Mirabella moved through the halls, her steps uneven, a soft thump-drag echoing as she limped from room to room. Her porcelain feet, smooth and fragile, barely made a sound against the cold stone floors, but her body—stitched from aged cotton and held together by memories—felt heavier than ever.

  She was looking. Searching. For what, she did not know.

  And she could not find it.

  Frustration welled inside her, a feeling that should not have belonged to something made of cloth and thread. Her hands, soft but reinforced with hidden strength, clenched at her sides. She checked shelves, overturned blankets, reached into chests where dust had settled from years of neglect.

  But there was nothing.

  Her stitched lips quivered, and though her button eyes did not shed tears, she sobbed. Dry, empty sobs, the kind that came from a soul that should not be able to weep but did so anyway.

  Because the pain was real.

  And the ache in her chest—stuffed with memory and longing—felt no different from the heartbreak of flesh and blood.

  She clutched something to her chest, the fabric worn, but still carrying traces of a scent long since faded. An old cloak, heavy and dark, stitched with the crest of a prince who was no more.

  Tenebrae’s cloak.

  Her fingers curled into the cloth as though it might hold him, as though if she just held tight enough, he would step from the shadows once more, chiding her for being sentimental.

  But he would not.

  Because now… he was just dead.

  Hopelessness weighed upon her like wet wool, suffocating, drowning. Perhaps… perhaps all truly is lost.

  Her mind drifted—back, centuries back—when the prince had been nothing more than a young boy. Before the crown. Before the war. Before the betrayal.

  She had been there for all of it. Not as a soldier. Not as a court lady. But as a rag doll.

  She remembered every moment.

  Every time her seams had split from too much love. Every stitch pulled tight again with tiny, clumsy hands. Every button eye replaced after being lost to some cruel game. Every bite mark from a stray dog, every tear from being ripped away by those who mocked him.

  She had been thrown, trampled, hidden away in chests for safekeeping—only to be retrieved in the lonely hours when no one was watching.

  And he had held her, whispered his secrets to her, wept into her stuffing when no one else would listen.

  But time had stolen all those quiet moments.

  Time had made him a lich.

  She remembered the day he first called upon necromancy.

  The magic had crackled in the air like static before a storm, curling around her lifeless form, sinking into her very fabric. She had felt something she had never felt before—a pulse, a breath that did not come from lungs, a shudder of awareness.

  When she first opened her button eyes, she did not recognize the face before her—not by sight, at least.

  A hooded figure. A skeleton where there had once been soft flesh.

  And yet—she knew him.

  She recognized him by spirit.

  Her voice had been new, unfamiliar, barely stitched into existence. ”Why?" she had asked. ”Why bring a rag doll to life?"

  His answer had made her laugh.

  “Because long ago, while someone was playing keep away with you as I begged and cried on my knees to have you back, I was spat on and told—”

  ‘Boys shouldn’t play with dolls.’

  That had been the first time she felt true emotion, a pain she had never known in all the years of being nothing more than cotton and stuffing.

  She had ached for him, for the child who had been mocked, for the boy who had been told to let go of what he loved.

  But then…

  Then came the words that unsettled her.

  “So I gave you life… and enough strength to strangle the life out of them.”

  She had blinked, her new mind struggling to process.

  “Now get to work. We have a long list of corpses to pile up before the solstice.”

  And so, she had obeyed.

  She had followed him, stood at his side as the boy she had once known hardened into a man—then into something else entirely. She had watched him become the Lich Prince, watched as his heart faded further and further into shadow.

  Yet now…

  Now she realized something she had not noticed before.

  He had been more himself—the boy she once knew—when he was around Lady Eliza than he ever had been with Lilith.

  More alive, even in death.

  But now…

  She clutched the cloak tighter, her small, cotton fingers pressing into the fabric.

  Now, he was just dead.

  And all she could do was mourn.

  She wished she could cry.

  She screamed instead.

  She wanted tears to cool the heat burning her from the inside out, but none came.

  Instead, she mourned—a deep, soul-crushing grief—because she believed that the one person she could truly call a friend was gone.

  All the while she cried, he existed.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  Not in the way she wanted, not in a way she could see, but he was there.

  Trapped.

  Inside the crown.

  Inside the realm between realms, where the dead drifted in a sea of forgotten dreams and lost voices.

