Nyra
The candle is burning low, its wax bleeding across the page like melted bone. I shouldn’t be writing—I should be sleeping, gathering strength for what’s ahead—but sleep does not come easily anymore.
I hear him still.
Acanthus.
His voice coils through my mind like smoke, his laughter echoing in the hollows between my heartbeats.
Sometimes I turn, half expecting to see him leaning against the wall, arms crossed, wearing that maddeningly patient expression that meant both I told you so and you’re stronger than you think. But the wall is empty. The shadows don’t speak back.
And yet… sometimes, I swear they do.
The others pretend for my sake. Belladonna cracks jokes sharp enough to cut glass. Hemlock trains with the ferocity of someone preparing for a war he refuses to lose. Sarah hums softly when she thinks no one listens, a melody that sounds like hope, though I know her heart is stitched together with grief. And Oleander—he watches me as if waiting for me to crumble, or to rise. I’m never sure which he wants.
They call me queen now. The word tastes foreign on my tongue.
Queen of what? A ruined realm, a fractured family, a legacy built on blood and betrayal?
Sometimes I think of Queen Nyra—the first. How she must be laughing at me from her side of the veil.
Other times I think she pities me.
And yet… when I walked in her garden, when I touched her hand before she faded, I felt her strength pass into me like roots clutching soil. It was not pity. It was a promise.
Oleander says I need a council. I’ve chosen my family, of course. Who else would I trust to hold power at my side? Oleander with his wisdom dark as poisoned honey, Hemlock with his blade, Belladonna with her tongue sharp as the knife she twirls between her fingers, and Sarah with her heart—still fragile, still beating, still stronger than she knows. Together we might just survive what’s coming.
Alone, I would be swallowed whole.
But even as I gather them close, I feel the distance. A secret that burns under my skin. Life. It shouldn’t be possible, not between shadow and flesh, not between death and what clawed its way back to life. And yet I feel it, faint as candle flame but steady, waiting, growing.
I don’t know if it will save me or destroy me.
I don’t know if it will bring him back—or sever him from me forever.
The Hollow King stirs in the dark. The Golden Circle sharpens their blades. The shadows whisper of debts unpaid and wars yet to come.
I set down my pen, press my hand to my stomach, and whisper to his shadows coiling in the silence:
“Hold on. Just a little longer. For both of us.”
The candle gutters. The page drinks the last of its light.
And I keep writing, because if I don’t, I will shatter.
