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cryoculus · 2 days ago

Text

— RETROGRADE ⟢

you’re a fugitive with forbidden magic in your blood, hunted by the masked killer known as the flame reaver. but when a chase ends with a fall that leaves his memory shattered, you’re left to deal with what’s left behind—a clueless man with the bluest eyes you've ever seen.

★ featuring; phainon x f!reader

★ word count; 18.6k words

★ tags; alternate universe, bounty hunter phainon, enemies to lovers, amnesia, slow burn, survivor's guilt, angst, implied/referenced past abuse, yandere/obsessive undertones, blood and violence, SMUT

★ warnings (PLS READ!); homicidal ideation (not acted upon ofc), potentially bad depictions of post-traumatic stress disorder and dissociative identity disorder, phainon gives himself self-inflicted wounds to keep himself sane (nothing graphic, but it's there!!), stalking, actual fight scenes w actual injuries??

★ notes; not for the first time, i unfortunately had to add another part to this series bc i am incompetent and unable to wrap up my stories in their initially intended chapter counts </3 but some friends have reassured that it is a-okay, so here we are :3c the lore dump in this part is probably a little jarring so just a heads up on that too and #sorry in advance SKAJDSKGHDFGKJ i hope you enjoy! (also this wasn't proofread bc i'm to sleepy to do it, so if yew spot any errors pls be a dear and lemme know!)

READ ON AO3

PART ONE | PART TWO | PART THREE

★ SMUT TAGS; outdoor sex (he eats you out like a starved animal by a river bank lol), oral (f receiving), vaginal fingering, overstimulation, service top phainon (he just wants to be so SO good for you!)

The palace gardens were always brightest in summer.

Chrysanthemums tangled along the walls, honeysuckle spilling sweet over every path, the air heavy with the warmth of sunlit stone. Somewhere beyond the lattice arches, soft music stirred with the usual acoustics of the grand halls. But here, beneath the willow trees, the world felt just a bit smaller than it really was.

You remember how the silks your family wore seemed to glow beneath the shade—robes embroidered with glimmering vines, sashes knotted with jade pins, hair bound in ribbons the color of crushed rose petals. A picnic spread was laid out upon the blankets: sugared plums, sweet almond cakes, delicate pastries wrapped in lotus leaves. Porcelain teacups clinked softly against saucers, all painted with the sigil of your house—the Verdant Thread, coiled like ivy around a silver spindle.

Your siblings and cousins sat with perfect poise, as they were taught. You, less so.

“Sit up straight,” your eldest brother, Ilarion chided, flicking your wrist with a sharp glance. His hair was already pinned high in the style of the court, and his posture was impeccable even at sixteen years old.

You stuck your tongue out when he wasn’t looking, too enamored with the warm honeyed cakes to care. Besides, the others weren’t much better—your younger siblings and cousins were too busy bickering over whose Threads shone brightest to mind their manners.

The Threads wove through the air like gossamer ribbons, faint and shimmering—some silver, some copper, some as pale as frost. You watched, fascinated as ever, as one of your cousins flaunted his magic with practiced ease. He wove patterns into the leaves, coaxing blooms to curl open in their palms, binding silk knots tighter with just a flick of his fingers. It was beautiful, but always tinged with pride.

Prestige, honor, and legacy.

Those were the words ingrained into every child of the Verdant Thread. Magic was your birthright, a gift from the gods. You were raised to believe you belonged above the rest��set apart, destined to lead.

...But you always believed it should mean more than that.

You’d been threading little blossoms into chains by yourself, watching a tiny moth flicker along your fingertip, when the accident happened.

A soft cry rang in your ears—sharp enough to pierce the air. One of the palace maids, a young woman barely older than yourself, had stumbled on the uneven stones while serving tea. Porcelain crashed to the ground in shards, the beautiful set ruined, and her hands were scraped and bleeding from the fall.

Silence fell beneath the willows.

Some of your siblings and cousins were quick to scoff, eyes gleaming with that quiet cruelty children of noble blood learn too young.

“Ugh. So clumsy. I wanted my tea now.”

“She’ll be dismissed for that.”

“Should’ve been more careful. That tea set was worth more than her life.”

At that point, you should have gotten used to their behavior. But still, you couldn’t bear it.

Before anyone could stop you, you scrambled from your seat and rushed to the maid’s side, ignoring the horrified gasps as your silk sleeves dragged through dirt and spilled tea. Her palms trembled beneath yours, slick with blood, and her face was pale as she tried to stammer out apologies through her tears.

“It’s all right,” you murmured with a small smile. “Don’t cry. It’ll be better soon.”

You called the Thread to your fingertips—as delicate and green as fresh shoots—and wove it through the torn skin, binding flesh back together with careful patience. It wasn’t perfect; your touch was still clumsy back then, your magic uneven and too gentle for swift mending.

But it worked.

A quiet hush spread over the gardens.

“You always act so foolishly,” Ilarion’s voice cut through it, sharp as a whip. “Why waste the Thread on a servant? She’s not worth the cost.”

You flinched, but kept your hands steady as you finished your weaving, refusing to let the maid recoil from you.

Before your brother could speak again, a warm laugh interrupted.

“How small-minded you are,” one of your older cousins, Aglaea simpered, her voice as bright as sunlight on water.

She’d been lounging at the edge of the gathering until now, her golden hair spilling like silk over her shoulders, her hands idle in her lap. But now she rose—every movement graceful, her presence commanding without effort.

You watched, wide-eyed, as her Threads shimmered to life—brilliant gold, dazzling against the soft green of the garden. With a single sweep of her fingers, she gathered the broken shards of porcelain and began weaving them together, mending every fracture with seams of shining magic. When she finished, the tea set looked whole again. Yet along every line where it had once broken, a glimmer of gold remained, glowing faintly like veins of sunlight trapped in glass.

“Cousin Ilarion,” Aglaea said, the golden Threads still glimmering at her fingertips as she gently set the mended set back onto the tray. “The beauty of our magic doesn’t lie in what’s flawless.”

She didn’t need to look to find you. Her eyes—pale and clouded, untouched by light since birth—remained half-lowered, serene as ever. But her Threads moved through the air with quiet certainty, trailing toward you like sunlit ribbons drawn by instinct. When her face tilted toward you, her gaze felt as steady as any sighted stare—guided not by vision, but by the magic she wielded with effortless grace.

“And the Verdant Thread isn’t meant to serve pride alone,” she added. “It exists to help. To weave life back where it’s been broken. No matter who holds it.”

You’d never forgotten those words.

That day, Aglaea had sat beside you, her golden Threads dancing softly between her fingers, and braided your green ribbons with hers in a quiet show of solidarity. She didn’t have to say anything more. For someone born under a branch family, her magic had always shone brighter than anyone else’s.

But it wasn’t just her power that had drawn you close. It was the way she used it.

Kindly. Boldly. Unapologetically.

And when you think of her now—of the garden, of that fleeting summer—you wonder, not for the first time, what she would say if she saw you now. If she would still take your hands in hers, still braid your Threads together, knowing everything you’ve done.

Knowing everything you’ve become.

The morning after you slipped from Merrow’s workshop, you were already crossing the eastern ridge, far beyond Serrek’s Reach. By the time the sun set again, you’d put the entirety of Vherisport behind you—its salt-heavy winds, its sprawling streets, its lantern-lit alleys where you’d once walked with him at your side.

It isn’t just distance you sought, though the more you could place between yourself and Phainon, the better. It was survival—a practical choice, as much as anything else.

You’d lingered near the ocean too long already.

Even in the quietest moments, when the waves lulled you to sleep, the sea had never belonged to you. It gave comfort in small ways—cool air, soft tides—but it didn’t answer you. The Verdant Thread could weave through rock and soil, through the roots of the forested lands of Ashkarra, but it grew faint here by the coast, where the trees thinned and the earth was still restless from old volcanic scars.

You’d felt it in your bones: brittle and strained, fraying at the edges.

But here and now, you can finally breathe again.

You found refuge in the woodland borders of the province of Erythmere, beyond the highlands where few dared linger. It was a dense, quiet place where the trees grew thick and ancient, untouched by cities or roads. The hills sloped down into hidden glades and clear rivers, and the canopy stretched high enough to blot out the sun in places, weaving green shadows over the forest floor.

It wasn’t home, but it was close enough.

The Thread stirs easily beneath your fingertips again, soft and plentiful in the undergrowth, its magic twining through the roots like old friends. Food isn’t a worry here; you know how to find what you needed—berries, nuts, wild greens, and the occasional clutch of eggs from the birds nesting high above. You plan to lie low. Probably a few days, and no more than a week. Just enough to gather your strength, wait out the ache, and decide where to run next.

By the time night falls, you’ve done everything you can to keep yourself steady.

Your hands have been busy since dusk—mending the fraying seams of your cloak, gathering herbs along the riverbank, coaxing warmth from a modest fire hidden beneath a hollowed ridge of stone. The forest has been kind enough to offer its quiet bounty; your belly is full, your limbs no longer trembling from travel.

There’s nothing left to be done.

And yet, as darkness drapes itself thick over the canopy and the woods begin to hum with their nocturnal chorus, a familiar dread curls beneath your ribs.

Sleep takes you slowly at first, dragging you down with the sluggish pull of exhaustion. You try to resist, as you always do, lingering at the edges of wakefulness with your senses still half-attuned to the forest’s pulse. But your body knows better. The Thread weaves through the earth beneath you, soft and abundant, and it tempts you into its quiet lull.

It’s easy to forget, in moments like this, how dangerous dreams can be.

The Thread guards you in many ways. It softens the rough edges of sleep, shields you from lingering too long in places you shouldn’t tread. Most nights, it leaves your mind untouched—empty, quiet, as it should be. But when your defenses slip and the old wounds rise, you dream.

You always have.

The garden walls loom taller than you remember, their edges crumbling into flame. Somewhere beyond them, voices scream—a sound that has never dulled with time. Overhead, the sky darkens in shades of violet and ash. The marble beneath your feet melts like wax, the halls collapsing in waves of heat and smoke. And in the heart of it all, a shadow moves—silent, merciless, and wreathed in black flames. You’ve run from him a hundred times in this dream, and still he finds you.

But tonight, the nightmare falters.

The fire dies away before it can reach you, pillars of smoke give way to something colder—like frost in the air after snowfall.

His shadow remains, but it doesn’t burn.

It stands in the distance, bathed in moonlight and not in flames, its edges softened by a strange, quiet glow. He is no longer the faceless horror of your memory. No longer a weapon tearing through the world without mercy. Instead, he waits—watching you with eyes that do not gleam with fire, but with something far more dangerous.

Endless pools of summer blue.

You know those eyes. You’ve seen them watch you from across a rundown workshop, softened by lamplight and sleep-heavy laughter. You’ve seen them crinkle at the corners when he smiled, warm and unguarded, as if nothing ever stained his hands. Even here, where the Thread cannot reach, you see him again.

Snow-white hair, pale against the darkness. A face half-lit by something too gentle to be fire, his features calm and quiet as he watches you with a patience that makes your chest ache.

This is not the Reaver you’ve spent your life fearing.

This is Phainon.

The man you left behind.

As the dream deepens, pulling you into its grasp, you find yourself at a complete standstill—unable to run, unwilling to wake—as he reaches toward you. Not with ichor-black flames or blades sharper than the night, but with hands that have carried laughing wharf children. The same hands that never let you go as you danced beneath a sea of lanterns.

You can’t stop him.

Even in dreams, you’re powerless against the warmth that lingers in his touch. The gentleness he was never meant to possess. The safety he was never meant to offer you.

But no matter how tightly you cling to it, the dream slips through your grasp.

It always does.

You wake with a sharp breath. The air bites at your skin, thick with the damp scent of moss and earth. You’re tangled in the rough weave of your cloak as your magic stirs beneath your skin. It mends what it can—smooths your pulse, calms your ragged nerves, pulls your thoughts back into place, strand by careful strand.

The Thread can heal all sorts of wounds. It can shield you from cold and hunger, from sickness and pain.

But it can never quite heal a broken heart.

You press a hand to your chest, fingers curling over your ribs as though you might be able to claw him out from under your skin. It’s just a dream, you tell yourself, over and over, but the memory of his hands lingers anyway.

