DAWN

IT WAS THE twenty-seventh year of daysdeath in the realm of the Forever King, and his murderer was still waiting to die.

The killer stood watch at a thin window, hands stained with new blood and ashes pale as starlight. The floor was scattered with broken glass, splintered furniture, the stone under his feet marked by soot and spilled ink. The door was ironclad, heavy, still locked like a secret. The killer watched the sun rise from its unearned rest, and pressing a thin bone pipe to his lips, he remembered how good hell tastes.

The château below him was sleeping now. Monsters slinking back to beds of cold earth and slipping off the façade that they were anything close to human. The air outside was pale with flurries of falling snow, with the chill of winter unending. Thrall soldiers clad in dark steel still patrolled the battlements below, and the killer’s lip still curled as he watched them. But in truth, he knew who was truly the slave.

He looked down at his hands. Hands that had slain things monstrous. Hands that had saved an empire. Hands that had allowed the last hope for his species to slip and shatter like glass upon the stone.

The sky above was dark as sin.

The horizon, red as his lady’s lips the last time he kissed her.

He ran one thumb across his fingers, the letters inked below his knuckles.

“Patience,” he whispered.