Mercy or Damnation

Kai:

Sleep doesn’t come easy anymore. Not when the wards are broken, when screams bleed through the night like a second heartbeat. Not when I know too much.

Tonight, I give in. Im too exhausted, too weak to carry on another minute in this hellscape. I sprawl on my narrow mattress, books and notes scattered across the floor, my veins humming with exhaustion. Candlelight flickers low, shadows shudder against the walls. Somewhere beyond the glass, the storm is still raging, battering the towers like fists against a coffin lid.

And when I close my eyes—

I fall.

Not into dreams. Into something worse.

The scriptorium’s shelves stretch endlessly before me, though the wood is blackened, charred, dripping blood like resin. Books breathe here, parchment wheezing with every turn of a page. Their voices overlap, discordant, a thousand-throated dirge.

She walks with fire, war in skin…

She’ll bleed to forge an age unknown…

Prophecy coils in the air like smoke, clogging my lungs, slicking my palms with sweat. I can’t breathe, but I can’t wake, either.

I stumble deeper into the rows. My footsteps echo wrong—delayed, like the sound has to crawl its way back to me. Shadows gather thick as oil.

And then I see her.

Isadora.

She stands in the aisle ahead, draped in black lace and candle flame, her face pale as marble, her eyes hollowed by something I don’t dare name. A crown of thorns gleams red on her brow, dripping down her cheek like fresh blood.

“Isadora,” I rasp. My throat is raw. I reach for her, but the air is heavy, every step like dragging through mire.

Her lips part. “Only I decide.”

The words aren’t hers. They are older, cracked with ages, deeper than the marrow of this place.

And then—another voice joins. Cold, disembodied. The one that has been stalking me since the first prophecy fragment.

The High Lords fall by her hand, or rise at her mercy. The Tamer chooses. She alone decides the end.

I freeze. My heart jolts like a struck bell.

The shelves around me collapse in a deafening crash. Pages scatter like bones through the air. And her eyes—her eyes catch mine across the ruin.

And I wake—

Choking.

Sweat clings to me, my hair plastered to my forehead. My lungs scrape for air, dragging in the scent of melted wax and rain seeping through the cracked window. The storm is still there, thrashing against the night, but my pulse is louder.

The prophecy beats inside me, each word a hammer blow. The Tamer decides. Only she.

Isadora.

I swing my legs over the bed, clutching the edge of the mattress like it’s the only anchor I have left. My notes are still strewn across the floor, mocking me with half-finished translations, ink stains, desperate scrawls.

I’ve been wrong. Or maybe just cowardly.

She isn’t just a player in the prophecy. She is the decider of the prophecy.

The others—Rhett with his wolf-bond, Lucian with his blood hunger, Silas with his shadows—they think they can protect her. Train her. Twist fate with their claws and teeth and ghosts. But it doesn’t matter.

Because in the end, her hands will hold the knife over all our throats.

I press my palms to my eyes, but the afterimage of her face won’t fade—the crown of thorns, the blood down her cheek, the hollow eyes whispering doom.

Gods, what if she chooses wrong?

Worse—what if she chooses us instead of herself?

The thought tears through me like lightning, hot and savage. I want it and I fear it in equal measure. I want her to look at me, see me, choose me. But I’ve felt what her magic does, how it steals without asking, how it takes and takes, sweet as poison.

And if she chooses us, if she binds us, what will be left of the Royal Table when she’s done?

I shove myself up, pacing. The candle sputters as if it feels the storm in me. My hands shake. My body aches with the remnants of the fever dream.

The second fragment is worse than the first.

Because the first gave me fear.

The second gives me choice.

And choice is a weapon sharper than any blade.

I don’t know if I should tell the others. Silas would guard her until the shadows swallowed him whole. Rhett would bleed the world dry before letting her fall. Lucian—Gods, Lucian would chain her to himself, drink her into submission.

And me?

I’m the coward. The mask. The one who pretends with light and glamour because the truth is too dark to bear.

But I know what the prophecy means now.

If she is the Tamer, then we are nothing but pieces on her board. Kings, pawns, sacrifices. Four thrones undone, and she decides who rises from the rubble.

I grip the edge of the desk, knuckles white, and whisper to the storm outside as if it might answer me.

“Only you decide, Isadora. Only you.”

The words linger, thick as blood in the air.

And I wonder—when the time comes, when she looks at me with those eyes, will I beg for her mercy? Or her damnation?