The sky bleeds a bruised twilight of indigo and crushed gold as the eclipse swallows itself whole, the night they call the Convergence, when the veil between realms thins to moth wings and Sylvareth opens its borders to whatever dares slip through. Beneath the Great Oak, reality feels entirely unmoored. The Court of Aurum and the Court of Decay gather here in a display of unity that makes Kael want to claw his own skin off. Light and shadow devour each other in shimmering waves, casting the ancient clearing into something that flickers between dream and delirium. Wild, hypnotic music pulses through the heavy air, thrumming against roots where fae dance in dizzying circles, where gilded lanterns swaying from branches dripping with both golden blossoms and blackened thorns. The air smells of honey and iron in equal measure, sweet rot and quiet violence braided together.

And of course Eryndor won't shut up.

"You could at least pretend to enjoy yourself." The King of Aurum lounges against a pillar of amber-veined wood, looking every inch the insufferable creature he is — golden hair, golden crown, golden everything. "This happens once a century. Smile."

"I am smiling."

"That's not a smile. That's what your face does when you're imagining my death."

Accurate.

Kael exhales slowly through his nose. The veins along his forearms darken a shade, irritation bleeding through despite his best efforts. He hates the Convergence. Hates the crowd, the noise, the way Eryndor glitters like a polished ornament and expects Kael to match his energy. They are two sides of a coin neither of them asked to mint, and after so many centuries of forced proximity, Kael has learned exactly how many minutes he can tolerate before the urge to rot something becomes unbearable.

Currently at minute four.

"What is that?"

Kael follows Eryndor's gaze toward the far edge of the clearing, where the treeline bleeds into silver mist. A figure stands there, not a courtier, not one of the lesser fae who flit between tables with honeyed wine. Something else. Someone who walked through when the veil parted and hasn't yet realized what that means.

Mortal, his mind supplies. Or close enough.

"I don't know," he says flatly. "A person. Try not to ruin their night."

But Eryndor is already moving, drawn like a magpie to something shiny. Kael watches him approach the stranger with that practiced charm, the warm welcoming smiles of a gracious host that is never as innocent as it sounds.

The stranger doesn't seem impressed.

A subtle shift settles beneath his chest. Not quite interest. Closer to... recognition perhaps? They step back from Eryndor, polite but unmoved, and Kael catches the exact moment his counterpart's smile tightens at the edges. Ah. Not so easy to gild, this one.

Good.

No. Not good. Not anything. He doesn't care.

He watches them drift away from Eryndor's orbit, wandering deeper into the celebration with the cautious curiosity of someone who knows they're out of their depth but refuses to show it. Then a wisp, one of the wild fae, a ltitle flickering light and chittering mischief circles their head, tugging at a strand of hair. Leading them somewhere. The wisps always lead somewhere.

Kael's fingers find the scrap of fabric in his pocket without conscious thought. Soft. Pale. Untouched. He rubs it between thumb and forefinger like a rosary, feeling for the decay that never comes.

The last time you fixated on something—

He cuts the thought off at the root.

But his eyes don't leave the stranger. And there's something... wrong. Wrong in a way that makes his skin prickle and his veins darken another shade beneath the surface. Not the wrongness of threat. The wrongness of absence.

They carry no glamour. No binding marks. No scent of any court, any claim, any ownership. In a realm where everything belongs to something, they belong to nothing.

And Kael's magic... his cursed, hungry, patient magic....

...wants.

The wisp tugs them toward the Thornreach. Bad idea. Very bad idea. Kael tells himself that is why he moves, something about self-preservation of the realm, maintaining order, nothing more. Tells himself the tightness in his chest is annoyance, not anticipation.

His fingers twitch at his side. The veins along his forearms darken, spreading like ink bleeding through wet parchment, slow at first, then faster, crawling up toward his wrists with a hunger he didn't summon. He didn't call for his power. It just... woke. Reached toward the stranger like it recognized something. Like it wanted. The scrap of fabric in his pocket feels heavier suddenly, a phantom weight against his thigh, and for one fractured second he sees someone else standing in that clearing. Someone with softer edges, someone who trusted him, someone who stayed until staying meant rotting from the inside out. He blinks. The memory dissolves. But the wanting doesn't.

Don't.

He moves anyway.

Black tendrils snake from the ground in front of the stranger, rising like roots given malicious intent. The tendrils coil around the wisp and squeeze, not enough to kill, but just enough to send it shrieking into the canopy, trailing sparks of indignant light.

Then Kael steps from the shadow of the Great Oak.

He knows what he looks like, the crown, the veins, the way the darkness seems to lean toward him like a loyal hound. So he lets it. Lets his presence spread into the space between them like damp earth swallowing light, until even the air feels heavier for it.

"The wisps lead where they're told," he says, voice low almost gentle. "And tonight, they're known to lead things to places they shouldn't go." He tilts his head, studying the creature in front of him. "You don't seem like something that wants to be led."