And worse still—

You miss it.

Somewhere deep in northern Ashkarra, where frost laces the branches like spun glass and the air smells of pine and old smoke, a lone hunter is on the prowl.

Cipher hums softly, bootsteps light against the frostbitten earth as she follows the winding trail deeper into the forest. In this unfamiliar highwood, the only beacon she deigns to follow are the flame-scorched trees that litter the forest path. Despite the signs of carnage, her breath ghosts out in little clouds, vanishing into the dusk air, but she doesn’t mind the cold much.

She’s worked colder jobs, nastier jobs, ones that paid twice as well and half as much fun.

Still, this one had her curiosity.

It wasn’t every day the empire called for hunters like her—those with no banners, no loyalties, no cause but coin. When it did, it meant something had gone sideways. Badly. And according to the fat little steward who’d pressed the sealed letter into her hand, something had.

The Flame Reaver was missing.

Cipher let the name roll through her thoughts, tasting the weight of it like an old wine gone sour.

The Reaver. The Butcher of Ashkarra. The Black Flame of the Empire. Every tavern and trading post this side of the continent knew the stories—of the man cloaked in smoke and death, wielding black fire that burned through flesh and stone alike. His Ember Ledger was the stuff of nightmares, a death sentence scrawled in neat imperial ink. If your name found its way onto that page, it was as good as carved on your tomb.

But now? He’d vanished.

Cipher grins to herself, slipping past a fallen tree slick with frost, hands tucked lazily into the folds of her cloak.

How careless, she mused. For a hound to slip from its leash.

She’s followed his trail for weeks now, moving from village to village, each more forgettable than the last. Most folks didn’t know a thing, too busy pretending their lives weren’t stitched together by fear. But the last one—some little dust-bucket of a town too small for a name—had offered her a morsel worth chasing.

A foreign woman, they said, passing through during a heavy snowfall some months back. Alone, with a face no one remembered clearly, wrapped in silks far too fine for these parts. She’d kept to herself—only lingered for a drink or two before slipping into the highwood under the cover of night.

She never returned.

Cipher has to chuckle at that part. What a funny coincidence. The Reaver had been spotted near the very same woods days before the storm hit.

So here she was, tracing footsteps already long gone, wandering the highwood with no one but the trees to keep her company. Ordinarily, she’d never risk venturing into unfamiliar territory. But there’s something strangely compelling about this job—so much so that the lone hunter finds herself drifting into uncharted lands, curiosity outweighing caution.

It doesn’t take long for her to find it.

The edge of the cliff catches her eye first—likely an outcropping covered in centuries old moss. Snow still clings to the branches above, but the line of trees with singed, blackened bark ends here, as if something fierce had burned its way to this very spot and vanished. One look over the sharp drop, and she can see a ravine that looks lost to time.

Without thinking twice, Cipher moves with the surefooted ease of someone long accustomed to bad footing and worse falls. Her boots find narrow ledges, soft patches of earth, and she slips through the descent like smoke curling down a chimney. The moment she finds solid ground, she crouches low, fingers skimming along the forest floor where the frost had been disturbed, too deliberate for animal tracks, too old to be recent.

And there, half-buried beneath a drift of snow, she sees it.

The Reaver’s mask.

It stares up at her from the snow-laden earth—the deep obsidian splintered clean through the middle in two pieces, a thick layer frost coating its surface. Beside it lay his twin blades, wicked things forged for a single purpose. The hilts are scorched black, dull from disuse, but Cipher has heard enough stories to recognize them on sight.

She lets out a low whistle, plucking the mask from the snow and turning it over in her gloved hands.

“Well, well,” the hunter chuckles, amused despite herself. “Looks like the mutt really did bite it.”

Her grin widens, sharp and wolfish.

Or maybe not.

Because for all the blood the Reaver spilled in his time, there isn’t a drop of it here. No corpse, or scorch marks, or any sign of struggle, save for the broken tools left behind.

“A foreign woman,” Cipher murmurs, lips curling around the words like a secret. “And a monster who vanished without a trace. That’s quite the pairing.”

Then the bounty hunter rises, slipping the broken mask into her satchel, and dusted off her gloves with practiced ease. Without another word, she turns and vanishes into the trees—whistling a low, playful tune that echoes throughout the cold, lonely ravine all the while.

The next days are a blur of roads and whispers.

Taverns, gambling dens, crooked trading posts hidden behind respectable storefronts—Cipher worked through them all with the same lazy grin, the same glinting coins tossed across counters, the same knack for loosening tongues. She didn't ask directly about the Reaver. All she had to do was drop the right bait—stories of burned villages, black flames, cloaked figures moving through the northern provinces.

And people talked.

Oh, they talked plenty.

“I heard he’s not even human,” one merchant muttered over a cup of rotgut wine. “They say the Reaver was an angel once. Cast down from the heavens, wings burned off for disobeying the gods. Now he hunts mages to atone for his sins.”

Cipher only smiled into her drink, filing the nonsense away.

In another town, deeper into the Crosspine route, she heard a different tale.

“He’s a ghost,” an old fisherman croaked, too many teeth missing to speak clearly. “He died years ago. What walks now is just a curse given shape. Black fire can’t come from a man, no matter what stories they tell you.”

Still, no mention of the foreign woman. That tidbit remained scarce, buried under superstition and fear.

But Cipher was nothing if not patient.

By the time she reached the outskirts of Crosspine, nestled along a busy trade road, she’s heard every version of the Reaver’s birth but the truth. Which was exactly why she paid a visit to Bartholos.

The bastard looks worse than usual tonight—skin the color of old wax, fingers stained with ink and pipe ash, his greasy hair tied back with a strip of twine. He always meets her in places like this: a sunken little cellar beneath a bakery, thick with the scent of stale bread and mold.

Cipher tosses a coin onto the table, watching it spin.

“I’m looking for a story,” she says, propping her boots up beside his ledger. “One worth the price.”

Bartholos squints at her, beady eyes gleaming. “You always are. Good for you, this one’s quite a dear.”

“But is it worth every coin in my pocket?”

That makes him snort before leaning forward, cracked hands steepled beneath his chin.

“They’re saying strange things in Crosspine,” Bartholos rasps. “Word has it, a woman not from Ashkarra slipped through here with a tall man at her side. Strange pair, one that kept quiet. Some folks said the man didn’t speak much, but he always tailed the woman like a stray given scraps for the first time in weeks.”

Cipher’s grin sharpens.

“And where did this charming couple wander off to?”

“Vherisport.” He chuckles, low and rotten. “They didn’t stay long here in Crosspine, from what I hear. Folks said the woman looked like she had ghosts on her heels.”

“Funny,” she says. “Seems everywhere I go, there’s a ghost or two.”

Bartholos’s grin widens, showing too many yellowed teeth. “Oh, you’ll like this one even more. You’re not the only one sniffing after old secrets. There’s been mutterings in the right places. About the Reaver himself.”

“Do tell,” she drawls, already thumbing another coin.

Bartholos licks his lips, greedy as ever.

“He’s not some angel, or a ghost, or a curse,” he whispers. “They say he’s the Emperor’s bastard son. Born with a mage’s taint in his blood. It didn’t matter how high his father’s blood ran—once the court magisters sniffed him out, they dragged him to the deepest vaults below Ashkarra’s walls.”

His grin grows feral with each word.

“They turned him into a weapon. Tore the magic out of him, twisted it with iron and blood. Gave him a name, a mask, and a ledger to fill. Burned away everything else.”

Cipher’s fingers drum against the table, slow and thoughtful.

“Now that’s a story,” she muses.

“You’ll find none better,” Bartholos croons, his tone oily with pride.

“Good,” she says sweetly, flicking the coin toward him. He catches it with a satisfied grunt.

Too bad for him, it was counterfeit.

Cipher stands, slipping the Reaver’s mask deeper into her satchel, her boots already pointed toward the next road.

“Vherisport, then,” she murmurs. “Looks like I’ll be chasing ghosts after all.”

But Bartholos isn’t finished.

Just as Cipher was about to turn on her heels, he slides something across the table—thin fingers lingering just long enough to make a show of it. A book. Slim, bound in dark leather, edges lined in iron claspwork. No title. No markings. Only the scent of old ash and something more sinister.

Cipher pauses.

“…You’re joking,” she says flatly, arching a brow.

Bartholos’s grin splits wider, delighted by her reaction.

“Not at all, darling. This is the Ember Ledger. The real one.”

Her amusement cools, just slightly. She’s heard of it, of course. Who hasn’t? Every tavern south of Ashkarra whispered of the Ember Ledger—the deathlist written in flame, the last rites of anyone unlucky enough to draw the Reaver’s notice. But no one ever said it existed. Cipher always assumed it was just a scare story. A myth wrapped in bureaucratic flair.

But here it was.

“You must’ve crawled through the devil’s bedchamber for this,” she mutters, sliding her gloved hand over the leather.

Bartholos only chuckles, proud as a crow. “Turns out even devils have debts,” he rasps. “And I’ve got a taste for collecting.”

Cipher flips it open, careful but quick.

The script inside is brutal. Names scrawled in tight, curling lines—not ink, but something darker, etched into the page itself. Like each one was burned into it. The first few are familiar enough—war mages, dissenters, enemies of the empire. But the further she turns, the stranger the scribbles become.

Faces she doesn’t recognize. Towns that were wiped clean off any existing map.

But then, her eyes catch on a certain name, just barely glowing against the page. Her breath hitches, slipping sharp between her teeth. The words scrawled beneath it aren’t titles. They read like death sentences, each one heavier than the last.

The Last Princess of Virelya. Master of the Verdant Thread. Highborn fugitive. Marked for extermination.

Cipher lets out a low whistle.

“Well, well,” she murmurs, tracing the glowing letters with the tip of her glove. “A foreign flower tangled in the Empire’s weeds.”

So that’s who you are.

“Quite the bounty you’ve led me to, Bartholos,” the hunter muses aloud, though her gaze stays locked on the page. “And here I thought I was just hunting after a runaway dog.”

Bartholos laughs, hoarse and wheezing. “Oh, you still are, darling. You just didn’t realize that he might just be in quite... unique company.”

Cipher’s fingers linger over the Ledger for a moment longer, committing every word to memory. Then she shuts it with a soft snap and pushes it back across the table. “Keep it,” she tells him lazily, already readjusting her gloves. “You’ve earned yourself a target painted on your back just for touching it.”

Bartholos’s grin doesn’t waver. “I always do.”

Cipher straightens once more, tucking her satchel tighter over her shoulder. She couldn’t stop the quiet thrill curling through her ribs—sharp, bright, and dangerous.

The Reaver.

The lost princess.

A bastard son turned blade, and a girl born with roots deep enough to strangle kings.

Now that is a story worth chasing.

“Off to Vherisport,” she says again, more to herself than anyone else.

Her grin lingers, cutting clean through the dark. Without another word, Cipher flicks two more coins onto the table—real, glittering silver this time—and strolls out, boots tapping a jaunty rhythm as she vanishes into the streets once more.

Bartholos just laughs, watching her go.

“Good luck, darling,” he rasps to the empty room, fingers brushing the Ember Ledger’s spine.

“You’re going to need it.”

The morning creeps in slow, curling through the cracks in the shutters and pooling pale gold across the floorboards. The workshop smells like cooling embers and old cedar, quiet in a way that feels… wrong.

Phainon wakes to the hush.

It’s a rest day—he knows that much. You always let him sleep in on rest days, especially after nights like last night. He’d been more than a little drunk, warm with wine and festival cheer, letting himself get pulled along in your orbit through the crowds of the Moonlight Festival. You’d teased him for it. Kept calling him a soft thing, dragging him to dance under the lanterns until the streets blurred.

Usually, you’re still nearby in the mornings. Dozing nearby, never touching but always close enough to share each other’s warmth. Or you would already moving about inside the workshop, soft-footed and quiet, lighting the fire or boiling water for tea.

But now? Nothing.

The quilt beside him is empty.

Phainon stares at the ceiling for a moment, slow to shake off the lingering haze of sleep and drink. His head aches, but the pulse in his chest is worse.

He pushes upright, sluggish, his limbs heavy from too much wine and too little rest. His hands drag down his face, and his eyes drift toward your usual corner by the stove. No kettle. No bundle of your things. Even your cloak is missing from its hook, making him frown.

