Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Once upon a time, there was a prince who wanted to chase the stars.

He gathered a band of heroes—the kind you only ever find in old stories. There was a clever scholar, a great warrior king, a gentle maiden, a cheerful priestess, a playful rogue, a kind healer, a cunning politician, a powerful imperator, and a beautiful songstress. Together, they vowed to destroy the great evil that had swallowed their world whole.

It was a noble quest. The kind that promised glory and redemption and light at the end of all things.

Of course, this story was a disguised cautionary tale. They all died horrible, terrible deaths.

This story was told in many forms, each rendition just a little different from the last but this was how the story usually went. The prince fought valiantly. His companions gave everything they had. The darkness, however, was endless. The light never came back. In the end, the tale reaffirmed that the prince fell to his knees on a field of ash and begged the gods to let him see his beloved’s face one last time before perishing before that great evil.

It was a fine line for the poets, Anaxagoras supposed.

A ridiculous one though, if you’d lived long enough to know better.

No one knew where the story came from anymore. Some said it was a myth, others claimed it was a long forgotten memory. Everyone had their own opinion on who the prince’s beloved had been. The lovely young maiden? The mighty warrior king? The scholar with his books and his single eye?

It hardly mattered. They were all dead anyway and the prince would never see his beloved's face again.

Anaxagoras had always thought it a foolish story. Too sentimental. Too tragic for its own sake. The sort of tale that made people think grief was noble and suffering romantic. The kind that made children whisper, If I were the prince, I’d fight harder. Get back up again and I’d win.

His betrothed had said something like that once, eyes bright with childish certainty.

He’d felt like laughing at the time. That boy was much too gullible and too foolish.

Of course he’d wanted to laugh. He was older than that naïve child. Anaxagoras already knew the ending, there was no changing it. And he understood why.

After all, some stories didn’t need to be told to be understood—they simply happened, over and over again, until you realized that no matter how brave the prince, or clever the scholar, or pure the love between them, the world would always find a way to end in gray.

He knew that better than anyone.

After all, this was his third time living through it.

In Anaxagoras' first life, he had thought little of love.

Love was a story for people who had time for poetry. Nobles were meant to serve, to maintain order, to preserve dignity and lineage. He had believed that with the conviction of a young fool who thought logic could fend off cruelty.

He was born to House Ephyrios—a minor but ancient family with an unbroken line of scholars and advisors that had hailed beside a body of water near the forests. His sister, Diotima, a Beta, was sixteen when their parents died. He was an infant, barely a year old at that time. Somehow, she kept them afloat. If she had not been level-headed, if fortune had not placed the right man in their path, House Ephyrios would have crumbled before he learned to walk.

That man was Empedocles, a renowned sage from the Venerationists School under the Grove of Epiphany.

Even now, Anaxagoras could recall him: tall, quiet, eyes alight with that peculiar, gentle madness of all true scholars. He had seen something in the boy that others hadn’t.

A spark.

A mind hungry enough for knowledge to rival his own.

It was Empedocles who fought for them, shielding Euphemia from the wolves of the court and taking Anaxagoras to the Grove itself to keep him off the grubby hands of the corrupt nobility.

Of course, society howled in protest. What a bunch of hypocrites! Is what Anaxagoras thinks.

But many speak out and argue: A Beta scholar taking in a young Omega heir was a scandal waiting to bloom!

They whispered of grooming, corruption, indulgence. They always did. But Empedocles had never looked at him that way. He was a man of the mind, a devout pursuer of truth. To him, Anaxagoras was not an Omega to be pitied or controlled, but a student worth cultivating.

And so he learned.

At the Grove, the usual constructs of hierarchies did not exist, house rankings that needed to be followed were inapplicable here. To those of the Grove, there was no distinction between Alphas, Betas, or Omegas. There was only knowledge and respect to those who held it at the palm of their hands. Though it wasn't that politics were completely off the table, they just focused more on knowledge than with other mundane things like money and material wealth.

That place had a rather strict but simple system, you were either a student or a teacher, and if proven through grit and worth you could given a chance to be crowned with even more respect as you were bequeathed with the title of "Sage" which was more of a tag to know what your achievements in the vast fields of knowledge were. For example, Empedocles, who was Anaxagoras' teacher, was renowned as a Venerationist Sage, who dutifully followed the philosophy of Venerationism.

Venerationism was the theory that ritual, ceremonies, and divine miracles are the closest way for humans to communicate with the Gods. The Venerationist school specialized in understanding divine ceremonies and rituals. They're referred to as the "The Cradle of the Kingdom's Politicians" due to their influence on kingdom politics.

Besides religious studies, there were other subjects offered in the Grove.

Like magical runes. The rudimentary basics of elements. And his personal favourite Alchemy. The sacred art of transmutation. The endless pursuit of answers.

The endless pursuit of knowledge above all else was what the Grove is known for.

And Anaxagoras thrived there.

His mind stretched wide and wild, consuming everything Empedocles put before him. By twelve, it had consequently pushed him forward as a candidate to become one of the Seven Sages of the Grove. And at that time he had discovered what no one else had managed for decades, a cure for the yearly autumn plague.

The process had been tedious, miraculous, and absurdly simple in hindsight. He had crushed stalactite samples into fine sand, blended them with soil chosen through dozens of failed trials, and cultivated a new herb through alchemic grafting and magical stabilization. The resulting bloom—a small, blue, mint-like flower that could be eaten or ground into paste which eradicated the deadly and painful lesions that plagued the poor every autumn.

He had been proud, then. Foolishly so.

The King had summoned him, granted him a boon. An Omega child of twelve, standing before the throne, certain he had changed the world. And when asked what he wanted, he had asked only for extra funding. For research. For knowledge. He was after all, truly a child of the Grove.

It was the purest request he would ever make. 

And the one that doomed him.

Because that act, that single moment of bright, naïve brilliance, caught the eye of Crown Prince Lycurgus.

Lycurgus, who smiled too easily and spoke of duty too sweetly.

Lycurgus, who claimed admiration, then affection, then possession.

Lycurgus, who made Anaxagoras his betrothed before Anaxagoras had even understood what being wanted meant.

That, he supposed, was where his first life truly began.

And where it started to rot.

Once upon a time, there was a prince who wanted to chase the stars.

Then, on a day that would later be turned into verse and lacquered into a courtly anecdote, the prince chose Anaxagoras.

The boy remembered everything about that day with the same peculiar clarity he reserved for experiments—the way light slid across marble, the particular hush of a hall that was waiting to be entertained, the precise angle at which the King leaned forward on his throne as if to better hear an interesting theorem. They praised his name like a new discovery. They called the feat “gifted,” “blessed,” “the Grove’s brightest.” The gilded words warmed the hearth of so many reputations that afternoon and saturated the hall like perfume.

Anaxagoras was twelve.

The Crown Prince was twenty-four.

To the courtiers, the difference was convenient. A young genius elevated straight into the radiance of the palace—what a charming alignment of merit and statecraft. The King smiled as though he were conferring not a burden but a favor; the nobles bowed as if they were applauding a theorem being proven aloud. Empedocles stood to the side and looked small and pleased, the way a teacher looks when a pupil recites a conclusion in the teacher’s own voice. That pleased look, given to Anaxagoras, cost him the privacy he had once been granted.

