What I Took From the Dead

Some wounds close. Others whisper.

—Old healer's saying

⁂

Irena pressed her palm to the tern’s wing. Bone shifted beneath the feathers with a noise like teeth grinding. The bird convulsed, its eyes rolling white with terror.

"Hush now," she whispered. "Pain before healing. Always."

Blue light seeped from her fingertips, knitting what was broken. Tristan watched from the marble steps, his crown discarded beside him. Something coiled inside him when she focused like this. The way her eyes darkened with an eagerness that made him wonder what she saw when life bent to her will.

The bird took flight. Relishing life in the coastal breeze. He hated it for that.

"Another life saved," he said, fingers twitching at his sides. "Wasting your gifts on common gulls."

Irena laughed, and the sound made the flowers lean towards her. "Tern, not a gull. And no life is common." She wiped her hands on her simple dress. "Besides, the bird will remember."

He helped her stand, drawing her close. His grip lingered on her wrist, tight enough to feel her pulse. To count the beats as if they were coins he hoarded.

"My father summoned me again. He grows impatient."

"For an heir." Her smile faltered.

"For anything that isn't you." He brushed soil from her cheek. "He thinks you've bewitched me."

"Haven't I?" She pressed her palm to his chest. "The fearsome Prince Tristan, tamed by a coastal-village healer."

"Not tamed. Saved."

Later, she took him to the royal crypts. Candles guttered in ancient wall sconces, painting ghoulish shadows across the stone faces of dead kings.

"I've been studying them," she said, her fingers tracing the carved features of Tristan's grandmother. "The embalmers remove the organs but keep the heart. They believe it anchors the soul."

"Why are you interested in this?" he asked, watching how her eyes gleamed in the dark.

"I heal the living. Shouldn't I understand what happens when I fail?" Her fingers drummed against a sarcophagus. "They say the soul weighs nothing. I want to know if they're wrong."

She turned to him, her face half-shadow. "Don't undo what death makes right, Tristan. Promise me. When my time comes, let me go."

"I don't care where souls go," he said, pulling her against him. "As long as yours stays with mine."

The diplomatic feast came three nights later. The emissaries from the Eternal Sultanate eyed Irena with suspicion, a commoner elevated beyond her station. She offered wine to the ambassador, a wizened man with jewels woven into his beard.

It happened in the space between heartbeats.

A servant collided with her. Crystal shattered. Wine splashed like arterial spray. The crowd laughed, conversation barely pausing.

Only Tristan saw the needle-thin blade, blackened with nightshade. Only Tristan caught the servant's pitch-dark eyes before he melted into the crowd. Only Tristan noticed Irena's sudden stillness, the pinprick of blood blooming through fabric like an opening eye.

The music played on. Nobles danced. Irena's lips parted in surprise as her cup slipped from nerveless fingers.

"Guards!" Tristan's roar silenced the room. "Seize him!"

But the assassin was already gone, and Irena was falling, her golden hair unravelling as she collapsed. He caught her, cradling her body as the poison worked through her veins. Her skin, always warm as sunlight, cooled beneath his touch. Her eyes, sea-blue and keen, dimmed like coals kicked apart.

"Stay with me," he commanded. "Don't you leave me."

Her own magic fought the poison, blue light pulsing beneath her skin in diminishing waves. Her eyes found his, tears gathering.

"Tristan," she whispered, her voice already distant. "The Child comes to take me. Don't follow where I'm going. You promised."

He carried her through torch-lit corridors, trailing blood and broken promises. Court physicians shook their heads. Priests offered useless prayers. Mages attempted counterspells that withered before they could take hold.

Three days later, she died in his arms, her body light as autumn leaves, her last breath carrying his name. Something in his mind cracked like ice in spring. A sound only he could hear, but which would echo into eternity.

What breaks can never heal the same.

—Shadetide text

⁂

Tristan refused to bury her.