You wouldn’t just leave without a word. Not on a morning like this.

But then it hits him, sharp as a blade between the ribs.

He remembers you laughing as you walked him home, steadying him when he nearly tripped over his own feet. He remembers the soft lamplight inside the workshop, the way you gently pushed him toward his side of the quilt, muttering something about not peeking as you both changed out of your festival clothes.

He remembers your hands, undoing the fastenings of your dress. The delicate rustle of fabric falling to the floor.

And then—

The scars.

Twisting across your back in pale, silvery streaks, like something melted into your skin long ago. Wounds that spoke of fire and cruelty, hidden beneath layers of silk until they were laid bare beneath his half-lidded gaze. He didn’t meant to ask, but the words had slipped out anyway, thick with wine and something deeper, something jagged.

“Who did that to you?”

He expected you to shy away. To lie. To tell him it wasn’t worth knowing about.

But you just looked at him as though you’d been waiting for him to remember.

"You did."

Phainon’s mouth goes dry at the memory, hands curling into the sheets. He remembers the way your voice sounded—steady but small, like every word weighed more than you could bear. How you didn’t flinch when he swayed closer, didn’t scream or shove him away, just watched him with that same quiet, distant gaze.

His breath catches, rough and uneven.

You said he did that.

And you looked at him like you weren’t surprised.

Phainon’s pulse drums in his ears as he stares at the empty space where you should be. The quiet stretches too long until the cold finally forces him to move. He throws off the thin blanket, standing too fast, bare feet hitting the cold floorboards. The workshop groans under his weight as he crosses to the door, gaze flicking toward the wardrobe where the beautiful dress he got for you peeks from the small opening.

He mutters a curse under his breath and reaches for his cloak. His hands move on instinct—grabbing his boots, checking the hidden knife tucked under the worktable—but his thoughts stay fixed on you.

Where would you go?

You know every alley in this city better than he does. You know every shortcut, every street vendor, every quiet rooftop where you sometimes drag him to watch the ships come in from a higher vantage point. Though you never breathe a word about why, Phainon is well aware that you’ve been on the run for a while now. So if you don’t want to be found, he won’t find you.

But that doesn’t stop him from trying.

Because now, more than ever, he needs to know why his hands are stained with scars he doesn’t remember carving. And more than anything, he needs to know—

Why the hell it hurts so much to wake up without you here.

The stairs creak beneath him as he descends, the wood groaning in protest under his slow, uneven steps. Phainon grips the rail without thinking, steadying himself, though his hands still tremble faintly—not from cold, not from drink, but from something else entirely.

It’s faint, at first. Just a prickle at the base of his skull, but then it thickens.

Like smoke slipping through old cracks in the walls, curling unseen along the edges of the stairwell. It clings to him, cold and suffocating, weaving into his lungs until every breath feels too sharp, too heavy, like something else is breathing through him.

And all at once, the thought strikes.

Find her.

It’s not his voice, not that quiet, uncertain tone that fills his head in the small hours of the night. This one has weight in it. An old, aching cold that sinks its teeth into the marrow.

Find her.

Phainon stops mid-step, one hand locked white-knuckled around the railing, heart thundering under his ribs. The thought doesn’t come gently. It drives in, sharp and searing, as if it had always been there—coiled tight in some forgotten part of him, waiting for the right moment to rear its head.

Find her. Find her. Find her.

It hammers in his skull, louder with every pulse of his heartbeat. A command. A need.

His breath rasps out, and the walls of the stairwell seem to close in, shadows twisting long and thin around him. He tastes it now—the old, bitter tang of smoke and ash, curling thick at the back of his throat.

Phainon knows, with a bone-deep certainty that terrifies him, that he could do it. Could follow that pull, hunt you down through every winding alley and shadowed street in this city. He wouldn’t need to ask anyone. Wouldn’t need to knock on doors or barter for whispers. The knowing is in him. Buried deep within his soul as if he was born to snuff you out.

All he has to do is give in.

His chest burns, willing the thought to break apart—to crack and splinter like frost beneath the heel.

But it doesn’t.

F̴̤̋I̴̠͗N̴̙͠D̷̗͗ ̸͈̆H̵̱̆E̷̢̕R̷̡͂.̸̱̀ ̴̻͆F̸͙͘I̶̛̘Ṋ̴̂D̸̥͝ ̷͖̍H̸̪̆E̴̜̾R̸̳̍.̶͍͐ ̵͕͑F̶̢̏Ḭ̶̈N̴̠̽D̶͍͒ ̸̜̿H̴̥͘E̵̝̓R̸̳͘.̷͈̚ ̸̱̆

It claws through his veins now, burning cold and bright, distorting every breath until it feels like he’s drowning in it. The world hums with it, the stairwell trembling beneath its weight, everything sharp and unbearable.

You left because you know what he is. You left because he hurt you before.

And if he doesn’t stop himself, he’ll hurt you again.

Phainon shudders hard, wrenching his hand away from the rail as though it burned him. The pulse in his head throbs, but he forces his legs to move—down the last steps, out of the stairwell, out into the light. The morning air bites at his face, sharp and bracing, but it’s not enough to clear it.

He doesn’t know what’s worse: the thought of losing you, or the fear that some part of him doesn’t mind chasing.

Alderhine is the kind of town that forgets the world is always on the verge of ending.

Tucked into the lower crook of Erythmere, it’s a small, slanting place built from old stone and redwood, where moss grows thick between cobbles and laundry lines stretch like prayer flags between the houses. No one here cares about wars or vanished monsters or the shifting tides of court. They care about harvest. About boots that don’t leak. About whether the smokehouse will last another winter.

You arrive just past the first breath of dawn, and the first think you look for is the local apothecary.

It sits squat and crooked on the edge of Alderhine’s north road, its windows fogged from within by slow-boiling brews. You knock once before pushing open the door and stepping into the scent of smoke and crushed sage.

The woman who runs it—a woman named Dynahrra—is nothing like Mistress Elwyn. She is brusque, unsmiling, and unmoved by courtesy. But she studies you with the gaze of someone who’s seen many travelers and known exactly which ones are useful. You don’t flinch under her scrutiny. You simply offer your hands.

“I don’t take apprentices,” she says.

“I’m not looking for a future,” you answer.

That gets her attention.

“I’ve trained under a field apothecary. I know salves, teas, bone-setting, and tincture prep. If you need help for a few days, I’ll work quiet and cheap.”

Your offer is dressed in safe language: trained, fieldwork, salves. Even when you help with the poultices later—twisting your fingers just slightly, unseen beneath the cloth to speed the mending—no one sees it. Not even Dynahrra. You keep your wards laced beneath the skin. Never anything more.

You sleep in the cramped loft above the herb racks. It isn’t home, and it isn’t meant to be. You know better now than to search for softness in places you’ll only leave.

Even so, your illusions are tight. Every morning, you twine the Thread around your face, your voice, your scent. The wanted posters are getting more accurate these days. You can’t afford to make mistakes.

And every evening, when your hands are no longer needed, you walk down to the tavern.

It’s an old thing—built from cedar and reinforced with old war iron. There's a board by the door, pinned through with trade notices, marriage requests, lost animals. And near the bottom, curling and yellowed from weeks of rain, is your face.

The same portrait they always use: regal, still, hair braided with silver thorns. The name beneath it doesn’t sting anymore.

You run a hand over your illusion again. Just in case.

Inside, the tavern buzzes with the low thrum of conversation. You sip your mulled wine and listen. There’s nothing unusual tonight—just talk of thinning grain stores, a lost ox, the coming frost. Someone plays the fiddle by the hearth. Summer is ending. Autumn is nearly here.

Then a man—drunk, face flushed from too much apple brandy—slams his mug down and slurs, “Heard the Flame Reaver was sighted again. North of the cliffs, three days back.”

You freeze.

At first, no one reacts. Someone laughs. Another scoffs. But the man doesn’t stop.

“He targeted a whole family o’ mages, hiding out in some ridge village. All dead now for sure. The Reaver burned their warding trees and everything. Said they screamed like pigs as he turned them all into ash.”

He grins, yellow teeth flashing. “Serves ’em right. Damn magic-wielders. They can’t keep hiding forever.”

There’s a beat of silence before the barkeep mutters, “You’re drunk, Tannor. The Flame Reaver hasn’t been seen in months.”

You barely hear the rest.

Your wine is cold in your hands. Your knuckles are white around the rim. But your heart—it hammers, fast and sharp, pressing against your ribs like it might break through.

Phainon hasn’t remembered anything. Not since you first pulled him from the snow, bloodied and dazed from a concussion. Not once did he speak of the Reaver. Not once did he show a flicker of flame.

He brought you lunch at Mistress Elwyn’s everyday. Held your cloak when it slipped, listened to you ramble about your day by the docks, stayed by your side even when you recoiled. Phainon always smiled with those gentle, sea-glass eyes like he didn’t know what it meant to hurt you.

And now—

Now they say the Flame Reaver’s trail burns through the continent again.

You rise from your seat without a word, placing coins on the table before leaving the tavern without a single backward glance.

The wind outside is colder than before. You don’t rush your steps, but you walk faster than you mean to. And it frustrates you to no end because it’s the drunken slurs of an intoxicated man that made you this agitated. You tell yourself not to panic, but the image won’t leave you. Melted stone. Scorched roots. Ward-trees turned to cinders.

Your stomach turns because it isn’t impossible.

You’ve always known the stories were more than myth. The Flame Reaver wasn’t just a name passed down in frightened whispers—he was real. Flesh and blood and fire, a living nightmare carved into the bones of history. And no matter how gentle Phainon had become beneath your hands, no matter how soft his gaze or how careful his voice, that truth had never changed.

He is the Reaver. Or was, once. Before memory stripped him down to something kinder.

But even the gentlest minds can fracture. Even the deepest scars can split open when tugged by the right thread.

You left him...

You left him, and maybe that was enough.

Maybe you were the one thing anchoring him, tethering him to warmth and light, keeping the old hunger at bay without even realizing it. And when you disappeared, when the cold crept back into the hollow places he didn’t yet understand—

Your steps slow. A tightness curls in your chest, twisting sharp beneath your ribs. You press a hand to your cloak, fingers fisting in the worn fabric as though you could hold yourself together by force alone.

Because if the rumors are true—if he’s started killing again—

Then it means the Reaver never really left at all.

And worse, it means you may have been the one to wake him.

For the next few days, you stay quiet.

You tend the apothecary with steady hands and a face smoothed blank. You mix herbs for old joints, wrap splints for children who climb too high, crush willowbark for pain. Dynahrra doesn’t comment on your silence, only glances up once as you move through the shop like a ghost and says, “Don’t forget to eat.”

But you don’t waste the hours. Every morning, before the sun rises fully over Alderhine’s sloped rooftops, you let the Thread unspool.

You’ve never used it like this before.

Healing, you were trained for. Illusions, you learned out of necessity. But this? Spreading the magic like mist, letting it seep into wood grain, into whispers, into windows left ajar—this was Sylpha’s gift, not yours. You remember your late sister laughing when you complained about the difficulty, saying it was like catching bees in a sieve. You just have to know what not to listen to, silly.

But you don’t know how to silence it. So for three days, your mind is loud.

Children squabble over marbles. The baker curses his undercooked crust. A girl sings to her cat while shelling peas. The cobbler mutters about a sore hip that just won’t mend. Useless things. Irrelevant noise. You try to sift through it all, try to find meaning beneath the clamor.

And eventually, you do.

There’s talk of scorched pastureland two villages north. Livestock found dead with their shadows burned into the ground. Night fires too bright for torchlight.

The Reaver is drawing ever closer.

You don’t sleep the night you decide.

There’s no ceremony to it. No final words, just the weight of your cloak on your shoulders and the soft click of your belt fastening. You leave your payment for Dynahrra in a folded scrap of cloth—more than what you owe. You don’t wake her up to say goodbye.

By the time the moon hangs high in the Alderhine sky, you’re already in the forest.

You pick the place carefully—deep enough that the town won’t see the light, but not so far that you’ll be trapped if it goes wrong. The path behind you is faint and winding, covered in leaves that muffle your steps, and ahead lies nothing but thickets and root-clung hollows and the kind of silence that always seems to arrive before something terrible.

