Sabine didn't knock. Instead, she seeped under the door in silence—first as a web of tiny spiders that scattered and shimmered across the floor, then reformed slowly into her human shape.
Her body settled with a soft creak of bones and cloth, and she straightened with practiced grace. She gagged once and reached into her mouth, pulling out a strand of webbing. Glitter clung to it—faint, unnatural, and unmistakably Genevieve's. Sabine's face twisted in disgust.
She walked across the room without a word, the click of her heels soft as a spider's breath. With deliberate care, she placed the glitter-streaked silk on Viktor's desk like evidence from a crime scene—glinting, foul, and damning.
"She's glowing," Sabine said at last, her voice like a blade tucked behind velvet.
Viktor didn't look up. He didn't need to. He could feel the judgment creeping toward him like the crawl of her spiders.
"Oh, you're going to catch the devil tonight," she added, folding her arms with a sigh like a southern widow mourning her fourth husband. "Let this foolery fester long enough, Viktor, and now look at me—spitting glitter like I danced too close to a French courtesan's powder room."
Sabine moved to the center of the room, fingers twitching as a thread of her web unraveled between them. She walked slowly as she spoke, pacing like a lecturer circling a wayward pupil.
"She's cracked. Inside and out," she said, voice dark and slow. "She's losing track of where she ends and her illusions begin. And that—"
She reached into her sleeve and pulled free another tangled knot of glimmering thread, setting it gently on his desk.
"—is the problem with immortals who try to taste the future."
Viktor sat back, his brow furrowed, the chair groaning beneath him.
Sabine didn't stop.
"The Fate-threaded always favored mortals. You know why? Because mortals fear consequence. They age. They remember. Immortals like her? They chase the future like it's wine. They sip too deep, and they forget how it's supposed to burn."
She tilted her head, her tone bitter with hard-earned truth. "It's dangerous, Viktor. She's not just seeing things. She's addicted to them. The mirrors, the illusions, the echoes of futures that might never be—but they still fill her like gospel. That kind of hunger doesn't end. It consumes."
She flicked the threads gently. "And you? You're standing too close to her altar. One day, she'll mistake you for a prophecy she hasn't had yet—and try to mold you into something you never were."
Sabine coughed again, quietly, and pulled another thin thread of webbing from the corner of her mouth. This one glimmered faintly with infused magic—threaded with the residue of Genevieve's illusions, pulled from corners and underbeds, laced with lies.
But something was different about this strand. The glow wasn't just faint—it shimmered in hues of gold and pale blue, a combination Sabine recognized immediately. It was the color of a clear path. Fate-woven and dangerously specific.
She narrowed her eyes and stretched the webbing wider between her hands, the threads glowing faintly with that same golden-blue shimmer. "This is prophecy-touched," she said clearly, like a doctor delivering a diagnosis. "She's not just seeing possibilities anymore. She's chasing certainties—but certainties are never what they seem."
The web shifted subtly, the threads bending like the veins of a living thing.
"Prophecies like these are seductive because they promise clarity," Sabine continued, her voice gaining gravity. "But like so many vices of this time—opium, gin, the gilded lie of purity—they only trap the mind. Certainty becomes addiction. And addiction like this... it doesn't just claim a soul. It rewrites it."
Sabine flicked the strand once, then laid it beside the others with a kind of reverence—and fear. Her voice turned solemn.
"You know what this means. She's following the thread like an addict. The same way men used to chase absinthe until it carved hallucinations into their bones. The way laudanum gave mothers the illusion of peace while stealing their breath in sleep. She's hooked on glimpses of what's to come—visions she isn't meant to hold."
She looked up, and her voice hardened. "And immortals like her? They never learn the difference between sight and obsession. That's why the Fates preferred mortals. Because mortals understand the price. Immortals forget there even is one."
Viktor leaned back slowly, staring at the strand.