"The customary three days have passed," the High Priest said. "Her soul cannot journey properly if—"

"Get out." Tristan didn't look up from where he sat beside Irena's body, preserved through enchantments that cost him three royal mages. Their blood still stained the floor. "All of you, out."

Alone with her, he brushed her hair, strands breaking between his fingers like dead grass. He fed her broth that dribbled from the corners of her mouth. He wiped it away, refilled the spoon, tried again. As if hunger could still touch her.

"I'll find a way," he promised, pressing his lips to her cold forehead. When he pulled away, the imprint remained, her skin too stiff to spring back. "Wait for me."

He slept beside her, ignoring the scent of early decay that perfumed oils couldn't mask. When he tried to lace her fingers with his, one snapped at the knuckle. He wept then. Not because she was gone, but because her body betrayed what his heart refused to accept.

The archives offered nothing. But in the forgotten wing of the library, he found a volume bound in leather that felt wrong against his skin. Too warm, too pliant. Its pages contained stories of ancient magics: Shadetide rites, echo necromancy, chronomagic. Techniques that tore at reality's fabric.

And a map to sunken ruins where such power had once been channelled.

The journey took weeks. The settlement near the ruins greeted him with fearful eyes. The locals warned of voices from the deep, of fishermen who returned changed.

"The Shadetide doesn't flow like water," an old woman told him, her milky eyes tracking something invisible. "It leaks between things meant to be separate. Like fingers prying apart closed doors. And once opened, those doors never shut right again." She clutched his sleeve. "Three fishermen returned last month. Their skin wept salt not from the sea, but from somewhere else. When they spoke, they described colours that have no names. By morning, their wives found them standing in perfect circles, facing outward, each with the other's hearts in their hands."

Tristan didn't care. He dove into black waters that felt too thick against his skin, that tasted of metal and forgetting. Found the submerged temple with its spiralling architecture that hurt his eyes to look upon directly.

Inside, slime-slick passages led to a central chamber where the water parted like a curtain. He placed Irena's preserved finger in the centre of a dais carved with writhing symbols, then opened his veins to let his royal blood mix with hers.

"I offer passage," he recited, his voice fracturing into discordant echoes. "I offer a vessel. I offer the crown and kingdom. Return what was taken."

The darkness became solid around him, probing his mind with fingers of ice, tasting his grief, his rage, his obsession. It offered visions—Irena alive but changed, Irena screaming as something wore her skin.

"Anything," Tristan answered the unasked question. "Any price."

For a heartbeat, one flickering moment before commitment, he remembered her words in the crypt. Remembered her begging him not to follow. But the memory dissolved like salt in water, and all that remained was need.

The Shadetide, a current flowing between life and death, between sanity and madness, accepted his bargain. It didn't arrive. It leaked. The breach didn't open. It bled.

Power flowed into him, through him. His skin cracked like pottery, revealing luminous black-green energy. His ribs folded outward, making space for something that didn't belong. His thoughts braided with older, hungrier ones. Thoughts that remembered the taste of star-death and the music of unravelling worlds. When he tried to scream, the sound split into fragments, echoing from throats that hadn't existed moments before, each crying in voices that weren't his, remembering lives he'd never lived.

The pain unmade him. He couldn't scream.

When he returned to his kingdom, royal mages shrank back in horror. He locked himself in his chambers with Irena's preserved body.

Three days of silence. Screams echoed through the castle. Light seeped like poison beneath the door. Whispers left listeners with nosebleeds and temporary blindness.

On the fourth day, Irena breathed again.

Her eyes opened. Sea-blue with something else swimming in their depths. She looked at him without recognition. Black ichor streaked from her eyes, carving furrows in her skin.

"What have you done?" Her voice was layered, others speaking with her, slightly out of sync. "What have you done to me?"

She reached for him, then recoiled at his touch. She gasped for breath that didn't satisfy her lungs.

"Let me go back," she whispered, her original voice briefly winning. "It hurts to be here. The air is wrong. The light is wrong. I'm wrong." Her eyes found his, full of terrible knowledge. "You asked if souls have weight. They do. I've carried them now. They're so heavy, Tristan."

