her as he dances out of the way of her swing. "Maybe that is it." His sharp-edged grin pokes out. "Your spunk. I do like that."

Sarielle bares her teeth. "You take pleasure in my hatred?"

"It is fun." He grins back, unfazed.

Her nostrils flare. "I'm not often one for such strong words, yet my hate for you burns strong and bright, Shaula. You are truly a monster, and none will ever love you."

His expression folds into a thinner smile, a calculation in his eyes. "Love is human. I have no need for it."

"Release my friend," she snaps.

The smile curls. "You speak as if I trap him, but I assure you he gave himself quite willingly." He lets out a somewhat dreamy sigh, one that tightens the knots in her stomach. "More than once, in truth. Love may be nothing to me, but it can be rather intoxicating, I have found."

The suggestion of that statement has a taunting bite, sliding over her skin with a crawling stickiness, squirming insects pedalling through beads of liquid amber. Time drags as it soaks in. A rotten taste fills her mouth.

He must see the pieces click, for he chuckles. "Do I sense jealousy?"

No, that's not what this is. Far from it. Her stomach turns, balled up tight. The memory crashes in along with a bundle of sharp forest scents: Nathan's gloved hands whipped so swiftly from their ghostly touch on her cheek, her neck; the dark bitterness, the glaring self-hatred, swirling like pain in his eyes; the soft fall of his apology; the way he ran and she let him go, like the fool she is. The last moment she had to see his face before she lost him. He was hurting and confused, vulnerable, too far for her to reach, and someone took advantage of that.

The urge to take hold of him and bury him in her arms, to tell him again and again how sorry she is, rattles through her, yet all she can do is clutch her sword. As it so often does, that seething protective instinct rolls over into a white-hot flash of anger.

"You monster," she growls, though the words are torn apart on her tongue, more snapping yell than anything sensical. It doesn't matter. She's already charging, driving her blade forward with blind force.

It at least catches him by surprise. The silver streaks in his dark cloak ripple like falling stars as he dives to the side, fingers scrabbling at the throne's marble arm to yank him out of the blade's path. He's only partially successful. A narrow slit opens up in his tunic aligned with his ribs, starkly pale skin and red blood visible beneath the flowing midnight material.

He pulls up to a crouch behind the throne's side, hand clapping to the razor-thin scratch. Rage like a wounded predator draws his eyes into black slits. Sharp teeth bared, he gets hold of the arm and uses it as a stepping stone for his pounce, cannoning into the air with such lithe agility Sarielle hardly tracks the movement. She forces her sword to cross her chest in a makeshift block just as a chilling rod of dark fire crashes into it, sending her stumbling several paces backward, heart hammering.

Nathan lands squarely on his feet, his curls mussed and splayed over his eyes as he lifts his head. He sweeps the hair aside with a rough hand and gives chase. Hot coals still pulsing in her chest, Sarielle equals his aggression, yet fear is quick and harsh in chipping at her surety. Every parry is clumsy and awkward, her left arm too stiff and slow to obey her commands. And he fights with ease. The eagerness is just the same as the green-eyed boy she tangled wooden blades with and promised to teach, but his stance, his flow, the dance of it -- all of it paints the honed skill of a warrior with a nose like a hound for weakness, for death. His nostrils flare like he scents her terror. One moment there is ice slicing across her burns, wrenching a scream from her throat as clashing temperatures sizzle and hiss agony through her flesh, and then her sword is flying from her hand.

She trips, falls, spine jarring as strands of pale carpet itch at her through her tunic. Air flees. Her lungs heave like they're full of water. She watches the sword swing -- so smooth in texture she cannot tell if it is real or made of fire, though its colour is so black it appears like a negative space, a tear in the world's fabric. She stares at its void tip, hovering right above her nose.

She hears the smile in his voice. "Now you are dead."

An exhale billows out of her in a rush, almost wheezing. She's never known panic quite this thick. Her eyes squeeze shut, jaw so tight it aches, every inch of her braced as if she is quivering steel that cages a mess of pawing creatures. Her heart begs survival while her thoughts settle like autumnal leaves.

This is it.

This is it, but she's not ready for it.

His blade radiates frost. It glazes her cheeks, wrestles a shakiness into her bones, then abruptly snatches the cold away. She finds she's still waiting. Through great effort, she cracks her eyes open.

The sword is gone. The last of the flames curl upward, smoky crescents of darkness that tangle with his hovering fingers before diving beneath his skin. Without it in the way, his face is bright and visible, looming over her. Their eyes catch, and everything freezes.

There's a gentleness to his expression that wasn't there before. His lips press a line, caught between a shaky smile and a frown. A thousand words sketch out in the spots of light the chandelier pools into his gaze, though she hasn't the capability to read any of them. They're already sinking back below murky depths.

"Nathan," she whispers with haste, as if saying his name might snag him back for good.

His grin twitches back into place, and she's left wondering whether hazy terror conjured the image entirely. The scales that litter his face -- which had momentarily become scarce in their pattern, she realises -- cluster around his eye as densely as before. Humming to himself, he steps back, then offers a hand.

Still slightly dazed, she takes it, grasping a stray string of hope as he pulls her to her feet. She stands with a jolt, gaze flicking to her sword. If she could only steal the advantage and force that real, soft Nathan to come back in full. He's here. He's trapped, but he's here. If she can just speak with him--

Her feet have barely moved before a lick of flame lunges outward, slithering under the sword's hilt and flicking like an elongated finger. The blade scrapes along the ground. She lunges, but he's quicker. The sky-blue loops of the hilt twirl around his palm as he scoops it up, twisting it experimentally in his grip.

She straightens and realises suddenly how close their faces are. She flinches back, but his fingers curl around her shoulder, holding her there. His eyes aren't even on her. They roam the edge of the curved blade, thoughtful. "The cutlass of a pirate," he murmurs.

"Yes." Her words are hard and desperate simultaneously. Stay with me. Come on. "From the story I told Nathan, once. Does he remember?"

Cruelty swims in the curt glance he casts her, and her heart sinks. "Every sickening detail." His voice drags into a sticky drawl. He rolls his eyes, giving her shoulder an urging tug that makes her stumble before releasing her as he turns. "Just as he dwells on all your boring little tales. Come."

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Anyone notice the lil echo of a Nathan and Sarielle scene from AToD? Because that randomly popped out of nowhere while I was writing and delighted me. I love my parallels and call-backs.

Also I just want everyone to know I love Sarielle. She T^T

- Pup