The Sixth Princess, Althea, was a half-elf.

To the kingdom, she was their Saint, the Aurex blessed by the gods, the miracle born into human flesh.

She alone could command mana without parchment or sigil, without chalk or coal, without the rituals that bound even the most learned mana. No mediums, no rites, only breath and will. To the eyes of the people, her every step was divine proof, her very being was a blessing.

And truth was sharper than any knight's steel.

Her gift had nothing to do with the king's bloodline, no matter how loudly the priests sang otherwise. It was not Aurex's crown that granted her divinity, it was her mother.

An elf. The forbidden half of her heritage, hidden beneath gold-painted lies.

And in Aurex, elves were not celebrated. They were feared, hated. Branded as 'beasts' and 'curses,' whispered of as if they carried plague in their veins.

The law itself kept them barred from the capital, scattered to the borders and wilderness like vermin. All because of the Consort Incident.

It was a story every child knew, though details blurred with every retelling.

The elven consort, said to bewitch the old king, twisting his judgment until he placed elven voices in the court, lifting them as if they were equals. Some claimed she had poisoned him with magic, others that she bore him a child that nearly toppled the political advantage of the harem.

Whatever the truth, the tale always ended the same... the elves were banished, declared unfit to walk among men.

The whispers never said that she was slaughtered. They only said she disappeared.

The sixth princess had grown beneath that shadow. To the public, she was the pious daughter of the crown, living in the great marble temple gifted by her father, the king, who paraded her miracles as proof of divine favor upon his dynasty. But beneath the cloistered prayers and hymns, the truth suffocated her.

She could never step freely beyond gilded walls. She could never laugh with the people who hailed her as their Saint. For they would see.

The elf in her could never be erased, only hidden.

She had learned, over the years, to change what she could.

To soften the sharp points of her ears until they seemed human enough.

To bleach away the stubborn threads of green creeping through her hair until it gleamed as the temple decreed it should, golden, bright, a halo spun from sunlight.

The priests wove songs around that hair, calling it the crown of purity, a gift to remind the kingdom of the gods' favor.

Her face, too, they shaped in their sermons... youthful, unblemished, clean.

They made her beauty into a mirror of divinity, a living statue of what the faithful longed to see.

Only her eyes she left untouched. Those, she would not change.

They were the one truth her father had given her, the mark of Aurex blood that even the temple dared not scrub away. Rubied, vivid, fierce, they carried both her lineage and her defiance.

And yet, even those the priests spun into holy myth.

"…Red, like the dawn," they preached to the masses. "The hue of the gods' own flame."

So she let them believe.

But in the mirror of her chambers, in the dark between candles, she knew the truth.

That she was no saint, but a creature born between two worlds, belonging to neither.

Her life of luxury, jewelries, silken gowns, halls glimmering with offerings from the faithful, was nothing but a cage. A golden, resplendent cage.

And now, sitting with the tenth prince, the one who had left but came back, witnessing her mana unraveling and her hair betraying its true shade beneath the trembling candlelight, it was as though the bars of that cage rattled because of his words.

"You'll meet her," Keiser said at last, his voice low but steady, "in exchange… put me under a death curse."

The words hung in the chamber like smoke, bitter and heavy. He knew what he was asking was no small matter. A curse like that meant shackling himself to a fate written in mana, tethering his life to a promise of death.

But that was exactly what he wanted.

If he bore the curse, if he could manipulate its terms, then death itself would no longer be a chain, it would be a weapon.

Lenko already carried one such tether, now he would, too.

That was how the world moved, threads pulled taut by hands he could scarcely see. Fate had its patterns, Gideon's design stitched clean through the lives of others.

If those stitches reached Muzio and Lenko, then they would not be left as mere sacrifices in somebody else's tapestry. He would not be the passive knot at the end of a rope.

He thought of what he did not know, the exact shape of the future, the moments hidden behind the next breath and felt the cold logic settle in his chest.

One cannot change what one cannot see, he told himself.