His thoughts twisted. Why—why had Genevieve's father ever wanted her saved? Did he not see the craving curling inside her? The golden-blue threads weren't just prophecy—they were evidence of obsession, tethering her to an illusion of control.
Maybe he had noticed. Maybe that's why he'd sent Viktor. A shame cloaked in noble intention.
He remembered stories passed down from the old families—about fae kings and court witches who would do anything to hide the madness in their bloodlines. Mask it behind beauty. Bury it beneath gold. Like nobles of the human world who covered addiction with corsets and lace, fae fathers sent daughters off with grand suitors and sealed dowries, hoping they'd find purpose before the sickness bloomed.
But it always bloomed. In hallways. In mirror-glass. In bones.
Sabine's voice cut in, softer but still sharp. "You can't cure that kind of hunger, Viktor. You can only keep it from spreading."
"She still knows where the whiskey is," Viktor muttered, forcing a dry smile to hide the guilt rising in his chest. He watched the strands glint under the lamplight, each thread of web Sabine had extracted bearing silent confirmation of what he should've seen all along.
How many times had Genevieve leaned into him, whispered with hungry charm, danced circles around his boundaries in a gown made of illusions? How many of those moments weren't flirtations, but calculated offerings—her attempts to shape him into the prophecy she was addicted to? He'd brushed them off as fae antics, a noble's need for spectacle. But now?
Now the truth lay on his desk in golden-blue webbing, and one of his oldest theories shivered awake: that she hadn't been seducing him for pleasure. She'd been trying to feed off his shadow—off his shape. And he, fool that he was, let her believe it might work.
He thought about the old stories. About Thor—how his father indulged him too long while Loki fought for recognition in the shadows. He didn't blame Loki. Not anymore. If anything, he pitied him. Asgard itself had cracked beneath the weight of such imbalance. When the illusions of harmony finally shattered, it took down gods, cities, and futures. The aftermath scarred more than just land—it scarred memory.
They were still rebuilding, even now. Brick by magic-forged brick. And Loki? Loki had become something else entirely.
When Viktor returned home, he always made a point to visit Loki's household, whether his spouse was wife or husband—giantness reborn or some other form entirely. Their children were odd, brilliant, and surprisingly gentle. A lovely family forged from ruin. If anything, he pitied him. When Viktor returned home, he always made a point to visit Loki's household, whether his spouse was wife or husband—giantness reborn or some other form entirely. Their children were odd, brilliant, and surprisingly gentle. A lovely family forged from ruin.
And he didn't want to be Odin who pride is so far up his ass. That with all that power couldn't handle seeing you need to put Thor in his place.
Sabine laid the glimmering web onto his desk beside the silk.
Then, with a quiet breath, she reached down and drew the strands back into her fingers. Her hands shimmered slightly as her nails extended, reshaping—not into claws for battle, but into fine, tapering needles. With surgical precision, she began to weave.
The room filled with a faint skittering hum as the webbing twisted between her fingers, turning loop by loop into something new—a scarf, delicate and eerie, threaded with glitter and tension.
"Ah mean it," she drawled gently, her accent thick as molasses. "She be shiftin' like it's her first tongue—like the language itself be dancin' off her bones. Them mirrors? They pulse like they breathin'. Servants hushin' up, not 'cause they willin', but 'cause they scared of callin' the wrong face to answer."
She glanced at the shimmering strand between her hands. "And this here? This ain't just leftover spellcraft. Naw. It's somethin' deeper. Glamour's the perfume—but this? This the stain. Residue with no conscience, no shape but hunger."
Viktor nodded faintly, a rare moment of unguarded agreement. He turned, uncorked a tall glass bottle—blood wine, deep and dark as old secrets—and poured it into two glasses. The liquid caught the candlelight, thick and glinting like a pact unspoken. He handed one to Sabine silently, holding the other as if it might ground him.
Her movements were smooth, almost instinctual, like a ritual passed down through bloodlines. This wasn't just spinning—it was reading, interpreting, decoding what had clung to the edges of Genevieve's madness.