You rest your back against a silver-barked tree and close your eyes.

Then you begin to call.

The Verdant Thread answers like a limb long starved of motion—sluggish and reluctant, dragging itself into wakefulness beneath your skin. It has never been this heavy before. All those days of eavesdropping, of threading it through Alderhine’s chimneys and shuttersills, left it worn and frayed at the edges. It feels like pulling wet wool through your lungs, a rasping tension that curls beneath your ribs.

But still, you push through it.

You press your hands into the mossy ground and exhale slow as the magic unspools from you, fanning outward like veins through the forest floor. It seeps into the loam and tangles around the roots of trees, rising in slow pulses from the underbrush, glowing faintly where it licks at stone and bone and bark. It’s not a whisper of magic, not some subtle thread hidden in soft illusions.

No. This is a scream.

You don’t try to mask it in wards or weave it gently into the soil. You let it pulse bright and wild and alive, a beacon unmistakable to the one beast in the world trained to hunt it down.

Let it be seen. Let it burn. Let it reach the eyes of the Reaver like a red flag raised over enemy soil. Because if he is out there—if those blackened fields were his doing, if the rumors of ash and mage-killing fire are true—then this is the surest way to draw him in.

A flare shot straight into the heart of the dark.

You need to know if the man you came to love is nothing more than a dream stitched over an old, festering truth. You need to see it for yourself. To face the fire and know whether it still wears his face.

(Blue-eyed Phainon, who tended shipyard nets, who brushed wind-knotted hair from your face with trembling fingers, who held your silence like it was precious and never asked for more—)

Because if he’s gone—if he never existed in the first place—then maybe it’s time you stopped running from ghosts.

So you wait.

The magic hums beneath you, alive and reaching, its call spilling out into the wild in steady, deliberate pulses. A heartbeat of green light and aching memory. A net cast for a monster who once walked like a man. You sit still beneath the trees, pulling your cloak closer to your trembling body.

And somewhere, far off beyond the edge of what your ears can hear, something shifts.

The first sign is fire.

Not the crackle of hearthflame or the warmth of a wild ember. This fire arrives like a wound torn open across the sky—black and violet tongues licking up through the treetops, thick with rot and malice. It hisses as it consumes the canopy, bark blistering to ash in its wake. The forest floor begins to smoke. You barely manage a breath before the world around you ignites.

Then, he comes.

Not a man, not even a monster—just violence made form. The Flame Reaver tears through the underbrush like a storm given shape, masked and cloaked in familiar shadows, twin blades drawn like they were always meant for your blood. He crashes through tree limbs and soil alike, fire curling from his boots and seeping into the roots with a hunger that feels almost sentient.

Your stomach twists with recognition. Or something like it.

You barely dodge as a jet of black flame arcs toward you, cleaving the trunk you crouched behind clean in two. Sap hisses as it boils. Bark peels away in sheets of blistered rot. You stumble back, heart roaring in your chest, and he’s already moving again. He doesn’t speak. Doesn’t hesitate. The Flame Reaver descends without pause, as if you were always meant to be cut down.

But there’s no rhythm to his strikes—no pattern to exploit, only sheer brutality. You once knew the Flame Reaver as a mindless killer, but you’ve grown familiar with the shape of his violence. It was the only reason you’d survived him this long: he used to fight with precision, every movement measured, every strike calculated. But now he charges like something unshackled, all fury and force.

And those flames—

They’re wrong.

They coil too close, dragging something with them. Not just heat, but something you feel scraping across your skin, oily and intelligent. A rot you can’t name. This isn’t how he moved before. This isn’t the Reaver you’ve outrun. Not even the one who once left his mask behind and smiled like you were the only thing left worth being gentle for.

This feels like fighting a stranger wearing his skin.

You throw yourself behind a ridge of stone, gasping, heart hammering. There’s no time to think. The moment you peek out, he’s already turning toward you with blades raised, fire breathing from his shoulders.

So you draw the Thread—not to shield or to vanish.

You draw it to strike.

This is not your strength. The weave comes tangled, heavy, driven by instinct more than control. You remember Ilarion’s teachings, sharp-edged and impatient. He was the one who fought with it. You never did.

But even if it’s clumsy in your hands, the magic answers. Tendrils burst from your fingers, glowing with that unmistakable green-gold light, living magic summoned not with elegance, but desperation. It wraps around roots, lunges forward, lashes toward him like the forest itself might rise to hold him still.

And for a moment, you think it will work.

Until something in him answers.

Your breath stutters. The Reaver lifts his hand, and his own tendrils rise to meet yours. It’s a sick parody of the Verdant Thread—black vines veined with deep blood red. They don’t clash, they devour, and the moment the two threads touch, yours begins to curdle.

You scream.

It’s not just pain, it’s violation. The Thread is part of you—and now, something alien is inside it. Assimilating. Infecting. Turning your own blood into poison. You drop to your knees as the forest tilts sideways. Every tree, every sound, warps into something monstrous. Light spins behind your eyes as your head snaps back.

And then the visions begin.

Virelya burns again. You see it crumble beneath imperial fire, watch it sink into ash with your siblings’ voices still echoing from the desecrated halls of the palace. You see the long, hungry nights you’ve spent on the run. The blisters, the frost, the sound of your own breath shaking in the dark.

And then—worse than anything—you see him.

Phainon.

His smile. His hands. The way he always lied right next to you every night in Vherisport—always close, but somehow not close enough. The way his blue eyes glimmered beneath the lantern light as you danced together in the city square. Were those even his eyes? Were they ever?

In the midst of your delirium, the Reaver lifts his blades.

No time to run. No time to scream again. They gleam silver in the firelight, poised to pierce you through the heart—

But something grabs you first.

The world itself seems to tear. It folds in on you, violently and without warning, as if the forest were nothing more than a curtain yanked away. Light vanishes. Sound implodes. You fall through something that doesn’t feel like space, buffeted by wind that isn’t wind, until it spits you out again somewhere else entirely.

Your body slams into stone. Cold. Smooth. Unforgiving.

You curl instinctively, but your limbs won’t move beyond the bare twitch of your fingers. You’re trembling too hard to rise, breath shallow, ribs aching from the shock still threaded through your nerves. The Thread inside you stutters like a broken instrument, tangled with foreign rot.

Then, there are footsteps—soft against the stone, approaching with the quiet confidence of someone who expected to find you here. A voice follows. Not rushed or panicked, but steady in the way it cuts through the haze like a blade parting silk. “Her Threads have been tainted,” you hear a feminine voice say to someone you can’t see. “Get Hyacine. Now.”

“Yes, Lady Aglaea.”

...Aglaea?

The name is familiar. You know it is, but your mind is still bruised from the visions the Flame Reaver forced into your brain. You try to lift your head, to speak, but your throat closes up before you can get a word out. There’s a warmth at your temple, the brush of steady fingers telling you to take it easy.

“You’re safe,” the voice murmurs again, closer now. “The corruption isn’t strong enough to hold. Trust the Thread. Let it guide you back.”

You don’t understand what she means. The words slip past you like water. But nonetheless, your magic responds faintly to her voice—warmed by it, soothed by some unspoken resonance. Weak though it is, it pulses within you like the beat of a distant drum, and you reach for it desperately.

That pulse leads you upward through the haze. Your lashes flutter. Color bleeds in, soft and strange. The ceiling above you isn’t forest canopy but curved stone, lit by light that doesn’t come from torches.

When you finally manage to lift your eyes, she’s there.

Golden hair curled in soft cascades across her shoulders. Eyes that see nothing and everything at the same time—

“Cousin... Aglaea?” you manage weakly. “You’re alive... What are you—!”

The words catch in your throat as pain floods through you, a deep, pulsing throb that radiates from the crown of your skull to the tips of your toes. Aglaea's expression twists with pity, but all she can do is cradle you gently in her lap. Her golden Threads can mend shattered objects, restore what’s broken in the world around her—but not people. Not the way yours can.

“Shhh,” Aglaea hushes. “You overexerted your Threads, but the healer will be here soon. You are safe now.”

Safe.

You want to believe her. To let your eyes drift shut, to let your body go slack against the soft fall of her robes, to tuck that word into the hollow of your chest and hold it like truth. But something deep in you resists. Because even as Aglaea’s golden Threads twine around your wounds like sun-warmed ivy, even as her presence steadies the air like a lullaby, your magic still recoils.

That corruption didn’t come from a beast. It wasn’t wild. It knew exactly what it was doing. And for one breathless moment—between the venom laced into your veins and the ghost of blue eyes crinkling in a smile—you knew the truth. Those bastard Threads he used... Repulsive as they might be, they were familiar.

You are not safe.

Because whoever wore the Flame Reaver’s mask in that forest—

They know the shape of your magic.

The rain hasn’t let up since Cipher stepped through the gates of the port city.

It’s not a storm or a downpour. Just a slow, persistent drizzle that sinks into her bones, makes her boots heavy with grit. Vherisport gleams under it—pavement slick, signs bowed, lanterns blurred to halos. It’s the sort of rain that shuts windows and silences streets. Quiet and forgettable. Exactly how she likes it.

She’s been walking for days.

Down from the highlands, across brittle grasslands and through marsh-choked trails, her only company the echo of her own breath and the note she penned to the capital. She sent it ahead via hawk, scratched in her usual spare hand:

Mask and blades recovered. No body. No trace. Awaiting orders.

She doesn’t include what else she saw, and she certainly doesn’t write what she suspects. That the Flame Reaver hasn’t gone missing. He’s simply shed his skin.

The response is already waiting when she arrives.

She’s barely had time to duck under a crooked awning when a cloaked courier emerges from the mist, silent as the streets. No words exchanged—just a sealed scroll pressed into her hand, the wax stamped with the mark of the empire’s sigil. A raven with three eyes, always watching.

Cipher ducks into an alley to read what they’ve got for her.

No retrieval necessary. A replacement has been created. The original Reaver is now classified as a liability. Eliminate him. Failure will result in a... personal visit from the new Reaver himself.

Her brow creases.

They don’t even pretend to mourn the loss. No concern for why their prized bloodhound slipped the leash—just cold efficiency. A new one is already in the field, more vicious, more obedient. Cipher is to clean up the mess and burn the old threads before they tangle with the new.

She reads the order again, slower this time. There’s no room for ambiguity. She is to kill the Flame Reaver.

That... wasn’t part of the deal.

She’s an assassin, sure. A decent one. She’s done her share of impossible things for coin and silence. But this? Taking down the empire’s own monster, the one forged in flame and imperial blood? The one they had to cage with magic and steel just to use him? It’s unthinkable. Laughable, even.

She leans back against the alley wall, frowning up at the silver clouds bleeding over Vherisport’s rooftops.

Refuse, and the new Reaver kills her. Fight back, and it’s still her corpse on the pyre. Her fingers tighten around the scroll as she heaves an irritated sigh. It always leaves the worst taste in her mouth when she’s the one being swindled by some higher power.

So that’s it. The empire’s done with that old mutt of theirs, and now, they expect her to finish the story. But Cipher has always been careful about what stories she finishes—and which ones she rewrites.

She rolls the scroll tight and tucks it into her coat, letting the rain soften the last of the wax seal. Paper and orders. Ink and threats. All of it washes the same under the rain. She doesn’t move right away. Just lingers in the narrow mouth of the alley, watching mist crawl along the gutters like it’s listening. The city exhales around her. Somewhere a bell tolls the hour, dull against the fog.

“They created a replacement,” she murmurs to herself. “Like how they created the first one...”

Never once has Cipher believed the Ashkarran Empire to be noble or just.

They’ve torched entire kingdoms for the mere sin of harboring magic, reduced cities to scorched earth because a child whispered to the wind. Infants with mageblood are beheaded before they ever learn to speak. There’s no mercy in it—only ritualized fear masquerading as order.

Cipher has never cared to learn the reason behind the empire’s war on magic. Doctrine, prophecy, paranoia—it doesn’t matter. But if the empire truly believes mages are monsters, then perhaps it’s time they looked inward. Because whatever they forged in the dark—whatever they call a “Reaver” now—isn’t something the outside world ever created.

It was theirs all along.

