His cloak draped over his hunched frame, its tattered ends dragging like funeral veils across the cold marble.The fabric hung from him like decay incarnate, as if he had been stitched together from the remnants of old kingdoms and forgotten nightmares.
And his face—carved from vengeance itself.
A mask stretched too tightly over angular bones; skin pulled thin where veins slithered like blackened tributaries beneath the surface.The creases etched deep into his flesh were not from age alone—they were the scars of a man who had ruled through terror, who had built an empire on the bones of the fallen.
His eyes—glacial, endless, distant—gleamed with a flicker of something inhuman.
Not madness.
Not cruelty.
Something worse.
Something that knew far more than any mortal should.
And then—he smiled.
It was a ghastly thing, the corners of his lips tugging back ever so slightly, revealing teeth yellowed with time and stained with something older than wine or rot.
He did not speak.
He did not need to.
The air grew heavy, thickening like an approaching storm, pressing in against every wall and every breath.The room felt smaller, suffocating beneath his existence.
A moment passed—one heartbeat stretched into eternity.
Then, he rolled his neck, the tendons pulling taut beneath his paper-thin skin?—
And roared.
The sound was not human.
It ripped through the chamber, an earth-shattering, marrow-deep bellow that threatened to tear the very foundation apart.
The walls trembled.
The floorboards groaned.
The air seemed to crack and shudder beneath the weight of that sound.
Every muscle in my body seized.
And my heart?—
My heart lurched.
Because Elizabeth was nowhere in sight.
“Elizabeth,” I breathed—barely a whisper, yet it pierced the chaos.
Bodies collapsed around me—choking, convulsing, dying.The masquerade we had so carefully crafted was unraveling into ruin with Salvatore here.Poison laced the air, its scent acrid and metallic, a twisted symphony of death.Screams echoed, then faded into silence, one by one.
And she was gone.
Nowhere by my side.
Nowhere safe.