Lycurgus made the ceremonial speech with an easy voice and a precise charm. He spoke, as princes do, in sentences that flattened danger into promise. He hailed the Grove’s blessing as if it were a tidy contract between two useful parties. He praised Anaxagoras—for his mind, his work, his “service to the realm”—and he did it in public because the public is the place where claims become law. He used the language of guardianship, of stewardship. He used the language that made property polite.

“I will protect what is precious to the kingdom,” he said, and the hall swallowed up every word he spat out. “I will place it where it flourishes.”

He said it as though placing were the same thing as seeing.

It was not the words that hurt. It was the way he meant them.

There was a difference between being admired for what you had done and being selected because you were useful, because your presence elevated a dynasty. Lycurgus could recite the difference in a dozen learned forms and still be kind about it. He could press a hand to a shoulder and smile, and every mannered gentleman in the room would see only affection. But Anaxagoras had watched men who meant well discover that they could not, by gentleness, undo a cage. The hand that adjusted a collar might also close a latch.

After the King’s nod—the final, unambiguous knot—the chamber swelled into polite applause. Lycurgus came down from his dais with the practiced gait of someone who had walked this stage many times. He approached Anaxagoras with that precise softness the court praised as consideration. Up close he was taller than the boy expected; not only in years but in the way authority made his posture a thing of gravity. He bowed and, with the public eye upon him, he reached out. His fingers brushed his wrist as if testing resistance.

“The Grove has given us truth,” he murmured, a tone meant for only Anaxagoras though said in a room full of observers. “You will be safe in my care.”

“Safe,” the courtiers echoed, smiling at the tenderness.

That single word, offered with the garb of protection, had the structure of a promise and the weight of an ownership claim. Anaxagoras did not yet understand the entirety of its geometry, only that geometry existed, and that his small life was being fitted into its precise angles.

There were formalities after. Oaths to be read, provisions discussed in careful bureaucratic language, gifts exchanged for the press. A ring, not large, setting a pale gemstone into a band stamped with the king’s cipher: it was less a symbol than a seal. Lycurgus placed it where an adult would place it and spoke his name the way a scholar cites a source; precise, authority-laced, final.

“Anaxagoras from the Grove of Epiphany,” he said, “you will be my betrothed.”

The words spoken to him was never going to be question for his consent, instead it was a conclusion to his tragic fate upon the hands of a cruel, cruel man.

People smiled. The scribes recorded each syllable in cheerful hands. Empedocles inclined his head; his eyes were dry with something that could have been pride or fear. The boy recalled thinking, with a detachment that he will always be ashamed of, how elegantly the palace took a bright thing and set it on display.

Later, when Anaxagoras allowed himself to think about it like a human being instead of a specimen, he understood the timing. He had been useful. He had solved a problem that the kingdom felt at its bones. Reward follows utility. Praise follows utility. A youth with proven service was an asset to be allied and accumulated.

To Lycurgus, aligning with his mind was clever.

To the King, binding the Grove of Epiphany to the throne with a visible token of alliance was sensible.

To the nobles, it was a good story.

To Anaxagoras, it was the beginning of something with teeth.

The age gap felt less like arithmetic and more like a spatial law. He was of an age where he was not expected to weaponize gentleness for he was clueless of such societal norms. Anaxagoras was of an age where he could not yet tell the difference between patronage and possession. That ignorance was deliberate on the part of the court perhaps—kindnesses dressed as mentorship are easier to bear when one knows no other shape of the world.

On that day, Lycurgus presented his hand to the hall and offered him the future like a scientific endorsement. He called Anaxagoras brilliant and necessary, awarded him the King’s favor, and wrapped the whole thing in language that made assholes of those who objected. If a man of lesser subtlety had attempted to speak plainly, the court would have recoiled and the King might have frowned. Lycurgus, however, drew the net so tightly it became invisible.

Anaxagoras remembers his face at the very end—a faux soft smile, the air of someone who believes himself generous for tying another’s fate to his. He was handsome in the way absolute certainty is handsome; it demands admiration and therefore deflects suspicion.

Anaxagoras did not think then about childhood now; he thinks about lattice and lock. The ceremony was a stitch in fine thread, the sort used to mend a robe. Only later would he learn the robe they tailored was meant not to clothe him but to restrain.

The court cheered. Empedocles clapped. Anaxagoras bowed, as the child of a crumbling house is taught to do. His mind catalogued the facts, the hours, the wording, the ring’s faint cold on his finger. Pride warmed a corner of his chest because Empedocles, who had not seen him as a number nor as a question but as potential, as child who had not been effaced  by hardship.But beneath that warmth lay a nascent calculation: the measures, the balance of power, the variables he would have to think around. Anaxagoras at some point realized he needed to mature faster for even now he still did not understand his circumstances.

Once the noise diminished and the King returned to more pressing matters, Lycurgus lingered a moment near where he stood in the shade of tapestries. His hand found Anaxagoras' again—another polite gesture to the onlookers—but when their fingers touched it was softer, singular, like a hypothesis given a private test. For the first time Anaxagoras saw the tiny mechanism beneath the prince’s public charm: a predilection for control, arranged in courteous tones.

“Come to the palace when you can spare the time,” he said. “There is much I would like to show you.”

The calendar was already marking him as someone else’s resource.

That night, Anaxagoras returned to Empedocles’s study and slept with the cloak of the Grove over his shoulders. He read old scripts until his eyes stung, because the one thing he understood better than most was how knowledge could be made into property. He catalogued the King’s favors, wrote down the names of men who smiled as though they had given a gift, and for the first time in his life Anaxagoras tasted the metallic tang of an equation that did not balance in his favor.

Anaxagoras was twelve, and the story had been written for him in a hand that would not erase.

The Crown Prince kept his promises. That was the trouble with him.

Every invitation he extended arrived with flawless timing, every gesture executed with such courtesy that to refuse would have been a social misstep. Lycurgus never demanded Anaxagoras’ presence—he requested it, with letters written in an elegant, confident hand and sealed with the royal crest. The tone was always the same: If your studies permit, I would be honored to host you for supper.

A choice, phrased like a command.

At first, Empedocles found it flattering. The King’s heir taking interest in his protégé, what teacher wouldn’t be pleased?

“You’ll learn more from the palace library than even I can teach you,” he said once, his voice weary but proud.

And Anaxagoras, dutiful as ever, had gone.

The first dinner was pleasant enough. Lycurgus spoke to him as though to an equal—or rather, as though to a particularly clever mirror of himself. He asked about the properties of mana conduits, the theoretical efficiency of rune layering in arcane flora. When Anaxagoras spoke, Lycurgus listened, sharp and alert, eyes glinting like polished gold. The prince understood his words— truly understood—and that, at twelve, was intoxicating.

He mistook that recognition for safety.

Over the next few months, their correspondence deepened. The prince would send rare texts from his private collection, annotated in his tidy script. He’d ask for Anaxagoras' opinions, sometimes on scientific matters, sometimes on moral ones, always leading him toward conclusions that reflected his own worldview. When Anaxagoras disagreed, Lycurgus would smile faintly, not offended, but amused. “So certain,” he’d say, “and yet so young.”

By thirteen, Anaxagoras was dining at the palace weekly. Just a few months into this arrangement, Lycurgus had dismissed most servants during those evenings, insisting he preferred privacy when discussing philosophy. He praised Anaxagoras' intellect with an intensity that bordered on worship—you see things no one else does—and yet somehow each compliment folded into a kind of claim.

His tone was always so measured, so warm, that it was impossible to accuse him of impropriety. And so Anaxagoras said nothing.

