Steward studied the girl quietly, sensing the trouble that weighed heavily upon her. When she had first been introduced to him, he had wondered why a human girl so naive to the world would ever be brought to Valentine Castle. It was a place where the broken gathered, those who were unaccepted, discarded, or simply creatures that were never meant to exist under the same sky as humans.
And yet, here she was.
An existence so purely white that it was almost blinding.
How could something so bright not draw the darkness toward it? Those who lived in the dark were accustomed to surrounding themselves with others just as shattered, calling themselves the broken, the forsaken, the ones who would never again see the light. They learned to take comfort in their shadows, to rot quietly together.
But when a light appeared, so vivid and so unbearably bright, how could they not be drawn to it?
