Join me in night painted with crimson and black.

His soul suffered from lack of its half.

He carried himself through Ain’asel like a ghost. Not attacked by beasts, not bothered by the lesser folk. Like he was invisible for them – a being so hollow, it can’t even act as a feast. Like even his meat held no nurturing flourish. And as his empty well couldn’t fill with fear and despair – to properly feed the faery kind.

His road was just as hollow. Wind caressed him, not tore. Snow embraced him, not shackled in cold. The forest observed him – like a patient and very curious guardian who would put him on his path again, if he lost his way.

He was to leave Ain’asel – as it disliked soulless creatures. Broken dolls were pleasant only as fodder. It was the path to this state that fascinated the faery realm. Tiyan was useless to wind, snow and woods – he was a relic of his fathers, who perished, touched by the shadow.

So he went. An apparition, carrying the remnants of humanity in his frail body, disjointed from his mind. He was not a human anymore – he was a dark shadow in place of flame. He was fractured emptiness still – somehow – latched to this world.

He felt the last portal – the same which he passed leaving Avras. But not in the same way as for the first time. Now – the magic of faeries kissed him, not ravaged – a goodbye worthy of his role in Lorian Ain’dal’s rewriting of cosmic plans. A kiss, soft, and ethereal; wings and feathers in an aching place in which he long ago lost the feeling.

Ain’asel bid him farewell – in its own unpredictable way. A reminder of faery twisted nature.

He recognized places.

The one where they met the mangled human hanging on a tree. Now, it bloomed with strange, blue mushrooms – no sign of blood or flesh. Tiyan passed the overgrown colony – the mushrooms seemed to shiver as they sensed him. He would observe as they stretch on too-long stems, like his scent reminded them of something.

But he didn’t care.

When he approached the lost village, it was even more silent than for the first time. In a much calmer way – not ominous foreboding in its quiet un-life. He almost turned to the grove, involuntarily almost, like macabre and pain called him, tempted him – like he couldn’t anymore live without them. Lorian carvings urged him with blood and flesh.

He left the village as quickly as he realized where his steps carried him.

He wouldn’t help them like a human would do. He wouldn’t taste their endless torment as faeries would.

He was a passing ghost.

He recognized the place when he fought with a fae beast by Ona’s side. The wounded animal wanted him for his scar – just as even more dangerous monsters. The last time he checked his skin there, it was still there; but fading, as it was not a scar until now, it was a seal of a slave. Now… it lost all red and reminded him of times not perfect, but when he still had soul.

Lorian ate it.

He ate his soul.

And it felt like he ate him.

Which in fact, he did. He was not devoid of his core – but it was slowly chewed, leaving bloody strings in a dead god’s jaws.

Yet… Inamora – somehow – still called him. A masochistic calling to face his past and mourn what the present wasn’t. Another self-inflicted torment, which he couldn’t free himself from – and he didn’t want to.

It took him two months to reach it. He hunted to preserve strength. He drank water from snow. He used Ona’s knowledge to build houses from the snow, maybe not as warm as hers were, but allowing him to not lose more fingers. The skin in place of those Qhal cut off was stretched and dry. He had gloves, warm, wool-like; but not made of wool. Who gave them to him? He couldn’t remember. But they were saving him. He could hunt with them, he could survive winter – and when he passed the gate between the human realm and Ain’asel, he didn’t even need them. Winter in Avras was nothing he lived through in the fae realm. His limbs hardened, his skin too. He would laugh at how different his body – and even facial features – was now, compared to then. He looked like a man – not a twenty old boy he was not that long ago.

A man – with a hollow gaze, with strong hands, bent back, features of someone much older and with sadness etched on his face. He always hoped to reach this before. To let the boyish looks stay in his adolescence. He wanted to be like hunters – bold, strong, courageous. How little he knew what real power meant and how it breaks and sucks juice from people like him. And how many of his memories and thoughts will coil around power that destroys, claims and possesses.

Inamora greeted him with usual calm. Tiyan thought that no one would recognize him – he alone wouldn’t if he was in their position. People walked towards their daily duties, busy with everyday life. And he wasn’t even very surprised that he didn’t recognize anyone too.

Different life.

Different people.

Now, this village was alien to him, just as he was alien to them. These people didn’t live through the same thing he did. They faced their hardships with their heads held high and hoped for the better. He was already past the point he could lift his chin. He was shown where his place is, in the most terrifying way. How will he live among them now? Will he be seen as every human coming back from the fae realm? Maddened? Pariah? And if they accept him, how will he be able to return to this kind of life?

