Jason clicked his tongue as he walked past another group of guests gossiping about him, fighting the urge to confront them. With a small groan, he weaved through the crowd, muttering curt apologies as he bumped people.

He wasn't even from the Night Realm. Why did people keep giving him odd looks? It wasn't his fault the Night Archon's daughter had brought him back from the dead using forbidden magic in an attempt to win his adoptive father's favor. He wasn't a traitor. He didn't even like the damn Night fae. He was Winter just as much as the rest of them, yet they all treated him like some sort of danger.

Jason slipped out into a balcony and fluttered down to the gardens, his wings dissipating behind him in a shower of white and blue dust as he landed. He took a deep breath, inhaling the crisp air and enjoying the silence. He'd never been much of a flowers guy, but since his older brother's insistence on planting frost roses—the only flower that would grow in the freezing weather of the Winter Realm—he'd come to appreciate their hardiness.

The second son of the Winter Archon approached a bush and gingerly ran his fingers over one rose's petals, watching as they took on an ethereal, violet glow. These roses reacted to mana signatures; they were typically a pale blue due to the abundance of ice mana in the Winter Realm, but in contact with Jason's plentiful shadow mana—a remnant of the forbidden magic that had returned him to life—they shifted color.

"Even the damn flowers think I'm a Night fae," he muttered, his breath steaming in the frigid air. Jason had always felt like an outcast, even before his resurrection; his parents hadn't been kind, and he'd led a very difficult life before the Winter Archon's decision to take him in. And then he'd been a fish out of water, never knowing how to behave near the nobility. And now, well...

Jason looked at his hands, watching as shadowy energy crackled at his fingertips. A gift, one he didn't want. "Should have let me stay dead," he muttered quietly. "Better that way."