The hunter tugs her hood lower, mouth twitching into something between a scowl and a smile.

Let the empire think they’ve got their monster on a leash again. Let them think she’s afraid of what they’ve created. She’s walked beside worse things in silence. And if they think she’ll deliver their final blow just to keep her neck from the axe—

Well. Let them send their precious new Reaver after her.

She’s not planning to be where they expect her next.

Much like you, he leaves Vherisport without a word.

No notes. No farewells. Just the weight of your absence, a splinter beneath his skin, and the low, crawling instinct that tells him you’re still alive.

He follows it without question. It’s not a compass, not a trail—just a faint and feral pull. Like a scent cloying in his throat or a blade pressed behind his ribs. He doesn’t know if it’s an old memory or madness starting to simmer. All he knows is that it leads him east, away from the sea.

The voice in his head coils in his skull like smoke. It often gives him names for things he doesn’t want to name. Prey. Thread. Weakness.

He never asked what you called those tendrils of green light. The ones you used to ease burdens, to mend his wounds, to veil your face from sight. But the voice fills in the blanks he never thought to question. You wield the Verdant Thread. Magic that was meant to be extinguished.

But... why?

Why does it need to be extinguished?

The voice doesn’t let him ask questions for long. It lulls him back into that tempting melody of obsession, as it always does.

Kill her. Kill the last of the magic in her blood.

So he lets it guide him in a haze of bloodlust and something else. The empire is vast, but it doesn’t matter. When he closes his eyes, he sees you. Always you. Not as you looked the last night he lost you. No, worse—he sees you beneath him, lips red and bitten, body pliant from fear and betrayal alike.

The voice wants you dead. Wants to know what your magic would look like when he tears it from your spine. Wants to spill the Thread across the forest floor and watch the you writhe in agony.

But that’s not what he wants.

(…Isn’t it?

He can’t tell anymore.)

Most days he follows the voice, lets it steer his boots west, then north again, chasing the ache in his bones like a bloodhound after something long dead. When he’s more lucid—more man than monster—he tries to shut it out and shake off the compulsion. He takes wrong turns. Drowns himself in drink. Sleeps through dusk to skip entire sunrises.

It doesn’t help.

The obsession only coils tighter the more he resists. When he tries not to picture you broken and bleeding beneath his blade, the hunger twists and reshapes itself into something else entirely. Some nights, he wakes sweat-stricken and breathless, cock hard and aching as the sheets clinging damp to his thighs. He bites into his own wrist just to anchor himself in a different kind of pain. Other times...

Other times, it gets the better of him.

The tavern owner's daughter smiles too long when she brings him ale. Her blouse slips low at the collar, her laughter soft and practiced. He doesn’t even ask her name. He just lets her lead him upstairs, fingers tangled in his cloak, eyes full of questions he doesn’t bother to answer.

He fucks her in silence.

Not gently, not cruelly either. Just... needily. The mattress groans with every thrust, her voice muffled in the crook of his arm. But in his mind, she’s someone else entirely.

She has your eyes.

She has your voice when she moans.

And when he comes, it isn’t her face he sees.

It’s yours.

Afterward, he’s sick to his stomach. He scrubs his skin raw in the basin, disgust rising like bile. He wants to rip the thought of you out of his head, tear you from the hollow of his chest. But even now, you cling to him— not with mercy, not with warmth, but with weight. A crushing gravity that drags him back into your orbit, no matter how far he tries to run.

He spits into the basin, wrists red where his own teeth left marks. Upstairs, the girl shifts in her sleep. He can’t remember her name, but he doesn’t care to.

Because the voice says nothing, and that’s what frightens him most.

You wake to the sound of birdsong.

Not the riotous kind—no morning chorus of gulls or wind-lashed sea-sounds like in Vherisport. This rings more like a handful of quiet melodies weaving through open windows, and the distant trickle of water that might be a stream. It smells of lavender and crushed herbs. Of wood polish and the faint metallic sting of old magic.

The room is small, but warm. Stone walls veiled in creeping vines, pale green light filtering through gauze-hung windows. You blink blearily at the ceiling—vaulted, smooth, etched faintly with constellations you don’t recognize.

You’re alive. Which surprises you more than it should.

“Don’t move yet.”

The voice is soft but clear, spoken from a seat just off to your right. You turn your head, slow and stiff, and find a girl sitting beside your bed—barely older than you, dressed in pale robes cinched at the waist with flowering threadwork. She wears her light pink hair in twin tails that bounce in adorable coils. Her eyes are bright and gentle in their severity.

“I mean it,” she says again, a faint smile tugging at her lips as she rises. “If you shift too fast, your Threads might snap out of alignment. And if that happens, I’ll have to stitch them back myself—and trust me, that’s not something you want to be awake for.”

You blink at her, your body still half-sunk in fog. You didn’t even know that magic can be stitched together. “Who…?”

“Hyacine,” she says, dipping into a small bow. “Head healer of Silvarum.”

That name. It catches in your ribs like a splinter of memory. You’ve never heard of it before, but somehow it feels familiar. As if someone whispered it into your dreams.

Hyacine smiles again, like she understands the look on your face. “Lady Aglaea named it herself. Means ‘silver woods’ in an old Virelyan tongue. She said it was the first color she saw when the Thread called her here and built a sanctuary where mages like us can live undetected by the empire.”

A sanctuary...? Silvarum?

So that’s where you are.

But you can’t even rack your brain for where exactly this place is. Your mouth is dry. Your limbs ache, and though the pain isn’t sharp, the exhaustion is so deep it feels carved into your bones. When you shift your legs beneath the blanket, they move. Stiff, but not shattered. Tender, but not broken.

“How long have I...?” you manage to croak.

“Three days,” Hyacine replies, checking something in a bowl beside the bed. She dips her fingers into a basin of pale blue water and flicks it toward a circle of thread-marked stone. “You were barely conscious when they brought you in. The corruption was already starting to poison the deeper weave of your magic. If you’d been any later…”

You close your eyes, a cold weight blooming behind your ribs. “I shouldn’t be alive.”

“No,” Hyacine agrees. “But you are. Thanks to her.” She gestures vaguely toward the figure lingering by the far door—Aglaea, you realize. “And your own Thread. You forced it to hold longer than I’ve ever seen. That’s the only reason we had anything left to repair.”

You swallow around the knot in your throat. Then, slowly, you let your magic stir.

The Verdant Thread rises reluctantly.

You feel it like a nest of tangled nerves—frayed and fragile, as though your veins themselves are full of bruises. Not gone, not destroyed, but… wounded. If the Thread could speak, it would be groaning. Hollow. Aching. Afraid. The feedback makes your stomach turn. You pull back with a small gasp, instinctively curling your fingers against your palm.

“I wouldn’t push it,” Hyacine says gently. “You’re stable now, but your magic is still recovering. Think of it like a forest after a wildfire—the roots are there, but it’ll be seasons before anything strong grows again.”

You sit in silence for a long while, breath shallow, limbs curled in the shape of someone trying to feel human again.

Hyacine doesn’t interrupt. She only tends to the small spells etched into the stone floor, humming beneath her breath like it might soothe the aching walls themselves. But then the soft shuffling of fabric draws her attention. She turns toward the doorway and gives a short nod.

“Lady Aglaea,” she says gently. “I’ll give you both some time.”

You lift your gaze just as Hyacine slips out, her robes whispering against the stone.

And there she is.

Aglaea.

Your eldest cousin, the first sign of family you’ve seen since the fall of Virelya. You thought they all perished in the Flame Reaver’s black flames. But now she’s standing in the light of this sanctuary she built with her own hands, pale gold hair falling down her shoulders, her unseeing eyes full of something deeper than sight.

She crosses the room before you can utter a word, and kneels beside your bed. Her hands hover for a second—as if she’s unsure—before she leans in and folds you into an embrace.

Someone who knew you, knows you, and still wraps you close like you’re something too precious to have nearly been lost.

“You’re alive,” she breathes, voice cracking.

You melt into her warmth, into the trembling relief that you didn’t want to name until now. The fabric of her robes smells faintly of roses and parchment. Her grip is careful—never too tight, always mindful of your wounds—but it’s real. The closest you’ve felt to home in a long time.

“So are you,” you whisper back, your throat thick with your own emotions.

Aglaea lets out a breath you don’t think she’s taken since Virelya fell. Her hand cradles the back of your head. Neither of you says more for a long, long moment.

The Threads between you hum faintly—blood-bound, kin-bound, frayed but unbroken.

Somehow, against all odds, you found each other again.

It takes another two days before your legs can carry you further than the length of the room. Even then, it’s slow going. But Aglaea is there each time you rise.

On the third morning, she finally leads you beyond the chamber.

Silvarum opens before you like something from a dream.

Hidden beneath a canopy of silverleaf trees, the village looks less like a settlement and more like something the Thread itself wove into place. Cottages shaped from living wood and veined stone, roofs that bloom with flowering moss. Bridges arc between tree-latticed platforms, where lanterns swing in the breeze and children chase after illusions like butterflies.

You feel the pulse of it immediately: the magic. It lives in everything here. In the paths that light when you step on them. In the wind-chimes that sing only when someone smiles. Even the wellsprings hum with old Virelyan runes, restored and rethreaded with care.

Aglaea stays at your side as she introduces you to the citizens of Silvarum—some born of other fallen kingdoms, others who fled before the empire could brand them heretics. There’s a quiet reverence to the way they look at her, and when she places a hand on your shoulder and names you her cousin, a shared hush settles. As if some long-lost thread in their own histories has just been woven back into place.

It’s strange, you think, how normal it all feels.

The days in Silvarum are marked not by bells or empire-mandated horns, but by birdsong, garden harvests, spell lessons in open courtyards. There are mages who tend to forests with whispered charms, who coax herbs to grow in woven baskets. Apprentices walk hand-in-hand with the elderly, trading stories and weaving little enchantments into their scarves.

And as you walk through it all, you can’t help but think—this isn’t so different from home.

From Virelya.

Before it was razed. Before the skies turned black and the streets burned and your siblings and cousins died screaming. Before the empire came like a plague and taught you what fear really was. Here, it feels like a fragment of that old world, safe and unburned. And yet...

You know peace like this never lasts.

Silvarum isn’t on any map of Ashkarra you’ve come across. The empire hasn’t cracked down on it yet, thanks to Aglaea’s threadwork—woven so densely into the land itself that it bends perception, cloaks the village from any who don’t know how to find it. But that little stunt she pulled to save you—ripping you out of subspace just before the Reaver’s blade struck—was dangerously loud. Magic that strong always leaves a wake.

The thought of him—the black cloak, the scorched ground, those vile threads—sours your stomach.

Aglaea notices the way your steps falter.

She doesn’t ask. She simply guides you to a quiet fountain ringed in moss and trailing ivy, its waters glowing faintly with spell-light. The two of you sit on its edge, and she waits. You’re grateful for that—for her silence, for her presence, for the steadying calm of someone who never pushes past what you’re ready to share.

Eventually, you speak.

“The past year… it’s been…” Your voice breaks before it can settle into shape. You try again. “The Flame Reaver hunted me across forests, valleys, ruins I don’t even have names for. Every time I thought I’d lost him, he found me again. I ran until I didn’t know which way was east anymore. I hid. I begged. I survived.”

Your hands curl tight in your lap. Your Threads whisper faintly at your fingertips, echoing the tremor you try to keep from your voice.

“I thought I was going to die more times than I can count. But I didn’t. Somehow, I always made it through. And even more times, I just wish I never did.”

Aglaea says nothing. Just rests a hand lightly atop yours.

What you don’t say is this: that somewhere along the way, the thing chasing you stopped feeling like a monster. That he had a name. That you were the one who gave it to him.

That there was a time you called him Phainon.

But those memories stay locked behind your teeth. It’s too soon. Too much. Too confusing.

And even now—even after what he did, what he became—you can’t shake the certainty coiled in your gut like instinct. You’ve been the Reaver’s prey long enough to know your predator. Every movement, every shadow, every breath in the wrong wind. You know the Flame Reaver better than you’ve ever wanted to.

And that thing—the one who struck at you in the forest, who wrapped your Threads in his own ichor-laced tendrils and made them scream—that wasn’t him.

You didn’t see his face. Didn’t need to.

