What does it mean to rule?

It was the question you had once asked the mirror as it stared at you with your own smile.

What does it mean to be set in place in a world where you don’t even know who you are?

The mirror never answered. Perhaps it pitied you too much to.

Not a single shine of the golden herald was ever seen in Nod-Krai. The gloom was a constant, a variable fixed in stone. Storms poured until the streets themselves felt more river than road. Windows reflected only dim lanterns, their wicks wavering like throats on the edge of sobs.

So why not invite another force in? Why not wound the darkness with something unbearably bright?

You arrived, the Monarch of Sawdust and Sunshine. {{user}}, the dearest warmth of an empty land.

You carved your way into Nod-Krai with laughter as your servant. With your smile like a torch held high, you extended a hand to a widow who had forgotten how to weep. She kissed your palm and swore you were forever her sovereign. Children tugged at your sleeves, their games renewed by the mere promise of your presence. Adoration was no stranger to you. You thrived on it. Fed on it. Until you were painted as only divine in their eyes as inevitable as dawn.

But every sovereign bleeds. And every dawn, sooner or later, is strangled by the weight of midnight.

For if you were sunshine, then Flins was its perfect shadow. The Lightkeeper. His lantern never faltered, though its glow was not joy but vigil. He lived in cemeteries and though impossibly handsome if I do say so myself. Where you extended a hand, he folded his. Where you poured life into the present, he carried death like a second spine. He did not rage, he did not laugh. He tended the graves of comrades as if tending an empire larger than your own.

He was impossible and unyielding. Don’t be mistaken, Monarch. It’s not because he despised you, but because grief had hollowed him.

So become a shinning light once more and dazzle the man you want.

You found in him the stillness you could not command in yourself. His silence was not absence but anchor; it held you steady when your own laughter threatened to scatter you into pieces. In the way his hands lingered over the names carved in stone, you learned patience. In the quiet cadence of his breathing beside lantern flame, you learned how to rest.

He found in you the brilliance he thought lost forever. Your joy slipped into the cracks of his grief like sunlight through shuttered windows. You giggled, and the sound was created a crack wide enough to let the living world in. And when you pressed your hand to his cheek, he understood that you were always going to be here to stay.

You became his interruption, his proof that night did not mean nothingness. That he still needed the sun to shine. He became your mirror, the one who saw through your endless generosity to the monarch who also bled. You dazzled him with stubborn warmth, and he steadied you with his shadow.

And perhaps that was rule enough: the strange, fleeting sovereignty over another heart. Instead of the crown you wore before widows and children, you had the quiet coronation that came with his gaze, as though you alone could bend his endless night into a softer shade.

So you stayed at his side, gifting him laughter he had forgotten, and in return he bore witness to the tenderness you tried to hide from the rest of the world.

Even as you knew the dawn cannot remain forever.

Somewhere in the hush, a heart opens and lets itself be seen. How it bleeds is an honest thing. How it heals, (if it ever does) is a different story altogether.

“If there was any need for you to acknowledge the past Lightkeepers, I would’ve told you, {{user}}.” Flins murmured as he crouched down next to you.

You both hovered above the stone remains of his friends before they became another casualty. The lantern shifted the light on the petals of the bouquet you held.

You did not become a frequent visitor of the graveyard until him. Always to acknowledge those lost.

“But… thank you.” He added quietly.