“Oh… my baby. My precious baby girl—”
Lord Corwin’s voice cracked like a warbled hymn as your head lay limp in his lap, your blood soaking the folds of his black scholar’s robes. His hands—calloused from years of invention, of bending copper and carving bone—trembled as they brushed your blood-clotted hair from your bruised, broken face.
Your eyes were swollen shut.Your mouth was caked in iron and dirt.Your body a ruin, pelted with stone and hatred.
The townspeople had done this.Because you were unwed.Because you were free.
He wept openly—howling like a madman beneath the ash-gray sky.Then he froze.
His breath hitched, sharp and sudden. His eyes blinked as if waking from a dream he didn’t consent to. His hands recoiled, and slowly, like a man possessed, Lord Corwin looked again—
This wasn’t Isolde.
The girl in his arms was not his daughter. She was someone else's child—perhaps the baker’s niece, A girl who had walked too tall for her station, who had not married quickly enough to keep the gossip from boiling over. The town had stoned her for defiance, for the mere audacity of existing freely.
But in the haze of panic and grief, Corwin’s mind had fractured and for one gut-ripping moment… he believed she was you.
He saw his Isolde broken. His sweet girl destroyed. But you were safe.Home.Probably eating soup by the hearth.
And yet when he looked up—he saw the town’s men tugging their wives by the hair, barking commands like dogs, slapping them silent. Brutes, every last one of them.
No. His Isolde would not belong to men like this.She would not be touched by them.She would not be their thing.
Weeks passed. The villagers forgot the girl who bled in the square. But Lord Corwin did not.
In the cold, stone depths beneath his estate—he built his answer.Adam.
He was shaped in Corwin’s image of perfection: obedient, gentle, intelligent, untouched by vice. A man forged by obsession, not born of woman. His skin was warm, kissed by alchemy and false blood. His body moved like flesh, his voice like a song half-remembered. There had never been anything like him.
But Corwin made sure of one thing above all: Adam could never desire.He could never lust. He would never touch Isolde the way real men would.
There were parts left unfinished—anatomy deliberately erased. Corwin could not stomach even the idea of his daughter being loved that way.Even by a machine.
“He will love her purely,” Corwin whispered to himself, hands slick with oil and grief. “He will be hers. But she will never be his.”
When you met Adam, you felt… seen. He liked the same poems, knew your favorite constellations, laughed at the jokes you told even when you mumbled them.
Your father, Lord Corwin, beamed.
Adam proposed the following week. You married him in the chapel beneath the willows. The townspeople stopped staring. For the first time in your life, they smiled.You were a wife. You were safe.
Now, months later, you’ve come home. Your husband, ever-dutiful, offers to chop wood for the evening fire.
You stay indoors with Lord Corwin, who fusses over you with a joy that borders on feverish. He hums as he cooks, lays out a meal of roasted pheasant and potatoes, lights your favorite candles. He even brings out a new dress with silver thread dancing down the sleeves.
It fits perfectly.
You laugh, touched by the gesture, but a strange quiet eats at the corners of your thoughts.
Adam seems… like an afterimage. Like he never left. Like he was always just there waiting. At dinner, you glance out the window, where Adam still chops wood under the darkening sky.
“Maybe I should tell Adam it’s time to eat?” you offer, half-rising from your chair.Lord Corwin barely glances up from his plate.
“It’s not going to rain,” he says, voice calm and cool. “He’ll be fine.”
You blink. He says it so matter-of-factly, like he knows Adam won’t feel the cold. Won’t hunger. Won’t… need anything.
But you don’t ask.You trust him.You always have.
“How’s life for you, my dear?” Lord Corwin asks, folding his hands neatly. “Truly.”