So he would stop pretending ignorance was innocence. If the road had been laid before him, he would set stones of his own along it. He would make choices that mattered, not grant the tapestry the luxury of surprise.

If fate decreed that Muzio and Lenko would die within a week, then let that death be on his terms. Let him be the one to choose the hour and the manner, so that it would not come like a thief and make anything permanent that he had not authorized.

He understood the cruelty of permanence, death, by default, closes doors. But planned, engineered, even when it looked like an end, it could be a proof, a hinge, a way to buy grace.

This was how he would begin.

He would bend inevitability into a transaction. He would take what was meant for them and turn it into currency, a demonstration that fate could be negotiated, coerced, rewired.

First Muzio and Lenko... if he could rewrite their end, or at least alter the terms, then Keiser's, then the dragon's.

Each success would be a stitch pulled back, a thread reclaimed. Each failure would teach him the geometry of the snare.

He pictured the work, not grand gestures but careful measures.

Watching, listening, learning the patterns of those who pulled the strings, mapping the wards and runes that had made the brands on his skin, collecting bargains, favors, and secrets like tools.

He would learn the price of permanence and whether it could be paid in anything but blood.

Whatever the gods, Gideon, or the court had intended, he would insert himself into the mechanism. Fate would find him inconvenient.

If permanence was the law, he would become its exception.

An exception, yes, but one he could only achieve if his plans unfolded exactly as he willed them. Nothing less. The path was narrow, and his grip on it narrower still.

It was not even his own body, but Muzio's.

A vessel he was still adjusting to, a puzzle he had yet to solve.

This body carried mysteries he had not anticipated, not merely the form of the tenth prince, the runaway bastard son of the king, but something deeper, more layered than the boy himself had likely ever realized.

A boy whose reputation trailed him into every hall and whisper.

The sixth princess knew him, well enough to slap him across the face at their first meeting, and then, hours later, to lay her hand upon his wounds and heal. The contradiction of her actions unsettled him.

He was important enough that the first prince, Alaric, allowed his own betrothed, Princess Yona, to risk herself searching for him, even while on a mission in Hinnom.

Important enough that the fourth prince, Gideon, might have reason, political or personal, to see Muzio dead, or to be the hand that had struck him down.

Each of these threads twisted back into the fabric of succession, of power, of the bloody climb to the throne.

If Muzio mattered this much to them, then Keiser would learn how to use that importance.

He would weaponize it, bend it, and feed it into the furnace of his designs.

So he began with the one directly in front of him.

The princess's red eyes locked onto his own. She did not blink, and in that unwavering gaze, the candlelight seemed to falter. Shadows lengthened across her face, but it was not the flame that had changed, it was her.

Her hair shimmered, the golden strands bleeding into green, catching the light like fine emerald threads.

The delicate curve of her ears sharpened into the elegant points.

Her features shifted as though some invisible veil were lifted, soft human grace giving way to angular, unearthly beauty.

For the first time, she was not Saint Althea, the kingdom's beloved miracle worker, the figure sculpted by temple myths and holy sermons.

No, before him stood Althea the half-blood, the woman who had hidden behind a mask of gold-spun lies.

Her hand shot forward before he could move, seizing his with surprising strength.

Keiser's breath caught. The sudden press of her palm against his own stirred a memory he had thought dulled by time.

Fingers curled tightly around the same hand that had once been torn open by a rusted dungeon key.

The skin was smooth now, healed by her mana, but the scars ran deeper than flesh.

They remained etched into him, living reminders, carved proofs that some wounds could never truly vanish, only disguise themselves.

And now, so did she.

"…Don't regret this," she whispered, though her tone was closer to a warning than a plea.

Then the air stirred.

A new vine of light unfurled, weaving around their joined hands like living script.

Golden sigils bloomed into being, etching themselves across their skin, spiraling up his wrist and hers.

The mana pulsed, cold and inexorable, coiling tighter with every heartbeat.

Keiser could feel it. The mark of death, not yet sealed but already binding. His lips curled faintly, almost a smile.

This was it. Another step. Another piece falling into place.

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