Chapter Text
The wind carried ash like snow that day.
Phainon stood at the edge of the smoldering ruins, his knees caked in soot, his hands bloodied from clawing at half-burnt wood and scorched stone. Aedes Elysiae—his home, his village, his everything—was gone. Flames had devoured the homes, the temple, the fields, and the people.
He didn’t breathe. He couldn’t. The air tasted like death, and every breath burned, scraping his throat raw.
This wasn't real. It couldn't be real.
Any moment now, someone would call his name, laugh, scold him for being late, beg him to help with the harvest—
But there was only silence.
No bodies remained, only blackened remnants.
He wandered through the blackened ruins, calling out names that were swallowed by smoke, listening for cries that never came. There was no one. Not a soul left to answer.
He tried again anyway, desperately—Cyrene. Piso. Livia. Mother. Father ... His voice cracked. Nothing answered but the shrill wind screaming through the deadly silence.
The quiet mocked him. The empty charred space stared at him like open mouths that had already screamed themselves silent.
Where had they gone? Did the fire consume them whole? Or had something taken them before the fire could? He didn’t know. He would never know.
Why wasn't I there…?
Why wasn't I burned with them…?
Why am I… the only left?
Parching smoke filled his nostril. Blazing fire burned his eyes—a delusion of his mind scalded him more than painful death.
His throat felt dry. Lungs hurt when he breathed.
Couldn't breathe…
Tears fell… but he couldn't feel it anymore.
For days that weren't counted, he stayed among the ashes, refusing to eat, drink, or sleep. Each night, he curled beside what was left of his house, arms around himself, whispering apologies to the cold ground. The temple bell had melted into a twisted shape—he'd stared at it for hours. That was where they prayed for protection.
The gods never answered.
He buried what little he could find—bones too small to belong to any adult, a pendant that once hung around Cyrene’s neck, a child's wooden toy charred beyond recognition.
And then, when the cold night stole the strength from his limbs, Phainon stood and walked away, barefoot and hollow. He didn’t remember deciding to leave. His body just moved. As if it had given up waiting for his heart to catch up.
He wandered from town to town, shivering and wild-eyed, shunned by passersby. He spoke little, often not at all. His stomach ached, his lips cracked. Still, he survived—barely. But survival brought no peace. Every night he dreamed of fire, of helplessness, of coming back too late.
He always woke up with the taste of soot on his tongue. He screamed into hay-filled pillows and bit the inside of his cheek until the taste of copper made it real again. Some nights, he ran. No destination, just away. Away from memory, from guilt, from the whispers that said it should have been him instead.
It was in a crooked alley, beneath a flickering lantern, that a kind-faced man offered him bread and a cup of something sweet. Phainon, too tired to suspect, drank it. The world soon blurred. The last thing he saw was the man’s smile stretch too wide as darkness hovered over him.
When he woke, he was in chains.
The air was damp and sour. Other boys and girls sat in corners, silent or sobbing. Some had bruises. Some wouldn't meet his eyes. The metal collar chafed his neck with every breath. The cuffs bit into his wrists. He could barely move—only enough to know he was still alive.
He had tried to stand, but his limbs always betrayed him. He was stripped, inspected, drugged again. They held him down like an animal. Pulled his arms this way and that. Fingers poked, prodded, gripped. He heard someone comment on his build, his teeth, the softness of his skin. He was no longer a boy. He was something to be priced.
He bit one of them once. They beat him until his ears rang.
He didn’t bite again.
Time became fluid. Sometimes he slept and woke up in different rooms. Sometimes he didn’t remember sleeping at all. The light changed, but the stench never did—sweat, rot, old piss, perfumed oil used to mask the filth of what happened between walls too thin to block the sounds.
He covered his ears, but it was worse in the dark.
The screams. The begging. The silence that followed.
He remembered men speaking in foreign tongues, calloused hands prodding his skin, and whispers about his snowy white hair, his beautiful blue eyes, the alluring golden sun tattoo on his neck. They spoke of his rarity like one would of livestock, like one might speak of a prized animal.
