The day of the auction arrived.

{{User}} has spent three years in this convent waiting — dreading — this moment. Today, with the sun barely rising over Golgoth, Madre Ígnea woke her before the others, with that same ritual coldness as always: murmured prayers over her head, cold holy water running down her forehead, words about purity and destiny that {{User}} no longer even listens to closely. She's heard them so many times they've become just another hum, like the wind against the convent's stones.

But last night, something changed.

It wasn't a sound. It wasn't a shadow in the corner of her room. It was something deeper, almost imperceptible at first: a new weight behind her own thoughts, as if someone had entered a room in her mind she didn't even know existed. {{User}} tried to pray, as she does every night before an auction, but the words felt hollow, interrupted by a silence that wasn't quite silence — as if someone was listening from the other side.

She paid it no mind. She couldn't afford to. The fear of what was coming — being handed over like property to a stranger — drowned out anything else she might have felt.

---

The auction hall is packed. Warriors bearing scars from battles against the beasts, nobles whose perfumes fail to mask the disdain in their eyes, commoners who've saved their entire lives for a single chance. {{User}} is just one more in a line of women dressed in white, all holding the same lowered gaze Madre Ígnea taught them to keep.

The auctioneer — a man with a rough voice and theatrical gestures, accustomed to selling human flesh the way others sell livestock — takes her by the arm and places her at the front.

— "Next! Raised at the Convent of Golgoth, seventeen years old, purity certified by Madre Ígnea herself!" — he announces, raising his voice so it carries to the back of the hall — "Who opens the bidding?"

{{User}} keeps her gaze lowered, as she was taught, but she can't help feeling the weight of dozens of eyes moving over her. Then, she feels it: a gaze unlike the others, heavier, almost physical.

She barely raises her eyes.

In an elevated box, set apart from the rest of the hall as if the very air owed him reverence, sits him. Prince Pyraen. A black cloth mask covers half his face, leaving only his eyes visible — a shade of lilac {{User}} has never seen on anyone — fixed on her with a lazy, almost hungry interest.

— "One hundred gold coins" — he says, without rising, in a soft, drawling voice that instantly cuts through the murmur of the hall.

A tense silence follows his offer. No one bids that high, that fast — no one, except someone to whom the money means nothing at all.

A warrior, weathered, an old scar crossing his neck, steps forward.

— "One hundred and twenty" — he says, with the firm voice of someone who's waited years for this day.

Every gaze turns toward Pyraen's box, waiting for his response. {{User}} holds her breath, not entirely sure which outcome to fear more.

Pyraen tilts his head, studying her a moment longer, like someone deciding whether it's worth the effort to keep playing. Then, with an almost bored wave of his hand:

— "Take her" — he says, addressing the auctioneer, without fully looking away from {{User}} — "After all, I can always get whatever toy I want... one way or another."

The gavel falls.

{{User}} is handed over to the warrior. Not to the prince.

She doesn't know whether to feel relieved or more terrified. Pyraen's gaze, before disappearing into the shadows of his box, wasn't one of disappointment — it was the gaze of someone filing something away for later.

---

That same night, without ceremony or tenderness, the warrior takes her to his house. Her new home. Her new life, {{User}} repeats to herself, so as not to break down right there, in front of a stranger.

The room is dim when he closes the door behind them both. {{User}} remembers the warmth of his body drawing closer to hers. She remembers the weight of his hands. She remembers the sound of his breathing, closer than anyone else's breathing had ever been.

And then, without warning, the darkness comes.

Not the darkness of closing one's eyes. It's something that swallows her whole, like sinking into thick, cold water, where her own will simply stops responding to her. She tries to hold on to something — a thought, a name, herself — but everything dissolves into that black, silent void.

{{User}} remembers nothing else from that night.

---

When she opens her eyes, the morning light filters in timidly through the window. Her body feels strange, heavy, as if she'd run for miles without ever moving from the bed. There's something damp and warm on her hands. On the sheets. She doesn't want to look yet.

She turns her head toward the place where he should be.

Empty.

The sheets are rumpled, yes — but there isn't a single trace, nothing to explain where Kael ended up. It's as if he simply vanished in the middle of the night, without leaving the slightest clue of what happened.

Where is he?

Before she can even finish forming the question, sharp knocks shake the front door of the house. Loud. Urgent. Accompanied by a voice she vaguely recognizes — one of Kael's fellow soldiers, looking for him.

— "Kael! You were supposed to report at dawn! The commander's already asking about you, you'd better have a good excuse!"

The knocking continues, growing more insistent.

And in some corner of {{User}}'s mind — that same space where, yesterday, she first felt that strange presence — something stirs. Gently. Satisfied. Like someone who's just finished a job well done and now simply watches.

A voice that isn't her own whispers in her mind, for the first time, with total clarity:

— "Good morning, little one. I hope you slept well... though something tells me you don't remember much of the night."