Chapter Text
Journal Entry: Morning, Undated
Today Stelle waged war against her breakfast. I have learned that her chaos is the only air in this silent tomb. She laughs to fill the silence; I guard the door so the silence cannot get back in.
Every morning the Royal Solarium was cast in a golden light that made the tower where she was kept look far more elegant and glittering than it deserved for a prison. Stelle sat alone at one end of a table once made for twenty, waging war against her breakfast.
She’d separated the raisins from the oatmeal and arranged them in careful rows on the rim of the bowl. The oats, she carefully explained to no one in particular, represented the peaceful agrarian society, while the raisins were the invading forces. She was currently constructing what appeared to be a siege weapon out of a spoon and a butter knife.
Dan Heng stood by the door, helmet tucked under his arm and watched a raisin arc through the air with the trajectory of a badly aimed arrow. It landed in a vase of lilies with a soft plop.
He did not reprimand her for playing with her food. He assessed the angle of launch, the distance, the improvised fulcrum. It was tactically sound, although a heavier projectile would have better range.
Stelle sighed, holding up the spoon like a white flag. "Captain," she said, not looking at him, "the enemy fortifications are too strong. I require heavy artillery."
Dan Heng walked to the sideboard without a word and selected the heavy silver ladle for better weight distribution, and placed it silently beside her bowl. Then he returned to his post by the door with his hands clasped behind his back, face impassive as stone.
Stelle picked up the ladle, testing its heft, and something that might have been a smile flickered across her face.
He was not annoyed; he was memorizing this moment. The silence of the palace pressed against his lungs and her chaos was the only life in the room. He knew the enemy wasn't the raisins but the crushing boredom of a life counting down to zero and she was fighting it the only way she knew how.
Later, when the Solarium was empty and the servants had cleared away the battlefield, Dan Heng sat in his quarters with the small leather journal pressed against his knee. The charcoal moved across the paper in his careful, angular script.
The Council of Cherry Preserves was overthrown by unilateral spoon action at 7:14 AM. The Ambassador was shown no mercy.
Journal Entry: Afternoon, Undated
She gave a state funeral to a fly today. The death inside these walls is a game but the death outside is a hungry, grey reality.
Afternoon light slanted through the western windows, painting the corridor in amber and shadow. The housefly had died sometime in the night, a small corpse on the marble windowsill, legs curled inward in a final gesture of surrender.
Stelle stood before it like a general surveying fallen soldiers.
"Captain," she said, her voice carrying the grave authority of someone pronouncing judgment, "the procession requires an Honor Guard."
Dan Heng, who had killed men in seven different ways before breakfast on certain classified occasions, looked at the dead fly, then at the matchbox coffin she'd constructed from the breakfast table's tinderbox, then at the napkin she'd draped over her head as a mourning veil.
A lesser guard would have scoffed and reminded her that she was a princess of the realm, not a child playing dress-up.
But a lesser guard also would have missed the desperate, aching need beneath the absurdity, the need to make death small and manageable, something that could fit inside a matchbox.
"Understood," Dan Heng said and fell into step behind her.
She led the procession down the main hall with solemn, measured steps and Dan Heng followed with the perfect, lethal precision of the Kingdom's deadliest warrior, his boots striking the marble in the slow cadence of a funeral march. His hand rested on his sword pommel and his eyes swept the corridor with the same vigilance he'd use escorting the King himself.
They passed a window. Outside, the sky was bruised purple-grey, swollen with weather that wouldn't break and the royal gardens sprawled below. Even from this height Dan Heng could see the signs of the Blight: leaves browning at the edges despite the gardeners' efforts, the hedges looking spindly and starved. The roses were dying from the inside out.
The death inside the palace was a joke; the death outside was real and hungry.
Stelle stopped at the planter by the eastern stairwell, kneeling and setting the matchbox down with reverence, and began to dig a small hole with her fingers. Dan Heng stood guard, scanning the empty hallway as if assassins might leap from the tapestries.
"He buzzed too close to the sun," Stelle intoned, her voice muffled slightly by the napkin-veil. She paused, considering. "Or the soup, the records are unclear. But he lived with honor and he died swiftly, and we commend his spirit to the wind."