It began with gestures so small they seemed trivial. Lycurgus adjusted his chair for him. Brushed a fleck of dust from his sleeve. Touched his shoulder lightly when leading him to the window to discuss the sunset’s “refraction over glass.” The touches were never inappropriate, not exactly, and always too brief to draw notice.

But they lingered in Anaxagoras' mind, long after the prince withdrew his hand.

The palace whispered that the young scholar was a marvel, that the Crown Prince had found in him an intellectual match, a partner in both knowledge and governance. Nobles praised their compatibility, their conversations, their “shared passion for the betterment of the realm.” Anaxagoras' sister, Diotima, even wrote from their estate, delighted that her brother was so valued. “You’ve secured quite a powerful supporter,” she said in her letter. “The Gods must favor you.”

He tried to believe it. He tried to be grateful.

But the older he grew, the more he began to understand the pattern beneath Lycurgus’ attention. The prince was… fascinated by him. Not only for his intellect, but for his resistance, the small moments when Anaxagoras disagreed, when his expression cooled instead of flattered. Those moments lit a strange pleasure in Lycurgus’ gaze, like a man delighted by a puzzle refusing to yield.

Once, during one of their private dinners, Lycurgus leaned close enough that Anaxagoras could feel his breath ghost against his ear as he murmured, “You’re beautiful when you argue.”

Anaxagoras had flinched, not visibly, not enough to give offense, but enough for Lycurgus to notice. The prince had smiled, indulgent. “Ah,” he’d said softly, “forgive me. I forget how young you still are.”

But he hadn’t forgotten. Anaxagoras could tell. Lycurgus remembered everything.

By fourteen, Anaxagoras had learned that the prince’s affection came in carefully measured doses: reward for compliance, attention for obedience.

When Anaxagoras defied him, questioned a decree, or refused to flatter—Lycurgus would turn cold, not angry but distant, his silence heavy with unspoken rebuke. Then, days later, he would call Anaxagoras to his side again, offer him some new token of approval, like a book, a word, a smile and the chill would vanish as though it had never been there.

He was, in his own way, a master of conditioning.

The court saw only devotion. The scholars saw mentorship. Empedocles saw patronage.

Only Anaxagoras saw the cage being built around him, one act of kindness at a time.

When he finally asked, tentatively, if he might spend less time at the palace and more in his studies at the Grove, Lycurgus’ reply was immediate and gentle. “But your studies thrive best here,” he said, reaching to straighten the collar of Anaxagoras' robes. “You have everything you need under my protection. Do you not trust me to provide it?”

It wasn’t a question that could be answered safely. So Anaxagoras schooled his expression, he bowed, and said, “Of course, Your Highness.”

Lycurgus smiled in return, the same smile he gave diplomats before outmaneuvering them.

That night, when Anaxagoras returned to his quarters in the palace, he found the latest volume Empedocles had sent him still sealed in its wrapping. The courier had been turned away “on royal orders.” There was a letter beside it, written in Lycurgus’ hand.

You study too hard, it read. Rest, for my sake.

He did not rest.

But he began, for the first time, to understand that the story he was living was not a tale of mentorship or romance—it was likely an experiment.

And he was the subject.

The year Anaxagoras turned fifteen, the palace stopped feeling like a place.

It became a system, of locks and smiles, of soft words that closed more doors than they opened.

He had long since been moved from the Grove of Epiphany to the royal estate, “for convenience.” The King praised his brilliance, the ministers lauded the Crown Prince’s foresight, and Lycurgus, always gracious, said that the young scholar’s insight “brought light to his days.”

It sounded like a compliment. In practice, it was confinement.

His chambers were beautiful—high windows, carved mahogany furnishings, a desk overflowing with fine inks—but they looked inward, over the gardens, never outward toward the gates. The walls smelled faintly of cedar and old parchment. At night, the faint hum of the wards under the floorboards was the only sound; steady, low, almost like breathing.

He could leave, of course. No one stopped him.

But each time he returned from the libraries or the chapel, Lycurgus was waiting. Always smiling. Always knowing.

“You work yourself too hard,” the prince would murmur, drawing him toward a chair by the window. “Stay tonight. We’ll dine together.”

It was never a request. It was an unspoken order. And when Anaxagoras hesitated, only for a moment, never long enough to be impolite, Lycurgus’ hand would find his shoulder in that same practiced, claiming way. A touch that seemed almost tender, until one noticed the weight behind it.

Once, when he was sixteen, Anaxagoras mentioned that he missed the Grove’s quiet forests. Lycurgus’ expression barely shifted, a flicker of displeasure, gone as quickly as it appeared.

“Forests are for those who seek,” he said. “But you’ve already been found.”

That night, the palace was buzzing with a rumor that Empedocles had retired to a remote island. The details were vague, the timing suspicious. Anaxagoras received no letter of farewell from the man himself but he understood the sentiment.

To hold his tongue.

The first time Lycurgus kissed his hand, it was in public, a solstice ceremony held in the great hall. The gesture drew delighted murmurs from the court; nobles whispered of the Crown Prince’s devotion, his affection for his young betrothed.

Anaxagoras smiled, because that was what was expected. The warmth of Lycurgus’ lips lingered long after the ceremony ended.

He scrubbed his hands raw that night. The scent of royal cologne clung anyway, sharp and resinous, stubborn as smoke. He was mildly worried it wasn't cologne that stuck to his skin.

After that, the boundaries shifted—imperceptibly, inexorably.

A hand guiding him down a corridor. Fingers brushing his neck while adjusting his collar. A palm resting too long on his back during a court dance.

Nothing overt. Nothing he could object to without seeming ungrateful.

Lycurgus never raised his voice, never struck him. He didn’t need to. His control was woven into the fabric of Anaxagoras’ life: who he spoke to, what he read, even what he wore.

When Anaxagoras appeared at a banquet in a green sash rather than the blue one Lycurgus had commissioned, the prince merely smiled and said, “You prefer to stand out, then?”

An innocent question. Spoken before the entire court.

The following week, every servant who had helped him dress was quietly reassigned. He never heard of them again even when he'd subtly asked about their whereabouts.

That was when Anaxagoras realized he needed to be a bit more careful with testing limits but he would not be himself if he wasn't stubborn.

And he was ever so uncompromising when it came for his thirst of knowledge.

This was when he began reading late into the night, one of the few bits of rebellion left to him. The candlelight smoked faintly, staining the air with beeswax and ink. Alchemy, philosophy, astronomy—anything that reminded him there were still things no one could take: his mind, his reason, the small, steady spark of self that still belonged to him.

Lycurgus, amused by his devotion to such a thing, encouraged it.

“You’re radiant when you speak of ideas,” he’d say, fingertips brushing Anaxagoras’ jaw. “It’s what I love most about you—your purity of thought.”

Purity. The word turned in his mind like a knife.

One evening, Lycurgus brought him to the observatory—the highest tower in the palace. From there, the city lights spilled like molten gold below them. It should have been breathtaking. And it was, in a way. But Anaxagoras noticed how the walls of glass and crystal caught every reflection, multiplying their images infinitely.

No shadows. No escape.

The air was thin that high up, almost cold enough to burn the lungs. The silence was immense, broken only by the faint ticking of the brass instruments.

“Do you see?” Lycurgus murmured behind him. “All that exists here does so for us. For what we might build.”

Anaxagoras’ breath hitched as fingers brushed the back of his neck.