He found his house.

It wasn’t empty as he thought it would be. In the window, he found a glimpse of a lamp burning inside – it was an early evening, yet the winter days were short – dusk started to slowly claim the sky. Someone repaired the building, fixing the walls, painting the door and mending the roof.

It was here. Where he was born. Where he led his simple life, not caring about the next day.

Here, it all started.

And it looks like here it also ends.

He just stood there, not knowing what to do. Who took his house? Is there still a place for him in this village? Or they deemed him dead – and they had all reasons to. No one leaves the fae realm, and if they do, it would be better if they died.

Maybe it would be better if he died.

Scratching to the door. They moved a little, a small gust of wind – and a paw – jerked them open, making way to a medium-sized, brown dog. He ran at him, tail wagging, almost insane from joy and relief. He gave a happy bark and jumped at him, almost making him fall.

The dog paws supported his tights and wet and loving and eager tongue started to mark his hands.

Korr…

Korr barked again and Tiyan could swear that he saw a genuine smile on his face. He crouched and embraced his dog’s sturdy body, he put his face into his fur and inhaled the scent of…

… home.

The same. The very same home. Home, where he listened to the hunters’ tales. A not so big, but familiar place, where he wanted more and dreamed of more and where he and parents and… Mina…

The door was pushed wide open.

Korr was licking Tiyan’s skin in a welcoming frenzy. His tongue already found his face and now, it was showing him he was missed. And before him…

Noyd.

Tiyan’s heart rose and sank all at once. Relief and overwhelming panic seized his body.

It was her. She changed almost nothing. Her hair was the same vermilion. Her eyes had the same green leaves shade. Her trousers maybe were too big for her and her jacket hung over her like on a tree. But it was the same Noyd he left on the edge of Inamora that day, and promised to return.

And he returned. As promised.

He didn’t know if it was bad or good.

He changed more than her.

Her eyes widened – like in slow motion. A strange guttural sound left her mouth, almost choking. And she joined Korr. Tiyan would cry – from joy and pain and fear – if he was able.

“Tiyan… Tiyan…” her hands cupped his face and she left a hot kiss on his lips. She felt the same relief – and perhaps the same panic – as himself. “You returned. I almost lost hope…”

He was trying to form a thought, any thought that would be sufficient. but with Noyd, everything hit him again with full force.

And deep in his mind, he felt a fae—no, not simply a fae. It was Lorian Ain’Dal, taking his body and free will to the sound of shifting shadows and his own moans of pleasure. Drawing blood from his skin and pushing it deep inside him.

Nothing will be the same.

The village started to acknowledge him as well. Some people – unknown or forgotten – started to approach. Some arms embraced him, some worried words, some questions. There, farther between houses – a mayor’s wife. She still lived, she survived. Someone took his duty, which – if he had full soul – he would welcome with overwhelming relief.

He was home.

He returned.

And it changed… nothing.

When they came for him, he was already broken.

Two months had been enough for him to learn what had happened in Ain’asel during his absence. He had been feeding himself with loss and despair for so long, fueling a hatred so dull and heavy it was almost placating. And now he had been stripped of purpose so quickly, with such stinging precision, that he was shocked his limbs still moved and his lungs still drew breath.

Savior.

That was who he hated. That was who he wanted to stop.

His world had crumbled quickly and mercilessly.

He was a monster. That was what he had always told himself. Lorian Ain’Dal, the monster. But Lorian had done something that reduced Alnam’s hatred and pain to a small, irrelevant speck of pollen on the wind—insignificant beside the cosmic apocalypse that would have come, if not for him.

The small folk told him everything in minute detail. The pain Lorian had suffered for years—and Alnam realized that even then, when Corvel was killed, when his own voice was taken—the gods who could drain an entire fae land of life. The end of the world that had been stopped because Lorian had the courage to stand before the ancestor and tell them no.

His feelings were destroyed. His purpose taken from him. Death was the only sensible choice left—but even that had been denied.

He had to live and listen to the lesser folk chattering—of monuments raised, of temples being built.

They had found themselves a new god, one who could not answer their prayers. But weren’t all gods dead? And yet they still hungered for their blood. Maybe Lorian heard it all. Maybe he existed in a cosmic prism, somewhere between time and space. Maybe, as all the fae, he nourished a tree… looking with leafy eyes on the life he saved. Or maybe he couldn’t care less.