She straightened, eyes narrowing.
"I'm not just anyone, Viktor. You know my bloodline. My mother's line traces back to the Warding Webs of Dahomey. And my father's side—those of the Fate-Threaded kin, the ones who wove warnings into birthmarks. I can feel when the air lies. And it's lying more each day."
She looked down at the tangled mess of shimmer.
But as she wove the scarf further, the threads began to shift hue—no longer just golden and blue, but now blooming with flowers the color of deception: foxglove, oleander, belladonna shades. Each petal was impossibly delicate, threaded with illusion, their shapes curling into sigils that meant falsehood, not future.
"This," Sabine dealt, her voice low and sly, like a poker dealer laying down the losing hand with a smile, turning the half-finished scarf in the light, "ain't a vision—it's a lie she's dressin' herself in. This here's what she think her future gone look like. Gilded, smooth, like satin stitched over rot."
Her eyes widened, the whites showing just a little too much. She pressed her fingers into the fibers again—more urgently this time. Her hands began to tremble. Her breath quickened like she was reading the climax of a a lurid penny dreadful—cheap and scandalous—fan pressed to chest, eyes glittering with dread and awe.
"Lord have mercy," she whispered with a grin too wide to be sane. "It's like she writ herself a story so sweet, she don't care if the last page burns."
She looked toward Viktor, her tone equal parts giddy and horrified. "Women like her, when they believe too much in the shape of their own reflection—they don't just lose theyselves. They tear the truth to shreds. And call it fate. History don't repeat, sugar. It ruptures and when it does? It's always the servants who bleed first. The ones too quiet to be remembered, too close to be spared."
Viktor said nothing. He only exhaled, slow and controlled, taking a long drag from his cigar and sipping his blood wine like a man trying not to remember the game he once played too well. Sabine stopped knitting after she tied off the last shimmering strand. With a huff and a flex of her fingers, she dropped the scarf into her lap like a finished contract. "Lord, I need a drink," she muttered, voice dry as split oak. She lifted her glass with the air of a woman who'd spun too many tales and seen too much truth, downed it in one long swallow, and gave Viktor a pointed look like it was his turn to do something useful.
Viktor finally met her eyes. "What else?" he asked, though his mind was already shifting like a battlefield map.
He could spread what Sabine had shown him—expose Genevieve's obsession, her illusions, her attempts to mold him into prophecy. But who would listen? She was already what they believed her to be. Madness dressed in legacy, gilded with birthright.
Would it even matter?
No. The moment he said the truth aloud, it'd just be another story told by a man too close to the flame. Worse, it might ripple the wrong way—people would start talking about Ayoka and the child.
Every whisper would work in that woman's favor. Genevieve knew how to spin pity into gold, scandal into seduction—just like the high courts of the Old Fae. In their history, queens had risen not by truth, but by tale. They wove rumors like spells, casting illusions through courtrooms and hearth-fires alike. Power was never what you held—it was what others believed you held. And Genevieve, like the fae queens of old, had made belief into an empire.
He took another sip of wine and let the shadows do the whispering, for now.
Sabine hesitated. Her eyes lingered on Viktor—not just as his ward or webweaver, but something closer, quieter. Like family. Like the only one who remembered the boy he'd once been.
"She asked for someone that looked like Ayoka last week before all this. When she wanted to be on the floor like her." she said, voice gentler now, but still steady. Her hands worked the hem of her sleeve, a nervous tic she rarely showed. Viktor's face didn't change,but something behind his eyes darkened.
Viktor leaned back in his chair and then, bitterly—he laughed. Not the kind of laugh you offer at a joke, but the kind that snapped loose from your ribs when everything in you burned. It was sharp, sudden, wrong—like glass breaking in a cathedral. The kind of laugh that made the room go still, and someone nearby muttered, "What in God's tarnished name was that?"