“Together,” Lycurgus added, voice honeyed. “You and I.”

Their reflections met in the glass—two figures, one smiling, one still. The illusion made them appear the same height, the same shape, almost the same person.

That night, Anaxagoras dreamed of glass: endless reflective walls, his own face staring back at him, expressionless. When he woke, his pulse thundered and he realized there were no mirrors in his room. Lycurgus had ordered them removed months ago, claiming they “invited vanity.”

Once, Anaxagoras asked why the prince seemed so intent on keeping him close.

Lycurgus laughed, a low, affectionate sound that might have been genuine if it hadn’t chilled him.

“Because you make me better,” he said. Then, after a pause, his tone softened to something almost intimate. “And don’t I provide for your needs?”

When Anaxagoras didn’t answer, Lycurgus tilted his head, studying him the way one might study a disobedient pet. “You remind me,” he continued, “of an old story, the one about a cave. Have you heard of it?”

Anaxagoras hesitated. He had, of course.

Lycurgus smiled faintly, and went on before he could reply. “There were men who lived their whole lives chained inside a cavern, watching shadows dance across the wall. They thought the shadows were reality, because they could see nothing else. And when one of them was freed and stepped into the sunlight, he was blinded at first—hurt by the very truth that would save him. But once he saw the world as it was, he understood how pitiful the others had been, mistaking darkness for knowledge.”

His hand brushed Anaxagoras’ cheek, almost tenderly. “You live in that darkness, my love. The world deceives you. You think I’m cruel because I lead you toward the light. But one day, when you finally understand, you’ll thank me.”

He said it with such quiet conviction that it almost sounded like faith.

Safety. Another lie wrapped in silk.

Anaxagoras forced a wobbly smile. He had learned how, by then.

But when Lycurgus left, he let the smile fall and pressed his fingers to his throat, feeling the faint echo of the prince’s touch.

The night pressed close around him. Somewhere in the distance, a bell tolled the late hour; slow, solemn, unending.

He thought, not for the first time, that there were prisons built out of love.

And that some cages, gilded finely enough, could even be mistaken for paradise.

The older Anaxagoras grew, the less he could bear his situation. Nor could he turn to his books to escape what he is living through.

Sure it had once been his refuge; it had meant peace—the hum of distant bells, the weightless hush of the Grove’s mornings. Now it pressed on him like a weight.

Every empty corridor in the palace whispered his own words back at him: the careful courtesies, the thank-yous, the apologies. He had learned to speak with precision, but Lycurgus had learned to listen for defiance in every syllable.

It began with a debate.

The council was discussing the expansion of the northern trade route. Anaxagoras, invited only to observe, found himself correcting an arithmetic error in one of the ledgers. The minister blinked, uncertain, and before he could apologize, Lycurgus laughed.

“My betrothed forgets his place,” the Crown Prince said lightly, eyes bright as polished steel. “Leave governance to those who hold the burden of it.”

The court laughed too, obediently.

Later, in private, Lycurgus poured Anaxagoras a glass of wine, set it in his hand, and said almost fondly, “You’re very brave to contradict me in front of the court. Brave, and a little foolish.”

The wine tasted of copper. He wondered, fleetingly, if the taste came from the cup or from his own bitten tongue.

For weeks afterward, Anaxagoras' petitions to visit the libraries of the Outer City were delayed, misplaced, and forgotten. He worked instead in his rooms, his notes accumulating in secret stacks. Knowledge had always been his language of freedom, and so he hoarded it the way others hoarded coins.

But the palace was built to notice. Servants reported. Doors that once opened freely now asked for permission. The alchemical furnaces were inspected before he could use them—‘for safety,’ they said. Each day, something small disappeared from his reach.

He stopped asking. He knew very well it would be a futile attempt.

When he turned seventeen, they held a coming-of-age celebration that lasted three days. On the final evening, the prince presented him with a new signet ring to replace the iron one he had once used to chain Anaxagoras to him—gold, set with an opal carved in the shape of a flame.

“A symbol,” Lycurgus said as he slid it onto Anaxagoras' finger. “The mark of our union.”

Anaxagoras didn't remember if he had smiled or looked horrified.

The ring was heavy, beautifully made, and exquisitely cruel. Almost impossible to remove without help. It pinched slightly when he flexed his hand, a reminder that beauty could tighten its grip too.

After that, Lycurgus grew gentler again, as if soothed by Anaxagoras' silence. He invited him to discussions on philosophy, praised his insights, quoted him in speeches. It might almost have resembled happiness, if not for the way every kindness followed a silence he had been forced into.

He began to understand: Lycurgus needed resistance to prove his own power. Each time Anaxagoras bent into obedience, the prince’s affection returned like sunshine after a storm; brilliant, blinding, and impossible to trust.

What a terrible, conniving man!

There were nights when Anaxagoras tried to imagine another life: the Grove’s rain-soaked courtyards, the scent of crushed mint leaves on his hands. In those dreams, he could almost breathe. He began keeping a small notebook under the false bottom of a drawer—half research notes, half unsent letters he would never send for they had no recipient.

One evening, Lycurgus found it.

He didn’t raise his voice. He merely turned each page  with measured patience. When he reached the final line of his latest entry: “I am forgetting who I was before I became his.”

He closed the notebook, set it down, and looked at Anaxagoras for a long, unreadable moment.

Then he smiled.

“Do not write such things again,” he said softly. There was no anger nor admonishment in his tone, only the faintest trace of amusement. “People might think you’re unhappy.”

That night, every candle in Anaxagoras' chamber burned low before dawn. He did not sleep. He watched the flames gutter and thought about oxygen—how a flame dies not because it’s weak, but because the air around it is spent. He wondered how long a mind could burn the same way.

When Lycurgus visited him the next morning, all warmth and laughter, Anaxagoras bowed perfectly and spoke with measured grace.

He knew now the rules of this kind of war: never show the wound, only the scar.

Outside, the city bells rang for the new day. Inside, the prince kissed his forehead and said, “My clever one, how good you look when you’re calm.”

Anaxagoras smiled faintly.

Because that was the only practiced response he could master.

His first taste of freedom came to Anaxagoras on paper.

It was a letter, no larger than a folded handkerchief, sealed with the wax emblem of the house he no longer called home. The edges smelled faintly of pressed lavender. His sister’s handwriting, familiar and painfully careful, greeted him after so many years of silence.

Dearest baby brother,

The years have been long without you. The anniversary comes soon, and I wish to offer our parents’ prayers with both their children present, as it should be. Come home, even if only for a day. The world is smaller when you are near.

—Your sister, Diotima.

The letter trembled in his hands. He read it once, then again, and again—half afraid the ink would fade if he blinked.

For a long time, he simply stared at it. The date was three days from now. He knew what it meant to leave without permission, what it would cost him. And yet, something inside him whispered that he had already paid more than enough.

He folded the letter, slipped it between the pages of an old treatise on ancient thermodynamics, and began to plan. Though he had no clue as to how this reached him before being blocked by the Crown Prince's people, he thought it was an olive branch being offered to him and he had no desire to refuse it.

Anaxagoras had always been clever with systems, and the palace was nothing more than a system: guards rotating in predictable intervals, routes that grew lazy with routine, the precise hours when Lycurgus retired to his study and demanded not to be disturbed.

The prince’s confidence was his greatest vulnerability. He believed his control was absolute.

It took Anaxagoras two nights to map the pattern. On the third, he escaped.

