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The lighthouse walls are dark. Built on bolted seams that breathe the smell of old holdings, the weather of a faint iron-tinged rust against the world. Within—a light crackle of flames. Occasionally, a groan would echo within the walls.
This is where Illuga's husk has been kept.
Tucked away in the dark's warmth like a treasure too precious, something too fragile to survive outside.
Flins was not at all unaware of what he had done. He held all his lies plainly—and buried them deep within him the way a fool would choke on their own feelings, knowing the edge, accepting the risks—and told himself that no one could blame him, and knew in that same bated breath that the opposite was entirely true. They would not understand. Those small and fragile human hearts, stitched together with their brittle affections, their moralities, their eyes that held so much yet so little pain, despised the well-intentioned for things they could not parse—they would glare. They would usher away. To them, it was an abduction without understanding what it truly meant.
They would not understand the danger of it all. The feeling of a discombobulated loss that he had already felt once and refused, refused, to ever feel again. Whatever it cost. Whatever it wanted of him.
This Illuga could not be lost.
He could never let himself lose Illuga.
Not again.
The young master's hair spread across the pillow—a smokey silver-gray that shone under the moonlight akin to the color of melancholy and a fuzzy memory—the fae's hand carded through it with a meticulousness that borders ritualistic rites. Slow. Deliberate. Each pass carried the kind of tending and unique devotion both malevolent and affectionate.
His visage, even now, remained beautiful. Unmistakable. The face that Flins has catalogued in his mind the same way he did his precious gems and coins that he could not bear to lose—completely, with all the very intentions of, an unstated wanting.
All of this was for him.
To keep.
To hide.
It was particularly still.
Illuga's body laid in the slow corroding of its living days, the Wild Hunt's claim written into him like a foreign ancient seal.
The young master was beautiful. He had always been beautiful—this was not new, not a thing that Flins ever needed to think of—but the beauty's primary character had changed now, the way something fragile breaks at something vastly ruinous. It had become the kind too dreary to look at directly. Flins' practiced gem-keeping, all those many years of tending and preserving and sheltering darling things from the weather of time—none of it was enough for this. Nothing he knew in his many thousands of years of living would preserve the young master's glory the way it deserved to be kept: untainted, and pure, and whole, and his.
The mole beneath the corner of his left eye—that small and darling mark, perched at the top of his cheekbone—looked more striking against the Wild Hunt's pallette. His rosy skin had gone deathly pale, marred with the dark webbing that spread like frost on glass, like the memory of spring in Winter Iceleas, and beneath it the corrupted flames that dance—magenta, seeping and ruinous in color, delicate across the temple of his body as though they were ceremonial candles, as though they had much to offer, as though inviting devotees. Beckoned was the fae to meld his flames with those smaller, poisoned ones. Enticing him in a way both beautiful and dangerous.
He does not accept the invitation.
He could not meet the young master's eyes.
His blank gaze—open yet absent—he could not bear to look into that pale blue and find, staring back, the reflection of what he had become through the nights. What he had perhaps, always been, underneath the nobility, underneath the glamor, underneath every careful and composed layer he had woven for himself across the long centuries of his keep.
He already knows what he would see there.
He does not need a mirror.
Flins' hand moved from the silver of Illuga's hair downward, tracing slowly along the neck—and finds the gargantuan scar, running along the side of that pale throat now blanketed in abyssal rust, the corruption settling into the old marks like sediment and silt.
Then—
"It should have been fine, Sir Flins."
His hand stills.
The Wild Hunt spoke in Illuga's register. Every cadence correct. Every familiar inflection precise as if the young master's voiced had been learned inside out—it knew the particular tone to it, the small and beloved irregularities, the way certain words sat differently in his mouth depending on his mood. The abyss had been patient and unbelievably thorough. It spoke of the deep scaffolding that consisted the depths of his young master, rooted in the desires it had already read from Flins like an open and embarrassing journal entry, and it offered him what that greedy fae heart of his so deeply missed.
He knows what this is.
He knows.
The fae was not a fool—has never been a fool—he had lived long enough to recognize the shape of lies, to smell the particular sweetness that deception offered. He knew the abyss settled and learned. How it wore the faces of its victims' beloveds with a predator's intent.
He knows all of this.
And he listens anyway.
Indulgence—he lets the voice wash over him, lie to him in Illuga's tone, each syllable a small and terrible gift he had no right to accept. He had missed this. This—the voice, the warmth of the young master's particularity, the way it shifted when Flins would tease, sharpening at its soft edges into something adjacent to fondness. He had missed it with a specific hunger, who was previously left with a mere husk, in the darkness of his lighthouse, now being offered a fib that wants to destroy him.
He could not help but be selfish.
"I know, young master," the fae answered, his voice was very quiet, and very gentle, and belonged entirely to a fool.
"I know."
The corruption had settled into the scar tissue as though the old wound had been carved for it—as though some old history intended to carve that channel long ago into the skin of the young master for claim, knowing what would one day be poured through it. The flames responded to his glamor the way a fault line did to force: shifting at the seams, with him coming apart in increments and revealing the dark flame that lay in increments beneath a human disguise, it was as fast and macabre unraveling against the press of corrosion.
