The world, as we know it, does not revolve around the weak.

  And I, Marie White, have always been weak. That much has never been up for debate—not in my household, not in my life, and certainly not in the eyes of my parents.

  From the earliest days of my childhood, it was clear that I didn’t live up to the standards they had quietly set for me. My magical aptitude—what little spark I possessed—was deemed insufficient. There were no private tutors, no late-night study sessions in spellcraft, no formal lessons in self-defense. Magic was a privilege reserved for those worth investing in. Apparently, I wasn’t one of them. I was told, gently at first and then with increasing sharpness, that I wasn’t meant for combat, nor for freedom. I was meant to be a lady—elegant, composed, a perfect daughter of nobility whose strength lay not in power but in poise.

  And so, I was trained. Not to fight or command, but to govern. They taught me how to manage estates, balance ledgers, and decipher political double-speak. I learned to smile at banquets and deliver empty compliments with grace, to walk the delicate line between polite submission and quiet authority. It was a cage gilded in etiquette and expectation.

  They never asked what I wanted. They never cared that I hated the role they shoved me into. I tried to break free, of course—what child wouldn’t? I made friends with a few village children, sneaking out to play in the fields or linger at the stables. I convinced a guard to teach me how to ride, and I loved every stolen moment of that freedom. But when my parents found out, they made their position clear. The guard was dismissed—cast out like a criminal—and I was punished, confined to my room for weeks under the guise of “reflection.” My rebellion was met with cruelty, not concern.

  So no, I didn’t grow up in solitude. But I was alone all the same. My interactions were curated, sanitized. Noble girls near my age were invited to keep me company—carefully selected by my mother and briefed on propriety. But none of them ever felt real. They spoke of fashion, gossip, and marriage prospects with glazed eyes and painted smiles. They were shallow, willfully ignorant of the world beyond their silk-draped corridors. It was exhausting pretending to care, pretending to be one of them.

  By the time I was thirteen, my fate was sealed. My parents arranged a marriage—not to send me away, but to bring him in. Arthur. A boy of noble birth and careful grooming, chosen specifically because he agreed to marry into our family name. My father, for all his disdain of weakness, finally saw a worthy heir in the child he handpicked to replace me.

  From the moment Arthur arrived, he was given everything I had ever wanted. Magic. Mentorship. Power. He was my father’s golden child, and I was all but invisible. Subconsciously, I think I started resenting him the moment his foot crossed our threshold.

  But in the beginning, Arthur wasn’t… unbearable. He was awkward, yes, and formal to a fault. But there was kindness in his words, at least on the surface. We became friends, or so I thought. We’d sit in the gardens in the late afternoons, talking about everything and nothing. He listened—sometimes. He didn’t sneer at my thoughts the way others did. Compared to the aristocratic vultures I was forced to mingle with, he was a breath of air. Not fresh, exactly, but at least tolerable.

  Looking back now, I wonder what I ever truly saw in him.

  There were signs, even then. He treated the staff with disdain, dismissed townspeople like they were insects. He was polite to my family, especially my father, but cold and calculating with everyone else. Still, I ignored those things. I had to. He was my only friend. My only ally in a home where everyone else had already cast me aside.

  My father didn’t help matters. He encouraged Arthur’s arrogance, praised his ruthlessness, and turned a blind eye to every act of cruelty, so long as it served the family's prestige. Arthur could do no wrong. He was the future.

  Then came my eighteenth year.

  That was when everything changed. Arthur's mask slipped, and the monster underneath revealed itself fully. His cruelty escalated—from whispers to actions, from manipulation to outright violence. My mother and I could no longer deny what he was becoming, but we were powerless to stop it. We spoke up. We pleaded. We begged. But our voices were nothing compared to my father’s pride and ambition. He wanted a tyrant, and he had one. He didn’t care about the cost.

  And me? I was just another piece on the board.

