WebNovels

Chapter 1 - Chapter 1. The Stroke of Midnight

The clock struck twelve.

With the twelfth toll, something in the palace loosened, as if a hidden seam had been tugged and the fabric forgot how to lie flat. Walls held their breath. Shadows remembered different shapes.

I reached for him.

There should have been warmth—a small, familiar weight that used to curl against my ankles at night, the steady breath that taught mine how to calm. My fingers found only air, then cold linen, then the quiet that follows a name you cannot recall.

The lamp did not flicker. The stars did not move. Only my heart misstepped, once and then again, like a dancer trying to remember a step she never learned.

Someone had changed my room.

The blue-heron screen—gone. The carved cedar chest—gone. In their place: a straw mattress, a chipped basin, a gray dress folded with the kind of neatness that belongs to people who cannot afford mistakes.

A servant's neatness.

I sat up. The collar scratched my throat. My fingers went to my neck and found no chain, no ring, no proof of a promise I could almost remember if I bled for it.

When I opened the door, the corridor curved the wrong way.

The Averith Palace had always been a labyrinth, but it used to be my labyrinth. I knew which tapestries hid doors and which shadows hid men. Now a hunt scene wore winter; a fig tree's perfume had been replaced by obedient cypress and disciplined air.

"Name," a senior maid said, eyes moving over me like dust she meant to remove.

"I—" The word broke on a truth I couldn't name. "I woke and the room… it feels wrong."

"It is right enough." She shoved a tray into my hands: a porcelain pot, two cups, a shallow dish of honey pretending to be gold. "North pavilion. His Highness does not drink tea that has waited."

His Highness.

My hands remembered how to carry the tray. My feet remembered how to move. The rest of me was a stranger wearing my bones.

The north pavilion demanded two staircases tonight, not four. The courtyard had been narrowed, as if the architects were tired of giving us too much sky.

At the door, two guards watched me the way hawks watch a mouse think it is safe. "State your name," one said.

My name had a mouth-feel like pomegranate and winter smoke. It slipped away when I reached for it.

"From the kitchens," I said instead. "For His Highness."

They traded a look, rapped the door, and announced me.

Midnight lived in the chamber—dark wood, darker silk, a fire quiet as breathing. He stood by the window with his hands behind his back, and the lamplight wrote a thin gold along the edge of his profile.

The crown prince of Averith. Kaelith Duskborne.

We learn those words with our letters, stamped with them the first time we bow. But the man before me was not a lesson or a coin. His gaze turned, and heat slid over my skin. Not because he smiled—he didn't. Not because he spoke—he hadn't yet. Because his eyes burned, banked like embers beneath ash, the precise warmth of which my wrist remembered without permission.

"Set it there," he said, low and unimpressed—the kind of voice that had never needed to be loud to be obeyed.

I set the tray on a table that could have bought a village. My hands didn't shake. Much.

He didn't look at the tea. He looked at me. Not as men look at a servant, but as a hunter counts distance: wind, weight, angle, the way a thing will fall.

"Your face." His mouth shifted—not kindness, not cruelty. Thought. "Have we met?"

Yes almost slipped free—some half-memory, or maybe only a dream: another night, storm against the shutters, a weight at the end of my bed, breath warming my calves as if thunder could be gentled by it.

"I don't think so, Your Highness," I said instead.

Something old and nameless in him seemed to disagree. It moved beneath his skin, then vanished the way heat ghosts above stone.

He stepped closer. Not enough for scandal. Enough for gravity.

Smoke and winter mint. His fingers brushed the tray's rim and lingered near mine a heartbeat too long to be an accident.

"Tell the kitchens there will be no honey next time."

"Yes, Your Highness."

I should have left. A servant who lingers invites questions; questions invite consequences. But the floorboards had been measured with a rule, and the walls felt like good listeners.

"Do you dislike the north pavilion, or are you counting," he asked, "the walls?"

"It's different," I said before sense could stop me.

"From what?"

From yesterday. From the version where the corridor curves left and the fig tree sweetens the night. From a room that held a cedar chest and a promise.

"From how it was," I said, "yesterday."

He stilled. He could have laughed. Dismissed me. He did neither.

"Leave the cups," he said. "Go."

I bowed and turned. An invitation on the low table caught my eye—the imperial seal pressed into wax like a thumbprint on a throat.

A ball, in three nights, to celebrate the betrothal of His Highness Kaelith Duskborne to Lady Serin Vale.

The letters laid a cool hand where my breath should have been. I did not know Lady Serin. I knew what she would be: tall enough to wear pride without slouching, polished enough to reflect a prince. The palace would make her real if she wasn't.

"Do not touch that," he said.

"I hadn't." The warning slicked over my skin anyway. Do not touch what might hurt.

"Yes, Your Highness."

I left.

On the servants' stair, the bell tolled once. Not midnight. One. The sound slid through me and shook a memory loose: a soft weight against my shin; a nose insisting on my palm until I laughed; a collar tied with a scrap of ribbon because everything else had been taken and I needed to give something to someone.

I pressed my forehead to the door of the small room that was now mine until the wood cooled me. The gray dress waited, obedient. I put it on. I braided my hair. I folded the blanket's corners the way the senior maid would approve, because sometimes survival is only the art of remembering the corners.

Dawn tried the window and changed its mind. The palace prefers night. In the dark, power looks cleaner.

I lay down and stared at the ceiling. If I closed my eyes, ember-dark eyes burned back—steady, patient the way devotion is patient.

Devotion is a kind of chain. No one tells you how soft it feels at first.

The bell would toll again soon, and perhaps the world would shift with it. But midnight had left ash on my tongue, and ash is what remains when the fire refuses to forget.

In the ashes of midnight, desire never truly dies.

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