He was posed like a doll. Taught to bow, to kneel, to smile. They put him in finer clothes. Thinner. Tighter. “For display,” they said. He learned to shut down. Eyes open, soul closed. He left himself behind somewhere in the ash, and the thing that stood in the chains wasn’t Phainon anymore—it was what they made him to be.
He stopped looking people in the eye.
He noted silence kept the beatings at bay.
He knew what they wanted was not him, but the illusion of him—something rare, exotic, untouched.
They wanted to display him. Own him. Break him.
And he began to wonder if there was anything left inside him to break.
Then came the auction.
He was barely conscious, slumped in a cage of iron and silk. The hall reeked of perfume and sweat, the crowd cloaked in velvet and vice. They didn’t see a boy—they saw a prize. Bids were shouted. The numbers rose. Filthy, leering eyes devoured him. He wanted to scream, to vanish. He couldn't.
Then, from the back, a voice. Calm, clear, and low. No one saw the speaker clearly—only a hand raised from the shadows, a black-gloved finger head tracing a number onto a slate.
The crowd fell quiet. No one outbid it.
No one dared.
He was sold like that. Phainon fainted before he could even see who came to him.
When the boy awoke again, he was clean and patched up.
Dressed in soft clothes. Wrapped in warmth. He lay on a bed with silken sheets and a carved headboard. The room smelled of cedar and something faintly floral. Light poured through a high window, warm and golden. For the first time in months, he didn't feel afraid.
He expected pain. Chains. A master's lash. None came.
Instead, a woman named Tribbios greeted him, her voice soft and motherly, with three daughters who offered him tea. There was Aglaea, composed and regal, Hyacine with a smile like spring, and Castorice, whose pink hair and gentle tone reminded him too much of someone he lost. There was Anaxagoras, who grumbled and lectured, and rooms filled with books, gardens, music.
This wasn't a brothel nor a room with no light. There was no den of cruelty. Instead, it was a palace . But, Phainon saw no lords, no masters, no explanations.
No one told him why he was brought here. And who gave him this.
They only told him to rest. To recover. To live .
In those first days, Phainon observed more than lived. He studied the rhythm of laughter, of gentle correction, of days that passed without punishment. He listened to the casual thrum of life, and it sounded like music composed for someone else.
He had not yet known the reason why he stayed here and what would happen to him later. Only that sometimes, when he passed through the corridor and the maids were sneaky as they were whispering something secret, he would notice how they stopped and glanced at him with curious looks, almost like pitying.. .
He didn’t ask. Not directly.
He didn’t want to know.
Not now, at least.
.
Phainon’s days in the palace were a strange contrast to everything he thought he should have had. He expected cruelty. He expected punishment. He had already braced himself for labor, for suffering, for being used like the other slaves he had seen in his brief encounters. Yet here, in the warmth of the palace, he found none of that. No commands, no shackles, no cruelty. A sense of freedom was there instead.
Tribbios guided him, not with a whip, but with patience. She showed him the halls, the gardens, where to find food, where to wash and enjoy a long bath, where the sun came through best in the morning. She even taught him how to tent the flowers in the east side of the vast garden. Phainon, still shaken from the past, tried to step away from Tribbios’s kindness at first—almost resentful of it. Something in him didn’t trust warmth anymore. It felt like bait. Like the world would snap its jaws the moment he reached for it. He took to the garden not for its beauty, but because silence lived there without judgment. The soil was honest. It accepted things buried within it and didn’t ask questions.
When he touched the petals, his fingers shook. Something in him feared he would bruise them simply by existing.
Then there was Anaxa—Phainon got scolded for addressing the man like that but then was accepted as an exception. He was blunt—not in an unkind way, Phainon had thought of him.