  Arthur’s behavior toward me grew colder, more calculated. The kindness that once lingered in his voice turned to ice. His eyes no longer saw a person—they saw a possession, a tool, a steppingstone. I was the key to his power, and he made sure I never forgot it. Every glance, every touch, every conversation was soaked in the unspoken truth: I belonged to him. Not as a wife. Not even as a woman. Just as something to be used and discarded.

  I was trapped.

  My mother and I—bound by our roles, by our titles, by centuries of tradition—could only watch as the rot spread through the heart of our home.

  And I? I remained the same.

  Still weak.

  Still caged.

  Still waiting.

  I shouldn’t have accepted the passive role assigned to me from the beginning. But back then, I didn’t know how to fight for anything—not even for myself. By the time I realised what I had become, it was already too late. I was married to Arthur, in name only, and yet I had no influence over the land that bore my family’s crest. The servants who once bowed to my bloodline now answered to him without question. Everything that once held meaning in my life was slipping away, smothered beneath the shadow of a man I never chose.

  When I begged my mother for help, desperate and clinging to any last ember of hope, she simply looked at me with a hollow gaze and whispered a truth too bleak for either of us to bear: “There is only one way out of this madness.”

  Three days later, she slit her wrists at the dining table.

  She sat upright as she did it, a ghost in silk and pearls, staring into nothing while the blood spilled across the fine porcelain and white tablecloth. She died quietly, offering no spectacle—just silence. Even in her final act of defiance, she remained a perfect lady. I sat there, frozen in my chair, and watched her disappear from my world while Arthur chewed another bite of meat and complained about the seasoning.

  To summarise my childhood in one sentence: it was shit.

  It didn’t get better—not when my father died under circumstances so mysterious that no one dared question them, not when the elves rose in fury to reclaim the ancestral land our king had gifted to my family generations ago. It all unraveled too quickly, too messily. The world didn’t collapse with thunder; it fell apart like old paper, soft and silent.

  During it all, I shut myself away.

  Books became my only constant—old volumes filled with myths, histories, forbidden theories. Sometimes I read just to remember what it felt like to want something. Occasionally, a few noblewomen visited out of politeness or political necessity, and I managed to exchange a few pleasantries. But I stopped pretending to belong to that world. My few meaningful conversations came from the rare moments I stole outside the manor, when I met merchants, farmers, and children on quiet walks across the land I had once thought would be mine to rule.

  But I never gave up. Not truly.

  Buried deep beneath all the hurt and resignation, I nursed a fantasy I was too ashamed to speak aloud: that someone—anyone—might come to save me. A hero, just like in the books. Someone braver than I was. Stronger. Someone who would see me, really see me, and tear this decaying cage down with their bare hands.

  Of course, no one ever came.

  Arthur let me live for one simple reason: I wasn’t a threat. I was irrelevant. As long as I didn’t challenge his rule or step beyond my assigned role, I was as harmless as a discarded doll gathering dust on a shelf. And I played my part. I stayed silent. I smiled when I had to. I watched and waited, biding my time like a coward—but a patient one.

  And then, so slowly I almost missed it, everything began to change.

  It started with a prophecy.

  The church announced it as if the gods themselves had spoken:

  “A being sent by the heavens shall rise from the underwater prison.

  Those who free her shall earn her unwavering loyalty.”

  Arthur, ever hungry for power, sent his best soldiers without hesitation. Two men embarked on the journey. Only one returned.

  The being they brought back was… a girl.

  A teenager. No older than fifteen. She looked around the world as if she had never seen sunlight, her eyes wide with wonder, her steps tentative, awkward. When I saw her—small, confused, utterly lost—I felt my heart sink. I had expected fire and thunder. A warrior. A saviour. Not this fragile-looking child. How could she be the one? How could this be the force sent to destroy Arthur?

  My hope faltered. For a moment, I thought the prophecy had been nothing but smoke and lies.

  But then I listened.

  The maids whispered when they thought no one could hear them—about what had happened in the training yard, about how Markus had been thrown like a ragdoll, how he had bled, how the girl had erupted in rage over something they couldn’t understand. I followed their gossip like threads in a tapestry, weaving together a picture of something far more terrifying than I could have dreamed.