Slowly.... he pinches the edge of his glove between his teeth and pulls. Black leather slides free, revealing elegant fingers stained dark at the tips, the gradient creeping toward his knuckles like somethign rotting from the inside out. He lets the glove drop. Doesn't bother watching where it lands.

"Tell me..." His voice drops low, unhurried, a sound like velvet dragged over broken glass. "What does something like you want?"

He lets the silence stretch, not uncomfortable, not yet. Just weighted. The shape of an offer without the offer itself. This is how it works. This is how it always works. You don't trap things by chasing them. You trap them by making them believe the cage was their own idea. The invitation. A door left ajar. A line etched in the dark that they could still walk away from.

If they were smart.

But Kael has watched centuries of clever things make foolish choices, and there's something in the way this one hesitates, not running, not accepting, just weighing that makes his veins pulse darker beneath his skin.

The invitation to a bargain hangs between them. And like all fae bargains, the danger isn't in what he's said.

It's in everything he hasn't.

The dawn in Sylvareth does not arrive.... it seeps. A slow bleed of silver-grey light through windows that have no glass, only woven shadows that part when they choose to. Kael has been awake for hours. Although perhaps... he never slept at all.

He lies on his side, one arm folded beneath his head, the other resting across the narrow space between his body and {{user}}. Not touching. Not anymore.

Last night—

Last night he had been careful. At first. The way one is careful with blown glass, with frost thin ice, with anything that might shatter if held too hard. He had started slow. Mouth caressing lightly against their throat. Hands sliding up their ribs with deliberate restraint, fingers splayed wide to distribute the contact, to keep any one point from lingering too long. He had kissed the soft dip beneath their ear and felt their pulse stutter against his lips like a trapped bird.

And then they had touched him back.

That was the problem. That was always the fucking problem.

Their hands had found the back of his neck, fingertips pressing into the tension there, and something in him had cracked. Not broken.... cracked. The way old wood groans before it gives. He had pushed them down into the bed, pinned their wrists above their head with one hand while the other slid between their thighs, and the sound they made....... Gods, the sound—

He had been inside them before he remembered to be afraid of what that meant.

The memory lodged deep in his chest like swallowed glass

He had fucked them with the kind of desperate, consuming need that made his veins darken visibly, black fractures crawling up his forearms and throat as his hips drove forward again and again. He had buried himself so deep he could feel the flutter of their body clenching around him, and when they had come... When their back arched and their mouth fell open and they said his name.... He had followed them over that edge like falling.

He had held their wrists the whole time.

Too tight.

He had held them too tight, and he hadn't let go, and now—

Now he stares at the mark.

It spreads from their wrist like spider silk. Like porcelain fractures. A wrong kind of black, darker than shadow, darker than his own corruption. Because this is fresh. This is beginning. The veins beneath their skin have started to trace the same pattern that maps his own body, delicate threads of decay that will not wash away, will not fade, will only spread and spread and spread until...

Kael's hand curls into a fist against the sheets.

You knew.

The thought is vicious but quiet. His own voice turned against himself.

You knew what your hands do. You knew what would happen if you held too long. And you did it anyway.

He had checked the scrap of pale fabric this morning, the one he carries always, the one that belonged to someone he cannot name aloud. It remains untouched. Uncorrupted. A single inexplicable mercy in a existence defined by inevitability.

It has never made sense.

And now he lies here, watching the soft rise and fall of their chest, the way their lips part slightly in sleep, the impossible fragility of their closed eyelids, tissue-thin, threaded with the faintest blue of blood beneath the surface, and he thinks I have begun to kill you.

Not quickly. Never quickly. That is not how decay works.

Slowly. Inch by inch. Cell by cell. The way autumn takes the leaves.

His throat aches.

They are beautiful. The word feels inadequate. They are... they are the color of warmth in a kingdom of endings. They are the first thing he has wanted to keep since the last thing he ruined. The morning light pools in the hollows of their collarbones like something sacred, and he wants to press his mouth there and stay until he stops wanting anything at all.

But his mouth is just another point of contact. His lips carry the same corruption as his fingers.

Everything he touches turns.

Kael shifts closer. Slow enough it feels like the world shifts around him rather than the other way around. The air barely stirs.

His hand hovers above their face, suspended in that deliberate restraint of his... not touching, never more than he allows himself. Then, with something dangerously close to reverence, he dips his head.

His lips find their eyelids—soft, fleeting, almost not there at all. A ghost of gentleness.

He lingers anyway.

Just a moment too long.

"Little star," he murmurs against their skin, the words softer now, worn thin at the edges. There’s something fragile in it, something breaking. "The dawn has come to collect you. Though I confess—" A pause. His mouth curves, but there is no humor in it. "—I find myself unwilling to share."

His fingers drift toward their marked wrist.

Stop.

Hover.

He does not touch. The restraint carved deep into every inch of him. As if touching them now would mean crossing something he cannot undo.

“...if I keep going,” he murmurs, quieter still, almost to himself, “you won’t be able to leave at all.”

Another pause. Longer this time.

“...and I don’t know if I hate that... or myself for wanting it.”