Phainon might’ve worn that cloak, that mask, that name. But he was never that thing. You’re certain of it.

...And still, you hate how it sounds. How even in your own head, it feels like an excuse. Like you’re defending him. Like you’re trying to forgive something unforgivable.

You aren’t. You won’t. But truth doesn’t care what it sounds like.

Lost in thought, you almost miss it when Aglaea’s voice slips through the silence.

“What will you do now?”

You look up, startled, but she isn’t pressing. Just watching. Her blind eyes don’t search, but somehow they still see.

“I don’t know,” you murmur honestly. “I… don’t want to stay too long. If the Reaver’s still tracking me—if he follows me here—”

“He won’t find us,” Aglaea says, firm but gentle. “Not with you here.”

You blink. “What?”

She shifts to face you fully, taking your hands in hers. “The Verdant Thread runs in your blood too. You felt what it did—how the sanctuary answered when I pulled you through. That was you, not just me. With two Verdant casters bound to this land, I can strengthen the glamours around Silvarum tenfold.”

You hesitate. “But if it fails—”

“It won’t.” Her voice is soft, but steady. “Not unless we let it.”

You glance around the village: the children weaving light into their toys, the apprentices reciting spells to the rhythm of laughter, the elderly woman teaching a group of teens how to distill potions from enchanted herbs. It’s quiet. Whole. Real.

Safe.

You swallow hard, the words catching in your throat. “You want me to stay?”

“I want you to stop running.” Aglaea brushes your hair gently behind your ear. “You don’t have to be a ghost anymore. You don’t have to wake up every day waiting to die. Let this be your home.”

The idea sounds impossible.

But even so...

You’ve never belonged anywhere since Virelya fell. Never stayed long enough to put down roots. But now, looking at Silvarum, it hits you like a slow, aching realization. Maybe there are places in the world where you can belong. Even if just for a little while.

You draw in a breath, then let it out.

“Alright,” you whisper.

Aglaea’s smile blooms like a sunrise.

“Then welcome home.”

The moment he steps over the threshold into Alderhine, he knows.

The scent of your magic hits him like tidal wave—old and green and threaded with something soft, something yours. It coils through the stones and wood and moss, winds through open shutters and climbs the ivy-strangled chimneys. It drips from flower boxes and herb stalls and laundry lines. It laces the air itself.

She’s close. She’s close. She’s close.

The voice in his head won’t stop. It’s louder now, frantic, crawling over his thoughts in spirals. He can’t tell if it’s memory or instinct anymore—if it’s his own voice screaming or someone else entirely—but it doesn’t matter. The words ring through his skull like a siren song.

He follows the scent.

He stumbles through the town like a fevered animal, sleeves torn, boots caked in dried mud, his pale hair tangled and sweat-drenched. His cloak is long gone. His mask—shattered. His eyes burn like open wounds, too wide, too bright, darting over every corner like a starved hound trying to sniff out the last trace of blood.

He barrels through alleyways, checks windows, presses his hands to glass. He crashes into a fruit stall, nearly knocks over a baker’s basket. A child yelps when he whirls too fast at the sound of laughter—he grabs the edge of a table and stares, shaking, but it’s not her.

Where is she?

She’s here she’s here she’s here

Ŵ̷̡͎̺̣͔̝͇̖̻̓̀͒͐̏̆̌̊̓Ḩ̷̳̖̹̩̥͎̞̜͔̈̒̏Ȩ̵̡̜̻͎̗̖̌R̷̼̯̥̠̗̐̈̉́̊̅̉̀̏͒Ė̸̡̹̼̺̈́̒̄̒̽̈̑́͘ ̵̠̫͙͙̫̱̝͖̰̳̈́Ȉ̴̛̝͙̺͂̆̅̚͠͠͝͝Ş̶̤͎͓͌̋ ̸̣̯͕̙͔͍̳̦͐͌̀̄͂̄́͘S̵̨̭̞͙͔͚̹͈̭̉̌͗͌͛̒̎H̴̦͖̝̲̐͛E̵̖̲͇͕͙̝͎̠͈͚̓̑͒ͅ.̵͕͖̳̯̂̈́̃̍̕͘͝

To his annoyance, he doesn’t find you right away.

The town hums with your presence, but it never reveals you in the flesh. Your magic curls like smoke beneath every surface—so thick, so cloying, it coats the back of his throat, sticks to his skin like fever-sweat.

So he lingers.

Because Alderhine’s streets smell like you. Even its silence sounds like you. And though the voice claws through his skull, hissing she’s here she’s here she’s here, the town keeps you just beyond reach.

By day, he walks the streets like a ghost too stubborn to fade. Locals start whispering. The baker crosses herself. Children flinch when his shadow stretches too long down the cobbled alleys. He doesn’t care. He only watches. Smells. Listens. By night, he returns to the woods.

Not just any woods—the Silverwood. A quiet sprawl of moon-pale trees just beyond Alderhine’s edge, where the air grows thick with damp moss and forgotten magic. The moment he first stepped beneath its boughs, he knew. You had been here. Weeks ago, maybe more. But time doesn’t matter. Not to him. Not when the earth still drinks in your presence, and the bark still bears the touch of your fingers. Every inch of the forest sings with it.

Verdant. Bright. You.

He walks in silence. Reverent. Obsessed. Stalking between silver trunks like a beast wearing man-shaped skin. He touches leaves where your magic lingers, presses his fingers to roots you once coaxed into shape. Sometimes he crouches low just to breathe it in from the dirt. It fills his lungs. Smothers his thoughts. Warps them.

She was here. She was here. She was here—

And then.

On the fifth day.

He sees you.

It’s late afternoon when it happens, the sun casting honey-colored bars through the trees. He steps through the same worn trail he’s taken every evening since he arrived. Same ritual. Same hunt. The voice is quieter today, almost content. But then he rounds the bend, and everything stops.

You’re standing in a clearing.

You, draped in soft linen and woven threads, sunlight tangled in your hair, head tilted in laughter as you’re surrounded by children. One tugs at your hand. Another leans into your side. You’re smiling. You’re glowing.

He stops breathing.

The forest is too still. His heartbeat pounds in his skull like war drums. He grips the bark of the nearest tree with a grip too tight, too tense, too violent.

He sees the way the children reach for you.

And he sees red.

They’re too close. They’re touching you. Their sticky little hands cling to what’s his, to what he nearly died for. What he bled for. What he searched for until his bones broke and his mind frayed and the only thing left in him was the certainty that you were his.

He could kill them.

He could do it in a blink. And then you’d be alone. You’d see how he would burn the world into ashes just to find you. You’d—

You’d hate him.

The thought slams into him like a bolt of thunder. Like ice water down a flame.

You would hate him... No. Nonononono—

He can’t have that.

So he stops. Stops himself from stepping forward. Stops his fingers from twitching toward a blade he hasn’t needed in weeks. He just watches. Breath shallow. Muscles coiled. The voice in his head goes deathly still. He waits beneath the shadows, half-hidden by the silver trees.

Watches you laugh. Watches you live. Watches you forget him.

His nails dig into the bark until blood wells beneath the beds.

And still, he does not move.

He just waits.

Because soon enough you’ll be alone again.

And when that moment comes, he’ll be ready.

It’s been two weeks since you agreed to stay in Silvarum.

Life inside the sanctuary is nothing like the fugitive’s existence you’ve grown used to. There’s no need to look over your shoulder every few seconds. No sharp silence between heartbeats. No trembling fingers pressed to illusion spells while your lungs threaten to collapse.

Here, magic is not something to be hunted. I’s woven into every stone, every breath, every soft-spoken greeting. It threads through the trees, the wind, the very fabric of the sanctuary—and for once, you’re not just surviving within it. You’re living.

Despite your newcomer status, you’re respected. Word of your magic spread quickly—your skill with the Verdant Thread, your aptitude for mending and strengthening the ancient wards and glamour holding Aglaea’s illusion together. You’re no mere guest in this place. You’re part of the weave now. A guardian of the veil.

But the safety this place offers doesn’t silence the dreams.

He still finds you there.

A man with white hair and too-blue eyes. He sits alone at the edge of the docks in Vherisport, watching the sunset bleed gold into the sea. You always wake before he turns around. Before he speaks your name.

Phainon haunts you. Not like a monster, but a memory too raw to touch.

He doesn’t belong here—not in this place of warmth and softness and shared meals under moonlight. He belongs to another world entirely. A world of ash and blade and bloodied footsteps behind you in the dark. You tell yourself he’s part of the past.

But part of you still wonders if he’s out there. If he’s searching for you.

So, when the children beg you to take them berry-picking in the Silverwood beyond the sanctuary, you say yes. Not just to distract them, but to distract yourself.

The Silverwood is still technically safe. The sanctuary’s protective threads stretch deep into its roots, and some of the older mages often walk to Alderhine when supplies run low. You tell the mothers it’ll be fine. You’ll keep them close. You’ll watch their magic. You won’t stray too far.

The first few hours are uneventful.

Your little band of children plays among themselves. They run and laugh and shape sunlight into glowing motes that hover above their heads like fireflies. You hover at the edge of the clearing, your skirts gathered in one hand, a woven basket in the other. You kneel to gather herbs between patches of wild berries, listening to their joy with half a smile.

It’s peaceful.

Until it isn’t.

The shift is subtle at first—just a strange hum of static in the air that makes the hairs at the back of your neck stand. Like something exhaled into the clearing from far off. You pause, one hand frozen above a cluster of low-slung vines. Your heart skips not with excitement, but dread.

You feel it looming somewhere out of sight.

Not a bear. Not a lost traveler. Something else.

Something that once wore a black cloak and a cracked obsidian mask. Something that burns everything it touches. Something you thought you already escaped when Aglaea pulled you into the sanctuary. You straighten slowly, eyes scanning the trees with razor-sharp focus. The Silverwood is bathed in sunset gold, shadows long and deep between the trunks.

But somewhere out there, something is staring back.

Your fingers twitch against the basket’s handle. You don’t say anything aloud. You don’t want to frighten the children. Instead, you reach inward. Into the Thread.

Aglaea, you whisper across the weave.

The response is immediate. Her magic brushes yours like a hand to the shoulder. What’s wrong?

There’s something out here.

Silence. Then: You need to come back. Now.

No, you send back, quickly. I’ll handle it. Just open a path. Get the children out.

You’re not strong enough to fight anything. You’re barely recovered.

I won’t fight. I only need to see.

The pause stretches. You can feel her reluctance like friction in the spell. But eventually, Aglaea yields. A pulse echoes through the Thread, and somewhere deep in the clearing, a shimmer of light begins to open behind the berry thicket—a passage. A hidden door that only magic can see.

You round up the children with a calm voice and a steady smile. You lie. You say it’s getting late. That you’ll gather the rest of the herbs and they’ll go ahead without you, just for a little while. The youngest clings to your skirt, clearly hesitant. You smooth her hair back and murmur, “It’s alright, sweetheart. I’ll be back before supper.”

Once they’ve gone—once the shimmer closes like a dream—your smile drops.

And you turn back to the trees.

The presence hasn’t moved. It still waits. Still watches.

And as you step deeper into the woods, you already know. The way your skin prickles, and your breath catches. The way your magic curls inward, like a living thing remembering all the pain you’ve had to suffer—

It’s him.

The Flame Reaver is here.

You don’t flinch. You refuse to.

The forest air grows colder the deeper you step, as though the Silverwood itself is holding its breath. Shadows ripple between the trunks, and your magic coils tight beneath your skin, preparing to strike. You reach for it. Let it slither through your limbs, thread itself into your pulse. Whoever’s watching—whatever returned to finish the job—it’s not going to take you down quietly.

“So,” you murmur, turning toward the darkness. “You came back.”

The woods give no answer.

“Poor form, really,” you continue, voice sharper now, slicing through the silence like a blade. “You had your chance to kill me weeks ago. Left a trail of burnt bodies and poisoned threads in your wake, and for what?”

Your hands glow faintly, brimming with light-veiled vines. You lift your chin. “To fail?”

Still, no answer.Only the weight of breathless tension.

You narrow your eyes at the shape slinking just beyond the clearing. “And that imitation of the Thread? Pathetic. Did you really think you could twist something alive into something that ugly and call it magic?”