He embraced her, oblivious to the wrongness. "I've brought you back. Nothing else matters."

That night, two chambermaids found the prince cradling his bride, crooning lullabies as her skin writhed as if infested by insects. They tried to flee. Their bodies were discovered with throats blocked by black roses blooming from their lips and eye sockets.

What opens can never fully close.

—Warning carved on the temple wall

⁂

"The queen is recovering," Tristan announced to his council. None questioned the impossibility. They'd seen what happened to those who questioned him since his return.

In truth, he kept her secluded in chambers draped with heavy curtains. She couldn't bear sunlight. It made her skin blister and steam. Sometimes he found her crouched over small animals, their bodies splayed open as she examined their insides.

"I'm trying to understand," she told him, eyes flickering to solid black. "How life holds together. How death pulls it apart."

Her fingers, too long and wrongly jointed, probed a cat's organs. "I can feel where its essence went. I remember dying, Tristan. I remember you promising to let me go."

"I never promised that," he lied.

She turned, her neck elongating unnaturally. "In the garden, when I mended the bird. In the crypt, among your ancestors. In our bed, whispering against your skin. And as I died." Her voice fractured, multiplied. "I begged you. You promised me."

The gardens withered. Roses died, then regrew with black petals and acid-dripping thorns. Palace cats walked on hind legs, watching servants with too-intelligent eyes. Stone walls whispered in a language that caused nosebleeds and blindness.

Tristan noticed none of it, his attention fixed solely on Irena.

The priest who had officiated their wedding, begged audience. "The queen is no longer human," stated as his eyes filled with tears. "Whatever walks in her flesh, it's an abomination."

Tristan transformed instantly. Black-green energy erupted from the cracks in his skin, his hand becoming a claw that plunged into the priest's chest.

"She is perfect," he hissed. "She is mine."

He didn't hear the door open. Didn't notice Annabeth, his childhood friend and captain of the royal guard, witnessing the murder.

"Tristan," she whispered, horror and pity warring in her voice. "What's happened to you?"

He dropped the priest, shifting back to human with visible effort. "Annabeth. You shouldn't be here."

Annabeth's hand hovered over her sword hilt. Her mind filled with memories—Tristan weeping at his mother's funeral, stealing pastries from the kitchen for her when she was ill, teaching her to swim in the palace fountains. They'd grown up together, and promised to always protect each other. Now, she saw that boy drowning in whatever he'd become. She remembered the priest's dying words to her: It wears him like a glove. The prince is almost gone.

"The rumours—I didn't believe them." Her hand finally went to her sword. "They say the queen walks the corridors trailing shadow-things that consume servants."

"Lies," he said without conviction. "She's unwell, but recovering."

"Show me." Annabeth's jaw set with familiar stubbornness.

"No." He blocked the inner door. "She needs rest."

"Tristan, I've known you since we were children. Whatever's happened—we can fix it together."

For a moment, something of the boy he'd been flickered in his eyes. Then Irena's voice drifted from the chamber, multiple voices in eerie harmony. "Who's there, my love? I'm so hungry."

Annabeth drew her sword, advancing towards the door. "That's not Irena."

"Don't," Tristan's voice broke. "Please."

She pushed past him, throwing open the chamber door. What she saw made her sword clatter to the floor. The thing by the window wasn't Irena. Its proportions were wrong. Limbs too long, joints bending impossibly. Skin rippling with movement. Worst were the faces—dozens pressing outward from within her flesh, mouths opening and closing like gasping fish. Tristan filled her view, fury pouring from his eyes.

This is Tristan, she thought. He once fell from an oak tree trying to get me an eagle feather. Now his hand could tear that tree in half. And he would, if I stood behind it.

He can't see it, Annabeth realised. He's too far gone. And I can't save either of them.

"Oh, Tristan," she whispered. "What have you done?"

