Reverie Ash

He knelt before Reverie Ash, wrists bound, head bowed.

The gold dust on the floor clung to the sweat on his skin, turning him into something half-statue, half-corpse.

Reverie stood over him, silent, hands clasped behind her back.

The room was empty but for the two of them. She had dismissed the guards — not out of mercy, but out of respect.

Some reckonings must be private.

“I loved you,” he whispered, voice breaking open like a wound. “I followed you. Everything you asked—”

He choked on his own breath.

Reverie tilted her head slightly, studying him like an interesting ruin.

“I never asked for anything,” she said, voice like steel skimming ice.

“I expected.”

The was a difference.

Fear stripped the color from his sky blue eyes when he raised his face to hers at last. But desperation still shone there. Hope clung like rot.

“It’s not too late,” he said. “You could choose a different way. We could still—”

She crouched in front of him in a single, fluid movement, her face mere inches from his.

He flinched.

She smiled.

“You think love is a leash,” she murmured. “You think loyalty is a negotiation.”

She reached out and gently brushed a lock of hair from his forehead, like a mother blessing a child.

“You don’t understand me at all.”

And then — almost tenderly — she pressed a blade, thin as a whisper, beneath his jaw.

Not to kill.

Not yet.

First, she wanted him to see it coming.

First, she wanted him to understand:

He hadn’t failed her by betraying her. He had failed himself by thinking she was someone who could be betrayed.

“You were never my equal,” she said, soft as a secret. “You were my shadow. And I am tired of dragging shadows behind me.”

When she stood again, wiping the blade clean on the edge of her cloak, the room smelled faintly of copper and crushed dreams.

She didn’t look back.

There was no need.

Reverie Ash never mourned what she had already outgrown.