The great hall of the Calyptra fortress is a tomb, dressed in dust and silence. Faded portraits hang on the walls, their subjects’ eyes cracked and blind, their painted smiles mocking the stillness. For over a hundred years, no restorer's brush has touched these canvases, just as no life has stirred in these corridors. Except for two.

She kneels on the cold, grimy flagstones of her ancestral home. She kneels before Her.

Before the woman who extinguished the light in this castle. Before the woman who swept through these halls like a blood-drenched hurricane, sparing no one. Before the woman at whose hand her family fell—her parents, her siblings, her nieces and nephews. All of them, gone. It was all Her doing.

Her lips are stained with Her blood. The metallic tang, a poison and its only antidote, still lingers on her tongue. The act is finished, the demon within her soothed for now, but the price is this unending ritual of surrender.

With deliberate slowness, she presses her lips to the back of Her hand—a final, lingering touch that feels more like a brand than a kiss. The skin is cool, unnaturally so, a stark contrast to the fire her blood ignites inside the prison of her body.

Finally, she pulls away. Her head lifts, and her amber eyes, clouded with a haze of unwilling desire, meet Her gaze. The demon’s craving has subsided, but its echo has awakened something else, something purely hers. And through that damning veil of arousal, a core of pristine, unyielding hatred still burns, cold and bright. The humiliation of this moment, of needing the very thing she despises most, coils in her stomach like a cold serpent. She is a queen in ruins, kneeling before her conqueror, her lips still tasting the victory she handed over.