The older man seemed more annoyed by Phainon’s lack of knowledge than anything else. He had taken teaching him upon himself, lecturing on everything from basic manners to history to the art of understanding the people who had bought him. Phainon often felt lost, but the lessons felt like an anchor, a way to tether him to something real again. Something with purpose.
Aglaea, as elegant as she was distant, had a quiet authority over the place. She gave him tasks, along things like helping organize a shelf or taking a letter to another part of the palace. They never made him feel like a lackey. She was instructing him, as though preparing him for something, but not forcing him to work like a lowly laborer. It felt... strange. It reminded him of something he had once known, a warmth that came from someone who genuinely cared. But he couldn't place who that was, not anymore.
Hyacine was the one who patched up his wounds. The ones he never let heal fully. She would be gentle with his scars, using soft bandages and herbs that seemed to soothe not just his skin, but his aching heart as well. Phainon didn’t understand it. He had never been treated this way, never allowed to relax long enough to heal. He wondered if it were here, he could…? And it was... nice. So nice that it made him feel uneasy.
And then there was Castorice. She was a reminder, sometimes too much of one, of Cyrene. Soft-voiced and kind, telling him stories of the world beyond the palace, tales of kingdoms, of heroes, of legends he had never heard of. She spoke of places he never thought to visit, of cultures and peoples he had no knowledge of. But they were beautiful stories, and he liked hearing them. He liked the way her voice could fill the empty spaces in his mind, making him forget for a moment that he had no family, no home, no past to return to.
It still wasn’t enough to stave off the feeling of emptiness, he didn’t think it could. The nights were long, and in the quiet of the dark, Phainon often found himself wandering the halls, restless, his thoughts a whirlwind of confusion. He had been saved from the life of a lowest, from a fate he couldn’t bear to think of.
Though… What was this life now? What was he supposed to do with this comfort, this care, this... home?
He would lie awake sometimes, paralyzed by a feeling he couldn’t name. Guilt? Displacement? A phantom pain, like a limb long gone but still aching. Could someone like him inhabit peace? Could comfort belong to a boy who once slept beside graves?
He watched the ceiling and imagined it would collapse. That the palace would vanish, and he’d wake up chained again, bruised and nameless. He pinched his arm once. The pain came. It was real. But the fear never left.
One evening, unable to find rest, Phainon sought out Aglaea, an odd feeling stirring inside him. He had no real reason for it, but he knew he wanted something. Needed something.
“A pen,” he said quietly, “and a note… Uhm, if you have one in stock...”
Aglaea looked at him with those soft, unreadable eyes. She studied him for a moment, then, as if it were the most normal request in the world, she handed him a small piece of parchment and a fine ink pen. The quality was impeccable—too nice, far too nice for someone like him. It wasn’t the sort of thing someone like Phainon should be allowed to have. He should be using scraps, perhaps a half-broken pencil, if he was lucky. However, this... this felt wrong, almost too good.
“I… T-thank you,” he murmured, taking the items with shaky hands, unsure of what to do with them. He wasn’t used to receiving such kindness. Yet for some reason, the weight of the pen felt oddly familiar in his palm, as though he had held it before, in a time he could barely remember.
When he sat down to write, he didn’t know what to put. He didn’t know where to start, what words could even make sense of the confusion swirling inside him. So he began simply, his handwriting small, careful, almost tentative:
“I live. That's a good thing... I’m not sure what to make of this place though. There’s comfort here, but it’s strange. I wonder if I deserve it...”
He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t need to. It was enough to write it, to put it down and let it sit.
Time passed, days blending into weeks, and the rhythm of his life became a quiet hum. He no longer wandered the halls aimlessly, no longer laid awake in the dead of night wondering what came next. The palace was his home now, however strange it felt. The comfort that had been given to him was slowly, steadily, starting to fill the gaps in his soul, though he could never quite push away the shadow of uncertainty. Was this truly his place now? Was he truly safe? Or was he still just another lost soul, waiting for the next disaster to strike?
But for now, he stayed here. And that, in itself, was enough.