She placed the matchbox in the earth and covered it with soil from the planter. Then she stood, brushing her hands clean, and looked up at Dan Heng.
"Captain," she said quietly. "Does it hurt? To stop buzzing?"
The question drove into his chest like a blade between ribs.
"No," Dan Heng said. His voice was steady, professional, the perfect lie. "It doesn't hurt."
She nodded, satisfied, and walked away down the corridor. Dan Heng remained at attention for three more seconds, staring down at the small mound of earth.
She was playing at death. Making it small and absurd and manageable because the looming reality of her own sacrifice was too vast to look at directly. She was asking about the fly, but she was really asking about herself.
Will it hurt when I stop?
His jaw clenched hard enough that his teeth ached.
That night, the journal entry was even shorter than usual.
We buried the fly in the planter. She asked if it hurts to stop buzzing. I told her no. I lied.
He stared at the words for a long time, then added one more line in smaller script beneath.
Not you, never you.
Journal Entry: Late Morning, Undated
She seeks textures. Today it was the bark of the old oak. She asked me to feel it. I could not, my hands are made for danger, not wonder. I am a weapon pretending to be a man, guarding a bird who has never flown.
The walled garden was a lie wrapped in greenery, an illusion of freedom bounded by stone. Stelle was permitted to walk here twice a week, weather permitting, guards permitting, fate permitting. Dan Heng walked three paces behind, close enough to intervene yet far enough to maintain the fiction of privacy.
She stopped at the old oak, the gnarled one that had been ancient when the palace was young. Her hand rose slowly, palm flattening against the bark, fingers spreading as she closed her eyes.
Dan Heng watched her stand there as if she were trying to listen to something beneath the wood, then she opened her eyes and turned to him. "Come here."
It wasn't an order. She never gave him orders, not really, but she gestured him forward with the kind of expectation that assumed compliance.
"Feel it," she said when he was close enough. "What does it feel like to you? Is it rough? Is it alive?" She looked at him, head tilted. "Don't just stand there like a statue someone forgot to paint."
Dan Heng did not move to touch the tree. His duty was not to catalog textures, his duty was to feel the danger in the air, the tension in a glance, the weight of a threat before it materialized. His hands were calibrated for weapons and violence, for the claws that tore through flesh like paper, not for the meandering desires of imprisoned humans.
Yet his gaze wasn't on the security perimeter, it was on her hand against the bark, so small against centuries of growth and survival. Her fingers looked fragile, the bones delicate beneath pale skin.
"The perimeter," he said, which wasn't an answer but filled the silence.
She let her hand drop, something flickering across her face, disappointment maybe, or resignation. "Right. The perimeter."
She walked on and he followed, and the moment passed like all moments in the garden: brief, bounded, already becoming memory.
That night, the charcoal pressed hard against paper.
My duty is to feel the danger in the air, the tension in a glance… but for a moment, I wondered. What does sunlight feel like to someone counting its passages?
He stared at the words, then at his own hand. The calluses, the scars, the strength built for breaking rather than feeling.
He could snap that tree in half if he needed to, he could tear it root from ground with enough leverage and the right application of force.
He wondered what it said about him that destruction came easier than preservation.
Journal Entry: Afternoon, Undated
She asked if I would rather be the dust or the brick. I would crumble this entire castle to dust if it meant she could drift out the door.
The Library was a cathedral of silence, dust motes dancing in a shaft of dying sunlight that cut through the high windows like a blade. Stelle was draped over a chair upside-down, her hair pooling on the rug, watching the dust drift with the intensity of someone studying scripture.
Dan Heng stood in the shadows by the philosophy section, motionless. He'd learned early that stillness made him furniture, and furniture heard everything.
"Would you rather," Stelle asked the ceiling, her voice dreamlike and distant, "be the dust or the brick?"
Dan Heng's eyes tracked to her. She wasn't looking at him, hadn't acknowledged his presence, but she knew he was there.
"The brick serves a purpose." His voice came from the shadows, low and even. "It holds the roof."