The fae still forced his fingers to trace along the scar.
It flickered beneath his touch. A unique and sanguine recognition—the corruption knowing him the way parasitic things did their hosts. He noted the quality of the flickers. He ignored it. And then, with the deliberateness of a final decision, at last—
He met the young master's eyes.
Dull. Frosted over. They were gone and frosted—the glass present, still correct, but without the warmth and the nature's dew. Would the young master still count as human? Whatever remained inside that pale and webbed frame, it was not his Illuga that dreaded himself in quiet exhaustion, it was not the young master who bristled when teased, and definitely not the fragile human who carried his own destruction like a duty. That young master was now gone.
Flins misses him.
Could not bring himself to say so—not here, not to the face of the thing that wears him, this accursed counterfeit assembled from the Wild Hunt's patient study of everything the young master ever was. To even dare speak the missing aloud would be offering it something. To give it something to play him by, like how malevolent fae would play all the naive humans with offers and names. And so the ache remains where it has taken residence: in his heart, as he tended carefully and faithfully to a phony.
He is very hungry, suddenly.
He was not a fool—he reminds himself, while caressing the fake—fools drew their lines, they would stand at the edge of what they would and would not do and hold the boundary there, but he yearns to make it a little less absolute, he wants to lean into the bright and terrible warmth of the false comfort offered by the abyss without being entirely consumed by it. This is what he told himself.
This is what he had been telling himself.
There was something in the old fae tongue that spoke to the staking of claims—that named the space between ceremonial hunger and devotion, between wanting and taking. An old, old rite. Spoken in the dark, in someplace with no witness.
He thought of what he could take.
Something of Illuga's. Something that would make the boundary between them a little less absolute—close the distance by one degrees, and press the two of them together at the seams. But unlike most fae rites, it could not be done with blood. Blood belonged to the living, and Illuga was no longer truly alive in essence—the flames that danced on his skin saw to that, and the Wild Hunt had made him sit at the threshold between categories, neither one thing nor the other.
What of it?
Perhaps fire understood fire. The way that two flames, pressed together, would ignite a bigger, ever-burning flame.
Ever selfish. Ever the in denial fool the ancient fae was—with all the knowledge, and open eyes, even with the consequences already visible on the horizon.
He let his azure flames reach the scar.
His flames—dark as the ever-winter sky with its deep, starless blue of something that has never been warm—extended toward the abyssal scourge with the precision of a drawn-out practice, tinkering with the heat before it could break the young master. Not enough to burn the Wild Hunt away. Only enough to meet it. Only enough to touch the edges of what had taken root in his young master, and understand, from the inside, what he was dealing with.
He does not think of the consequences.
He consumes.
The weak flames pushed back—just as they would do as the abyss, they were nothing but persistent, these small abyssal things and their greedy little intentions—yet he did not repel them. He lets them come. Lets them find his azure and be swallowed by it. Takes the scourge for himself and lets it cause harm, weighted harm, at the cost of this.
Oh.
Oh.
How abominable.
For a flame—for him, for the Will-o-Wisp's person, for the fae that has had his flame burn long before the present—it was like water poured directly into the heart of his fire. Extinguishing. He blazed back, pathetically, all instinct, no grace, the figure contorting itself against the wrongness of everything that was left.
His glamor flickered.
Then it fell.
And beneath the human countenance—the careful architecture of a visage comprehensible to mortal eyes—was the darkness. The real Flins. Kyryll Chudomirovich Flins, ancient and violent in his surfacing, bit back at the abyss as it wound along the edges of his greedy flames, neither clean nor righteous in kind.
The granules of corruption—wrong, fundamentally and cosmically wrong, unsettling the mind the way a note played too slow in a rondo would spoil the dance—it consumed what was left of his composure, gnawed at the soft places he had let Illuga live, and threaded their poisoned flames through him like ivy to ruins. It violated. It consumed with the specific hunger of a greed left to starve for far too long now finally given access to a feast—
It made him sick.
Deeply so.
And yet.
That very sickness grounded him.
It landed him back in himself that nothing gentle would have managed. Cut through indulgence's throat, the hunger, the long and pathetic yearning—tied his delusions down to the grave they have lain and stood over him, firm and unlovely.
He calls it love. It is love. It is love in its most horrible and grotesque form.
And somewhere beneath the composure, beneath the ornate and florid architecture he had spent centuries constructing over his raw, the older self, before he had learned to simply call himself Flins—
It stirred.
The draconic inheritance. The core layer of a Snowland Fae's making, laid down before the court and the graces. It surfaced—slowly.
It surfaced as attention.
The particular texture of an attention that predators gaze upon their prey with, the way that ancient things did to their treasures—not the attention of a respectable court noble man.
He had the kind of wanting that did not understand the word enough.
No more was there the understanding of it. Flins found the concept of enough as foreign as the concept of his true eternal rest, incomprehensible—outlasting every lesson in restraint he had ever administered to himself.
He looks at his dear Illuga.
He thinks, mine.