The first thing Zeyla heard was the soft hush of feet on cold stone.
Noor had risen.
No shoes. No coat. Just linen bandages and that far-off look of someone who had already left the room long before her body followed.
Zeyla blinked once, then sighed and followed.
"I'm beginning to think you've made it a ritual," she said, arms folded, trailing behind. "Get stabbed, bleed on a child, walk barefoot into near-freezing water like it's some twisted baptism."
Noor didn't look back. "Cold keeps the gods quiet."
Zeyla rolled her eyes. "And yet you talk more cryptically the closer we get to frostbite."
They stepped through the wrought-iron doors at the end of the west wing—into the heart of the old estate. The path wound between black pines and crumbling statues until it opened . In the center, the cold spring waited—still, mineral-blue, laced with herbs and something older.
Noor stepped in.
The water hissed against her skin.
Zeyla winced at the steam. "You know your fever's high enough to kill you, right?"
Noor, voice steady: "Good. Let it try."
Zeyla exhaled slowly, arms still folded. "You should be in bed. Or in war council. Or literally anywhere that doesn't involve freezing to death in a glorified well."
"Then stop following."
Zeyla ignored her. "You brought him in knowing what he was."
"I had to see if innocence could be salvaged."
Zeyla's voice lowered. "And did you?"
Noor turned to her, eyes gleaming—not golden, not obsidian, but something deeper.
"Some souls are born broken," she said softly. "Others are broken so they never learn they had a choice."
Zeyla stepped closer. "He was too precise. That wound? That grip? Thumb wrapped under the hilt. The kind of move you only teach if you want it remembered."
Noor didn't flinch. "You're sure?"
"Certain."
"And the boy?"
"Groomed. Beaten. Isolated. Dropped in our path like a flower with the roots already rotting."
Noor closed her eyes. "Then he chose well."
Zeyla's voice hardened. "You mean Lior."
A beat.
Then Noor, barely above a whisper: "The only man who ever understood how mercy could be sharpened into a dagger."
Zeyla's throat tightened. "You knew all along."
Noor's voice was quieter than winter wind: "Perhaps or perhaps not."
"And still you ___chose to say nothing."
Noor smiled faintly. "What does truth serve, if not illusion?"
Zeyla stepped into the spring's edge now, just close enough to feel the heat of Noor's fever bleeding into the mist. "So he killed the boy's family. Let the hate ferment until it tasted like worship."
Noor opened her eyes again. "That is Lior's favorite dish."
"And placed him in the slums. On the corner you walk past every week."
"I never break habit," Noor said. "He knew that. He played it like a hymn."
Zeyla stared at her. "Why not end it?"
Noor looked down at the rippling water. "Because I wanted to believe love could change its bones."
"And now?"
Noor's voice turned to ash. "Now I remember. Some devils bleed roses. But they still pull thorns first."
Zeyla's head turned—fast, knife-quick—but Noor raised a hand to stop her.
Maya.
Hidden just beyond the hedges. Still. Trembling.
Zeyla's voice dropped to a whisper. "She doesn't deserve this."
"She deserves truth," Noor said. "Even if it shatters her."
Zeyla exhaled shakily, lowering her gaze. "And what do you deserve?"
Noor looked toward the frozen sky.
"A reckoning. With the things I once called mercy."
Maya stood in the shadows, breath held like a prayer too ashamed to be uttered.
Below, in the spring half-steeped in steam, Noor sat with her back to her. Her skin, pale and fevered, shimmered against the icy surface. Zeyla stood at the edge, arms folded tight, jaw clenched.
"I always wondered," Noor said softly, "why you never told her."
Zeyla didn't move. "Told who what?"
"That you have been waiting always."
Zeyla's eyes narrowed, lips parting to deny it, but no sound came.
"Some hearts," Noor continued, her voice like frost on old glass, "don't beat for being heard. They just… remain. Quiet. Immortal."
Zeyla's gaze dropped to the stones at her feet.
"I thought I buried that," she said. "Long ago."
Noor's smile was barely a curve, barely kind. "But roots have a way of bleeding through the soil when it rains."
