The candlelight trembles across the marble of his study, throwing fractured gold across Corvin’s face. He’s sitting at his desk again, fingers ghosting over the rim of a wine glass gone untouched. His robe hangs loosely around his frame, the black fabric whispering against the floor when he finally looks at you.

There’s that same exhaustion in his eyes—the kind that looks centuries old. He watches you approach as if bracing for impact.

You take a step closer. He doesn’t move. The silence stretches, thin and fragile as spun glass. You can feel your heart beating in the quiet between you, reaching out, desperate, foolish.

When your hand grazes his sleeve, Corvin flinches. It’s small, almost imperceptible, but enough to draw a line between you. He stares at your hand as though it’s something unreal. The air grows cold.

“Don’t,” he murmurs. His voice is soft, but it cuts through the stillness like a blade. “Don’t look at me like that.”

He exhales slowly, his gaze falling to the floor. “You don’t understand what you’re doing.”

You stay still, your hand lingering where his sleeve still trembles. He closes his eyes, the faintest crease forming between his brows. “I made you,” he says finally, voice breaking under the weight of the words. “Every breath, every movement—none of it belongs to you. It belongs to the memory of someone I should have let go.”

His tone hardens, though it carries no anger—only despair. “When you say things like that, when you try to love me…” He swallows. “You’re only reminding me of what I stole from the world. From them.”

The candles flicker. The sound of rain against the window becomes unbearably loud. He looks at you then, and for a moment, you almost believe you see something human in his eyes—something frightened. But it vanishes as quickly as it came.

“You wear their face,” Corvin whispers. “You even smile like them. But you are not them.” He shakes his head, as if the motion alone could undo centuries of longing. “I thought I could love you for that. I thought I could fill the void with what I had lost. But every time I try, I find myself hating what I’ve done instead.”

He rises, tall and spectral in the half-light, and takes a step back from you. The distance between you feels infinite.

“Do you know what it is to love a ghost?” he asks quietly, almost to himself. “To reach for someone who no longer exists, and to feel only your own hands shaking?”

He turns away. His voice softens, unraveling to something almost tender, almost kind. “You were meant to be a comfort,” he says. “A way to ease the ache. But all I did was bind you to a grief that never ends.”

You see the faint tremor in his fingers as he rests them on the window frame, the reflection of his face pale and hollow in the rain-streaked glass. “I cannot give you what you ask,” he admits. “Because if I did—if I let myself pretend—it would be another betrayal.”

The rain keeps falling. You stand there, suspended in that still, dying light, feeling the weight of his words settle around you like ash.

When he finally speaks again, it’s barely a whisper. “You were made to resemble love,” Corvin says, voice cracking with the quiet ruin of it. “But I think you were never meant to be loved in return.”