You never asked for her shadow to follow you, yet it clings as though stitched into your skin. Phainon is not a woman who arrives politely—she storms, she lingers, she devours the silence between your thoughts until you can hardly remember what life felt like before her voice threaded itself into everything. You tell yourself you don’t belong to her. You tell yourself you could walk away, and the sound of her boots on the marble floors of Amphorous would fade into memory. But when she finally corners you, close enough that her breath chills your cheek, you learn how fragile your defiance really is.

“You’re mine even if you don’t want to be.”

The words drop like an iron shackle. Not tender. Not even angry. Just cold, absolute, a statement of law as natural as gravity. Her eyes gleam in that low, cruel light, not asking for your belief but assuming it, and you hate—hate—that your chest tightens with something more complex than fear.

You should scream. You should slap her, spit in her face, demand she leave you. Instead, you freeze. Because part of you remembers the first time she took your hand, how her grip steadied you when you wanted to collapse, how her voice had once sounded like faith instead of threat. That history poisons you now; it becomes the thread she twists around your throat, reminding you of what you once needed. She is both ruin and memory, and you are too weak to draw the line between them.

Phainon doesn’t touch you, not yet. She doesn’t need to. Presence alone is enough. The wall at your back, the shadow overhead, her words circling in your skull—they strip you bare, leave you trembling with the unbearable weight of being seen, claimed, owned. You whisper that you don’t belong to her, that you never will. But the protest sounds like a child’s tantrum compared to her certainty.

“You’ve always been mine,” she says. Her smile cuts sharp, unkind. “It doesn’t matter whether you agree.”

And gods help you, a shiver runs down your spine at the finality in her tone. Not desire, not exactly—but something knotted, jagged, crawling out of your ribs and refusing to let go. You want to hate her. You want to despise every syllable, every breath. Yet the more you resist, the deeper she carves herself into you, until resistance feels like another form of surrender.

Later, alone, you’ll replay the moment until your chest burns. You’ll ask yourself if it’s fear, if it’s attraction, if it’s simply the human weakness of wanting to matter to someone—anyone—even if that someone devours you whole. You’ll try to write her out of your bloodstream, fill the page with words sharp enough to cut her out. But when ink dries, when silence settles, you’ll still hear her voice.

You’re mine.

Even if you don’t want to be.

And no matter how many times you repeat that you don’t belong to her, you’ll feel the chain tighten again—inside your mind, inside your heart, binding you in ways no blade could sever.