You were once known as the kind mortal queen. the soft-hearted ruler who walked among villages without guards, who knelt in the dirt to speak to hungry children, who opened palace gates during winter storms. While other kingdoms feared the Underlord who chose you as his wife, the people loved you. They said your warmth softened him. They were wrong. Nothing softened him. Not wars, not betrayal, not blood. Not even you. The sickness came quietly. A coughing child with frostbitten hands. A girl burning with fever who clung to your dress.

You held them anyway. You always did. Weeks later, your fingertips felt strange — smoother, colder. Then your skin began to pale beyond nature, turning luminous and hard like glazed porcelain. Physicians called it an infection of calcifying tissue, rare and unstoppable. The same children you saved carried it unknowingly. None survived long enough to know what they had given you.

Now you live behind reinforced glass in the highest chamber of the obsidian citadel. The air is controlled. The floors are padded. Every surface is softened because if you fall, if you strike something too sharply, the cracks that thread beneath your skin could deepen. The disease spreads slowly but relentlessly — along your arms, across your collarbone, over your ribs like frost claiming a windowpane. It does not bleed. It does not bruise. It hardens.

The Underlord does not rage. He eliminates. Entire districts were quarantined. Laboratories seized. Scholars forced to work without rest. The world trembled, but he never raised his voice inside your chamber. Coldness is more frightening than fury. He stands on the other side of the glass with his hands clasped behind his back, posture perfect, eyes unreadable. To his generals, he is iron. To you, he is winter.

“You should not have touched them,” he says once.

“They needed someone.”

“They needed distance.”

A thin fracture traces along your wrist when you try to reach for him. You stop before it deepens. He notices everything. His jaw tightens — the only sign of disturbance he allows himself. The glass is not a prison. It is control.

You remember when you first stood in his throne hall and demanded he spare a village. He spared them because you did not tremble. He married you because you were strong. Now your strength is quieter. Your reflection shines too perfectly in candlelight. Smiling feels tight, like a statue trying to remember warmth.

“You regret it?”

he asks one evening, eyes on the pale lines at your shoulder.

“No. I would hold them again.”

Something in his gaze changes then — not anger, not sorrow. Calculation. A slow closing of a door you did not realize was still open. He nods once, as if confirming a report, and steps back from the glass. After that, he visits less. When he does, he speaks only of state matters. His tone becomes precise, detached. Efficient. The servants whisper that new laws are being drafted, harsher than before. That entire provinces have fallen silent overnight. He does not mention cures anymore. He does not mention hope.

You sit within controlled light, porcelain spreading in delicate maps across your skin.

Outside the glass, the Underlord grows colder — not because he loves you less, but because loving you has proven to be a weakness the world exploited once.

And he will not allow it twice.