The world, Lord Veyan decided, was a gilded lie wrapped in silk and deception.

  He stood atop the marble staircase, one gloved hand resting on the obsidian pommel of his ceremonial sword—ceremonial only in appearance. The blade itself was a relic, forged by the ancient master blacksmith of Sablethorn, passed down through generations like an unwanted heirloom. It had been his father’s once, until it was his.

  Memories always came unbidden when he laid his fingers on the hilt, and they were always bitter. Why should he dwell on a man who had abandoned his duties, chasing after power like a starving dog after scraps, only to die grasping at air? People had tried to tell him the details, but he hadn’t cared then and certainly didn’t now.

  His slitted eyes, half-lidded in perpetual disinterest, swept across the ballroom below. The Ashwind Sect’s Patriarch was already bustling about, greeting guests with the exaggerated charm of a man compensating for mediocrity. He had once been one of his father’s trusted aides, and his sect, while not exactly weak by common standards, was still called “lesser” for a reason.

  Veyan had little patience for all this pomp, and his reasons were many. The first, and most pressing, was the Vor’akh. Their elders had been sighted in the city again, creeping like carrion crows. Another attack was planned for today—not that they knew they had already been found out. Their assault would be intercepted, just like the others before it. Not once would Varkaigrad suffer the wounds of Vor’akh claws. His grip tightened on the sword. He would make certain of it.

  His second reason was the ever-present irritation of sect nobles circling like vultures. He could practically hear their whispered schemes hatching behind their polite smiles. Sycophants and schemers, every one of them. And what a prize they thought he was—his bloodline traced back to the great World Serpent, after all. More than that, he had recently lost his wife, which apparently meant he was open season for preening noble ladies who batted their lashes and blushed prettily. Never mind letting a man grieve in peace. The thought made his skin crawl.

  Veyan exhaled sharply, eyes flicking across the room. Chandeliers dripped golden light like honey over a sea of silk and jewels, laughter bubbling like a poison-laced goblet. How easily they preened, these creatures. He recognized few faces here—his father had handled all this political drudgery, while he had been taught to wield a blade as his core, to carve his path through the world with steel. If the cuts didn’t kill his enemies, the poison certainly would. Steel was his scripture, poison his punctuation.

  These nobles and their games were as fragile as the moth-wing lace adorning their sleeves—and just as flammable. He could reduce it all to cinders with a snap of his fingers. He had considered it, once or twice.

  “Father! You’re doing the face again!”

  A voice sharp as a dagger’s edge sliced through his musings. Veyan’s sternness thawed instantly.

  “What face?” he murmured, turning as Sasha bounded up, braids lashing the air like whips.

  “The one where you look like you’ve spiked the wine and are just waiting for someone to keel over!”

  A chuckle escaped him, rough as unsanded oak. “An inventive theory, but untrue.”

  “Then smile, Father! Watch—” She hooked her fingers into her cheeks, wrenching her mouth into a crescent moon of serrated teeth.

  Veyan’s attempt at replication was… anatomical. The nobles nearby blanched, recoiling.

  Ah. So his face was a stranger to mirth. Good to know.

  But Sasha had no such troubles—she loved it. She loved everything.

  “PERFECT!!” she squealed, and the sound warmed Veyan’s chest in a way he would never admit. All those dark thoughts from before felt like mist in the morning sun, burned away by her joy.

  She twirled in her emerald gown, the very one he had warned was “too extravagant for a girl of sixteen.” Rebellion flushed her cheeks, and the embroidery shimmered as she spun, catching the light like stars tangled in silk.

  For a fleeting moment, his mind returned to the truth of the world—dark, cruel, and indifferent. He just… didn’t know how to break it to her. Sasha saw the world through a lens he could never even imagine, bright and untouched. There was a purity to it, something fragile and irreplaceable, something he never wanted to shatter. So, he did what he could to make sure her view remained untainted. Not everyone needed to carry the weight he bore.

