His Weakness Wore Moonlight

Storms came when Corvin didn’t want them to, and that was most nights. They gathered now without his call—a bruise spreading across the sky, wind pushing hard against the ramparts of Draegor Keep until the iron pennants screamed. He stood beneath the north tower’s gargoyles and watched lightning vein over the Blackwood, counting the heartbeats between flash and thunder. He pretended the rhythm belonged to him. It never did. “Another squall?” Kael asked, climbing the last steps two at a time. Corvin’s Beta shook rain from his hair and leaned his elbows on the parapet like the storm were a friendly dog. “Or something you didn’t warn me about?” “If I’d called it,” Corvin said, “the stones would be bowing.” Kael huffed a laugh. “And here I was, hoping for humility.” Corvin didn’t answer. The clouds were wrong. He could taste iron in the wind, feel the storm’s wildness snag on something not of his making—an edge of light turning the bruise to black-violet, as if the sky were splitting apart to show bone. The first scream wasn’t human. The second was the keep itself, timbers shuddering as the air collapsed inward. Far out over the trees, a seam of radiance tore through the clouds. Light poured through it, not sunlight, but something colder, cleaner—silver like a blade at the throat. “Down,” Corvin said, already moving. Kael fell into step without question. By the time they reached the gateyard, a ring of soldiers had formed beneath the sky’s wound. Isolde stood with them—gray braids pinned like a coronet, a healer’s satchel thumping against her thigh. To outsiders, she was the keep’s physician; to those who knew better, she was the old wolf who remembered what the first vows had cost. She didn’t look at Corvin as he approached. She looked up. “It’s not a storm.” “It is,” Corvin said, tasting his own lie, “and it’s mine.” The seam closed as quickly as it had opened, like a stitched wound healing in reverse. Something fell from it—a small, bright body, wrapped in light that guttered and caught again as the wind tossed it sideways. For one breath, Corvin thought it is a star. For the next, he understood it had a face. “Breach the ward,” Kael snapped to the archers. “We don’t know if—” “It’s not hostile,” Isolde said softly. “Listen.” They all did. Under thunder’s growl, under the hiss of rain, a sound threaded the yard: a clear, delicate ringing, like glass spun into a note. It wasn’t an alarm; it was an arrival. The bright body hit the world too gently for a fall from the heavens—slowed at the last instant by a flare of silver that threw halos on wet stone. Soldiers lifted shields against the shock, but when the light faded, nothing burned. A woman lay on the flagstones, rain clinging to the black fall of her hair, a gown torn by a journey no cloth could understand. The strange thing was not the silver lines gleaning faintly beneath her skin—or the crescent-shaped scar at her wrist that pulsed like a heartbeat—but that the storm, the damned, feral storm, hushed. Thunder staggered and held its breath. Corvin felt it—the quiet in his blood that never came, the leash inside him slackening as if an unseen hand had unknotted it. The ache he’d lived with since boyhood—the beast’s need, the endless pressure of not-transforming, not-becoming—eased by a fraction. The relief was so sudden his knees went weak. Kael saw it. Kael always saw. His gaze cut to Corvin, sharp as a blade. What is she to you? it said without speaking. Isolde stepped forward, palm up, healer’s humility, bowing her head. “Child,” she murmured to the stranger. “Can you hear me?” The woman’s lashes lifted. Her eyes were not silver, not blue, but the peculiar twilight shade of the sky before the first stars woke. Rain jeweled them. She looked past Isolde, past the ring of soldiers, and met Corvin’s stare across the yard as if she had been searching for only him. The storm went to its knees. “Don’t move,” Corvin said, and it was unclear whether he addressed her or himself. The woman pushed up on one elbow, grimacing at the torn skin beneath the shimmer. The silver sigils along her forearm brightened in answer to her own pain. “I won’t,” she managed, voice hoarse but steady. “If you won’t.” A murmur ran through the soldiers. Kael made a small noise—surprise, maybe; it had been years since anyone met Corvin’s voice with an equal weight. Isolde took a careful breath. “You are hurt, girl. Let me—” “I’ll live.” The woman’s gaze didn’t leave Corvin. “Are you the one who holds the storms?” Holds. Not summons, not commands. Holds—as if he were the jar and the lightning the thing trapped inside. “Yes,” Corvin said, because lying to a miracle seemed impious. “Then I found the right place.” She swayed. Isolde reached her first, hands steady at the woman’s shoulders. The healer’s fingers brushed the crescent scar, and Isolde’s mouth tightened with recognition. She flicked a glance up at