Chapter 1: The Next Life After Death.
I opened my eyes to the taste of grave dirt and roses.
Cold stone pressed against my bare back. Above me, obsidian stalactites dripped with silver light, and the air was thick with the scent of myrrh and old blood. My lungs burned as they remembered how to breathe.
A man knelt beside me, black robes pooling like liquid night. His hair was the color of moonlit snow, his eyes twin embers glowing beneath a circlet of human finger-bones. Beautiful. Terrifying.
He cupped my cheek with a hand that should have been ice, but wasn't.
"Welcome back, my bride," he said, voice low enough to rattle the crypt walls. "I have waited two hundred and thirteen years for this moment."
I tried to speak. My throat felt sewn shut with centuries of silence.
He smiled, slow and reverent, and brushed his thumb across my lower lip. "Shh. The binding is still settling. You will remember nothing yet. That is… merciful."
Binding?
I looked down. A circle of crimson runes encircled the slab where I lay. My skin (pale, unfamiliar, perfect) was covered in delicate black sigils that pulsed like living tattoos. They crawled higher with every heartbeat, curling possessively around my collarbones, my throat, the hollow between my breasts.
His sigils. His name, I realized with a lurch. I just didn't know what it was.
He lifted me as if I weighed nothing, cradling me against his chest. The fabric of his robe was velvet and cold iron both. "You are mine now, little star. Death could not keep you. Nothing ever will again."
I should have been screaming.
Instead I buried my face against his neck and inhaled frost and midnight and something heartbreakingly familiar.
The last thing I heard before darkness took me a second time was his whisper against my hair:
"Sleep, my love. When you wake, the world will kneel… and you will
love only me."
Chapter 2: The Name I Was Never Allowed to Speak
When I woke again, I was drowning in silk and starlight.
A canopy of black gauze hung above an enormous bed carved from dragon bone. Thousands of candles floated in mid-air, never dripping, never dying. I sat up slowly. My body felt… wrong. Too light. Too strong. Too alive.
A mirror stood across the room, tall and framed in screaming faces frozen mid-wail.
I walked to it on legs that didn't shake.
The woman staring back was a stranger.
Porcelain skin, raven hair to my waist, eyes the color of fresh blood under moonlight. A diadem of black diamonds rested on my brow. And around my throat, a collar of living shadow that tightened whenever I tried to remember who I had been before.
Behind me, the door opened without a sound.
He stepped inside, carrying a silver tray: a single goblet and a dagger with a blade of smoked glass.
"You're awake," he murmured, pleased. "Good. The binding took beautifully."
I turned. "Who am I?"
His smile faltered for the first time. Something ancient and wounded flickered across his face.
"You are Queen Seraphine of House Nocturne," he said carefully. "My wife. My only equal in ten thousand years."
"That's not what I asked."
The goblet trembled in his hand. Just once.
"Your old name no longer matters," he said, softer. "It belonged to a life that betrayed you. I erased it so the pain could never touch you again."
He set the tray on a table and approached, slow enough that I could have run.
I didn't.
He stopped an inch away. Close enough that I could see the faint cracks in his perfect mask, close enough that the heat of him burned colder than winter.
"Drink," he said, offering the goblet. Dark liquid swirled inside, thick as melted rubies. "It will help the memories settle. You'll stop asking questions that hurt you."
I took it. Our fingers brushed. Lightning shot through every sigil on my skin.
For one heartbeat, a fragment surfaced:
A battlefield. A blade in my back. A man with golden hair screaming my real name as I died.
The goblet slipped from my fingers and shattered.
He caught me before I hit the floor, arms iron bands around my waist.
"Seraphine," he hissed, panic cracking his voice for the first time. "Don't fight it. Please."
I looked up into those burning eyes and felt the collar around my throat tighten like a warning.
"Tell me your name," I whispered.
He hesitated. Just long enough.
"Azrael," he finally said, the word dragged out of him like a confession. "King of the Dead. Your husband… and the one who stole you from the grave."
The candles flared blood-red.
Somewhere far above us, a holy bell began to toll, one I shouldn't have been able to hear from the heart of the underworld.
Azrael's face went very still.
"They found us already," he breathed. "The knight has come for what was never his."
He pressed his lips to my branded throat, gentle and savage all at once.
"Run if you must, little star," he whispered against my skin. "But the dead always find their brides again."
The bedroom door exploded inward in a blaze of sacred light.
And the man standing in the wreckage, sword dripping with holy fire, looked at me like I was the
only thing he had ever wanted to save…
Chapter 3: The Knight Who Still Remembers My Name
The holy fire on his sword painted the shattered doorway gold.
He was taller than memory allowed, armor scorched black in places, white cloak torn to ribbons. A scar now cut through his left eye, silver against sun-bronzed skin. Yet when that single sky-blue eye found me, the world narrowed to the sound of my own dead heart trying to beat again.
"Elara," he said, voice raw, as if the name had been living in his throat for centuries. "Step away from the corpse-king."
Azrael's arms tightened around my waist. Shadows boiled from the floor like ink in water, coiling into phantom wolves that snarled at the intruder.
"Sir Cassian Valmont," Azrael answered, calm as winter midnight. "Still chasing ghosts after two hundred years? How tediously pious."
Cassian's gaze never left me. "I felt the moment you clawed her out of the grave. Every ward in the Sun Temple shattered at once. I rode three nights without sleep because I knew, if I was even one hour late…"
He couldn't finish. The sword trembled in his grip.
I took one involuntary step forward. The living collar around my throat burned like molten iron.
"Don't," Azrael warned softly, lips brushing my ear. "He will fill your head with lies you were never meant to carry again."
But the name, Elara, echoed inside my hollow chest like the first drop of rain on a coffin lid.