  And he called out to her.

  Desperately.

  In his meditations, his focus was on trying to project a message beyond this prison, trying to pierce the veil between their worlds.

  But it was no use.

  She was his last hope…

  And he didn’t even know if she knew it.

  With a frustrated sigh, he let his mind slip back to the past.

  The past before this world. Before this life.

  The first thing he could remember was a valley, deep and green, cut with rivers like veins in the flesh of the earth.

  And beyond it, a mountain.

  High. Mighty. Unreachable.

  At its peak, there was a light brighter than the sun, an impossibly beautiful glow that could be seen from everywhere.

  But that light was guarded.

  By a beast.

  A terrible creature whose name had been forgotten, a gatekeeper of something forbidden, something that no one was meant to reach.

  And within this memory, he saw the Ragdoll.

  Mirabella.

  The first of her kind.

  Unlike him, unlike his big brother, unlike his mother and father, she was not alive.

  She did not breathe, did not hunger, did not speak.

  She was not like the animals of the valley or the creatures of the mountain.

  But she was his.

  A gift from his mother.

  A treasure he held close to his heart, even as he grew, even as the world around him darkened.

  He had held onto her even in his final moments.

  Even in his first death.

  He did not remember the moment his soul left his body, only that it had been slow.

  Agonizing.

  His attacker had thought it was quick.

  But it wasn’t.

  He had felt everything.

  The pain, the betrayal, the cold creeping into his limbs, the realization that this was truly the end.

  And then he had heard her voice—his mother’s final curse.

  “Cursed are you forever. You are cursed for what you have done to him. YOU are forever the Son of Murder!”

  When he opened his eyes in this new world, the first thing he did was call out.

  “Mother?”

  No answer.

  “Father?”

  Silence.

  “Brother?”

  Nothing.

  No voices, no warmth, no familiar presence to reach for.

  He was alone.

  A boy—small, fragile, unfamiliar in his own skin.

  And all he had was Mirabella.

  The little ragdoll tied to his waist, its fabric torn, frayed, stained red with blood—his blood.

  He tried to remember his attacker.

  Tried to see the face that had taken everything from him.

  But his undead heart clenched, and the moment his mind reached for the name, the image, the memory—

  Something blocked him.

  Something buried it deep.

  It had always been this way.

  Even back then, even as a child in this world, standing alone beneath a foreign sky, the moment he tried to remember that final betrayal, his mind would rebel, twisting, choking, forcing him to turn away from the truth.

  And now, in this prison realm, where he was little more than consciousness, floating between the living and the dead, the same thing happened.

  As a Lich, he had no heart.

  As a Lich who had reclaimed his humanity, he had no need for breath, no need for blood to pump through his veins.

  Yet in this strange, suffocating limbo, something inside him still ached, still panicked, refused to let him see.

  He did not remember much of the world before.

  The memories had not fully carried over.

  And so, living in this new reality had been like reliving life all over again—but foreign, distant, an existence that felt detached from his own.

  Nothing was familiar.

  Nothing was home.

  So, he made his name his home instead.

  For a long time, before he ever called himself Tenebrae, before he ever truly understood what he had become, he preferred to go by the first truth that was spoken over him before his death.

  The name his mother had screamed into the void.

  The name his murderer had unknowingly branded onto him.

  The Son of Murder.

  Tenebrae sat in the endless abyss, his presence little more than a ripple in a place where time had no meaning, where silence wasn’t just a sound—it was a law. The emptiness stretched in all directions, swallowing everything. It was nothing.

  It was everything.

  And yet, a voice cut through the stillness.

  “Did you have a nice memory slither by?”

  His skeletal fingers flexed at the sound, his hood barely shifting as he turned his head.

  “What?”

  She smirked—though the expression didn’t quite fit her face, as if it were worn like an ill-fitting mask. “I saw it,” she mused, circling him like a slow-moving wraith. “You felt something, didn’t you? Maybe not a smile, but something. Which is more than I can say you’ve shown in a while.”

  She wasn’t wrong.

  The silence of the Void made it easier not to feel. It was simpler to exist as a shade of himself, untethered, unburdened. But just now—just for a fraction of a fraction of whatever counted as time in this place—he had felt something pass through him. A memory.