Corvin, who said many things at once. Moon-marked. Dangerous. Necessary. “Bring her inside,” Corvin said. He didn’t know yet what she was, only that the storm’s silence was a drug, and he was already addicted. “Put her in the west tower.” “The west?” Isolde’s voice was mild. “Where is your study? Where your bed is.” “We’re not gossiping in the yard,” Kael said, deadpan. “Rain is unromantic.” Corvin didn’t bother answering either of them. He gave the woman a final look—the way rain beaded and did not quite wet her skin, the faint concentric circles that glowed beneath her pulse—and turned away before the quiet in him broke. Her name came later, in the lantern-lit hush of the west tower’s antechamber. Isolde worked by instinct as much as knowledge, salves and stitched herbs and a low humming that wasn’t a song but had a melody all the same. Kael kept to the door, one shoulder braced against the jamb, eyes flicking from the woman to the slit window, counting threats even when none were obvious. Corvin stood where the shadow met the edge of the firelight, close enough to feel the warmth but not close enough to be warmed. He didn’t trust the new hunger in him. He didn’t trust that it was hunger at all. The woman watched Isolde’s hands for a while. Then, as if she were remembering how to be in a body, she looked around the room—at the old maps layered like scars on the walls, the weather-stained books whose pages smelled like rain, the bowl of black river stones Corvin used when he couldn’t bear to touch anything living. Her gaze touched each thing and returned to him, as if noting a house by its bones. “Nyx,” she said, only then. It was not a question or an offering. It was a name anchoring itself to the air. “I am Nyx Ardyn.” The name slid through Corvin like a blade sheathed in silk. He felt the storm beyond the windows and stepped closer to hear it. He felt, absurdly, the wolf inside him—caged, chained, forever denied—lift its head and scent the dark. “Corvin Drayke,” Kael replied, because Corvin didn’t. “Alpha of this keeps. Occasional tyrant.” “Perpetual jester,” Isolde said. “Hold still, child. Your light is fighting me because you’re fighting it.” Nyx’s mouth tipped in a tired smile. “I’m not used to being…heavy,” she confessed, weirdly human in her embarrassment. “This place presses.” “The world is weighty,” Isolde murmured. “Even for those who think they are air.” Nyx’s attention returned to Corvin. “It’s quieter,” she said, simple wonder in her voice. “In here. In you.” She touched her sternum, as if trying to translate a language she already knew into one these bodies understood. “Out there, the storms were teeth. Here they…listen.” Corvin didn’t breathe for a count of three. “The storms do as I tell them,” he said at last, the old lie wearing a new face. Nyx shook her head. “They do as you beg.” Kael coughed to hide his laugh and failed. Isolde’s braided crown dipped as if bowing to a truth spoken clean. “Why are you here?” Corvin asked, too blunt, softer than he meant. Nyx’s eyes flickered towards the window. For a heartbeat, they reflected the lantern’s flame as if it were a moon held very close. “A door closed,” she said. “Another opened. I fell through the wrong one on purpose.” “On purpose,” Kael repeated, admiring and wary at once. “Bold.” “Desperate,” Nyx corrected. “Your world has a knot in it. I can feel it from mine. Something is sealed that should not be. The longer it holds, the stronger the sky becomes.” Her fingers found the crescent scar at her wrist and pressed. The light there answered. “I was sent to find the knot and undo it before it tightens.” “And you landed in my yard,” Corvin said. “I landed where the storm was loudest,” Nyx said, meeting his gaze like a challenge. “Where it hurt the most.” The quiet in him deepened. It wasn’t peace. It was the absence of struggle, the way a throat feels when a hand lifts from it after years. He could breathe. He had never realized how much of his life had been spent not breathing. “You speak like a priest,” he said, because the alternative was to say you are the first thing that has not broken me in decades. “I’ve never met a priest,” Nyx said, with a sudden, small smile that transformed her face from otherworldly to almost mortal. “But I’ve met mothers. Mine is…very holy.” Kael glanced at Isolde. “We’re going to have problems, aren’t we?” “We were born with them,” Isolde said. She finished tying off a linen band and sat back, knees cracking. “You’ll live,” she told Nyx, satisfied. “Eat, drink, and sleep. In that order, if you can manage it.” “Before she sleeps,” Corvin said, surprising himself, “she answers me.” He stepped into the firelight at last. The silver threads beneath Nyx’s skin brightened just a fraction, as if recognizing the shape he had made. “You said you had come to undo a knot. There are many in this keep. Which one is yours?” Nyx didn’t look away. “The one inside you.” Thunder