The moon poured through the high-arched window like spilled milk, casting silver lines across the obsidian marble floor. The palace was silent, asleep — or pretending to be. But in the tower above the court, where the wind whispered forgotten names into the stone, Zephyra Morn sat awake in her chamber.

She held a silver-handled brush in her hand, dragging it slowly through a waterfall of dark

curls that shimmered like midnight oil. Her skin was warm brown velvet under the moonlight, kissed by shadows. One eye, a soft amber. The other, sharp silver — like it had stolen starlight and kept it prisoner.

She hated them both.

The brush slowed.

It wasn’t the kind of hate that burned. It was the kind that ached. The kind you carried because you had no choice but to. Just like she carried her crown. Just like she carried the whispers.

"A girl with cursed eyes can never rule."

"She’s touched by something unnatural."

But they didn't know. No one did.

She wasn’t cursed.

She was waiting.

Zephyra set the brush down and looked at herself in the tall mirror. She didn’t flinch at her reflection. She didn’t admire it, either. She simply stared, studying the girl with eyes that didn’t match — the girl who didn't quite belong in this world of crystal goblets and golden lies.

Somewhere outside, the forest sighed.

Somewhere deeper, something stirred.

She didn’t know that a name — Darian Vex — had already been written into the shadows of her life. She didn’t know that eyes, centuries old and starved for something more than blood, had turned in her direction.

Not yet.

For now, she sat with her tangled thoughts and her quiet rage. For now, she brushed her hair, as the wind whispered, and the moon watched.

meanwhile:

The graveyard was quiet.

Not the kind of quiet that brought peace — the kind that trembled with the memory of screams.

Darian Vex stood beneath a broken arch of stone, his black coat dusted with ash and bone. He had fed. Not out of rage, not out of cruelty — but because the hunger would not wait. And when you’ve lived as long as he had, there were only two truths:

Blood was never enough.

Desire was always worse.

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, crimson smeared like sin across his knuckles. The girl had been soft. Barely grown. He didn’t ask her name.

He never did.

Darian tilted his head to the sky, where clouds writhed like bruises. Somewhere far beyond the veil of this mortal world, he felt it again — that pull. The thread. Thin and golden and trembling through the dark.

It had started weeks ago.

A scent he didn’t recognize.

A heartbeat in a dream.

Eyes — one silver, one amber — blinking at him from across a burning field.

He thought it was madness.

But now, even while standing over the blood-warmed stones of the dead, her presence pressed against him like a whisper behind his ear. Not physical. Not yet.

He could feel her brushing her hair.

His eyes closed. A strange ache twisted through him, deeper than hunger.

Who was she?

Why did she feel like something he had lost before he was even born?

The wind picked up, stirring the edge of his coat. In the distance, wolves howled — not to the moon, but to him. As if they knew.

As if they could sense that something ancient and dangerous was waking.

He stepped away from the grave, his boots silent on the moss.

“Soon,” he said, his voice low and rough with longing.

Somewhere in a palace of light, she was waiting.

She just didn’t know it yet