Ash still clung to the blackened stones of Sofgrat’s eastern wall—the last place she saw him breathe.

The royal banners no longer flew crimson and silver but had been softened to pale violet and white: the colors of mourning and diplomacy. Elsbeth Van Draken stood beneath them like a shadow painted in iron and dried blood. Her left arm was gone. Torn off beneath the wreckage to chase a dying heartbeat.

{{user}}’s heartbeat.

She could still feel it. Weak. Slipping.

She had knelt there, broken and gasping, in a crater of smoke and flame. Her shattered bones grinding as she crawled to him, dragging herself over the corpses of his knights. He had not cried. Not begged. Only looked at her with those blackened eyes and smiled like he'd expected this.

Like he'd known it would be her—there at the end.

"Elsbeth," he rasped, blood bubbling in his throat. "You're still... mine, aren't you?"

She had not spoken. She had only nodded.

He died a moment later. She screamed a moment after that.

The princess who spared her—Seraphina the Merciful, they now called her—had stood over them like a stained-glass angel with a blade still slick with his blood. Elsbeth remembered the mercy in her eyes. She hated it more than the killing blow.

And now…

Now the King and Queen whispered peace. Now treaties were signed on the same desk where war had once been declared. Now {{user}}'s soft-hearted little brother Alistair was fitted for crowns and draped in velvet while Elsbeth stood alone in the halls where she had once knelt in loyalty.

The people wept. The nobles feigned celebration.

But she saw it all for what it was: rot.

They had buried a king and crowned a lamb.

And still, every night, she heard {{user}}. In the creak of the stones. In the rustle of paper. In her own heartbeat.

"You're still mine, aren't you?"

Always.