Cassian lifted his free hand, palm open. "Look at your wrist, Elara. Look."
I did.
Beneath the crawling black sigils, a faint golden sunburst birthmark glowed, one I had never seen on Queen Seraphine's perfect skin. A birthmark I suddenly remembered kissing under summer stars when we were both still human and mortal and stupidly in love.
Memory slammed into me:
A battlefield at dawn. Cassian on his knees in the mud, begging me not to marry the prince my father had chosen. Me laughing through tears, promising I would run away with him the night after the wedding.
Then pain. A blade between my ribs from behind. Cassian's scream as the world went dark.
I stumbled. Azrael caught me, but for the first time his touch felt like chains instead of salvation.
"You killed me," I whispered. I wasn't sure which one of them I was accusing.
Cassian's face crumpled. "I was too late that day. I have spent every life since trying to be on time."
Azrael's voice turned lethal. "She was dying anyway. Poisoned by her own betrothed. I offered her eternity. You offered her a grave."
The shadows lunged.
Cassian swung his blazing sword in a perfect arc. Where fire met darkness, steam hissed and the candles screamed like tortured souls. The floating lights exploded one by one, raining wax tears.
I found my voice. "Stop!"
Both men froze, immortal predators caught mid-snarl by a mortal command neither expected.
I stepped between them, barefoot on broken glass that should have cut me but didn't. My shadow stretched wrong, too long, splitting into raven wings behind me.
"Someone," I said, voice shaking but steady, "is going to tell me the truth. All of it. Starting with why the Necromancer King murdered the woman he claims to love."
Azrael's ember eyes dimmed. For the first time, he looked almost human.
Cassian sheathed his sword with a metallic cry and dropped to one knee, head bowed. "Because I asked they spare you the pain of knowing what you truly are, my lady. And he… he loved you enough to obey."
The palace shuddered. Far above, in the world of the living, thunder cracked though there were no clouds.
Azrael extended one pale hand toward me. "Come, little star. The past is a graveyard. Let me show you the future I built for us instead."
Cassian did not look up. "Or come with me, Elara. And remember why you once chose the sun."
Between them, the collar around my throat pulsed like a second
heartbeat, waiting for my choice.
I chose neither.
I ran.
Past Cassian's outstretched hand, past Azrael's sudden snarl of betrayal, into corridors that twisted like the veins of some enormous dying beast. The palace rearranged itself around me, doors slamming, staircases spiraling upward into starless skies, downward into screaming voids.
Yet every path spat me out into the same place.
A greenhouse made of bones and crystal, moonlight pouring through panes of frozen screams. Roses grew here, black, thorned, impossibly tall. Their petals dripped crimson that never hit the ground; instead the blood floated upward and became new stars pinned to a false heaven.
Azrael was already waiting, seated on a throne of braided femurs, chin resting on steepled fingers.
"You cannot outrun what you are," he said gently. "Not here. This palace is woven from your soul as much as mine."
Cassian burst through a wall of living ivy seconds later, sword blazing again. "Release her, corpse-king!"
Azrael didn't even glance at him. "Tell me, Cassian, do you know what day it is in the living world?"
Cassian hesitated.
"It is the 13th of Frostfall," Azrael continued. "The exact anniversary of the day she died in your arms. Two hundred years ago tonight."
He rose, robes whispering like funeral shrouds.
"And every year on this night, the veil thins. The roses bleed. And the truth walks free whether we wish it or not."
He snapped his fingers.
The roses turned their heads, every single one, and opened eyes where stamens should be. Thousands of wet, human eyes staring at me.
One blossom near my feet unfurled wider. Inside was a memory playing like a droplet of water turned mirror:
Me, younger, human, laughing in a sunlit garden. Cassian braiding daisies into my hair. A golden circlet on a velvet cushion nearby, my wedding crown for tomorrow's ceremony.
Behind us, hidden in shadow, a tall figure in black watched with raw hunger. Azrael, before he wore the crown of bones. Already in love. Already damned.
Another rose bloomed: the wedding night. Me in white, poisoned wine trembling in my hand. Azrael stepping from the mirror, offering a different cup, one that would bind my soul to his forever if I drank.
I had drunk.
Another: Cassian arriving minutes too late, finding my body cold, Azrael already carrying me into the underworld while I clung to him like a child.
Cassian fell to his knees among the bleeding roses, sword forgotten.
"I begged him," he rasped. "I fell on my sword and begged him to let you rest. He said only if I never told you the truth, that you were never meant to be mortal at all."
Azrael's voice was almost tender. "You were the Goddess of Death, little star. Sealed into a human body by jealous celestial siblings who feared your power. I simply… returned you to your throne."
He stepped closer, boots crushing petals that screamed softly.
"But love is a selfish thing. I could not bear an equal who might one day leave me. So I bound you. Erased you. Made you mine alone."
Cassian looked up, tears carving clean lines through the soot on his face. "And every year I come here on this night to remind him the binding weakens. That one day you will remember everything and choose for yourself."
A thorned vine slithered around my ankle like a bracelet.
I looked at Azrael, at the faint cracks of madness in his perfect mask.
Then at Cassian, mortal and breakable and still bleeding from riding three days to reach me.
The roses began to sing in voices that belonged to every woman who had ever died for love.
I knelt and picked up Cassian's fallen sword. The holy fire did not burn me.
"Both of you," I said, voice no longer trembling, "have stolen pieces of my eternity."
I pressed the blade against my own palm. Black blood welled, thick as starlight.
"Tonight I take them back."
The greenhouse screamed as every rose turned to ash at once.
And somewhere deep inside the palace, something ancient and long asleep opened its true eyes for the first ti
me in two centuries.
To be continued…