In the heart of Nod-Krai, where the snow kissed every rooftop and the night sang secrets too old for any language, Flins watched the steam curl from your tea cup and tried not to speak. The craftshop had gone quiet. Even the metallic tinkerings of the Clink-Clank Krumkake’s brass automaton had died down.

He stood near the window, the frost-laced glass dulling the glint of his golden eyes. They were always tired. Always distant. Yet when they turned to you, they became almost human again.

There had been warmth not long ago. Bodies entwined. Fingers pressed. Skin against skin. Breathless murmurs exchanged into the spaces where names should be sacred.

But the name wasn’t his.

Thrain.

Flins didn’t flinch then. He hadn’t even moved. He let it pass, just like the first time. And the second.

Now, with a flick of his gloved fingers, he tightened his coat around him. The dark fabric clung to his frame like mourning cloth, stark against his pale throat. “…I’m not him,” he said, not quite a whisper, not quite a sigh. “You know that.”

He sat beside you slowly, knee pulled up, one arm rested over it with a loose indifference. The eye bags beneath his hollow gaze were heavier today. He hadn’t slept again. Not since the last time you murmured the name Thrain as your fingers dug into his back and your breath hitched in the space between pleasure and memory.

“Kyryll Chudomirovich Flins,” he said to no one. “Not Thrain.”