CHAPTER 37: A GHOST IN THE PALACE...

Yona’s hands tightened on the grip of her twin short blades until her knuckles blanched, the steel trembling faintly in her grasp, resonating with the fury she kept caged inside.

These blades had never known another’s hands... never once left her grip, not for training partners, not for allies, not even for blood-kin. They were hers alone, her last line of truth in a life filled with chains.

Yet he had wielded them.

Not once. Twice. More than that.

Each time with the steady precision of someone who had walked years in battlefields, someone whose body already knew the weight of such weapons. His movements hadn’t been fumbling, hadn’t been the lucky strikes of a desperate royal whelp... they were measured, practiced, dangerously practiced.

As though he had been born with steel in his hands.

But that was impossible.

The tenth prince was no warrior. He was a royal outcast. A ghost in the palace. A boy whispered about in half-forgotten rumors of exile, disappearance, disgrace.

A stranger.

No. Not a stranger. Not anymore.

Because he had slipped past her defenses... or rather, he had walked straight through them, uncaring of the fortress walls she had spent years constructing. He had pressed past the masks, past the cold defiance, past the weight of her family’s leash and the beast shackled to her very core.

Past all the armor.

And then... damn him... he told her, with that blunt, cutting honesty, To speak. To say what she wanted. To act how she wished. To be.

Her body suddenly jolted as the ward spat her back, the recoil slamming her boots against the ground.

The ward thrummed, mocking her. She had tried every ounce of brute force, every trick she knew to unravel it, but it was useless... The runes would not yield. He had altered it from the outside, reshaping the script remotely.

Her teeth ground together.

That bastard.

’How could he do this? How could a royal castoff... a bastard, a runaway, a reject cast out... hide such capability?’

The boy she’d met had eyes too sharp, keen enough to catch her stealing.

He had mana... enough to spark, enough to sting, enough to bind. He had caught her in his trap, and worse, he had released her... undone the layered seals her family had bind into her being, the chains that kept her ’the princess’.

And now?

Now that same boy fought at their side.

Now he bled with them.

Now his words and his actions held them together when they might have fractured.

And now... he was the one standing between them and danger.

As if they were the ones on the verge of collapse.

’Couldn’t he see how much blood he’d already lost?’

’How many more runes, how many more sigils, he could carve into his body before there was nothing left of him?’

Yona’s jaw clenched.

’What bullshit.’

He was shite at using magic.

That much was plain.

His sigils bled into his skin like poorly sewn stitches, his body shaking under the strain. Every pulse of mana he forced through himself looked as though it carved deeper into his flesh.

And yet... he still wielded it.

Not the clean, sanctioned art of runecraft that she had been drilled in, not the polished, pristine techniques of palace tutors.

No... he clawed at his own skin with something else.

Something she had only ever heard mentioned in passing.

A relic of history lessons from her royal studies, treated with the same disdain one would give to dust on silk. Not worth memorizing. Not worth thinking about. A taboo.

Blood scripting.

Her instructors had brushed it aside with a flick of their jeweled hands, their voices sharp with scorn.

"Don’t even try it. It’s a taboo art, wasteful, dangerous, an embarrassment. Now, back to consort training... memorize your smiles and your postures."

And yet here it was... right in front of her. Not in a book. Not in a lecture. But alive, scarred into the body of the tenth prince.

Her chest twisted.

In just a single day, the boy she had first seen in Hinnom’s market... the one with pristine cloak and careful posture, who kept his eyes half-hidden like he wanted the world to see pass him.. to walk and never look back.

That fragile image had been burned away.

Now, what stood before her was like someone else entirely.

Blood soaked him, clung to him as naturally as breath. More blood than even she, hardened by a year of hiding, rescuing people form Hinnom and cutting down beasts without pause, had ever worn on her skin. He was half-wrecked, scarred raw by the very magic he abused, but still standing.

Still moving.

Still choosing.

And she hated that this hit her harder than she wanted to admit, when they could no longer strike the ward.

The bastard had rewritten it... twisted its runes so that every blow they hurled against it only hurled them back with doubled force. It was deliberate, a cruel way to silence their interference and keep them away from that writhing amalgamation.

So they were forced to watch.

They watched as Keiser turned them aside with that infuriating calm, as the Gula’s shadow loomed over him. They watched the limbs descend, jagged and dripping with that black sludge, closing around him like its jaws.

The sound that followed when the beast slammed him into the ground made their blood turn to ice... an ugly, bone-deep scream that rattled through the ward and echoed into their ribs.

"NO!" voices cried in unison, raw and frantic.

Yona’s scream tore her throat,

Lenko’s guttural shout burned through his lungs.

Diego’s voice carried over the clamor of panicking villagers still fleeing.

None of them cared that the Gula might turn on them next.

None of them cared that raising their voices might draw its gaze.

"Let the ward down!"

"Let us through, bastard!"

"MUZIO!"

And still the Gula smothered him, that foul sludge sliding over his body, climbing, swallowing. His form was almost gone beneath it, his head tipping, his limbs twitching.

Their shouting grew hoarse, desperate.

He was slipping.

They could see it. He was slipping beneath the weight of the thing, about to vanish completely.

Until the ground itself shook. Until another voice cut through the nightmare.

Until that man came.