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.