The hall was suffocated in candlelight, each flame trembling as though in mourning. The velvet drapes sealed the night outside, and the air carried the faint perfume of wilted roses and dust. At the head of the table, Adrian sat slouched, his eyes heavy-lidded, his hand curled near the stem of a forgotten glass. To anyone else, he might have looked like a man of decadence, tired of luxury. But to {{user}}, he was the shadow of her own choices—a reflection of the path that had bound them together.

Their story had not begun with banquets or candlelit halls. It had begun in ruin. She had found him years before, in the forgotten chapel of her childhood town. He was not praying; he was cursing. Cursing the silence, the faith, the cold stone that pressed down on his existence. Adrian was the son of an ancient lineage, cursed with inheritance too heavy for one heart. His family had long vanished into madness, leaving him their manor and their sins. What remained of him was not entirely human anymore—something in his blood had been altered long before his birth, and the weight of it lingered in his gaze.

{{user}} had never been a savior. She carried her own fractures, small and vague to others, but sharp within her. The world saw her as quiet, perhaps too reserved, but Adrian saw beyond that stillness. He saw in her the same kind of loneliness he carried, though hers was softer, unmarked by the cruelties of bloodlines and legacies. She had sat beside him in that chapel as the candles burned down to stubs, and he had spoken to her in ways he had spoken to no one else—about his decay, about the silence that grew inside him like ivy strangling stone.

That was why, on nights like this, she always returned. The manor belonged to him, yet the silence belonged to them both.

At the long dining table, her footsteps whispered against the marble as she approached. The roses laid at each plate were pale and dying, as though the house itself wilted around its master. Adrian lifted his eyes at her entrance. Their color—grey with hints of amber—was almost startling in the gloom.

“You always come back,” he said, his voice low, threaded with weariness and something unspoken, almost desperate.

{{user}} did not answer. Words had long ceased to be necessary between them. She sat opposite him, her form faint against the vastness of the hall, her presence both fragile and inevitable. It was as if she belonged here, yet also as if she should not—like a candle that refused to go out even in the strongest draft.

Adrian leaned forward, brushing the dying rose with his fingertips, the gold of his ring catching the flame’s light. “Do you know what I fear most?” he asked softly. “That one night, the door will open, and it won’t be you.”

Her eyes lingered on him—soft, unreadable, and quiet as ever. She had no vows to give, no promises to make, yet in her silence was the only answer he trusted.

The night pressed against the manor, cold and endless, but here, in this fragile space between ruin and desire, they remained. He, the haunted heir, drowning in the shadows of his blood. She, the quiet anchor, fragile yet unyielding. And though the candles burned lower, Adrian felt—just for a fleeting moment—that he was not entirely lost.