When the cages close.
When the wings break.
When even the dragons turn away --hold on.
-Ella the Silvertongued Princess
--
Dove.
The world blurred at the edges when I opened my eyes — colours bleeding into each other like bruises under skin.
The first thing I felt was heat.
Warmth wrapped around me, heavy and thick, a strange kindness after so long in the cold.
My body... it didn't hurt the way it should. Not the way it used to. The pain was there — sharp, terrible — but it was distant now, like thunder beyond the hills.
For a moment, I thought I must be dead.I hoped I was.
Then I saw her.
A woman leaning over me, dark hair slipping loose around her face, a bloody cloth dripping between her fingers. Her hands moved in slow, practiced motions across my ruined skin — wiping away blood, cleaning the places where my body had been peeled apart like old fruit.
I flinched, but my body betrayed me — too weak to even recoil. The touch, even so gentle, sparked something feral inside me. Panic. Shame.
But she didn't notice my eyes were open.And I stayed silent, small and still, letting my gaze drift around the room.
It was warm here — warmer than the dungeons had ever been.The walls were lined with jars and baskets, their scents mingling into a heady, dizzying haze. Above me, high and strange, a ceiling of stained glass arched like the inside of a broken cathedral — its mosaic alive with frozen wings and shimmering beasts.
Dragons, I thought hazily.Dragons circling the sky.
Somewhere, magic still lived.Somewhere, the world hadn't yet died.
Hope flickered, weak and sickly in my chest. Maybe someone had found me. Maybe I was safe.
But the thought hurt worse than the bruises.
Hope was a blade too sharp for broken hands to hold.
The girl finally noticed my eyes and leaned closer, her voice a whisper soft as torn silk:
"You're in the Aviary. I'm tending to your wounds. You've been badly beaten and flayed."
I closed my eyes again.
Aviary.The word stirred something half-remembered.
A place for birds.A place where beautiful things were caged.
I tried to speak, but my throat seized. It felt like I'd swallowed broken glass. My mouth moved uselessly for a moment before the words finally rasped out:
"What is the Aviary?"
There was a pause.A stumble.The girl — Raven, her name flickered across my mind like a dying candle — pressed a cool cloth to my lips, letting me suck weakly at the water until my cracked throat could swallow again.
When she spoke, her voice was raw with pity."A whorehouse."
The word dropped between us like a stone in a still pond, sending ripples through everything I was trying to hold together.
I didn't scream.I didn't weep.
The tears slid silently down my cheeks, traitorous and tender, carving paths through the dried blood.
I thought I'd lost everything already.I thought there was nothing left to take.
But even hope can be stolen, when you're weak enough.Even the dream of dignity.
I closed my eyes tighter and pretended to sleep.It was easier to be nothing.It was easier to be gone.
The room drifted in and out of focus.
At some point, the door creaked open.Footsteps. The heavy thunk of a cane. A voice, sharp and grating, slicing through the air:
"You best not have been sleeping, child."
Raven straightened so quickly I heard the scrape of her chair against the stone."Just stretching, madame. Dove woke earlier and asked where she was, but she's been silent since."
There was a long pause — thick, suspicious.
"Raven."My caregiver's name was spat like a warning.
"She understood enough to ask where she was. She's not slow."
Fear coiled in Raven's voice as she stumbled through her explanation.The heavy footfalls dragged closer.
I forced my eyelids to flutter open.
The woman looming above me was older than I'd expected.Older, but not frail.She was built like the roots of an ancient tree — gnarled and stubborn and cruelly alive.
For a heartbeat, her mask slipped.
She gasped — a sharp, greedy intake of breath — when she saw my eyes.A flash of something I couldn't name flickered across her face before it vanished, shuttered away.
She pressed the back of her knotted hand to my forehead.I flinched again.I couldn't help it.
Her voice dropped into a whisper so soft it barely touched the air:"Rest, princess. You are safe here."
Lie, I thought dully.Another lie to stack atop the others until the whole world collapsed under their weight.
But I was too tired to fight.Too hollow to argue.
So I let myself fall.Deeper, darker, into the cold mercy of sleep.
Because even lies, sometimes, are softer than the truth.
And for now — for now — they were all I had left to hold onto.