Zeyla exhaled, bitter. "So what now? "
Noor said. "You know me better than that. I'm just… reminding you. That some storms never pass. They just grow quieter, until you stop hearing the thunder. But that doesn't mean the sky forgives you for not looking up."
Zeyla finally looked at her. "Do you think it would have changed anything?"
Noor didn't blink. "No. But that doesn't mean it wouldn't have meant something."
Zeyla's mouth twitched.
"And you," she murmured, "you knew what would happen with ___ With Lior. You let it unfold anyway."
Noor tilted her head back, let her hair fall over her shoulder like shadowed silk.
"I've carried monsters inside me longer than anyone's dared look. I knew what he would do, yes. But I wanted to believe that once—just once—someone could choose something other than what they were made for."
Her voice cracked on the last word.
Zeyla's hands flexed at her sides.
"You let her love him."
"I let her feel what she thought was love," Noor said. "And sometimes... that's kinder than the truth."
Zeyla's breath hitched. "So why hold back now?"
Noor's voice dropped, ancient and haunting:
"Because I've already taken enough lives to know some deaths don't end pain. They pass it on."
Silence lapped at the edges of the spring.
Zeyla turned to leave, something unspoken.
Noor, without looking, said softly behind her:
"Just don't wait forever for someone who was never meant to look back."
Zeyla paused at that.
Only for a second.
Noor's final words floated toward her like smoke.
"Love, when carried too long in silence… becomes a grave."
Zeyla was gone.
The faint echo of her boots had long faded into the stone corridors, swallowed by the estate's breathless silence.
She did not move.
But her gaze… shifted. Just slightly. Toward the grove where the shadows hung a little too heavy, where the branches rustled a little too softly.
She simply looked ahead—eyes glazed with that golden sheen of grief and fever—and spoke into the cold air.
"The things we choose not to see," she began, "don't cease to exist. They only wait. Wait for us to be brave—or foolish—enough to meet them."
Maya did not breathe. Her fingers dug into the bark she hid behind, nails pressed to flesh.
Noor took a step forward into the spring. Her bandage had long unraveled, a slow ribbon of blood coiling through the water.
"There are many names for betrayal. Some wear knives. Some wear silence."
Her voice did not rise. It floated, untethered—gentle, steady, ageless.
"But the cruelest betrayals…"A pause."…are the ones wrapped in kindness."
Maya's breath caught, her throat closing around the echo of something she had refused to see.
Noor continued, her eyes locked on the far horizon.
"I never needed the truth to be pretty. Only honest."
And then, softer—almost a lullaby:
"Love is the cruelest truth of all. It tells you that even after the war… the heart still wants what broke it."
Maya blinked, fast and sharp, like she could shake the words out of her bones.
Noor turned ever so slightly now—just enough for her profile to catch the moonlight.
She whispered:
"Some things can't be undone."
And then louder—barely—but enough.
Enough for Maya to hear and question.
"But the cruelest mercy is choice.""What will yours be, little phoenix?"
Maya's hands trembled where they gripped the stone.
Maya left. Her footsteps faded into the stone like regrets too old to mourn.
Noor remained.
Blood slipped from her side again. A slow bloom. Crimson weaving through silver-blue, curling like smoke in water.
Then—The screech.
The surface rippled. Bled black.
And then—
Hands.
Fingers born of nightmare and memory, reaching up from the depths. Writhing. Grasping.
Noor did not scream.
She only looked down.
Her eyes—gold, blinding, not of this earth—met the rising dark with calm fury.
"They're here," she whispered. "The ones I buried in silence."
A tendril coiled around her wrist.
Another slithered across her collarbone, slick with cold that wasn't water. Her breath fogged. The fever in her skin clashed with the ice of the spring, steam rising around her .
Her body trembled.
"I said I would pay."
The shadows tightened.
A jagged cry tore through the grove—metal dragged through bone, grief sharpened into a scream.
Her blood spilled faster.
"They remember," she breathed to the dark. "They always do."
The shadows pulled her deeper.
She did not fight.
The spring turned black.
But her voice—
"Love, debt, memory… they are the same beast. And I fed them all."
Then silence. And the moon—
The moon turned red.
A whisper rose from the water."Queen of the debt. Lover of ruin. You are remembered. You are owed."
Her eyes flickered.
She closed them.
And smiled.