  She had hurt him. Both of them. And she wasn’t even trying.

  Hope returned—not as a flicker this time, but as a roaring, hungry flame.

  I took a risk. Perhaps the greatest of my life. I made my way to the wing of the mansion where they kept her. I was ready to beg, to kneel if I had to. I expected guards, traps, locked doors. But there was nothing. No one. Just silence.

  Faith in the prophecy, it seemed, had made even Arthur arrogant.

  They hadn’t bothered to secure her, and so I slipped through the shadows and found her. The girl from the depths. The one who might still save me.

  And in that moment, for the first time in years, I didn’t feel weak.

  I felt ready.

  She turned out to be a vampire—though that word alone doesn’t do her justice. At first, she didn’t show much interest in me. Her presence was distant, untouchable, like watching the stars from behind prison bars. She observed me quietly, her eyes gleaming with a strange mix of calculation and disinterest, and yet… it was as if she saw me in a way no one else ever had.

  With just a glance at my family tree—barely more than a few lines on parchment—she unravelled the delicate fabric of my life. She guessed my current position with eerie precision, not through conversation or interrogation, but through deduction, as though reading a play she had seen a hundred times before. I couldn’t say for certain how much she truly knew, but her silence weighed more than most people’s words.

  We didn’t speak long, but I still remember every moment. She was unlike anyone I had ever met—neither noble nor servant, not common nor royalty. She moved through the world like someone who had nothing left to fear. And though she told me next to nothing about herself, I had the overwhelming feeling she understood what it meant to be imprisoned. Maybe not in body—but certainly in spirit.

  And so, when I warned her that Arthur planned to fake an execution—to terrify her, to test her—she did something unthinkable.

  She made it real.

  At first, I was horrified. A maid—an innocent girl—was dead. A real life, snuffed out like a candle. And I had a hand in it. I had given her the information. I had set the stage. Regret twisted through my chest like a knife. That death was on me.

  And yet…

  It felt good.

  It felt good to see Arthur cornered for once. To watch that smug cruelty on his face give way to confusion and rising panic. She hadn’t defied his command—she had followed it perfectly. Arthur had ordered the maid’s execution. Lucinda had simply carried it out, and then wept, making him look like the monster he always was. She robbed him of both his control and his reputation in a single act. A gesture so calculated, it was almost artistic.

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  For once, someone had given Arthur a taste of his own venom—and he still needed her. That was the genius of it. He couldn’t even punish her without revealing how little control he had. It was, without exaggeration, the boldest act of rebellion I’d ever witnessed. And it came at a cost—for her. Not me.

  Yet, she never complained.

  The next day, I returned to her chambers. I was afraid—of her, of what I had set in motion, of the blood on both our hands. But I had to understand why she did it. Why kill the maid when she could’ve simply embarrassed Arthur in some safer, quieter way?

  Her answer chilled me.

  She hadn’t done it for me.

  Lucinda made that abundantly clear without ever saying it outright. That killing was strategic. A message to Arthur, yes—but more importantly, a message to me. She showed me what she was capable of, and in doing so, reminded me: she had options. Loyalty to me was one of them—but not a given.

  She had chosen not to strike him down yet.

  I remember how calm she was. How she leaned back, indifferent, as if death and manipulation were just another part of her morning routine. While we spoke, something else was unfolding. I’d sensed someone trailing me on the way to her quarters. Paranoia, maybe—but it felt too deliberate. I mentioned it to her, hoping she would react, act, help.

  Instead, she raised her voice and coldly dismissed me. Loud enough for the shadows to hear. I thought she was turning on me, throwing me to the wolves. But then, as I stood there stunned, she handed me a single slip of paper—small, folded neatly, as if prepared hours ago.

  “Tell everyone that Arthur has turned into a vampire as soon as we set out for the battlefield. The cities around this mansion, the villages, everyone. Don’t let it be traced back to you.”

  The words were simple. Almost too simple.

  At first, I didn’t understand. The people within the mansion knew Arthur was no vampire. He was a brute, a tyrant—but still very human. It would be easy to prove otherwise. And surely, this would only make Arthur more suspicious of Lucinda. Why would she risk that?