Alnam was left to himself—shackled in half-iron, half-silver binds that did not hurt but muted his powers completely.

He was a relic. And the purpose of relics is to crumble.

Was Lorian not the creature of shadow Alnam had believed him to be all this time? No. He had to be. His mind was collapsing under the weight of his pointless actions, loneliness and the lack of an anchor. To the other fae, he was a courtier who had stood against their savior, tried to destroy his plans, and attacked him.

Death was coming.

But when?

Those two months were like a limbo filled with stale, polluted water.

When. How. Where. The sentence never came, and Alnam eventually became too lost in his own world to care. They could come today. Tomorrow. Or in ten years.

It was irrelevant.

His life had ended when Corvel was killed. When his wife died.

When Lorian revealed himself as the herald of a new godless age.

When they came for him, he was beyond saving. They could be cruel enough to release him into the world, ordering him to live. To accept a realm in which Lorian Ain’Dal was a god and he was worth less than dust.

Perhaps that would be a fitting punishment for his blind belief in revenge and retribution. Ain’asel changed everything and everyone, even the fae who lived in it. It twisted purpose and pulsed through veins with the sweetest poisons. No one left it unchanged—humans, Seelie, Unseelie. Spring, summer, autumn, winter. All were faces of a land that liked to play with fate and life.

He didn’t know the fae who led the small procession accompanying him. She was one of Lorian’s Bean Sidhes, with wings as wide as the corridor and a beak instead of a face. It was black as obsidian; Alnam could see his reflection in it when she turned toward him.

But she did not speak—not at first. He so hoped to hear her voice.

Maybe human beliefs had been true all along. Bean Sidhes as heralds of death. She was leading him to his execution or to relocation—his death was already sealed.

She looked at him with an undecipherable, blank expression. Her eyes were pale—like Nymre’s. Alnam had heard that Nymre had taken the throne as regent. The king would soon be anointed—Lorian’s child.

Leira’s.

He wanted to feel hatred for her. But he simply couldn’t. She had enchanted him the same way Lorian enchanted lesser beings. The same way Lorian enchanted her. Wasn’t it ironic? The way Lorian’s hands had once landed on his spine, his mouth drinking his marrow, tongue deep in flesh.

He heard the Bean Sidhe’s voice at last.

“Open the door.”

A lesser faery from the palace guard leaned into the heavy silver doors, and slowly they began to open. The Bean Sidhe’s voice reminded him of Narlia. She was Higher Unseelie, yet her words were like a beautiful song made by Bean.

Torment yourself.

Open before all the memories.

Let them feast.

He stepped through the doorway.

The chamber was warm and dark, illuminated only by two lamps that cast faint light on the walls. The tiny shadows danced around him as if they knew him.

After all, they did.

In the center of the room…

…stood a fae-sized device.

Made of pure iron. He felt the radiation of the element even from here. The head and the body of iron, perfectly fit to his height and posture. Even he—an old Unseelie—knew it could not kill him, but it could injure and torment him. If prolonged…

The Bean Sidhe pushed him forward, not even hard. Almost delicately.

“The savior’s orders remain intact. He left instructions. As a traitor to the crown and the realm, you will be placed in the Iron Bed—for weeks. For years. Until you die. It will depend only on your body’s endurance.”

Alnam’s eyes met hers. There was no cruelty in them, even if he expected it. Only a sense of justice. A sense of duty he himself had awakened in faerie hearts many times. But those times were gone.

Maybe he deserved this. For letting Corvel down. For allowing Narlia to fall ill.

For letting himself believe it all had purpose.

But the real punishment wasn’t pain—and Alnam dreaded it most. He would be left alone, fed just enough to survive the Iron Bed.

Left to his thoughts, his shattered soul, and his memories. To his guilt, slowly fading in a prison meant not only for bodily suffering.

It was a prison for his mind.

When they dragged him inside, he felt nothing. No fear, just an emptiness in place of a heart, which bled blue, slowly releasing spores into the air around him.

He could numb himself to physical pain. He could make it almost bearable. But he could not numb himself to what had led him here.

Lorian …he had known it all along.

He would have offered him admiration for his foresight.

If he did not have a few lifetimes still ahead of him—an waterless mossy well full of wind and souvenirs of roads not taken…

Maybe in time he fill it with his unshed tears.