He wore his simplest robes, dark blue with a gray sash, and left his signet ring on the table beside the still-burning candles. The opal flame winked at him as if mocking the thought of departure.

By the time the moon had reached its zenith, he was outside the southern gate, hood drawn, heartbeat wild but steady. When the gate finally shut behind him, the sound was so soft he almost missed it. Freedom after all rarely announced itself.

The city beyond the palace walls greeted him like an old dream—rough, loud, and alive. The scent of river mud and spiced bread, the chatter of merchants closing stalls. It wasn’t beautiful, not really. But it was real.

He hadn’t realized how much he’d missed it.

The journey home was not long, though each hour felt stolen. His family's estate had been rebuilt since the last time he’d seen it, yet the familiar willow by the gates still leaned toward the road, the same as when they were children. And when she appeared on the veranda—hair braided, eyes bright despite the years—Anaxagoras felt his composure fracture.

“Naxy,” she whispered, almost disbelieving, before pulling him into her arms. “My sweet baby, you're home.”

He hadn’t been touched like that in years. Not carefully. Not lovingly.

He let himself hold on.

The day that followed felt suspended out of time. They visited the family cenotaph, placed white lilies before their parents’ memorial stones, and spoke of memories that had grown brittle from disuse. His sister laughed when he recounted old lessons with Empedocles. She scolded him for losing weight, pressed extra food into his hands, and called him her baby, her beloved little brother as though he’d never left.

For a brief, bright span of hours, Anaxagoras remembered that he was not only someone's betrothed, or an exemplary scholar, or a possession. He was a person.

As dusk fell, he sat beneath the willow, his head resting against the bark, and let himself think of nothing at all. 

If the world ended at that moment, he thought, he would not have minded.

But the world didn’t end.

It simply waited for him to return to it.

Lycurgus discovered the absence in the evening.

He had come, as he often did, to check on his betrothed under the guise of affection, a ritual as much about reassurance as love. He found the chamber lit, the curtains open, and the ring gleaming unattended on the desk.

For a moment, the Crown Prince stood very still.

He dismissed the servants with a quiet word. When the door shut, his hand fell upon the ring, his thumb pressing against the carved opal until its edges bit into his skin.

Anaxagoras was gone.

He was too disciplined to shout, too proud to rage. The silence that followed was worse—the kind that drew inwards, calculating. When he finally spoke, his voice was even. “Prepare the horses.”

By the time he reached the outer lands, the sun was long gone and the lamps in Diotima’s manor burned low. The guards never stood a chance, his seal opened every door.

When Anaxagoras looked up from the veranda, still laughing at something his sister had said, the air seemed to leave his lungs. His laugh got caught in his throat. Some instinct had made him glance toward the road, and in the distance—too still, too straight—stood a man watching.

Lycurgus stood there, expression smooth as glass.

“Your Highness,” Anaxagoras said, forcing the words out. “I—”

“Were you so homesick,” Lycurgus asked, stepping forward, “that you forgot how to ask for my permission?”

Diotima moved between them, her chin high. “It was my invitation, my lord. If punishment is due—”

“None will punish a grieving sister,” he said, with that same terrible calm. His gaze did not leave Anaxagoras. “But the Crown Prince’s betrothed should know better than to run away from his future.”

He extended a hand.

Anaxagoras didn’t take it, but neither did he resist when Lycurgus’ fingers closed around his wrist. The grip was gentle in appearance, immovable in truth.

When they left, Diotima called his name, and for the first time since childhood, Anaxagoras didn’t answer.

Diotima stood at the gates long after they’d gone, the scent of wilting lilies heavy in the air.

Back in the palace, Lycurgus did not shout. He never did. He poured wine, handed one cup to Anaxagoras, and said softly, “You embarrassed me. Are you a child? You ought to be more mature now.”

Anaxagoras kept his eyes on the floor as he accepted the cup. “I wanted to see my sister.”

“And you could have asked.”

“You would have said no.”

Lycurgus’ silence stretched. Then, with deliberate care, he took the cup from Anaxagoras' hand and set it aside. His touch lingered on Anaxagoras' knuckles, deceptively tender. “You make it sound as though I am cruel.”

“Aren’t you?”

For a moment, there was something raw, a flicker of disbelief, or hurt, or maybe only pride. Then it was gone.

Lycurgus smiled coldly. “I am many things, my love. But not cruel. Cruelty has no purpose. Discipline does.”

He leaned forward, pressing a kiss to Anaxagoras' temple. “Don’t make me teach you that lesson.”

The next day, the palace guards were doubled. All letters were blatantly screened now. Anaxagoras' chamber was moved closer to Lycurgus’ own, “for convenience.” He could still see the gardens from his window, though the willow trees outside looked smaller now, their shadows thin against the white stone.

He had expected regret. Instead, he felt something different—something harder, sharper, lodged beneath the ribs.

He’d gone home once.

He’d do it again.

Freedom, he decided, wasn’t a place. It was persistence.

And persistence, like defiance, could be quiet—but never dead.

The council chamber smelled of ink and incense—sharp, suffocating, familiar.

Anaxagoras sat at the far end of the long table, hands folded neatly atop the stack of documents he had been reviewing since dawn. The seal of the Royal Institute's archive gleamed faintly in the lamplight beside him.

He was seventeen.

Too young, they often murmured, too soft, too easily swayed by his station and his betrothal. An omega among alpha lords.

He never cared for others opinions. He had learned to let their words pass through him like smoke.

The councilors gathered in murmuring clusters before the meeting began—fat rings glinting on thicker fingers, laughter pitched just enough to be exclusionary. Lycurgus sat at the head of the table, posture relaxed, half-turned toward Anaxagoras. His eyes were unreadable, which meant he was watching everything.

When the chancellor finally called the meeting to order, the conversation began with the usual drivel: crop reports, tariffs, trivial disputes between border towns. It was almost pleasant in its dullness, until the Minister of Commerce—Lord Damon, whose waistline and ego grew in proportion each year—cleared his throat.

“My prince,” he began, the false deference dripping like honey, “I must raise a concern about the current allocation of royal funds toward... nonessential research.” His gaze flicked to Anaxagoras. “Namely, the Royal Institute.”

The temperature in the room seemed to dip.

Anaxagoras did not move. “Nonessential?”

The Royal Institute was where great scholars in the Kingdom gathered to work for the crown, although he was not a part of it himself as he did his own research alone and in solitary he knew that they were diligent in their work. Although when compared to Anaxagoras' achievements in the eyes of these fickle men their infinitesimal results may as well have been a tree that bore no fruit.

Damon smiled the way a wolf might smile at a caged bird. “Forgive me, young master, but the Royal Institute produces little return for the treasury. Alchemy, disease control, theoretical thermodynamics—noble pursuits, I’m sure, but hardly matters of statecraft. The people need results, not dreams.”

The laughter that followed was polite, but it carried.

Anaxagoras straightened slightly, the movement so small it might have been mistaken for adjusting his sleeve. “Dreams, my lord, are how we prevented last year’s epidemic from turning the southern ports into graves. A cure, I made, created from a feat of alchemy that you so despise.”

That silenced most of the room. Damon’s smile faltered, just a fraction.

He recovered quickly. “Ah yes, like that little cure you discovered years ago. A remarkable accomplishment for someone of your stature, sure. But perhaps it has set... unrealistic expectations for what an academic can achieve, especially at your age.” His tone turned almost paternal. “You’ve done much already, my dear. Leave the ledgers to those accustomed to the weight of them.”