Something shifts. You feel it. A ripple in the air. The sudden prickle of heat against your skin.

And then—he steps into the light, and your heart stops.

It’s him.

But it isn’t.

The man who emerges from the treeline is a wraith in the shape of someone you once loved. Pale hair tangled and snarled. Boots half-falling apart. His tunic torn at the sleeves, dried blood crusted along his collarbones. His eyes—gods, his eyes—once the clear blue of sunlit waters, are now too bright, too wild. Like they've been polished to glass from within. They shimmer with something feral. Something sick.

He looks like Phainon.

But the man before you isn’t Phainon.

Not the one who danced with you that summer, hand pressed to your lower back, blue eyes soft beneath the moonlight. Not the one who touched you like you were something fragile.

This one carries a knife.

He lunges without warning.

You barely sidestep the first blow—blade hissing past your ear, catching only the ribbon tied to your braid. You counter with a flick of your wrist, vines bursting from the dirt to seize his ankle, but he slips free too easily. He’s fast. Too fast. His limbs move like he’s being puppeteered from beneath the skin—mechanical, precise, brutal.

But familiar.

You’ve fought this rhythm before.

Even half-mad, half-starved, he fights like the Reaver. The same momentum, the same angles. You know the weight behind his swings, the stutter in his breath before he pivots low. You know him.

And he is not the one who tried to kill you weeks ago.

You hate how much relief that brings.

Still, relief doesn’t matter when you’re barely staying alive.

His knife slices through your sleeve, grazes your forearm. You grit your teeth and snarl a quiet curse, dancing back just out of reach. You have to get through to him. You need to know what’s wrong with him. Why he’s like this.

Your fingers twitch. A flare of borrowed magic threads between your eyes—a trick Aglaea and Hyacine taught you. You let your gaze blur just enough to see beneath his surface. Past the rage, the tension, the speed. And right there, the Thread lets you see it.

His brain is alight. Burning like a lantern soaked in oil. The energy is dissonant, jagged, and wrong—like a storm with no eye. No focus. His whole body is lit up like a war beacon, but his mind? A chorus of fractured voices all screaming the same name.

Yours.

“Stop,” you breathe, ducking another slash. “Stop—please. What happened to you?”

He laughs.

And it is not the laugh you remember.

It’s a rasping, breathless thing. Cracked and crooked at the edges. He pants through it like it’s physically painful to hold in the words spilling from his tongue.

“I found you. I found you,” he croons. “I looked everywhere. Through cities, through bones, through fire. And you were here, hiding, laughing with children—”

His voice breaks into a sneer. “Did they make you forget me? Did they make you soft?”

Your chest tightens. “Phainon—!”

Something inside him snaps.

“You said it!” He shrieks forward again, eyes wild. “Say it again!”

The blade comes down hard and you barely manage to catch his wrist. His strength nearly overwhelms you. His breath is hot against your cheek. Too close. Too fast. You twist your hips and drop, momentum dragging him off balance just enough for your elbow to crack into his ribs. His knife tumbles free. You catch it without hesitation, and drive the sharp edge into his side.

Blood splatters your skirts.

Phainon chokes on his own breath—his whole body jerking—before he stills. For a moment, he just stands there, looking down at the wound like he doesn’t understand it. Like he’s forgotten what pain feels like. Then he staggers back two steps and drops to his knees.

The silence is deafening.

You stand there, chest heaving, blood soaking your fingers. The knife clatters from your grip. The forest holds its breath.

And then—

“…your voice,” he whispers.

It’s hoarse. Quiet. So much softer than before. “You said my name.”

You don’t answer.

You can’t.

Because he’s not looking at you like a beast anymore. He’s looking at you like a man on the edge of waking from a nightmare. Blue eyes flickering with something fragile. Something breaking.

“I—” He blinks hard. His lips tremble as he swallows. “Where are we? What…what did I…”

He reaches for you with a bloodied hand, and you flinch. Not because you’re afraid, but because the man before you is breaking apart. Piece by piece, unraveling at the seams, and you have no idea how to keep him from falling off the deep end.

His fingers hover midair, trembling, suspended in the space between you. He looks at your face, then your hands—shaking, stained with his blood—and then, finally, at the gash along your shoulder. The one he left there. The fabric is torn clean through. Crimson soaks through the weave like spilled ink.

His breath hitches.

He blinks once, twice—then recoils like he’s been burned.

“I…” he breathes, stumbling back. “No. No—no—”

You move to steady him, but he jerks away too fast, dragging a hand through his hair like he’s trying to claw out whatever poison is spreading through his head.

“I hurt you.” His voice is wrecked, and so full of horror it knocks the wind right out of your lungs. “I hurt you again—”

Phainon’s knees drag into the earth as he collapses, hands fisting into the moss. His breath turns ragged, harsh, nearly unrecognizable. He looks up at you through a haze of tears—eyes glassy, desperate, gutted.

“I didn’t want to,” he chokes. “I swear—I didn’t—something’s wrong with me. I can’t think, I can’t sleep, there’s this voice—it keeps telling me to kill you but I don’t want that, I don’t want that—”

“Phainon—”

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he sobs. “I just wanted to see you, to tell you I was still me—I tried—”

You lunge forward and pull him into your arms before he can finish.

He stiffens at first—frozen with guilt and confusion—but you wrap your arms tighter around him, clutching his shoulders like a lifeline. You bury your face against his bloodied neck, your body trembling, your breath catching on the ragged sob you’ve been holding in for weeks.

And then his arms curl around you, tight. Desperate. Like he’s afraid you’ll vanish if he lets go.

“Y-you’re here,” you whisper, voice cracking, “You’re still here...”

You don’t care that your dress is ruined. Don’t care that his blood has soaked into the fabric or that your shoulder still burns or that the Silverwood is cold and watching. All that matters is this.

His weight in your arms. His breath against your skin. The tremble in his voice when he murmurs, “I missed you,” like a confession. Like a sin. “I missed you so much.”

You squeeze your eyes shut, letting the tears slip past your cheeks.

The two of you kneel there in the heart of the forest, clinging to each other beneath the pale silver trees—two broken pieces trying to remember how they ever fit together. And just as the first stars bloom above the canopy, the moon rises in silence, casting its light across the mossy clearing.

You don’t know what happens next.

But for now, he’s here.

Still your Phainon.

You work in silence.

The clearing is still. The moonlight pools at your feet like spilled silver, bathing everything in a soft, reverent glow. Phainon rests with his head in your lap, eyes closed, body curled against your side like a wounded animal finally allowed to sleep. His breath comes slow now. Steady. The tension that once kept him taut and dangerous has bled out of his limbs.

You lay one hand over his side—just above where the knife went in—and exhale through your nose.

Your magic answers the call.

The Verdant Thread glows faintly beneath your palm, curling through him like strands of golden silk, winding through skin and sinew, coaxing the torn muscle to knit itself whole. The effort draws a tight ache from your temples—residue from the poison still lingering in your veins—but you grit your teeth and keep going. When the wound seals, you move to your own arm next, humming low under your breath, drawing the last of your strength to close the gash along your shoulder.

When you’re done, the forest exhales around you.

No blood. No broken skin. Only the crusted stains on your clothes and the dark exhaustion dragging at your spine.

Carefully, so gently, you lift your hand and pass it over Phainon’s temple. You pretend it’s just a fond touch—just a stroke through his pale hair—but beneath your fingers, you thread a quiet flicker of magic. Just enough to peek beneath the surface. His mind is still a storm. But things are calmer now. The wild, chaotic fire you saw earlier has dulled, replaced by something low-burning, like coals after a blaze. He’s exhausted. He’s finally still.

You let out a breath you didn’t know you’d been holding.

Good.

Your fingers comb slowly through his hair. It’s longer than it was before—softer, too, though still tangled and messy from weeks of unwashed travel. You catch a few strands behind his ear. He doesn’t stir.

Then, you feel it: the tug of the Thread, faint and cautious.

Are you safe? Aglaea’s voice brushes against your mind, quiet but laced with worry. I felt something earlier. I was about to bring you in, but… it stopped.

You close your eyes, focusing on the link.

It’s okay now. Your hand remains in Phainon’s hair, stroking gently. I’ve got it under control.

There's a pause followed by a sigh of resignation.

Alright… I trust you. Please be back soon.

The connection fades.

You tilt your head back, breathing in the forest night, staring up at the pale scatter of stars. Your body aches. Your dress is stiff with blood and dirt. And lying here like this, with Phainon curled up beside you like a broken thing trying to remember how to be human, you know you can’t bring him back like this.

If the others saw him—if they saw you—it would start a panic.

You shift, gently tapping his cheek. “Phainon.”

A soft noise. His lashes flutter, and then those painfully blue eyes crack open.

Your heart lurches. He blinks up at you, dazed and still half in a dream. You brush a lock of hair from his brow and offer a small smile.

“We need to wash up,” you murmur. “Our clothes. My friends… they can’t see us like this.”

It takes him a moment to process the words. Then he pushes himself upright, moving slowly, like each motion aches.

You rise together.

As you lead him from the clearing, weaving your way through the trees toward the riverbank, he speaks.

“…Friends?”

You glance back. He isn’t frowning exactly. Just curious. His voice is quieter when he adds, “The children. Were they your friends?”

You shake your head. “Not exactly.”

And then, after a beat, you decide to tell him the truth.

“There’s a sanctuary hidden in these woods called Silvarum. I live there now. It’s protected by a veil—an illusion, strong enough to keep out anyone who doesn’t know how to see through it. Aglaea maintains the wards, and I help reinforce them. The children are sons and daughters of other mages who live within the veil.”

Phainon walks in silence for a long while. But he nods.

“You’re safe there,” he murmurs, almost to himself.

You don’t reply. You don’t tell him how hard-won that safety was. How much it cost you to start over.

Not yet.

Eventually, the trees part.

The river glistens under the moonlight—gentle and slow, its surface glassy and undisturbed. The air here smells cleaner as you crouch at the edge of the stream, dipping your hand into the water. Cold, but not biting. Phainon lowers himself beside you, wordless, still watching with those too-blue eyes.

You begin to scrub the dried blood from your skirts, working the stains out in silence. He does the same, awkward at first, like he’s forgotten how. When your fingers brush beneath the water, his breath catches from contact and you wonder—how long has it been since someone touched him gently?

You don’t ask.

You just keep washing. Letting the sound of water and wind and riverstones fill the quiet space between you. As the minutes stretch past, you wring the fabric between your palms, watching pale red bleed into the river.

Beside you, Phainon stills.

Not because he's finished. But because he’s watching you.

You glance up, expecting his usual far-off stare. But this look is something else entirely—quiet, focused, hungry in a way that has nothing to do with blood. His lips are slightly parted, lashes lowered, gaze fixed on the way your wet dress clings to your thighs.

You clear your throat, shifting slightly.

“I think the worst of it’s out,” you say, holding up your skirts. “Still stained, though. I’ll need hyssop to lift the rest.”

He doesn’t answer. His gaze trails higher—past your knees, past your waist, to the exposed skin where your blouse hangs loose from the shoulder he bandaged earlier. You see his throat work, bobbing with uncertainty that makes you think that you should say something. Remind him you’re vulnerable. That he’s still recovering. That this shouldn’t happen, not now, not like this.

But your mouth stays shut.

Because something in the way he’s looking at you—like you’re the only thing in the world that matters—makes your heart skip. And after everything, after all of it, you can’t deny the warmth curling in your belly. The part of you that wants him to keep looking. That missed this. Missed him.

Slowly, Phainon rises to his knees.

Water drips from his fingers, his arms. His shirt clings to his chest in heavy folds, but he doesn’t seem to notice. His focus is entirely on you.

“Can I...?” he asks, voice hoarse.

You blink. “You don’t have to ask.”

“I do,” he murmurs. “If I don’t… I’ll break again.”

Something tugs behind your ribs.

You reach for him, and he comes forward carefully, almost afraid he’ll spook you. His hands hesitate over your thighs before resting there, warm and steady. When he leans in, he presses his face into the soaked fabric just above your knees. His breath trembles with sheer want.

“I dreamed of this,” Phainon whispers. “Not touching you like this. Just… being near. Hearing your voice again. Knowing you’re right there when I reach for you.”

