The air itself trembled as Valeria the First stepped forward.
Her bare feet left scorch marks on the library's warped floorboards, each step sending ripples of golden light through the cracked stone. The remnants of the false Sleeper hissed and recoiled, shadows dissolving like mist under morning sun.
Seraphina's breath caught in her throat. Up close, the first queen was both beautiful and terrible—her face carved from living light, her starlit hair moving as if underwater, her crown of thorns dripping liquid gold where the points pierced her brow. And her eyes—they held the weight of centuries, the fury of betrayal, the sorrow of a mother forced to watch her children devour themselves.
"You." Valeria's voice was soft, but it carried the force of a landslide. She reached out, her fingers brushing Seraphina's branded forehead. "You remember."
The touch burned. Not with pain, but with knowing.
Seraphina saw it all—
The first binding, not as a myth, but as it truly happened: Valeria standing before her people, Kaelan's blade pressed to her chest, her last words not a spell, but a lullaby to the heart she would bury beneath the throne.
The lie that followed. The way the royal line had twisted her sacrifice into something darker, hungrier.
The moment the castle woke up and started wanting more.
Valeria's hand fell away. "They made me a monster," she whispered. "Made my love a feast."
Then she turned her sun-bright gaze on the writhing darkness that had been the false Sleeper.
"No more."
The library became a battleground of light and void.
Valeria moved like a storm given form. Where she stepped, the fleshy walls of the castle recoiled, black veins shrivelling. She seized the remnants of the false Sleeper—the last clinging shadows—in her bare hands and tore.
The creature shrieked, its form unravelling like rotten thread. "You cannot destroy me!" it howled, its voice fracturing into a hundred dying whispers. "I am the hunger in your bones! The greed in your blood!"
Valeria's answer was to plunge her hand into its core.
For a heartbeat, nothing happened.
Then—
Light.
Pure, scorching, cleansing light erupted from the creature's chest, searing through every shadow, every lie, every drop of corrupted magic that had festered in the castle's stones. The false Sleeper came apart like ash in the wind, its final scream cut short as Valeria clenched her fist and snuffed it out.
Silence.
Then a groan—deep, shuddering, alive—as the castle itself convulsed. The fleshy walls spasmed, the black veins bursting like overripe fruit. The floor beneath them buckled, stone grinding against stone as the ancient foundations protested.
Kaelan's light—now fully unleashed from his human shell—swirled in the chaos, a brilliant comet streaking toward Valeria. She caught him effortlessly, her fingers closing around his radiant form.
"Little star," she murmured, her voice suddenly tender. "You kept your promise."
Then she pressed him into her chest.
The explosion of light sent Seraphina crashing back against the ruined bookshelves. When her vision cleared, Valeria stood transformed—her starlit hair now streaked with molten gold, her eyes blazing with familiar fire.
Kaelan's fire.
He was gone.
But his purpose remained.
Lysandra wasn't moving.
Seraphina crawled to her sister's side, her hands shaking as she turned her over. Lysandra's skin was corpse-pale, her lips tinged blue, but—
A breath.
Faint. Shallow.
But there.
Valeria loomed over them, her new light casting long shadows. "She is empty," she said quietly. "The thing fed on her will first."
Seraphina clutched Lysandra closer. "Can you save her?"
The first queen tilted her head, considering. "I can give her a choice." She knelt, her golden-crowned brow furrowing. "But you must choose too, last queen."
Her burning hand pressed to Seraphina's chest, right over her pounding heart.
"The throne or the truth?"
"The crown or the end?"
Outside the shattered windows, dawn broke—not golden, but red, painting them all in the colour of fresh blood.
"I saw… her. The one who came before you. The one who hungered first."
Lysandra's voice was a blade scraping bone. Seraphina tightened her grip on her sister, but Valeria went rigid, her molten-gold eyes widening.
"Impossible," the first queen whispered. "She was erased. We erased her."
The castle gave another shudder, and a crack split the ceiling, raining dust like funeral ash. Somewhere deep in the fortress, stone screamed as it collapsed.
Seraphina's pulse roared in her ears. The throne or the truth. The words coiled around her ribs, a serpent of fire and ice.
