DaoistMApKyt

The dead should stay dead.

Kael Arvid repeated the words like a prayer as he adjusted the raven mask over his scarred face. The carved beak pressed cold against the bridge of his nose, the eyeholes narrowing his vision to slits of flickering torchlight. Beneath him, the ballroom of House Dain shimmered—a grotesque painting of gold and rot. Nobles laughed behind ivory masks, their gloved hands clutching goblets of wine dark as clotting blood. The air reeked of clove and something fouler beneath, like meat left too long in the sun.

He hadn't come for wine.

The dagger at his belt was hungry. It had waited seven years for this night. Seven years since House Dain's soldiers kicked in the door of his family's cottage. Seven years since he'd watched from the treeline as the flames turned his sister's screams to smoke. Seven years of imagining this moment—the moment he'd slide steel between Lord Dain's ribs and whisper his family's names as the light

The Hollow Masquerade

Eleanor felt it first in her bones—a loosening, like vines uncurling from around her ribs. The blood from her palm dripped onto the waiting roots below, each drop hissing as it struck the soil. The ground drank it in, not with hunger, but with something like recognition.

Mira swayed beside her, the pearl in her hand pulsing with soft light. The skeletal children had gone still, their hollow eyes fixed on the rose blooming from the crow's ruined chest. Even the first gardener had lowered its shear-hands, the thorns of its body gone slack.

The rose petals trembled, then fell away one by one, revealing what had been hidden at its heart all along—not teeth, not bones, but a single, perfect seed. It glowed faintly in Mira's cupped palms, warm as a living thing.

The crow's remains crumbled to dust, its feathers dissolving into the wind. The chapel walls sighed and settled, the teeth in their frames finally falling silent. The first gardener took one step back, then another, its form unraveling into the earth like ink in water.

Eleanor sank to her knees, the bark peeling from her skin in long strips, taking the pain with it. Mira crouched beside her, pressing their foreheads together as the garden whispered around them—no longer in Emily's voice, but in hundreds of others, lighter now, unburdened.

The children's bones softened into soil.

And the seed in Mira's hands sprouted, a single green shoot unfurling toward the sun.

Somewhere, deep in the earth, something that had been waiting for a very long time finally let go.

Chapter 36: The Letting Go