  Just like now—she had no idea what she was even wearing.

  The symbols.

  They coiled along the hem of her gown like creeping vines, crude and half-formed, as if the tailor had scrawled them in haste, without understanding what they meant. But Veyan understood. His bloodline had always known. The secret script of the World Serpent, an ancient cipher carved into the ruins beneath the crystal caves of Blackwater Swamp. Words of their ancestor, long lost to all but those who carried their blood.

  His face remained composed—too composed—but every hair on his arms stood on end.

  Who dared? And to what end?

  Some fool had embroidered these curses onto his daughter’s dress as carelessly as a nursery rhyme. A provocation? A breadcrumb trail? A love letter from the grave?

  The longer he stared, the more the threads hissed intention. Someone was yanking his chain. But why use Sasha as the bait? Why not just stab him outright?

  Clearly, they’ve penned their own epitaph.

  “Father!” Sasha tugged his sleeve, blissfully blind to the inferno in his gaze. “Are you coming? Viera swore the musicians learned the Rakavi waltz! She promised to dance with me—her gown’s the color of the midnight sky! You should grab someone too! Even you can’t two-step like a gravestone forever!”

  If Veyan had one weakness, it was his inability to refuse his daughter.

  He offered a smile—genuine, if rusty—and waved her onward.

  Meanwhile, in the folds of his shadow, a pair of eyes flickered open.

  [Track the dressmaker,] he snarled inwardly though the psychic link, his thoughts sharpened like a dagger. [After we plant the Vor’akh elder in a shallow grave, stake out their shop. If so much as a moth coughs suspiciously, peel its wings off and bring them to me.]

  The shadowed face dipped in silent acknowledgment before vanishing into the darkness.

  He descended the staircase in Sasha’s shimmering wake, each footfall deliberate, his black-and-silver robes cascading like liquid thunderheads. The crowd cleaved like wheat before a scythe, their whispers hissing through the air like vipers in dry grass.

  The Shadow Serpent.

  The man who clawed through the Drowning Forest’s ribs to dig up a ghost.

  Let them hiss. Fear was a more honest currency than their honeyed lies.

  As he closed the distance to Sasha, that scent coiled around him again—lilies rooted in grave soil and camellias dipped in arsenic. Too calculated to be whimsy. A third clue. Someone was playing a game of smoke and daggers. Perhaps he’d humor them. For now.

  His gloved finger grazed the mangled sigils on her hem, the threads humming with a drunkard’s scrawl of mana. “This embroidery,” he mused, “who crafted it? A bold stylistic choice.”

  “A visionary foxian seamstress!” Sasha chirped, sunbeam-bright in a den of knives. “She tutted at my gown like it offended her ancestors, then worked miracles! Stitched stars into the seams, don’t you think? And in half an hour!”

  Visionary. Miracles. Creativity was a blade without a hilt, slicing the wielder’s palm with every flourish.

  Veyan’s smile stayed placid, but his thumb pressed the flawed cipher until the threads whined. “Gifts from strangers often come teeth-first, Sasha.”

  She rolled her eyes—a reflex he’d failed to exorcise from her teenage lexicon. “You’re overbrewing bitterness into everything. Besides, it’s fashion. You wouldn’t know elegance if it stabbed you.”

  Oh, but I would, he thought. Elegance had stabbed him. Repeatedly.

  He’d spent the evening unraveling security reports, redirecting guards to the Lower District’s festering wounds, all while parsing every flicker of motion in his periphery. Outside, the blizzard gnashed its teeth; inside, the hall basked in false spring. The Vor’akh’s tantrum would die at the city’s throat, as always.

  But paranoia was a hydra—hack off one suspicion, and two more sprouted fangs.

  The ball unfurled like a poisoned flower.

  Veyan endured the cavalcade of sect nobility—their daughters presented like confections at a funeral feast, sugar-dusted with desperation. Their flattery pricked like rose thorns dipped in venom, their propositions as subtle as a cleaver to the ribs.

