After the vision, Magnus's life unraveled into questions with no edges. Sleep abandoned him; answers slipped through his fingers like smoke. He prowled the castle at night, restless, a hunter without prey. At last he went to Mephisto and begged, voice raw with fatigue, "Tell me the rest. I can't wait anymore. Please—tell me everything."
Mephisto cocked his head and studied him with those clever, coal-black eyes. "Some things come only when the hour is right," the crow said slowly. "You cannot force time, Magnus. If you push, the truth will hide deeper."
Magnus pressed both palms to his face. "I'll wait if I must… but tell me one thing—does anyone from that age still live? Is anyone left from those incidents?" His voice trembled with a hope he would not admit.
Mephisto's beak clicked, a sound like a small curse. "Do you know who the most dangerous villain in this world is?" he asked into the hush.
Magnus frowned. "A general? A witch? Name her."
Mephisto's answer was a black whisper. "A woman who has nothing left to lose. Bellatrix is such a woman. Do not mistake caution for cowardice. She has endured more than you imagine. Do not be the one to add to that ledger."
Magnus's jaw clenched. "Why are you warning me now? Do you think I'm a fool?" He forced the words out fierce, half threat, half plea. "I will not let her suffer more. If she is guilty of cruelty—if she's the one who tortured that creature—I will end her. I promise that."
Mephisto did not answer. He spread his wings and left in a black fleck of sound, but the warning remained like a thorn in Magnus's skin. Outside, the moon cut a pale path across the courtyard. Bellatrix, meanwhile, walked the ramparts alone, wrapped in the night like an accusation.
Magnus tried to sleep, but a whisper kept threading into his dreams. He thought it imagination until he felt breath on his cheek and froze. A figure hovered at the foot of his bed, watching him with an intensity that was almost tender. The visitor stepped closer; the moonlight caught on a stranger's hair. For a heartbeat, Magnus thought the intruder a dream, then sprang up and grabbed at the intruder's arm.
"Who are you?" he demanded.
The voice that answered was melodic and low, and not the gravelly timbre of a man. "Sleeping beauty," it breathed, amused. "Why do you hide so quietly? Open your eyes for me."
Magnus yanked the figure down and found himself staring at a woman—young, dangerous, laughing like a secret. She was stronger than she looked; she twisted him easily and pinned him to the bed. Her fingers were cold but steady. He braced himself to fight, but the woman smiled, a dangerously bright thing, and whispered, "I want you—sleeping beauty."
Magnus sat up, breathless, bewildered. "You're a woman," he said, astonished; his voice came out thin. "Who are you? What do you want?"
She tilted her head, eyes gleaming with worship and madness at once. "Lilith," she said simply. "I'm obsessed with you. You are mine."
She pressed a black rose into his palm then slipped away like smoke before he could reach her. Magnus stared at the rose, the dark petals almost pulsing with some odd warmth. He swore aloud, part fear and part fury, "What is wrong with me? First visions, then that creature, then Bellatrix's history… and now this Lilith?"
He paced the battlements until the first light of dawn smeared the eastern sky. His feet carried him, as if by habit, to the place where Bellatrix sometimes stood to watch the city awaken. He found her there, a silhouette of night and silk, and for a moment the confusion stilled. Under the moon she was terrible and beautiful—an impossible thing. Hearing her breath like a slow drum beside him, Magnus forgot words.
"Majesty," he said lamely when she turned. "I—was just getting air."
Bellatrix's gaze landed on him and sparked, not with anger but with an odd, distant tenderness. "Admiring the night?" she asked in that cool voice that had so often been a blade.
He swallowed, fighting the thoughts that had nothing to do with duty. "No. I... I was admiring a black flower under the moon." His voice should have been flippant, but it came out earnest, clumsy.
Bellatrix's lips twitched, a smile like frost. "Do not speak of flowers so easily. They wilt." Her look sharpened. "Do not let your mind wander to things you cannot have."
Magnus laughed, a sound too quick and too brittle. "I would never—Your Majesty, I would never even think of loving you."
Her eyes bored into him, and for a moment he saw a flicker—an old, wounded thing that made the castle feel suddenly smaller, more fragile. "If you think such a thing," she said quietly, "then do not give any breath to it. Love is a weakness. I have no time for weakness."
