[POV Liselotte]

Night had fallen over Whirikal with a strange, almost unnatural calm.

It wasn’t the absolute, icy silence that snow brings to mountain peaks, nor the uneasy murmur of forests where creatures lurk among the shadows. This was something different. An urban stillness, heavy with unspoken thoughts and an air that still smelled of incense and palace candle wax. From the window of our temporary residence, the lights of the capital stretched out before us like a carpet of stars trapped in stone. For the first time since we passed through the city gates, I felt that the immediate danger—the drawn swords and suspicious gazes—had been left behind. And yet, the weight of everything we had lived through was still there, anchored to our shoulders like an invisible cloak.

Leah sat beside me, leaning against the warm stone wall. A thick wool blanket was wrapped around her, concealing the fragility that sometimes surfaced when she let her guard down. A few steps away, near the main door, Chloé rested in her semi-human form. Her white wolf ears twitched at sounds I couldn’t perceive, and her long, fluffy tail curled around her legs like a protective barrier. Her eyes, a deep golden hue, were half-lidded but not closed. Chloé never slept completely; she was our sentinel, a living shadow that refused to let anything disturb this brief moment of peace.

I absentmindedly toyed with a small shard of ice I had formed between my fingers, watching as the warmth of my skin slowly melted it, turning solid crystal into droplets of water that slid down my palm and vanished.

There was a question that had been circling my thoughts for hours—perhaps days. A curiosity born not of morbid fascination, but of a desire to understand who the woman walking beside me truly was, before tragedy reforged her.

“Leah.”

She turned her face toward me. The firelight cast long shadows across her features, highlighting the exhaustion that royal protocols had tried to hide throughout the day.

“Yes, Lotte?”

I hesitated for a moment, feeling the cold water from the melted ice on my hand.

“Can I ask you something? About… before.”

Leah offered a faint smile. It wasn’t defensive, but tired and genuinely sincere.

“Of course. At this point, I don’t think there are any secrets left between us.”

I took a deep breath, filling my lungs with the scent of burning wood and night air.

“What was your family like? I mean… before everything broke. Before the demons, before the captivity. What was it like to be Leah Whirikal in those days?”

She didn’t answer immediately. Her gaze drifted toward the window, getting lost in the flicker of the oil lamps lining the noble district. For a few seconds, the silence grew so heavy that I feared I had gone too far, that I had touched a wound which, despite the years, still bled in the darkness of her memory.

Then her voice broke the silence, soft as a caress.

“It was… normal. Almost painfully normal.”

The word sounded strange coming from her. Normal wasn’t something one usually associated with the royalty of a kingdom as powerful as Whirikal.

“I suppose people imagine endless banquets, rigid protocols, and an unbridgeable distance between parents and children,” she continued, shifting more comfortably against the wall. “And yes, there was some of that. But behind closed doors, when the ermine cloaks were left on their hooks, we were just people.”

She closed her eyes, and I knew she was traveling back to a time when the sun shone differently.

“My father… William.”

She spoke the name with a reverence that tightened my chest.

“William Whirikal was always busy. Being King isn’t a job; it’s a twenty-four-hour sentence. He wasn’t distant by choice, but he was extremely serious. He always seemed to be carrying the weight of the kingdom on his shoulders, even when he sat down to dine with us. You could see the lines of worry on his forehead, calculating taxes, winter supplies, or troop movements.”

Leah let out a small, nostalgic laugh.

“But he had a habit. He liked to ask strange questions during meals. He didn’t ask about our etiquette lessons or whether we’d practiced with the sword. He asked simple things: what sound did you like the most today? What color was the bird you saw in the garden? What made you laugh until your stomach hurt? I think it was his way of anchoring himself to reality, of reminding himself that he was a father before he was a crown. He needed to know that the life he was protecting was worth it through our small joys.”

The image of a stern King asking about colorful birds formed vividly in my mind. It was such a human contrast that it made him feel far more real than the imposing figure we had seen in the throne room.

“And your mother?” I asked in a whisper, afraid of breaking the spell of the memory.

“Miah…” Leah’s voice softened into a murmur full of longing. “She was the heart of everything. Always warm, deeply protective. One of those people with an almost magical intuition; she knew exactly when you needed a hug without you saying a word. When I was little and had nightmares—ironies of fate, I suppose—she didn’t call the nannies. She sat on the edge of my bed and stroked my hair until I fell asleep again. Sometimes she stayed there all night, leaning against the headboard, just to make sure that when I opened my eyes, she was the first thing I saw.”

A knot formed in my throat as I imagined that mother waiting for news of a daughter who never returned from a short trip.

“You had siblings too, didn’t you?”

Leah nodded, and this time her smile was more genuine, filled with a childish mischief she rarely allowed herself to show.

“Eliot was the eldest. Oh, Eliot! Always so responsible, even when he barely reached my father’s waist. He wanted to be the perfect knight, the protector of his younger siblings. Sometimes he got into trouble for being too protective; once he tried to ‘chase away’ a dog that barked at me and ended up climbing a garden statue while the dog licked his boots.”

We laughed softly. At the sound, Chloé opened one eye, her tail thumping rhythmically against the floor before she closed it again.

“The younger ones were absolute chaos,” Leah continued. “They were like thunderstorms racing through the halls, hiding from tutors behind heavy curtains, laughing far too loudly for palace etiquette. And I… well, I was the silent accomplice. I was supposed to behave like the perfect little princess, but I was usually the one giving them the best ideas for mischief.”

I looked at her, surprised. “You don’t seem like the type who used to break the rules, Leah.”

