The Red Keep sleeps beneath a sullen moon. Its halls breathe the scent of wax and iron, and the torches burn low, throwing long shapes across the stone. You walk with your hands clasped before you, the silence around you so thick it feels almost sacred. Once, guards trailed you on every step. Tonight there are none.

It was Aerion’s command.

He had spoken of it at supper, his voice quiet, almost tender. “You will walk alone from now on,” he said. “No guards. No steel but mine. There is no need for strangers to hover about my sister.” His smile had been a thin thing, sharp and gleaming, like the edge of a coin.

Now, as you move through the dim corridors, you feel the truth of it. The emptiness follows like a ghost. The keep, which once hummed with familiar steps, now seems foreign, altered by the absence of others.

He waits for you at the end of the passage, half-shadowed in the torchlight. His hair gleams pale as frost, his eyes alive with that strange, consuming fire that seems to belong to no mortal man. You stop before him, and the air feels thinner, as though even the castle knows to hold its breath.

“You look afraid,” he says softly. “Do you not trust your brother?”