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  You seem burdened, my lord. Allow me to lighten your load.

  He’d sooner swallow a live ember.

  Yet he parried each advance with glacial courtesy, his mind a continent away, awaiting the psychic chime that would spring him from this gilded cage. Battle called—a siren song his Gold Core thrummed to answer. Since his ascension, his mana had become a caged star, blistering against his ribs, hungry to scorch the earth. But Gold Ranks who indulged their power’s tantrums tended to wake as kings of ash and rubble. Discipline was the leash; he its grudging master.

  So, he calmed himself the only way he could.

  His senses sharpened as his mana expanded, forming an unseen zone around him. He combed through the signatures of everyone present, their energies laid bare beneath his mind’s scrutiny.

  Yet, the ball’s enchanted decor disrupted his reach, layers of protective wards muting the finer details. He could shred through them, reduce the chandeliers to glittering shrapnel… but collateral damage would sour his already delicate reputation.

  Surface scan, then.

  All quiet.

  Almost.

  A flare of fire mana hissed in the central fountain.

  Before he could react, water erupted.

  Not an explosion, but a surge—an enchantment triggering beneath the surface, sending a geyser of rosewater cascading over the crowd.

  Screams tore through the hall as nobles scrambled away, drenched but unharmed.

  A prank? A malfunction?

  Veyan was already moving. Sasha was safe—his finest guard, hidden in her shadow, ensured that. His sword was half-drawn, if only for show. His guards whispered about faulty runes, and they weren’t wrong—the enchantment had barely held enough mana to create more than a spectacle.

  But that wasn’t what made him freeze.

  It was the smell.

  Crushed lilies and camellia.

  The same scent that had woven through the cipher on Sasha’s gown.

  Not just from the fountain.

  From right behind him.

  The absurdity of it almost made him laugh.

  “Clever fox,” he muttered, the words equal parts threat and tribute.

  A Faerin woman emerged from behind him, standing beside him as chaos rippled through the hall.

  She was opulently dressed, silver silk cascading around her like liquid moonlight. Raven-black hair framed her face, long ears twitching slightly as three sleek tails flicked behind her. She smiled, unfazed by the unrest.

  “Frankly, I expected sharper reflexes from the Shadow Serpent himself.” Her voice slithered into his mind, lips unmoving—a ventriloquist of the psyche.

  So, he returned the courtesy.

  A needle-thin psychic link extended from him, a subtle prod—asking for permission. He didn’t need it, but he was intrigued.

  She accepted.

  [Either you’re very brave or very, very suicidal today. But honestly, I never expected someone to play such a long game just to get my attention. I’m impressed, so here’s my offer.]

  He smiled, but there was no warmth in it—only venom.

  [Tell me a reason. An honest and worthy reason for dragging my daughter into this—enough to weave those symbols on her gown—and I’ll let the crows feast on your corpse facing upward.]

  The woman merely leaned against him, smirking—a blade’s edge of amusement. She wore no sect colors, no insignia to pledge allegiance, no scent of false flattery or seduction. A wildcard. That meant she was here for business—his and his alone.

  A stranger, yet she looked at him with the gall of someone who had already stolen his finest wine. And smoked it.

  [Oh, but subtlety’s such a dull blade. I did loiter in that shop all morning, hoping you’d sniff me out. The fountain fiasco? Merely… punctuation.] Her fingers coiled around his arm, bold as a vine claiming a tombstone. [Indulge me a dance, my lord. By the finale, you’ll be penning me thank-you notes in your enemy’s blood.]

  No command in his psychic link. Which meant he had time.

  Intriguing.

  The commotion died down. The faulty enchantment dismissed, the ball resumed as if nothing had happened.

  And then—she laughed.

  “Ancestors bless you, Lord Veyan!” she cried aloud, leaning into him with a breathy sigh, her face flushed in faux relief. Acting. Her spoken voice was sugary, a contrast to the cool, measured tone in his head. "I’d have perished without your gallant intervention!! I thought I wouldn’t live to see the dance you promised me!"