You don’t know what to say to that. Your chest aches.

So instead, you lean down and brush his hair away from his face.

“I’m here now,” you whisper.

Phainon exhales shakily, and then he surges forward, pressing his lips to your inner thigh through the wet fabric. You gasp, body twitching slightly, but he doesn’t pull away. He lingers there with his lips parted, dragging soft, open-mouthed kisses through the thin linen. It’s a quiet devotion, like prayer.

Like worship.

His voice is a low rasp against your skin. “I want to make you feel good. I want to hear you say my name again. Not because you’re afraid of me. Because you want me.”

Your breath catches as you will yourself to nod once.

He doesn’t need more than that.

Phainon shifts forward, parting your legs gently. His movements are unsure at first—hesitant and unpracticed—but the hunger in him is real and raw. His hands settle on your hips to keep you steady as he presses a kiss just where the wet fabric sticks to heat. Then another. And another.

“Lift up for me?” he whispers.

You do.

He slides your soaked underwear down your legs with careful hands. Cold air kisses you before he does. But when his mouth finally finds where you ache for him most, you cry out softly, hips twitching in surprise. He groans against you, like the taste alone is enough to unravel him.

Phainon eats like he’s starving. Like this is the first real thing he’s had in weeks. He takes his time mapping out your sopping cunt with his tongue and lips, listening intently to every breath and stuttered moan. When he finds a spot that makes you buck, he stays there, lips curling into a quiet smile.

You tangle your fingers in his hair. His name slips out—soft and breathless.

And he whimpers.

He grinds against the riverbank, untouched, panting into your skin. But his focus never wavers. Not once. He wants nothing more than this—your voice in his ears, your thighs trembling around him, your taste on his tongue.

“Please,” he murmurs. “Please, please—don’t ever leave me again.”

You don’t answer.

You just cry out again, gasping into the dark.

“Phainon—!”

The name leaves your lips before you can stop it—his name, the one you gave him—and gods, the way he preens at the sound, it’s almost obscene. He presses deeper, tongue curling, drinking every soft cry from your mouth like it’s his birthright. His hands grip your thighs, holding you open, keeping you steady as he feasts on you with endless, eager strokes.

It’s too much. Too good. Too fierce.

You bite your lip hard enough to draw blood, but the pleasure keeps cresting, dragging you higher, tighter, until you’re gasping his name again, broken and breathless.

And when you finally fall apart against his mouth, trembling, one hand gripping his hair, he moans like he’s the one who’s been undone. His pace quickens as you tumble over the edge—shaking, crying out, clutching at his hair as he sets your whole body alight.

But Phainon doesn’t stop.

Even after you shatter into pieces beneath him, he keeps going—licking, tasting, chasing every aftershock with greedy, fervent devotion, as if he needs it to live. As if your pleasure is his only sustenance. And the greedy woman you are, you let him. Because somewhere deep inside, past all the fear and guilt and grief, you’ve always wanted this.

Him.

Your ruin, your hound, your most faithful sin.

And now that he’s found you again, you know there’s no escaping him.

You’re still gasping when he finally lifts his head. His mouth is slick, shining with your essence and utterly drunk on the taste of you. His chest rises and falls in ragged bursts, his breath as uneven as yours, but gods, the look on his face—he’s so proud. Like he’s done something holy.

When you meet his gaze—half-lidded, bliss-drunk, yours—you feel the last of your resolve crumble.

You reach for him.

You don’t know who moves first—maybe it’s both of you—but your mouths crash together in the same heartbeat, a kiss that’s messy and wet and filthy, tasting of everything he just took from you. He groans low in his throat, hands tightening on your thighs, pulling you closer, as if he can’t stand even an inch between you.

His fingers slip between your legs again.

You gasp into his mouth, but he doesn’t stop.

Phainon kisses you harder, swallowing every sound you make as his fingers slide inside—two of them, thick and sure, curling deep with devastating precision. His palm grinds against you, his knuckles pressing right where you’re still too sensitive, and the sheer need in him makes your head spin.

He’s not teasing or toying with you. No, he pumps his fingers in and out of you with frantic, eager strokes, his lips never leaving yours, kissing you like a man possessed.

And gods, it’s too much.

The river murmurs beside you, the air thick with heat and breath and the slick, obscene sound of his fingers working you open. His kiss turns ragged, sloppy, and still he keeps going—moaning into your mouth every time you whimper his name. He shudders at the sound, his pace faltering only to deepen the next thrust, driving you higher, harder.

You feel it rising too fast, too much, but there’s nowhere to run. Not with him holding you this tight, not with his mouth devouring yours, not with his fingers coaxing every broken cry from your throat.

You break apart again with a strangled gasp, shaking as you spill around him, your body trembling under the force of it, but even then, he doesn’t pull away. He kisses you through it—his greedy tongue licking deliciously into yours—and you let him.

Because for the first time in forever, you don’t want to run.

Because you’ve never known anything like this.

Pleasure was always a foreign thing to you—distant, unreachable, a luxury meant for people who weren’t hunted. But here you are, trembling in the aftermath, sprawled over the river’s edge, every nerve still alight with the ghost of his touch. And he’s still watching you.

Phainon stares like he’s never seen anything so beautiful—wide-eyed, lips swollen from kissing you, flushed and dazed and far too pleased with himself. He leans in again, his blue-eyed gaze heavy with a thirst that can never seem to be quenched.

“Don’t,” you rasp, still breathless, your body too limp to push him away properly.

But he only smiles, so soft it almost hurts, and presses his forehead to yours, his nose brushing your cheek as he murmurs—

“Please,” he breathes, like a man praying. “Let me have you again.”

You nearly fall under it—under him again.

But before you can stop him, before you can even think of yielding, the distant sound of children’s voices breaks through the trees.

“Miss! Miss, are you there? Lady Aglaea sent us to look for you!”

The spell shatters, and your heart lurches. Phainon blinks, confused and too drunk on you to react in time. But you don’t think. You just shove at his chest with a panicked gasp, scrambling upright.

It’s instinct—pure, panicked instinct—as the children’s voices ring out through the trees.

Phainon hits the river with a loud splash, going under with a startled noise that bubbles up through the current. The water swallows him whole for a breathless beat, leaving you gasping, flushed and frantic on the riverbank, yanking your robes back into place with trembling hands.

But before you can even begin to gather your wits, his head breaks the surface again—white hair plastered to his face, eyes wide and soaked through, staring up at you in open, startled betrayal.

“Don’t just sit there!” you hiss, half-mortified, half-laughing despite yourself as you lean down to grab his wrist. “Come on, get out!”

For a moment, he stares at you incredulously. As if you aren't the reason he's soaked. But still, he lets you drag him up, water dripping from every inch of him as you haul him toward the rocks. He’s still grinning, of course—still looking at you like you hung the stars—even as he staggers beside you, wet and flushed and utterly unrepentant.

Then just as you both start composing yourselves, there’s a sudden burst of footsteps crashing through the underbrush.

“There you are, Miss!” One of the children skids to a stop at the riverbank, wide-eyed and breathless, followed by another two just behind him. The same kids you stowed into safety earlier. “We’ve been looking everywhere! The stew’s ready—Aglaea said you’d be in trouble if you missed supper again—”

They all stop.

Three pairs of innocent eyes take in the sight before them: you, still flushed and breathless, robes tugged hastily back into place, hair mussed; and Phainon, drenched from head to toe, his soaked shirt clinging to every line of muscle, looking far too smug for a man just pulled from the river.

Silence.

Then—

“Ohhh,” one of the girls says, blinking slowly. “Were you swimming with your friend? I don't think I've seen him before though...”

You want to die.

“Yes,” you blurt, too fast, heat searing up your neck. “We—yes. He, uh, slipped. Into the river.”

Phainon coughs behind you, shoulders shaking with poorly muffled laughter.

“Come along,” you mutter, grabbing his wrist again—this time to drag him after you before the children ask anything else.

You hear one of them whisper behind you as you go, in a voice loud enough to make your ears burn:

“Why does Mister look so happy if he fell in?”

You don’t answer.

But Phainon just smiles, letting you pull him along like the most loyal hound alive—water still dripping in his wake, but his gaze never leaving you.

Still pleased.

Still helplessly, utterly yours.

Far beyond the veil of Silverwood, where moonlight does not reach and the riversong dies into silence, someone watches.

Perched atop a crooked tree branch half-eaten by ivy, a lone hunter sits without so much as rustling a leaf. Her boots dangle carelessly, eyes half-lidded beneath the gleam of brass goggles. Wind stirs the long fabric of her cloak. A gloved hand twirls a coin between two fingers, absent and rhythmic.

Down below, barely visible through the branches, the river glints like a ribbon of glass. Just beyond it: the foreign woman, and the tall man who follows too visibly for his own good. Their robes hang wet, hair disheveled, cheeks flushed. They walk together now, trailing behind a small cluster of children, and still he watches her like she hung the constellations with her bare hands.

“Well,” Cipher murmurs, voice dry as parchment. “That took longer than expected.”

Her coin flicks into the air, catches the light of the high moon, and falls back into her palm without a sound. She closes her fingers around it and lets the silence stretch.

She’s been hunting ghosts for weeks now. Tracing magic signatures too old to follow, footsteps too clever to leave trails. And yet here they are—together again. The princess and the monster. Reunited, tangled in riverwater and stolen glances like they hadn’t nearly torn the coast in half chasing each other across it.

“Interesting,” Cipher says at last, smiling faintly to herself.

Then, in a single fluid motion, she rises. Not onto the branch, but into the air beyond it—walking where there should be no footing at all. Her silhouette wavers, the lines of her form rippling like a reflection disturbed. Step by step, she vanishes—folding into shadow, until even her breath is gone.

“Very interesting, indeed.”

PART ONE | PART TWO | PART THREE

⟢ end notes: part 2 is upon ye!!! also i don't think it's obvious enough but cipher and aglaea are appearing way too often in my fics for characters that i don't even own in-game?! i love my queens ok... also, CONGRATS FOR MAKING IT THIS FAR WOOHOO 🥳 give urself a pat on the back bc WOW that was a lot! not much to note here except: i hope you guys noticed that, in the three scenes written in phainon's pov, he was never referred to by his name in the last two scenes bc the influence of his reaver instincts has more or less taken over his mind at that point. and when he was still the reaver, he was nothing but a weapon without a name. the moment reader called out his name during that altercation in the silverwood forest, it was the first time he fully came to his senses in weeks. poor guy. anyway sawrry for blabbering lol thank you kindly for reading, and for the avid reception of the first chapter!! what if i CRY what would you guys do HUH>?>?!

#hsr x reader #phainon x reader #honkai star rail x reader #hsr smut #phainon smut #honkai star rail smut #phainon x you #hsr x you #honkai star rail x you #cryoculus #full-length fic

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candysims4 · 2 days ago

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TROPICO SWIMWEAR COLLECTION | PART 5

I've added 5 new items to my 'Tropico Swimwear Collection,' being 5 swimsuits. All of them have 4 swatch types, resulting in a total of 20 .package files.

Now, there are 32 items in total in the entire collection.

You can find part 1 here, part 2 here, part 3 here and part 4 here.

ALL ITEMS ARE:

TEEN TO ELDER

BASE GAME COMPATIBLE

MADE FOR FEMALE FRAME

DISALLOWED FOR RANDOM

240 SWATCH COLORS (SAME FOR ALL ITEMS) - 55 plain colors - 65 patterned - floral - 65 patterned - misc - 55 patterned - leopard

THUMBNAILS (HOSTED IN IMGUR)

MY SITE (NO AD.FLY):

CARLA SWIMSUIT

CLARISSE SWIMSUIT

DENISE SWIMSUIT

JULIA SWIMSUIT

TATIANA SWIMSUIT Free release on 2nd August 2024 in my site

PATREON EARLY ACCESS + MERGED OPTIONS

Thanks to all the cc creators that I used in the pic. And thanks to @maxismatchccworld, @simblrcollective, @s4library, @wewantmods, and everybody who reblog this post!

If you’re a cc finds and want to be tagged when I post, please, let me know. You can send me an ask or in DM.

With your help, more people can know about my work! 💖 Love you all, XOXO 💖

CARLA SWIMSUIT

4.648 POLYGONS