rolled in the distance, almost apologetic. Kael swore under his breath. Isolde did not. She only folded her hands in her lap and looked at Corvin like a grandmother looks at a knife: knowing exactly what it can do, and what it will do if you take your eyes off it. Corvin’s voice was steady. “You mistook me. My curse is old and clever. It will not be unbound by a prayer.” “I didn’t bring prayers,” Nyx said. Her gaze dropped to his hands—callused, scarred, marked with the faintest trace of black runes under the skin. “I brought a key.” Something flickered across her features then. Not fear. Recognition, perhaps—like a musician hearing a song she wrote once, played by another. Her hand lifted without her permission and hovered over his palm. Not touching. The air between their skin thrummed. The sensation was not heated; it was knowing. The storms drew closer to the window, pressed like wolves against a door they’d been taught never to lean on. “Don’t,” Isolde said, not unkind. “Not yet.” Nyx’s hand trembled and fell. Corvin hadn’t realized he’d been holding his breath until his chest burned. The storms went on pretending they were weather. Isolde rose, joints creaking, and gathered her satchel. “Two rules in this tower,” she said to Nyx, and also to Corvin. “First rule: no heroics with ancient magic on an empty stomach. Second rule: when one of you is foolish, the other is wise.” She tilted her head toward the door. “Kael, you’ll fetch broth if you want an excuse to eavesdrop later.” Kael grinned. “Bless you, Isolde.” He was gone before Corvin could amend the order. Isolde paused at the threshold and laid a palm against Corvin’s arm, just for a breath. The runes under his skin woke as they always did when touched—and, for the first time in years, did not burn. “You hear that?” she murmured, too quiet for Nyx to catch. “Hear what?” he asked, though he already knew. “The part of you that stopped screaming.” He didn’t answer. He didn’t need to. Isolde patted his arm, turned to Nyx, and softened. “Rest, child. There will be a price for what you mean to do. It is always better paid awake.” They left him then—healer and Beta and their blessed noise—until the tower was only rain at the windows, ember-glow on the hearth, and the shape of a woman who could hush thunder by looking at him. Nyx watched the fire with her hands folded loose in her lap, as if there were a ritual to wait she had learned and loved. “I don’t like owing to strangers,” Corvin said at last. “Then don’t,” she replied simply. “You did not ask me to fall.” Silence stretched, not uncomfortable. He could feel, dimly, the storms standing off at the edge of the keep’s wards, heads low, tails still, not wanting to spook whatever had made them gentle. “If you stay,” he said, the words tasting nearly dangerous, “there are rules.” “I’m fond of rules,” she said. “They make the breaking sweeter.” “Don’t touch the windows during a red moon. Don’t answer voices that sound like mine if I’m not in the room. Don’t go on the eastern wall when I’m calling rain. And don’t—” “—try to open you by force,” she finished, and this time her smile held no mirth at all. “I wouldn’t. Keys work because doors want them.” The storms shivered. Corvin swallowed a curse and considered, unhelpfully, what it might be like to be wanted by something that could open him. “Sleep,” he said, rougher than he meant. “There will be questions in the morning.” “I have some now,” Nyx said, sliding down on the couch Isolde had piled with blankets. Her eyes were already losing their edge to exhaustion, but the last of her curiosity held. “Who was the woman who hummed like a river?” “Isolde. She keeps our dead from being too angry about it.” “And the one with the easy mouth?” “Kael. He keeps me from being too angry about anything.” “Good,” Nyx murmured, eyes closing. “You’ll need both.” He stood there longer than was sensitive, watching light gutter and rise in the small blue veins of her wrists, the crescent pulse slowing with sleep. Outside, the storm settled like a huge animal lowering itself by degrees, until even the wind was a breath and not a demand. Corvin had never believed the old stories that said the Moon was a woman. It seemed a foolishness, a way for poets to love something too far away to answer back. Tonight, the Moon had fallen into his house and told him his storms could be kinder. He could have ordered her locked in the dungeons. He could have called the wardens and demanded chains and sigils and an oath on old ash. He could have sent her to any tower but this one. Instead, he told the storms to sleep, and—for the first time since he was a boy and the curse had settled into his bones—he obeyed his own command. Outside the window, thunder rolled once, soft as a promise. Inside, Nyx dreamed—of keys and doors and a wolf that had never been given a body, standing finally at the threshold, listening for the sound of its name.