  She tilted her head, amused. “You know, I wake the souls up now and then… but many of them who have been here too long are already on the verge of insanity. Just a few…” She waved her hands dismissively. ”Minutes, hours, days? No… No, those words don’t truly describe time here. They spend… a mess of time with me. Yes, that will work—a good mess of time. And they break."

  She leaned in close, her voice dipping to something almost tender. ”But you… you just keep being so… you."

  Then, in a blink, she was in front of him, poking his chest with one long, delicate finger.

  “I just wish I knew what was going on in there.”

  He did not flinch.

  She pouted. ”In time… You will be absorbed into me and I will know just who and what you are, but… I am so impatient." Her weight pressed against him, a whisper of touch that should not have existed in a realm that denied touch itself. ”And the only rise I ever seem to get out of you is when I wake the others up. Not gonna lie, some of them need to stay asleep. They’re either too loud or too annoying to be awake…"

  Still, he ignored her.

  She frowned.

  Then her form shifted.

  Tenebrae’s jaw clenched as her face morphed, her features bending and reforming into different versions of Eliza.

  Some were almost perfect, but the flaws were uncanny—her eyes too hollow, her lips too twisted, her skin too smooth. Some were grotesque—inhuman variations of her image that sent a surge of disgust through him.

  His eyes burned with cold fury.

  “If you’re going to torture me with your poor attempt to butcher the beauty of someone I know,” he said darkly, ”then you are truly running out of ideas."

  She grinned, knowing she had finally pulled a response from him.

  “First—if this wasn’t working, you wouldn’t have said anything.” Her voice was silk, but laced with wicked amusement. ”And second, this isn’t torture. This is potential."

  His eyes narrowed.

  "There are seers here, Tenebrae," she continued, stretching her limbs as if reveling in this moment. ”Some of them can see the future, remember, and that allows me to see the future in a way. And what you are looking at now… could very well be how your precious Eliza will look the next time you see her.”

  She changed again.

  Fire erupted over her skin, consuming her completely. And in the inferno, her form settled—

  A burning Eliza, her human shape still intact, but her flesh glowing embers, flames licking at her dress, her hair alight, her eyes flickering with something not her own.

  Tenebrae felt something tighten in his chest—an emotion both unfamiliar and far too familiar.

  His voice was steel. ”What is this?"

  She tilted her head, the flames curling around her in eerie harmony. ”This…" she said, ”is what happens if she says yes to Niac Helios. If she becomes his.“

  The name struck him with a force he could not comprehend.

  His hand shot forward, and before he even realized it—his fingers wrapped around her throat.

  A growl curled through his bared teeth as he squeezed, his grip tightening, his body rigid with rage.

  Niac.

  He didn’t know that name. But something inside him—something old, something deep—hated it.

  Helios.

  That name, he did know. And it was never spoken in goodwill.

  “You would hurt the woman you love?”

  The voice wasn’t hers anymore. It was something else—something deeper, something dark and twisted, old and suffering.

  His grip tightened. ”You are not her.“

  The flames only burned hotter.

  “And she will never say yes to him.” He leaned in closer, voice venomous. ”So I get to enjoy this more than I should.“

  Then, the image shifted again.

  The fire vanished.

  And what stood before him now made his stomach drop.

  Eliza—her body broken. Her skin pale, her eyes gone, hollow sockets where they once had been. Blood—too much blood—stained her clothing.

  Tenebrae’s breath caught.

  For the first time in the Void, something in him ached.

  His grip fell away.

  “What happened?” His voice was barely a whisper.

  The broken Eliza turned her empty gaze toward him.

  Her lips barely moved as she spoke, her voice hollow, lifeless.

  “We didn’t lose a battle…” she murmured.

  “They won a war.”

  A shadow passed over him, colder than the Void itself.

  Something inside him fractured.

  The broken Eliza must have felt it, because she smiled—a slow, cruel smile.

  Then, she laughed.

  A hollow, echoing sound that twisted into something unrecognizable.

  Her form melted, shifting, dissolving into a swirling mass of darkness.

  The voice that remained was no longer Eliza’s.

  “Come on now, Tenebrae… have a sense of humor.”

  The darkness swallowed itself, vanishing back into the abyss.

  Leaving him alone.

  Alone, with only the echo of that laughter lingering in the nothingness.