  Unless… that was the point.

  She didn’t care about being suspected. She didn’t care about anyone inside this mansion. Her audience wasn’t within these stone walls—it was the people outside. The cities, the villages. The rumour was the weapon, not the truth.

  It wasn’t a hero who came to rescue me. No knight in white armour. No chosen one.

  It was a devil. A manipulator. A force so dangerous, even Arthur tread carefully around her. And yet, somehow, she was the only hope I had left.

  I know she had something to do with the disappearance of the army. I don’t know how, but she’s the reason Arthur returned without his soldiers, without his confidence. And the way she smiled—gently, innocently, as though none of it mattered—made me want to scream and laugh all at once.

  She made no effort to hide her strange connection with Arthur. The way they spoke, touched, looked at each other—it was wrong. Not just because of their age difference, but because it was completely unbalanced. Like watching a snake charm a bear.

  And yet, in the midst of all that horror, she turned to me and asked, casually:

  “And, how did it work out on your side?”

  As if Arthur, groaning in agony on the floor, meant nothing. As if I mattered more in that moment than anything else.

  I should have been grateful. I should have felt honoured. But all I felt was fear.

  I glanced at the man beside her—her newest companion. But the way he stared at Arthur’s broken form… there was no pity there. Only fascination. Hunger. Something far worse.

  Then, with all the grace of a child playing with a wounded animal, she bent down and snapped her fingers against his shattered bone. The sound of his pain filled the room, raw and feral.

  And she smiled.

  Confused by the sudden turn of events, I froze. The sound of Arthur’s pained groans still echoed in the background, yet Lucinda’s expression barely shifted—aside from the exasperated roll of her eyes. That small, careless motion told me more than words ever could.

  She had no sympathy for him.

  None.

  In that moment, I realized something terrifying: I couldn’t trust her—but I also couldn’t defeat her. I had already played my role. The seeds she gave me had taken root and bloomed faster than even I anticipated. The townspeople were already whispering. The name Arthur White was being passed from lips like a curse, always in the same breath as blood-drained corpses, slaughtered women, and soldiers who never came home.

  I barely had to nudge them. The truth—or rather, the fear—was already there. A few carefully placed words. A single, loaded implication. That’s all it took.

  Now, Lucinda stared at me with those unnatural, knowing eyes—tilted her head slightly, as if trying to see through my skull. She was waiting. For an answer. For something. And I scrambled to find it, desperate not to slip, not to endanger everything I’d fought for. Not to risk my people.

  My voice came out more desperate than I intended.

  “I did everything you asked. It’s time for you to fulfill your side of the deal.”

  A pause. Stillness. And then…

  She began to circle me.

  Slowly.

  Gracefully.

  Predatorily.

  Like a shark testing the waters after scenting blood.

  “And what, exactly, is my side of the deal?” she asked, her voice playful and cold at once—mocking the very idea of a bargain between equals.

  “You promised to make me a real duchess,” I said, standing firm even as her shadow passed over me. “In return, I would grant you freedom.”

  She laughed. A sharp, high-pitched laugh that rang through the broken silence and made my skin crawl. It wasn’t laughter from joy or amusement—it was laughter at my expense.

  Behind me, I felt her hands—small and cold as marble—settle gently on my shoulders. I tensed instinctively.

  “I already am free,” she whispered, her voice silk against my ear and sharp as a blade. “There’s no one in this world who can restrict me. Not anymore.”

  Her words sank into me like ice. Of course. Of course she wasn’t bound—not by walls, not by rules, not by kings or blood or gods. Even Arthur couldn’t touch her. No one could.

  I swallowed. My last card—the prophecy—was flimsy, but it was all I had.

  “But the prophecy…” I began, voice shaking despite myself. “A being sent by the gods will appear in the underwater prison. Those who set her free will be rewarded with loyalty.”

  She drew away slowly and circled back in front of me. Her crimson eyes glittered with something too ancient and too amused to be called human emotion.