It was always the same—praise turned into dismissal.

Anaxagoras could have ignored it, for the sake of not having to argue with those with no common sense. But not today.

He felt frustrated. He felt that there was no point in being obedient to day, he was never one to follow rules anyway.

“Then by all means,” he said softly, “carry that weight.”

Anaxagoras reached for one of the ledgers in front of him, flipping it open to a marked page. Columns of numbers gleamed like quiet accusations. “The funding proposal for your trade network lists ‘transport maintenance’ as twelve thousand gold. Yet—” he turned the page, “—the actual allocation was only eight thousand. Four thousand unaccounted for, funneled through an intermediary owned by your cousin’s estate.”

The color drained from Damon’s face.

“I imagine that extra weight must be quite difficult to carry,” Anaxagoras continued, tone mild. “Do you recommend I leave this to your experience as well?”

For a heartbeat, no one spoke. Then someone choked on their own breath trying to suppress a laugh.

The chamber erupted in whispers.

Lycurgus didn’t stop him. He hadn’t moved at all—merely leaned back in his chair, chin resting on his gloved hand. Watching. Indulgent.

“Mind your words,” Damon snapped, composure fracturing. “You forget your place, boy.”

“I thought my place was here.” Anaxagoras tilted his head. “At His Highness’ side, as he requested.”

He should have stopped there. He knew it. Every instinct told him he was already treading dangerous ground. He had tried this little act before and got scolded for it. But something inside him—brittle, angry, alive—refused to be quiet.

“So tell me,” he said, voice steady as drawn glass, “is my place to remain silent while thieves dress themselves in the language of loyalty?”

The silence that followed was dense enough to crush bone.

Even Lycurgus stirred at that, a slight movement, his gaze finally locking with Anaxagoras’. There was heat there, sharp as a blade’s edge. For a moment, Anaxagoras’ composure nearly broke under it. He could feel his pulse against his throat, too fast, too loud.

When the Crown Prince rose, no one dared breathe.

He crossed the distance between them with measured steps. Anaxagoras forced himself not to flinch as Lycurgus’ hand came to rest at the back of his neck—a gesture that looked tender but anchored him like a chain. The prince’s thumb brushed lightly against the pulse there, slow, deliberate, right along the lines of where he'd absently stuck his scent patch.

“Enough,” Lycurgus said, voice low. “My betrothed speaks with passion. It’s a rare quality in this hall.” The pads of his fingers lingered, grazing lightly at the edges of the patch as though debating over whether he would rip it off or press it firmly in place. “You should all be grateful someone here still cares for the truth.”

The council bowed, reluctantly, like men kneeling before a storm they couldn’t reason with. Damon swallowed hard, his fury masked by forced obedience.

Lycurgus leaned closer, enough that only Anaxagoras could hear him. “You enjoy provoking them,” he murmured, the ghost of a smile in his voice. “One might think you were trying to make me jealous with all that attention you spend on these lowly bugs.”

Anaxagoras’ breath caught, his brows furrow. “I only wanted them to listen.”

“And listen they shall.” Lycurgus’ hand trailed from his neck to his jaw, thumb tracing the curve of it with disarming gentleness. “But I advise you to worry about how they'll remember your words.”

He straightened, turning back to the council. “The Royal Institute's funding will remain as is. In fact—” his tone softened, almost fond, it made Anaxagoras feel sick, “—increase it by a tenth. Consider it a reward for today’s... entertainment.”

A ripple of unease passed through the table but no one argued.

When the meeting adjourned, Anaxagoras stood in silence, papers still clutched in trembling hands. Lycurgus lingered at his side, smiling that quiet, knowing smile that meant he was thinking too much.

“Come,” the prince said finally, low and patient, the way one might speak to a favored pet. “You’ve had your fun. Let me walk you back.”

Anaxagoras nodded once, his throat tight.

He had made his point.

He had won against the council.

And yet, beneath the glow of it, there was a flicker of something colder, the knowledge that the only man who could destroy him had just chosen not to.

For now.

The corridors outside the council hall were silent, save for the echo of their footsteps.

Anaxagoras walked half a step behind, as etiquette demanded. The papers in his hands had long since stopped trembling, but the ghost of Lycurgus’ hand at his neck still lingered—the warmth of it, the pressure that felt like both a caress and a claim. The startling anxiety at having those hands touch him in places he gave no consent for.

He hated that it made him aware of his own skin. Of his place in biology. Of his role in this gilded cage.

“You were magnificent,” Lycurgus said at last, the words cutting through the quiet like silk. “You should have seen their faces, Damon, that buffoon, looked ready to choke on his own tongue.”

Anaxagoras kept his gaze forward. “I wasn’t trying to amuse you.”

“Oh, I know.” Lycurgus’ tone was indulgent, teasing. “That’s what made it so entertaining.”

They turned into the west corridor, the one that led toward Anaxagoras’ chambers. The afternoon light spilled across the marble floor, warm and golden, catching the edge of the prince’s uniform—the purple and gold thread, the subtle glint of his signet ring.

It would have been beautiful, if Anaxagoras hadn’t known how dangerous it all was.

“You embarrassed them,” Lycurgus went on, “and still looked lovely doing it. You realize, of course, they’ll despise you now more than ever.”

“They already did so from the start, is there a real need to worry about it growing?”

A quiet hum of agreement. “True.”

For a moment, there was only the sound of their steps. Lycurgus glanced sideways at him, and the faintest curve touched his mouth—not cruel, not kind, but knowing.

“You were shaking though,” he said softly. “You think I didn’t notice?”

“I wasn’t.” He lied.

“You were,” Lycurgus said, amused. “Right before you called Damon a thief in front of twelve witnesses. It was adorable.”

The word made something twist unpleasantly in Anaxagoras’ stomach. He stopped walking before the door to his chambers and turned, forcing calm. “I did not need you to speak up for me. If you’re looking for gratitude, you’ll be disappointed.”

Lycurgus stepped closer. Too close. He reached out, brushed a stray lock of hair from Anaxagoras’ temple, and let his fingers linger there—tracing, memorizing, claiming.

“I’m not,” he said quietly. “I’m rather proud of how you've  learned to defend yourself.”

The words shouldn’t have mattered. But they landed somewhere deep, sharp enough to draw blood.

Lycurgus’ hand slid down, the pad of his thumb brushing the line of Anaxagoras’ jaw, down to his chin in fascination. “You’ve grown so much since the day you first came here,” he murmured, almost thoughtful. “I remember how frightened you were. How small.”

“I’m not small now.”

“No,” Lycurgus agreed, smiling faintly. “You’re not.” His gaze softened, and that made it worse, the way affection could sound like a promise, or a threat, depending on who spoke it.

Anaxagoras hated the warmth that crept into his chest at the sound of that voice—low, fond, and sincere in a way that made it worse. He hated that it made his pulse stutter.

He wanted to despise him cleanly, wholly. But Lycurgus never let hatred stay simple.

“I’ll leave you to rest,” the prince said after a moment. He took Anaxagoras’ hand—not roughly, not commandingly, just with that same unbearable gentleness—and raised it to his lips.

The kiss was soft, deliberate, the brush of breath against skin.