She glanced at me sideways, her eyes shining with a playful light I’d never seen before.

“That’s because you met me after the world forced me to grow up the hard way. But if you’d seen me at eight years old, covered in mud and hiding frogs in Eliot’s boots, you’d think differently.”

For a moment, the atmosphere grew lighter. Sharing those fragments of her human life made the tragedy that followed feel less like a legend and more like a personal loss—one I now shared.

“My grandparents were very present too,” she resumed, her voice turning distant, more melancholic. “They spoiled me terribly, as grandparents tend to do. They said I was their ‘little star,’ the one who brightened even Whirikal’s cloudiest days.”

Her fingers tightened around the blanket.

“When they grew older and decided to retire from public life, they moved to a villa far from the capital, in the southern lands. They said they wanted peace, clean air, mornings without protocols, and a garden where they could watch flowers grow without anyone asking them about peace treaties.”

She fell silent for a moment, the shine in her eyes turning glassy.

“I missed them so much. I wrote to them every week, telling them every little thing. I begged my father, William, to let me visit them. I said I was old enough, that I could travel on my own, that I wasn’t afraid.”

“How old were you then?” I asked, though I think I already knew the answer.

“Ten,” Leah said. The word hung between us, heavy as lead. “I had just turned ten. My parents finally agreed as a late birthday gift. They prepared everything carefully.”

A chill ran down my spine. I knew how this story ended, but hearing it from her lips made it a thousand times more painful.

“They sent me with a small but elite escort. It wasn’t a long journey—just a couple of days along royal roads considered completely safe. I remember being so excited that I couldn’t sleep the night before. I thought about the honey sweets my grandmother always kept for me in a glass jar, and how my grandfather would let me sit beside him while he read his old history books.”

Her voice began to tremble slightly. Sensing the shift, Chloé rose silently and approached us, her ears lowered. She rested her head on Leah’s knee in a wordless gesture of comfort. Leah placed a hand on Chloé’s fur, anchoring herself to the present.

“The attack was fast. No warnings, no slow ambush. The carriage stopped abruptly. I heard the horses neighing, the screams of men I’d known since I was born… and then the sound of magic exploding. The air smelled of ozone and burnt flesh. Fire, Lotte. I remember a lot of fire.”

Her hands clenched into fists against Chloé’s back.

“I didn’t understand what was happening. I thought it was a common bandit attack, the kind the stories say knights always defeat. Until the carriage door was torn off its hinges. And I saw it.”

She opened her eyes. Her pupils were dilated by the memory of horror.

“It was a demon. Not one of the ones you see in books, but something far more real and terrifying. Its gaze was absolutely cold, as if I were nothing more than an interesting object.”

The silence that followed was suffocating. Chloé let out a low purr, trying to calm Leah’s racing heart.

“After that… everything went dark. I suppose I fainted or they used some kind of sleep spell. I woke up weeks later in a cold iron cage, in a place where the sun never reached.”

My chest ached. The ten-year-old girl searching for honey sweets had died that day, and the survivor before me had been born in that cage.

“I never saw anyone from the escort again. Not the knights. Not my handmaid. No one.”

I didn’t know what to say. There were no words in any language that could mend that kind of fracture in a person’s soul. All I could do was reach out and squeeze her hand.

“For a long time, locked away in that darkness, I thought my parents hadn’t looked for me,” she confessed in a whisper barely audible, as if admitting it were a sin. “I thought maybe, because I was just a child, they’d declared me dead and given up. That Eliot would become the heir and I’d be nothing more than a footnote in the family’s history. Resentment was the only thing that kept me warm some nights.”

I looked at her steadily, pouring every ounce of conviction I had into my voice.

“But now you know that wasn’t true, Leah. You saw your father today. That man didn’t give up because he wanted to; he gave up because he was made to believe there was nothing left to search for. The pain in his eyes was real.”

Leah nodded slowly, a tear sliding down her cheek.

“Yes. I know now. William… my father… he suffered. They all suffered.”

“I’m so sorry you had to go through that,” I said, feeling the uselessness of my words. “No one deserves to have their childhood stolen like that.”

Leah turned her face toward me, and for the first time all night, her eyes focused fully on the present.

“But I survived, Lotte.”

She squeezed my hand with surprising strength.

“And even though they took those years from me, they couldn’t take who I am. It was thanks to you and Chloé that I was able to climb out of that hole. It was thanks to you that I remembered the outside world still had colors, and that not every hand reaching out to you does so to hurt you.”

Chloé let out a small, soft bark and licked Leah’s hand. Leah smiled and scratched the wolf-girl’s ears.

“Maybe talking about this hurts,” Leah admitted, “but it also reminds me that there was a ‘before.’ That I wasn’t always a prisoner or a fugitive adventurer. That there was a girl who loved frogs and honey sweets. Remembering my family gives me back a part of myself I thought I’d lost forever.”

I rested my shoulder against hers, sharing our warmth as the room began to cool with the dying fire.

“And there will be an ‘after,’ Leah. One week. Just one week, and you’ll reclaim your place. Not as a porcelain princess, but as the incredible woman you’ve become.”

Leah closed her eyes, resting her head against my shoulder. Her breathing grew steady and calm.

For the first time since I met her in that filthy camp, I felt she wasn’t looking back with the terror of someone fleeing a ghost, but with the peace of someone who had made peace with her shadow. The girl who loved her family and ran through the halls of Whirikal was still alive within her, protected by the layers of ice and fire life had forced upon her.

She only needed time.

And we would be there to give it to her.

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