It clung to Aerion like damp velvet, heavy and suffocating, dragging with every step. The keep seemed to echo with it—the hush of corridors stretched too long, the echo of doors closing two rooms away, the cold bite of marble floors beneath his bare feet. He prowled the halls at night like a restless ghost, his robes dragging behind him like smoke, his hair unbound, shadows chasing him from torch to torch.
Sometimes, he whispered into the darkness, low, frantic, as if words could conjure flesh. As if Clyde might step from the gloom as he always had: silent and steady, sword at his hip, eyes grey and unyielding.
“Where are you?” he muttered once in the corridor, clutching his own arms against the chill. His voice cracked, brittle as glass. The sound fell flat against stone, mocked by silence.
At court, his laughter turned brittle too, sharp-edged and dangerous. He sprawled across velvet cushions, jewelled goblet in hand, and sliced courtiers apart with a glance. Their painted smiles withered under the weight of his words. He mocked their gossip until they squirmed, sneered at their whispered confidences until they looked ready to choke on them.
And when he flirted, it was cruelty dressed as charm. His fingers lingered too long on a wrist, a jaw, a throat, only to vanish the instant hunger sparked. He pressed kisses into corners, lips hot with promise, then laughed in their faces and left them trembling. He was hunger without satisfaction, a flame that burned only to scorch.
“They say he’s grown crueller,” a lady whispered behind her fan.
“Crueller?” another replied, voice trembling. Her eyes flicked to where Aerion lounged with lazy grace, his smile all gleam and threat. “No—hungrier. Look at him. Like he’s waiting for prey.”
Aerion heard them. He smiled. All teeth. Let them call him cruel, hungry, monstrous. Better that than empty. Better that than lonely.
Heston, ever the butler, never spoke of it. But his hands lingered longer when pouring wine, as if measuring how much Aerion could endure before tipping into ruin. The chamberlain flinched at every sharp word in council, quill scratching in nervous stutters. The servants moved more carefully around him, as if every hallway now led to a lion’s den.
And Aerion fed on it. Their fear, their tension, their unease. He tore into it with claws and teeth.
Because it was easier.
Easier to bare his fangs, to make them cower, than admit what gnawed him hollow. That every shadow reminded him of Clyde’s absence. That every silence felt wider without his steady, wordless presence filling it.
At night, sprawled across his bed, Aerion pressed his face into Clyde’s last letter until the ink smudged faintly against his skin. He breathed deep, desperate for a scent that was almost gone, clinging to parchment worn thin from too many fingers.
“You bastard,” he whispered into the dark. “Why aren’t you here to stop me?”
But the shadows only pressed closer. And the silence, as always, answered louder than any cry.
By the fourth week, he stopped pretending.
He sat at his desk long into the night, candle wax dripping across the wood, parchment spread before him. He wrote furiously, ink blotting and bleeding from the press of his hand. Fury and longing in equal measure.
Why do you make me beg?
Have you forgotten me already?
Do you dream of me at all?
One by one, he burned them in the hearth, watching the words curl to ash.
Still, he kept waiting.
One night, he prowled his chamber until the wine blurred his vision. His chaise became his battlefield, velvet cushions crushed beneath his restless body as he fell into them, staring at the ceiling. The roses in the west garden had begun to wilt, their petals curling black at the edges, heads drooping as though in mourning. He told himself they missed Clyde’s silence more than he did.
But when he finally collapsed into bed, he reached beneath his pillow and touched the corner of Clyde’s last letter. The parchment was worn soft, the ink faded where his fingers had traced the words too often.
“You bastard,” he whispered into the darkness. His voice cracked, breaking on the word. “If you don’t write, I’ll come drag you back myself.”
The silence answered him, louder than any battlefield.
Snow fell like ash over the warfront.
It clung to armour, to tents, to the bodies laid beneath white sheets, softening their outlines into something too quiet, too gentle for the truth beneath. It crept into boots, numbed fingersuntil they could barely hold a sword, and froze the air in men’s lungs until every breath felt stolen.
Clyde sat on a half-rotted log outside his tent, the snow gathering in his hair and melting down his collar. His gloves were stiff with blood that no scrubbing seemed to banish. He’d washed them in the stream twice already, until his fingers cracked from cold, but the stains remained—a shadow, a ghost, like all the others that followed him.
Behind him, the camp murmured. A boy named Renn, no older than seventeen, hummed a lullaby in the dark, his voice cracked and low, breath rising in clouds. He sang for comfort, or for memory, or to keep from crying. Clyde ignored it. He had no lullabies left in him.