When he pulled away, his eyes gleamed with quiet amusement. “Still, my clever one,” he murmured, voice low, warm, honeyed, and dangerous all at once, “don’t make a habit of defying me in public. You might discover how very little restraint I have where you're concerned.” He paused, his smile deepening, intimate and cruel in its sweetness, too tender for it to be truly harmless. “And I can’t promise I’ll behave if you keep making yourself so impossibly hard to resist.”

Then he was gone, his footsteps fading into the long corridor, leaving behind only the scent of wine and cedar and the ghost of his touch.

Anaxagoras stood where he was, hand still tingling, the edges of his composure fraying.

He hated him. He truly did.

But his stomach fluttered all the same.

It made him want to bang his head against the wall.

When the door closed, Anaxagoras didn’t move for a long time.

The air was still faintly perfumed—cedar, wine, and something colder beneath it, like polished marble. The scent of him. It clung to the skin of his hand, ghosting the place where Lycurgus’ lips had touched.

How bold of him to air it out so openly, but perhaps if you stood at the top such rules bent to your will.

He rubbed at it once, twice, until the skin went pink. It didn’t fade.

His skin felt irritated, he wanted to rip off his scent patches and wallow in a cold bath as though to punish his heart for beating this way and that unconsciously.

Outside the window, the gardens glimmered with lamplight. Somewhere below, the night watch was changing posts. Every sound in the palace—the clink of armor, the echo of boots, the distant murmur of servants—pressed against him like a reminder of how tightly the world here was ordered, how thoroughly it belonged to Lycurgus.

He hated that order. Hated it because it was perfect in all the wrong ways. It was terrible and monotonous.

His defiance today had been small, a strike against hypocrisy, not tyranny. The council’s outrage, the way their composure cracked beneath his questions, had given him a moment of oxygen. But it wasn’t enough.

He’d stood among men who measured morality by profit, and when he’d exposed the numbers—their falsified records, the missing shipments, the quiet bribes disguised as “maintenance costs”—they’d blustered like children caught with ink on their hands. Lycurgus had smiled through it all, indulgent, as if he were watching a favored pet misbehave and let him be.

But Anaxagoras had seen the flicker in his eyes when the court erupted in whispers, a flash of something sharp and pleased. Lycurgus had enjoyed it. He’d enjoyed watching him burn the council’s patience to ash, because the fire still burned inside the cage Lycurgus built and he was allowing this blight at the council.

That thought made Anaxagoras’ throat tighten.

He turned to his desk. The papers were stacked neatly—mlre ledgers, proposals, old notes in his own precise hand. He pulled one free, a draft of a city sanitation project he’d once written and then abandoned after Lycurgus told him it was “not politically convenient.”

The words looked harmless now, rows of figures and formulas. But as he traced the ink with his finger, an idea began to take shape; one that felt dangerous, alive.

If Lycurgus wanted him docile, the perfect ornament of intellect and grace, then he would give him brilliance sharpened to a blade. He would design something so efficient, so irrefutably valuable, that the prince would have no choice but to parade it before the world. And he'd do it in a way that was sure to anger those councilmen to death.

And through that, Anaxagoras would remind them—remind him—that he was not a pet to be displayed, nor a prize to be owned.

He dipped his pen in ink and began to write.

Hours passed unnoticed. The candles burned low, wax pooling like spilled gold across the desk. His handwriting was steady, meticulous. Equations merged with blueprints, notes tangled with quiet fury.

When dawn came, he set the pen down and stared at what he had made. He exhaled slowly. The sky outside was paling, the first light touching the windows with silver. Somewhere down the hall, he heard the familiar cadence of footsteps—slow, measured, approaching.

Lycurgus never slept past sunrise.

Anaxagoras smoothed the parchment, set it aside, and composed his expression into the polite calm he’d mastered years ago.

When the door opened, the prince’s smile was soft, curious. He'd come to check on him as per his routine. “You’re awake already.”

“I couldn’t sleep,” Anaxagoras said evenly.

Lycurgus’ gaze fell on the desk, the mess of ink and diagrams. “Still working,” he murmured, fond and faintly admonishing. “You’ll wear yourself thin, my heart.”

Anaxagoras didn’t answer.

Lycurgus reached out, the back of his fingers brushing along Anaxagoras’ jaw—that same maddening, gentle touch that managed to feel both intimate and imperial. “You really should rest,” he said. “But then again, your brilliance keeps this place shining. I suppose I shouldn’t complain.”

He leaned in, pressed a brief kiss to his forehead. “Don’t ever dim, dear Anaxagoras.”

Anaxagoras closed his eyes. “I won’t.”

When Lycurgus left, he looked back once, smiling, as always. The door shut quietly behind him.

Anaxagoras sat motionless, staring at the designs spread before him. Then, almost absently, he whispered to the empty room,

“That’s what you should fear.”

The laboratory had always been his few sanctuaries.

The palace slept above—velvet halls, painted ceilings—while beneath it, the air thrummed with the low pulse of the furnaces. Here, Anaxagoras could almost forget the weight of his name, the ring he is forced to wear, the man who owned both.

Copper wires glowed faintly in the dim light. A single candle sputtered beside a half-open tome, its ink-stained pages trembling with the movement of his hands. The smell of burned salt and jasmine oil clung to his hair and sleeves. He’d been awake for too long. He always was, when he worked.

What he’d created was elegant, deceptively so. A distillation process designed to refine impure metals with a fraction of the usual resources, something that would make it cheaper to forge the equipment needed for the capital’s food reserves and irrigation lines. It was revolutionary, but not in the way the court would appreciate since the tax money would be funneled here instead of their pockets.

It was built for the people, not the crown.

He’d spent months crafting it in secret. Quietly requesting materials under different names, diverting excess supplies, adjusting formulae by lamplight when even the guards grew drowsy. The final result now shimmered inside a glass crucible, pale and perfect as morning frost.

It wasn’t rebellion by sword or speech. But it was a rebellion all the same. This was what he excelled at and the only way he could truly fight back so he'd take as good as he could get.

And tomorrow, they would have to look at him and listen. The more humbled they were the more delighted it would make him.

He cleaned his tools, changed into the first robe within reach—soft linen, not the ceremonial silks—and tied his hair back with a strip of cord. When he caught sight of himself in the mirror, he almost laughed. He looked nothing like a prince’s betrothed. He looked like the boy he’d once been, the one who had only wanted to make the world better. But he looked like himself and he couldn't help but smile at his reflection.

Then he took his invention, wrapped it in cloth, and left for the council hall.

The corridors above were hushed, filled only with the echo of his steps and the distant murmur of guards changing shifts. At the end of the passage stood his escort for the day—a young knight trainee in the colors of the Crown Prince’s house. His armor gleamed faintly in the torchlight, well-kept but worn at the edges, as if its owner had seen too much duty for someone his age.

When the knight caught sight of him, he straightened immediately, lowering his visor before offering a short bow. “Your grace,” he said, voice low but steady.

Anaxagoras hummed in acknowledgment, distracted, his mind already running through the presentation ahead. “Let’s go,” he murmured, adjusting the cloth bundle in his arms.

The knight fell into step beside him, a silent shadow whose presence he barely registered beyond the rhythmic sound of their boots on marble.

As they approached the council doors and the murmur of noble voices rose like static beyond the archway, Anaxagoras felt, inexplicably, a small sense of calm at his back; steady, wordless, and watchful.

It was a feeling he didn’t experience often. And so, he decided to savor it as best he could. He had many pressing matters to deal with today and it might be a while before he'd feel it again.