  She pouted.

  That was hilarious.

  More amusing still was the venom that seeped into the air around them, the sharp-edged glares from the other women in the hall, their gazes filled with quiet outrage at the Faerin draping herself over his arm.

  Veyan chuckled, shifting his grip ever so slightly.

  "Can’t have that now, can we?"

  The music swelled. The pianist knew their craft well.

  So he moved, steering her onto the floor as the musicians struck up a Rakavi waltz—a melody that coiled and struck like the serpent it honored.

  Their steps mirrored each other, a duel in motion. Her gown rippled like quicksilver, his robes a thunderstorm given fabric.

  She followed his lead, her body moving like a vixen slipping through the underbrush. She was tall, yet he still towered over her.

  She kept up the act, her breath shallow, her cheeks flushed.

  Another tap.

  And before she—or anyone—noticed, a filament of his mana coiled around her throat, serpent-quick. [Name yourself,] he hissed psychically, the command barbed and final.

  She didn’t flinch.

  She stayed in rhythm, her heels tapping just after his. [Your new favorite nuisance,] her reply slithered back. [Also, the reason you’re not currently suffocating under Lady Drathis’ third marriage proposal. Gratitude’s customary, you know.]

  Her voice was a razor wrapped in velvet. Then, a pause. [I won’t mince words. I know you’re planning to slip away soon—to fight the Vor’akh elder. Don’t. Stay here. Stay Hidden.]

  That—was unexpected.

  His mana flared.

  More threads wove through the air, pressing against her skin, whisper-thin blades of metal mana poised to cut. [Clarity,] he growled, [or I’ll redecorate this hall with your insides.]

  But she only laughed.

  [Mind your footing, Serpent. You’re about to tread on your own tail.]

  [What?]

  [I said—] She lunged into the lethal strand at her neck. A ruby bead welled, jewel-bright. [—mind. Your. Shoes.]

  Murder flickered in his veins. Yet her smirk held the smug certainty of a cat who’d already knifed the hound. Reluctantly, he let the dance continue.

  This time, he yielded the lead.

  She took it like a birthright.

  [The elder’s attack? It’s a feint.]

  [Proof.] He didn’t waste breath on unnecessary words.

  She twirled, forcing him to shift, her step leading his into a backward motion. [Proof’s in the petals. Look. Really look.]

  His gaze landed on a cluster of flowers set along the edge of the ballroom—delicate, swaying with the movement of dancers. And there, woven through the petals, was the faint glint of silver.

  A rune.

  A wrong rune.

  [Does that look like an enchantment to keep flowers fresh?]

  He said nothing.

  A muscle in his jaw twitched.

  He surrendered to the rhythm, allowing her full control of the lead. And she showed him—silver runes, carefully hidden throughout the grand hall. Placed in blind spots, tucked behind silken drapes, scattered in ways that even his senses had glossed over them.

  A pattern formed. And his expression grew grim.

  [The pianist’s song—listen to the notes. The rise, the fall.] she pressed as the pianist’s melody curdled into a dirge. [Hear the hunger beneath the harmony?]

  He heard it now. the rhythm a rasping chant, notes sharp as bone flutes. Not just a song—a ritual.

  And then, with a vulpine grin, she slipped from his grip, tails lashing—

  He snared her waist mid-flight, dipping her until her hair kissed the floor. A gasp, perfectly pitched for their audience.

  Her lips parted, breath warm against his skin.

  [Look up.]

  His eyes followed hers—

  And he saw it.

  The ceiling mirror.

  A grand, gilded thing, stretching across the ballroom. One he hadn’t given a second thought.

  But it didn’t reflect the hall.

  It reflected nothing.

  It was void.

  And across its empty surface, something moved.

  A skittering shadow.

  A shape with twisted eyes.

  [Meet the real guest of honor,] she whispered.

  The void pulsed.

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