  “That prophecy,” she said, “is adorable.”

  I blinked.

  “There are so many loopholes in that little riddle.” She gestured lazily with one hand, mocking the sacred words that had shaped our decisions. “What is freedom, Mary? What does it mean to set me free? Maybe I freed myself. Maybe I was never imprisoned to begin with. What is loyalty? A feeling? An act? How long would I be loyal? A day? A lifetime?”

  She took a step forward, voice low and dangerous.

  “And how do you know it was even about me? Maybe the gods meant a slug imprisoned in the same waterlogged tomb. Maybe that slug has divine insight and just happens to crawl loyally behind whoever cracked open its shell.”

  My mouth opened, but no words came.

  “And finally,” she said, her tone dropping to a whisper that burned, “why in all the hells does everyone assume I would follow some ancient prophecy just because it’s divine?”

  She was done playing by the rules before the game even started. She didn’t bow to fate or faith. She mocked it.

  And suddenly, I understood.

  Arthur had made the same mistake I had. He thought he could use her. Control her. Bind her through prophecy and power and fear.

  But she wasn’t a chosen savior. She wasn’t a divine messenger.

  She was something much worse.

  She used the prophecy because everyone else believed in it. Because it gave her room to move. Because it let her blend in just long enough.

  And now, her crimson gaze met mine, unwavering. Unforgiving. A quiet storm in the making.

  Just one look into those blood-red eyes—burning with cruelty, madness, and something older than time—was enough for me to realize:

  This girl wouldn’t stop for gods.

  And she certainly wouldn’t stop for me.

  Should I resist her?

  Could I even afford to resist—without knowing what she truly wanted?

  Or was it wiser to surrender quietly, to bend ever so slightly and try to nudge her in the direction I needed?

  I didn’t know. But what terrified me most was that she probably did.

  “Mary White,” she said suddenly, sweetly—her voice light as a bell, but sharp as a dagger—“do you know why Arthur is still alive?”

  That smile. That infuriating, innocent smile. It didn't match the weight of her words. I swallowed.

  “Because you need him,” I replied. That was the only answer that made sense. She needed him.

  But what did that mean?

  Did she choose to control him over me? Was he her tool now? Her puppet?

  Was she ever on my side—or had she been playing her own game from the beginning?

  “Precisely,” she said, the single word so calm, so confident, it chilled me to the bone. “And what for?”

  My thoughts raced. Logic clawed at the walls of my panic.

  “You want to control him,” I said slowly, “and… no—no, you can’t use him like this.”

  I took a step back, heart hammering.

  “The king’s men will be here within a week,” I continued, desperation threading through my voice. “If Arthur doesn’t even look remotely human by then, there's no way he’ll be able to resume his duties as duke. He’ll be executed, if not for his appearance, then for the army he led to ruin.”

  I studied her face. She gave nothing away. Just watched me, passive and amused, as if I were a child stumbling toward a half-truth.

  But why?

  Why was she letting me arrive at these conclusions? Why dangle these hints before me and then let me stew in them? She could have coerced me. Manipulated me directly. Forced my hand, even. But she didn’t.

  That’s when I understood the terrifying reality.

  She didn’t need to.

  She had nothing to gain from dragging this out… and nothing to lose if it fell apart.

  “You have nothing to offer anymore,” I said aloud, horrified as the words left my mouth. “This is the kind of unbalanced relationship you don’t believe in.”

  As the truth settled in, I paled.

  This was the most dangerous state for anyone to be in—when their leverage was gone and consequences ceased to matter. I no longer needed her for anything. With Arthur gone, I held all the cards. All she had left was violence.

  The game board was set, and she already had her pieces in place. If things spiraled, I might survive. She might vanish. Or she might turn the world upside down just because she could.

  No loyalty. No obligation. No prophecy. Just an abyss of potential actions she could take… and a smile that promised none of them would be predictable.

  I had walked into a pact with something I couldn’t control. Something that didn’t even pretend to follow the rules of this world. And now, all I had left were the shadows of choices I could barely comprehend.