Chapter One: The Tower Where Shadows Sleep
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The eastern tower stood like a severed limb at the edge of the imperial palace—cut off, forgotten, rotting quietly beneath the weight of time. Wrapped in ivy and neglect, it rose crookedly above the surrounding grounds, its stones blackened by age and storms long past. Birds did not perch there. The servants never spoke of it. And none of the noble children dared venture close.
It was the place where they buried shame.
Where they buried him.
Killian had lived here for ten years. Six lives' worth of memories pressed into the cracks of these walls. And in all that time, nothing had changed. The wind still howled through the broken shutters like a dirge. The furniture was still warped with mold, the floors creaked with every step, and the cold remained constant—biting, deliberate, as if the tower itself wished he would simply stop waking up.
He stood in the center of his chamber now, barefoot on frostbitten stone, and stared at the room like a ghost returned to haunt it.
Faded tapestries depicting ancient imperial victories hung half-torn on the walls. A single canopy bed leaned crookedly against the far corner, draped in dust-stained silks. There were no guards. No attendants. Only silence—and the things that lurked within it.
They called it "his residence," but the truth was clear.
It was his prison.
In each of his past lives, he had counted the ways the Empire expressed its hatred. But the most honest one was neglect.
He was a prince by blood. Bastard or not, he bore the Emperor's golden eyes—proof of legitimacy that none could deny. But here, in the tower, not even the servants pretended to care. The ones assigned to him came rarely, if at all. When they did, they acted as if they were the masters and he the inconvenience. They moved through the halls with slow disdain, cleaning nothing, cooking worse than nothing, speaking in sneers when they thought he couldn't hear.
And when they were angry—when they drank too much of the wine they were never supposed to have—they beat him.
Small bruises littered his arms and ribs, purple and yellow blooms he remembered from too many lifetimes. One of the senior maids, a squat woman with bristled arms and a perpetual scowl, had broken his fingers once for "talking back."
He had been eight then.
That was in his first life.
He had tried to forgive them.
Tried to earn their kindness.
He had smiled through broken teeth and thanked them for cold bread. Apologized for things he hadn't done. Even wept when they left him hungry for three days during the winter of the Frosting Moon.
It had changed nothing.
But this was no longer his first life.
Now, he remembered everything.
And as he rubbed his bruises in the dim light of the tower's dawn, he smiled.
A slow, chilling thing.
They thought he was weak. That he could be ignored. Forgotten. Kicked like a stray dog until he whimpered into silence.
They were wrong.
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They had tried to kill him too, of course.
Not officially—never so loud, never so crude. No decree of execution, no public sentence. Just the silent rituals of a court that excelled in quiet murders.
In the tower, accidents happened.Often.Repeatedly.
The stairs were slick with oil more often than not. The wooden banisters had splinters in precisely the wrong places. Food arrived cold—or not at all—and when it did, it was often tinged with a bitter aftertaste, too subtle to detect with the tongue alone. He knew. He had learned. Some were herbs. Some were poisons. Some were simply unclean.
Knives were left lying in strange places. Weighted curtain cords draped invitingly near his bed. Shutters that opened during storms. And one night, when he was only eight years old in his first life, a servant boy with a blank face and a tremble in his hands crept into his room and pressed a pillow over his face.
That boy had never walked back out.
But it wasn't just the servants.
Not after the first few years.
Others came.
Men in gray cloaks, smelling of steel and blood. Mercenaries, assassins, shadows with no names. Sent not to make a statement, but to erase an inconvenience. The kind of killers one hires not to start a scandal—but to bury one.
They came at night, always. Because that's when children are weakest.When children sleep.
But Killian no longer slept like a child.
By the second life, it became a habit.
By the third, it was a survival reflex.
By the sixth, he didn't sleep at all.
Not truly.
He taught himself to hover between states, half-dreaming, one eye closed while the other tracked the flicker of candlelight under his door. He could lie still for hours without twitching a muscle, his breathing measured, his ears attuned to every creak and whisper of the tower's bones.
He knew when someone entered the outer hall, before they touched the latch.He could tell the difference between the tread of a drunken maid and the barefoot silence of a killer.He knew when they exhaled, when they blinked, when they began to hope he was asleep.
That was when he moved.
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He was his mother's son.
A dark elf's child, born not just of cursed blood but of shadow. A race crafted for the dusk, molded in silence, perfected in survival.
Dark elves could melt into the darkness—not in metaphor, but in truth.Their bodies aligned with the void, their breath stilled, their presence vanished.The torchlight would pass over them and find nothing.The knife would strike a bed only to find ruffled sheets.
He moved with that instinct now.
Even at ten years old again, reborn in this fragile vessel, his soul remembered how to slip through shadow like it was his second skin. He could crawl the ceiling beams like a spider, listen through stone, see without being seen.
They thought he was helpless.
They thought he would scream.
They thought wrong.
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They sent assassins.
He let them try. Then he let them bleed.
The tower had more bones than people knew. The garden was wild. The earth was soft and deep, good for burying things. Especially those who were never meant to exist in records.
By the sixth life, the attempts slowed—not because they feared him, no.Because they had stopped believing he was worth the effort.
A failed stain. A creature not even worth cleaning up.
That thought—more than any dagger, any poison, any fist—was what made Killian laugh.
Soft. Quiet.
Bitter.
They didn't care if he died anymore.
But they would care when he lived.
And when he began to move.
And when the cracks began to spread.
They would care.
He would make sure of it.
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He stretched slowly, testing the limits of his current body—how much it remembered, how far it could go before he broke something. He would need to be careful. For now.
But not forever.
His mind was already spinning through plans. Not for the court. Not for his brothers. Not for the empire.
No—the servants came first.
The ones who kicked him. Spat in his food. Called him beastspawn.
He would teach them who he really was. No swords. No magic. Not yet. What came next would be slow. Intimate. Something they would never forget.
Lesson one: fear.
He pulled a shirt over his bruised frame and stepped over a cracked floorboard, his bare feet silent on the stone. The morning sun barely reached this part of the palace, but Killian didn't need it. He moved through the darkness like a born thing—like something that belonged.
Down the crumbling steps. Past the crooked iron door. Through the overgrown garden that hadn't been tended in years. He walked in silence until he reached the river.
The water flowed cold and black, twisting between jagged stones like a serpent. Mist hovered over its surface, clinging to the banks like the fingers of the dead.
Killian stripped without ceremony and stepped in.
The cold embraced him, but he did not flinch. Let it bite. Let it sink into his bones.
He was remaking himself.
Piece by piece.
And when he emerged—dripping, breath calm, golden eyes shining in the gloom—he looked less like a child.
And more like the shadow they had always feared.
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