The wind howled through the broken teeth of the castle’s once-grand towers, rattling stone and bone alike. Ash drifted on the air like old memories, curling through shattered archways and crumbling staircases. The sky was a bruised gray, pressing down on the ruins as if the world itself mourned.
Rose walked alone.
Her boots crushed blackened glass and dust with every step, the soft crunch echoing through the stillness. The castle had been beautiful once. She could feel it—woven into the marrow of the stone, in the remnants of magic scorched into the earth. Something old had lived here. Loved here. Died here. But now, it was a corpse. And yet… it wasn’t empty.
Her wings dragged behind her—one flickering gold, bright as memory, the other cloaked in void, shimmering like a bruise beneath t