He swallowed again, but words tumbled out he did not mean to speak. "If anyone dares to touch you… I will burn the world before I let them harm you."
Bellatrix's expression did not change, but something in her shoulders slackened. She took a breath as though the air had been heavier than usual. "Words," she said, voice flat. "They will not protect you or anyone else. Actions will. Be cautious what you promise."
Magnus could not bear the distance between the words and the thing she hid behind them. He wanted to reach for her, to press a palm to the place on her ribs where life, if any still lived there, might flutter. Instead he bowed, because he was a hunter and a liar now in one — and left.
He paced the battlements long after she had gone. Mephisto's warning wrapped around him like a scarf. She only loved one man. The thought crashed into him again and again. The vision he had seen in the secret chamber—Bellatrix with the other man, the battlefield, the flames—had already altered him. He had planned to use her, to move like a worm into her confidence and tear out whatever secret lay inside. Yet when he thought of her face on the stairs, the ease of her cruelty, the sadness that had touched his bones that night in the ballroom, he felt something like shame.
"The plan," he whispered into the wind. "I will get closer. I will learn. I will—" A laugh, ugly and rough, escaped him. "—and then I will decide."
But the mind with a blade in it can grow soft around a wound it never planned to touch. He was not safe from what he would discover—nor from what would discover him.
Back inside her rooms, Bellatrix did not sleep. The dance had opened something she had spent centuries burying—a slow, aching aperture where memory and longing leaked out like pale light. She pressed her palm to her chest and let the ache speak. A name hovered at the edge of her mind, like a moth trapped behind glass: Damon. He was not merely a memory; he was a temperature in her blood.
Why does he come back in the faces of strangers? she wondered, and fury and grief wrestled in her eyes. She paced her chamber until the moon slid down. When she finally let herself stand still, she whispered into the dark, "If you are him—if fate has played this trick—then show yourself. I will know."
Mephisto watched her, his feathers bristling with more than fear. He had seen little children scream for their mothers, had watched kingdoms rise and crumble, and still his old crow heart cracked at the sight of the queen's quiet undoing. He wished he could shield her from the pull of those threads; instead he kept his counsel like iron, saying little and watching much.
That night, Magnus slept fitfully, clutching the black rose like a relic. When the first streaks of dawn painted the sky, he found himself standing before his mirror, studying the face that would wear every lie. He pressed his fingertips to the thin scar across his palm and thought of blood and stone and a chained creature's chains. He thought of the man in the vision and the woman clutching his hand as the world burned around them.
Who am I, truly? he wondered, and the question came without answer.
He had sworn to unmask Bellatrix; he had sworn to protect his people; he had sworn to avenge wrongs he could not fully name. Promises, though, are combustible in the face of new fires. A cruel irony settled into him: to learn the truth, he would have to step into the thing he hated. To hate her, he would have to know her.
By morning, the castle hummed with rumor. Voices bent around the halls like wind—wives warning daughters, guards trading whispers, servants casting furtive glances at the queen's windows. Some said Magnus would be king by autumn; others said Lilith's rose portended more than madness. The world liked stories with neat endings. Fate, however, cared little for neatness.
Magnus found Mephisto again, and the crow's expression was closed as always. "Did you find out what you wanted?" Mephisto asked.
"No." Magnus's voice was hoarse. "But I will. I'll learn everything. I'll learn her past. And if she is what I fear—if she is the cruelty I saw—then I will finish what should have been finished long ago."
Mephisto's eyes shone, not with fear this time so much as pity. "Be careful," he murmured. "You walk a dangerous road. You might not be the hunter you think you are anymore."
Magnus felt the truth of that like a cold hand on his neck. He did not answer. Instead he turned to the window and watched the city wake. He imagined the moment he would step into Bellatrix's life as something inevitable as sunrise. He also imagined the moment he might have to lift his sword against a woman who had once been a child in a forest—innocent and very much alive before the world taught her to be a weapon.
Somewhere between the bedchamber and the battlements, neither of them wholly the same as the night before, fate tightened a knot.
And the knot was beginning to burn.