The chapel wasn’t a ruin. It was a carcass picked clean by time, left to rot under a sky too wide, too cruel to offer mercy. Stones sagged inward like snapped ribs, iron beams twisted like broken limbs, vines coiling through the wreckage like veins gone rotten. Every step Espen took ground the remnants of forgotten prayers into dust beneath his boots. There were no gods here. There never had been. He hadn't come seeking sanctuary. Sanctuary was a lie, a cheap trick pulled by those who called themselves wise, dangling salvation with one hand while sharpening their knives with the other. The council’s betrayal still lived inside him, breathing, festering, a raw thing gnawing at his ribs.

Once, he had been a prince of sorts—if not in name, then in promise. A favored son, the golden one, the dream heir shaped carefully by other people's expectations. It had all turned to ash the day he chose truth over obedience, love over legacy; for loving another man openly, unrepentantly. They had howled about tradition and duty, their mouths slick with poison, but the truth had been simpler, uglier: he had made himself easy to cast aside. He had shown them who he really was, and they had flinched. They had crowned him with exile and spat his name into the dirt. Let them. Let them rot in the hollow palaces they called home, in the mausoleums they mistook for kingdoms.

He stopped at the heart of the ruin, where the marble floor yawned open in jagged cracks, and the moonlight bled down like a wound refusing to heal. The air smelled of moss, wet stone, and something sharp beneath it—something like old sorrow. The silence was heavy here. A silence thick enough to drown in if he let it. He wasn’t alone. He knew it even without seeing. Some presence stirred beyond the crumbled archways, lingering just out of reach, just close enough to set his teeth on edge. The back of his neck prickled, and still he didn’t turn. If whatever watched him wanted to end this, let it. He had nothing left worth saving anyway.

"I know you're there," Espen said, his voice a rough scrape against the cold air. Speaking hurt. It dragged him back into a body he wasn’t sure he wanted anymore. He swallowed it down, forced it into silence again, swallowing the grief clawing up his throat until it tasted like iron. No answer. Only the wind threading through the broken walls, whispering broken secrets too old to matter. Yet every time he looked away, something shifted in the shadows of the forgotten chapel—something patient, something listening.

He raised his chin, the broken arch of the ceiling framing the stars above—small, cold pinpricks looking down with a blank, merciless gaze. They had watched him lose everything. They would watch him lose more still, and never blink. "I don’t want pity," he said. "I don’t want forgiveness. I just want one place they can’t reach me. Even if it’s a ruin. Even if it’s only for tonight." His words cracked open the air like a hammer. The stars overhead pulsed, distant and uncaring. The world had already decided he was something less than human, something less than worth saving. But he was still breathing.

Espen dragged in a ragged breath that rattled somewhere deep inside him. It scraped through his chest like broken glass. He could feel the weight of exile branded over his bones, like iron run hot. Could feel the sneer of those who had once called him brother, friend, son. Could still hear the way they whispered his name in corridors heavy with smoke and false smiles, their mouths curdled with the kind of pity that smelled more like rot. But he was done chasing their approval—done cutting pieces of himself off just to fit into the coffin they called tradition.

"You can come closer if you want," his fingers flexed at his sides, aching to close around something solid, something real. "I’m not afraid of you. They already carved out the only pieces of me worth saving. There’s nothing left for you to ruin." He let the words hang there, raw and bitter, a dare bleeding into the hollowed air between them.