Dawn was just beginning to touch the castle towers when Madison and Ashley decided to leave their rooms.
The air was cold, but not uncomfortable; it had that sweet, damp perfume of night flowers that hadn't fully closed yet.
The corridors were bathed in a golden clarity that seemed to emerge from the walls themselves, not from the sun.
The Iron Blood Castle never fully slept.
It breathed.
Each column was wrapped in luminous ivy that sparkled with silver tones, as if they held fragments of moon in their veins. The stairs seemed to move with a living laziness, adjusting to the pace of those who crossed them. In the stained glass windows, ancient figures of wolves and moons subtly changed posture when one wasn't looking directly.
The air vibrated with an almost imperceptible energy, a constant murmur that could be mistaken for the sigh of the castle itself.