She had spent her life clawing for power, believing it would fill the hollow thing inside her. But now, with Lysandra half-dead in her arms and Valeria's light flickering like a dying star, she understood:
The throne was a mouth. And it was always hungry.
"I choose the truth," Seraphina said, the words tearing free like a vow.
Valeria exhaled—a sound like a sword leaving its sheath. "Then you must remember what the crown does not want you to know."
She pressed her palm to Seraphina's forehead.
FLASHBACK: THE FIRST BETRAYAL
A woman knelt in a chamber older than kingdoms, her hair the colour of a blood moon. Not Valeria—another. Older. Wilder. The true first queen.
"They will call me a monster," she murmured, stroking the throne's jagged teeth. "But I am only what they made me."
Then she slit her own throat.
But the blood did not pool. It slithered into the throne's maw, into the stones, into the veins of every heir to come.
Seraphina wrenched back with a gasp. "The curse… it was never yours."
Valeria's smile was bitter. "No. It was hers. My mother's. And I spent centuries trying to undo it." Her light dimmed, Kaelan's fire guttering inside her. "But some hungers cannot be killed. Only… redirected."
Lysandra moaned, her fingers twitching toward the crack in the floor. "It's still here," she rasped. "The throne's heart. It's under us."
A beat of silence. Then—
The floor moved.
Not buckling. Breathing.
Valeria's face went deathly pale. "Oh, little star," she murmured. "What have you woken?"
The ground beneath them heaved—not the shudder of collapsing stone, but the slow, rhythmic undulation of something alive. Seraphina's knees hit the floor as the tiles split apart, revealing not earth, but flesh—glistening, pulsing, threaded with veins of liquid shadow.
Lysandra gasped, her hand flying to her chest. "It's beating."
Valeria staggered back, her light sputtering. "No. Not again. Not like this."
A wet, tearing sound filled the air as the floor peeled open like a wound.
And there, nestled in a cradle of blackened ribs, lay a heart.
Not a relic. Not a metaphor.
A living heart, swollen to twice the size of a human's, its surface marbled with gold and rot. Each beat sent a wave of pressure through the room, thick as syrup, tasting of iron and spoiled honey.
The First Queen's Heart.
The source of the curse.
The throne's true self.
Seraphina's Revelation
Memories that weren't hers flooded Seraphina's mind—
A crown of briars biting into a brow. A kingdom built on whispered lies. A daughter (Valeria) weeping as she plunged a blade into her mother's chest, only for the wound to smile at her.
The visions burned away as Valeria seized her shoulder. "You see now," she hissed. "We tried to kill it. We drowned it in light, buried it beneath the foundations, but it grew back. It always grows back."
Lysandra coughed, her lips flecked with black. "Then we burn it properly this time."
The Heart's Whisper
A voice slithered into Seraphina's skull, sweet as poisoned wine:
"You could be more than a queen. More than a woman. You could be eternal."
The heart's veins twitched, stretching toward her like greedy fingers.
Valeria's light flared. "Don't let it touch you!"
But it was too late.
One tendril brushed Seraphina's wrist—
And the world split open. The First Queen's Truth. She stood in a grand hall, its walls lined with portraits whose faces melted like wax. At the centre sat a woman on a throne of bone, her hair a cascade of blood, her smile a knife-gash.
"They called me a tyrant. Monster. But I gave them the order," the First Queen crooned. "And what did they give me? A dagger in the dark. My own child's hand holding it."
The scene shifted—Valeria, younger, trembling, a blade dripping black. "You made us into this," she sobbed.
The First Queen laughed, even as her blood pooled into the throne's jaws. "No, daughter. You chose this. Just as your heirs will choose it, again and again."
Back to Reality
Seraphina wrenched free with a cry, her wrist blistering where the heart had touched her.
Valeria's form was translucent now, Kaelan's light nearly spent. "It's too strong," she whispered. "Even together, we can't—"
Lysandra moved. Before anyone could stop her, she plunged her hand into the heart's fleshy mass.
"I remember too," she snarled.
And squeezed.