She bent for her sword. The movement saved her momentarily as Tristan's claws slashed where her throat had been. She rolled, drawing a dagger. This time, she didn't hesitate. She lunged, blade finding purchase in his shoulder, black-green fluid spraying from the wound.

He roared with a sound no human throat could make and staggered back. For a heartbeat, recognition flickered in his eyes. Then the wound sealed itself.

"You can't kill what's already been claimed," he said, but it wasn't his voice anymore.

The next blow caught her across the chest. She bled out beneath his claws, and in her last breath searched the ruin of him for the boy who once swore to protect her. She didn't find him.

He returned to Irena, gathering her malformed body in his arms. A dozen mouths wept black tears against his chest.

"You brought me back," they said in chorus. "You shouldn't have brought me back."

What loves too much destroys what it cannot lose.

—Epitaph for the Lost Kingdom

⁂

Irena deteriorated rapidly. Her body couldn't contain what struggled within it. The fragment of her soul, the Shadetide entities, the necromantic energies. She began to unravel physically and metaphysically.

Her skin split along invisible seams, revealing glimpses of somewhere else. A realm of shifting shadows and impossible structures where time flowed like honey and beings with too many limbs danced between fragments of dying stars. When she screamed, the sound broke glass and caused plants to evolve rapidly before withering to dust.

"Make it stop," she begged during rare lucid moments. "Tristan, if you ever loved me, let me go."

But he couldn't. The castle was sealed and fell to ruin, but reports suggested the corruption was spreading. The nearby village had been evacuated after the dead began to rise. The sea around the coast-line had turned black, fish floating with human faces.

Reality was buckling. The Shadetide wasn't just leaking now, it was flooding through the breach, a tide of unmade possibility washing away what was solid.

None of it mattered to him. He knelt beside Irena as she thrashed on their bed. The room itself melted, stone walls flowing like wax, the ceiling receding into infinite darkness.

"I'll fix this," he promised, cutting open his palms with a ceremonial dagger. His blood was mostly black-green energy now. "One more ritual. Something stronger to bind you properly."

As he prepared the symbols, a small voice deep within—perhaps the last fragment of who he'd been—whispered that this was madness. That he should end it. Release her. Release them both. But that voice was drowned in the chorus of need that had become his only truth.

"You weren't supposed to take me back." Her voice was barely recognisable. "The Child claimed me. Now the Lion hunts me."

"I will never let you go." He drew symbols on her forehead, her chest, her twisted appendages. "The Child, The Lion, the Shadetide itself. Nothing will separate us again."

The ritual began. Power surged through the castle, toppling towers, crumbling walls. The infection accelerated, transforming everything it touched. Trees uprooted themselves to walk. Animals spoke in human tongues before tearing themselves apart.

Tristan didn't see any of it. His focus remained on Irena as he channelled power into her disintegrating form. His own body began to flake away like ash, revealing the Shadetide entity woven into his essence. His voice took on the same layered quality as hers.

"We'll try again," he promised as reality disintegrated around them. He pressed what remained of her hand to what remained of his chest, where his heart still beat with stubborn love. "You will never leave me."

The Shadetide laughed through both their voices, pleased with its new doorway into existence. As the kingdom collapsed, as countless lives were unmade, Tristan saw only Irena's eyes—sea-blue for one final moment.

"I was waiting for you," she whispered. "On the other side. You were supposed to join me there when the Child came for you." Her voice splintered. "Now neither of us can ever rest. The Lion will always hunt us. You've made us both undying and never alive."

Her form dissolved, leaving only a shimmer like heat above stones. The castle walls gave way to nothingness, the kingdom swallowed by the spreading breach.

"Don't follow," her voice echoed from everywhere and nowhere.

But he always would. That was his curse now. To chase her forever through broken realities, never finding, never resting, always seeking what the Shadetide had taken from them both.

What he loved, he ruined. What he ruined, he chased. Forever.

—Final words in the Book of Shadowcraft