"But the brick is stuck." She reached out, trying to catch a mote of dust on her finger. It swirled away from her, dancing just out of reach. "The dust goes where the wind takes it, even if it's just to the floor."
Her hand dropped back to dangle toward the carpet. She turned her head, still upside-down, face turning pink with blood, hair a silver waterfall as she looked at him properly.
"I think I'd rather be the dust, Captain. At least the dust gets to leave the room."
Dan Heng felt something crack in his chest, fracturing, a hairline split in stone that would take years to widen into collapse. She was suspended in amber light, vibrant and alive, watching particles of nothing drift toward freedom while she remained locked in place.
He was the brick, he was the structure, the duty, the unmoving object that held the roof and the walls and the bars of her cage. He was the architecture of her imprisonment.
And he would crumble the entire castle into dust if it meant she could drift out the door.
The thought should have horrified him. It didn't. It settled in his bones like truth.
"The dust," he said quietly, "doesn't choose its direction."
"No," Stelle agreed, watching another mote spiral lazily downward. "But at least it moves."
She closed her eyes, still inverted, and Dan Heng stood vigil in the shadows as the sun continued to descend across the sky. He remained in place, always the brick, hating every stone of himself.
She envies the dust. I envy the floor that holds her. I am the brick. I am the wall. I hate the wall.
Journal Entry: Evening, Undated
I held her back from the edge today. She was looking at the Blight on the horizon. It looks like a bruise.
The highest tower balcony was forbidden to most, too exposed, too dangerous, too many ways for accidents to happen when the wind picked up; but Stelle had negotiated access with the particular stubbornness of someone who knew their time was finite and their requests were difficult to deny.
Dan Heng stood in the doorway and watched her lean against the stone parapet. The wind was cold here, carrying the scent of rot from the far north as the Blight ate its way south, consuming everything green and living.
She was leaning too far over the edge.
"They say the Blight looks like smoke," Stelle murmured, straining to see the kingdom's edge. "But it just looks... grey, like an old bruise."
She leaned further, her weight shifting forward, gravity beginning its patient work.
Dan Heng moved before thought completed itself in three strides, no wasted motion. He stepped in close and wrapped an arm around her waist, anchoring her back against his chestm making his body the counterweight, solid and immovable.
Stelle didn't pull away. She leaned into his hold, using his stability to look even further out over the edge, trusting his strength without question.
"Do you see it, Dan Heng?" Her voice was quiet, nearly lost to the wind. "It's eating the green."
He saw it, the grey creeping death on the horizon, advancing like a slow tide as the skeletal remains of forests stretched behind it, the fields already turned to ash. The Blight consumed all and the Kingdom’s only defence was a sacrifice, a demand for her light, her life, her burning, a payment for the sin of existing while the world died.
The wind bit at his face, cold and sharp, but along his front where she was pressed against him, he was burning. The draconic core that ran hotter than human, the furnace in his chest that he had to constantly press down roared to life against her back.
She smelled like rain and the decay on the wind. She felt fragile against him, bird-boned and breakable.
She was innocent; she leaned on him because he was the Knight-Captain of the Guard, the wall between her and danger. She didn't know that every time he held her back from the edge he was calculating how to destroy the cliff itself.
"I see it," he said and tightened his hold fractionally.
Stelle sighed, satisfied, and finally stepped back from the parapet. His arm fell away slowly, reluctantly, his body already cold where she'd been pressed against him.
That night, the entry was written with a hand that trembled slightly from fatigue, he told himself, though he hadn't been tired in years.
The horizon is hungry. It wants to drink her light. I held her against the wind. She felt light, fragile. I will break the horizon before I let it take her.
He closed the journal and pressed his forehead against the cold stone wall of his quarters, breathing slowly through his nose.
The Blight wasn't something that could be killed, certainly not through a sacrifice as the Kingdom anticipated. Ultimately, even if she died, the Blight would advance and the Kingdom would still die.
But she didn’t have to be sacrificed. She could be stolen and hidden, carried away from the altar and the knife and the burning.
He could do that. He would do that.
Even if it made him the monster the kingdom would hunt.