The council was already in session when he arrived.

Ministers and scholars circled the great table, their voices raised in complaint. Lycurgus sat at the head, composed and gleaming as ever, one gloved hand toying idly with his goblet. The sight of him—golden, infuriatingly calm—almost made Anaxagoras turn back. Almost.

The doors opened with a sharp sound.

Every eye turned.

He walked in unannounced, the scent of smoke and iron still clinging to him, the soft gray of his robe stark against the polished marble. Someone began to protest—“His Highness’ betrothed was not summoned—”—but fell silent when Anaxagoras placed the wrapped bundle onto the table.

“This,” he said evenly, “is a more efficient refinement process for copper and tin. The same yield, one-third the cost. Your ledgers for next year’s budget are inflated by nearly twenty percent. I suggest we amend them before the court presents the proposal to the King and such resources in my invention.”

The silence that followed was exquisite.

Then, chaos.

“You question our calculations—”

“Your Highness, this is highly irregular—”

“An omega has no standing in this—”

Anaxagoras tilted his head slightly, letting their noise roll over him. “Irregular,” he murmured, “is overestimating transport costs by double the actual figure. Or listing nonexistent storage fees.” He flicked his gaze toward the Grand Minister, whose face had gone pale. “Perhaps ‘irregular’ means something else to you.”

A murmur rippled across the chamber.

He knew he was pressing too far. He knew Lycurgus was watching, and that every word might cost him later. And still—he pressed.

Because it mattered.

Because it was his work, his name, his truth.

At last, Lycurgus rose. The movement alone quieted the room. He descended the few steps between them, every inch the picture of control, his shadow long across the marble floor.

“Enough,” he said softly.

The word was not a command. It was a mercy.

He stopped in front of Anaxagoras, gaze unreadable. The tension was unbearable, the entire court seemed to hold its breath, waiting for the inevitable punishment.

But Lycurgus only smiled.

“My betrothed,” he said, voice smooth and dangerous, “does so love to surprise me.” His fingers brushed the side of Anaxagoras’ neck—light, absentminded, but deliberate in its claim. “I should be angry, perhaps. Yet I find I’m rather… impressed.”

A few of the ministers looked away. Others stared.

Lycurgus leaned in just enough that only Anaxagoras could hear him. “You do such odd things, my dear. I’m never quite sure what you’re trying to prove.” His breath ghosted against his cheek as he pressed a chaste kiss to his lips—a fleeting, reverent touch that left the scent of amber and iron behind. “But it’s admirable.”

The contact was nothing, and everything. Too soft to refuse, too public to recoil from.

Anaxagoras’ pulse stuttered. His head felt light, his chest hollowed by that strange, conflicting warmth; dread and comfort tangled too tightly to separate.

When Lycurgus drew back, his hand lingered for a moment longer, thumb tracing his jaw as though to wipe away the ghost of rebellion itself. Then he turned back to the council, his tone once again calm and commanding.

“Let the proposal be amended according to my betrothed’s recommendation,” he said. “If the boy is right—and he often is—then we owe him our thanks.”

He left no room for argument.

When the meeting adjourned, Lycurgus caught his hand once more, pressed his lips to his knuckles, and whispered, “How lovely you are when you act out. Quite the little performer. I truly insist that you must not make a habit of it.”

The sound of the court’s murmurs were still thick in the air when Lycurgus’s hand brushed against Anaxagoras’s shoulder.

“Stay,” he murmured.

The council had not yet been dismissed, but the Crown Prince moved as though it had. His cloak—royal crimson, lined with sable—came off his shoulders in a single fluid motion. Before Anaxagoras could protest, it was draped around him. The fabric was far too large, heavy enough to swallow him whole.

“Your robes are too thin,” Lycurgus said quietly, the faintest curve in his lips. “In your hurry to show us your truth, you forgot to dress yourself appropriately this morning.”

Anaxagoras stiffened. His hands tightened on the folds of the cloak, its warmth almost suffocating. He wanted to tell him he hadn’t forgotten—that he hadn’t cared. But the words lodged behind his teeth.

Lycurgus guided him back toward the dais. The session was still ongoing, though subdued now, the court’s earlier indignation replaced with uneasy obedience. Anaxagoras moved to take his usual seat for observation beside the prince, but before he could lower himself, Lycurgus caught his wrist.

“Here,” he said simply, drawing him closer.

The motion was gentle but inescapable. In one unbroken movement, he pulled Anaxagoras down—not into the chair, but onto his lap.

A ripple went through the room like a shudder of wind through glass.

Anaxagoras froze. Every instinct screamed at him to move, to stand, to say something but Lycurgus’s arm was already circling his waist, deceptively casual. His hand rested low at his side, warm, possessive, his thumb tracing idle circles against the fabric of the cloak.

The council continued, though the rhythm had changed. No one dared meet his eyes. The murmured reports resumed, stilted and subdued, as if to pretend that what they were seeing was entirely proper—a prince doting on his delicate fiancé, nothing more.

But the message was clear.

Whatever rebellion Anaxagoras had displayed minutes ago was now neatly folded beneath the weight of royal affection.

He sat rigid through the remainder of the session, his heart hammering against the quiet hum of Lycurgus’s breath near his ear. Every small movement, a shift of weight, a brush of fabric, made him acutely aware of how thoroughly the man had claimed the space around him.

At last, when the council was dismissed and the courtiers bowed their way out, Lycurgus stood, still holding him by the waist as though afraid he might vanish.

“Walk with me,” he said. It was not a request.

The corridors were dim now, the light of the torches painting long shadows on the marble. Lycurgus’ hand never left him. The echo of their footsteps was joined by another—measured, distant, yet steady. A knight followed a few paces behind, his armor gleaming faintly whenever the torchlight caught the curve of his pauldron. Anaxagoras didn’t turn to look, but he knew the sound. It had become as constant as his own shadow these days.

When they reached the doors of Anaxagoras’ chambers, Lycurgus turned, pressing him lightly against the door. The scent of wine and smoke clung to his breath.

“You shouldn’t surprise me like that,” he said, tone almost teasing. “One of these days, I might start believing you do it for attention.”

Anaxagoras said nothing. His hands were still caught in the folds of the prince’s cloak.

Lycurgus leaned closer, his voice a low murmur against his ear. “You are very clever, my little bride. But you’re also terribly unwise.”

Then, before Anaxagoras could react, he kissed him sgain.

It was nothing like the public brush of lips in the council hall. This kiss was deliberate, slow, certain—a seal rather than an act of affection. The heat of it shocked him, not in its passion but in its calmness, the steady certainty of someone claiming what was already theirs.

When Lycurgus drew back, his expression softened. “Be good, my love,” he whispered, fingertips tracing the curve of his jaw. “I would hate to have to teach you restraint, you have never been too obedient, I suspect you would loathe it.”

He left him with that.

Along with the echo of the kiss still burning on his mouth. The prince’s boots clicked against marble as he departed down the corridor, the distant knight’s steps falling into rhythm behind him.

Anaxagoras stood motionless for a long time, staring at the  older man's back after it retreated. The cloak still clung to his shoulders, heavy with his betrothed’s scent, thick enough to taste. Every inch of him felt tense, every thought fractured into white noise. It clung to the air and burned his throat like smoke. He felt sick with it, and yet, beneath the nausea, a smaller, traitorous warmth pulsed—something like safety. Or surrender.

He pressed the back of his hand to his lips. The taste of wine lingered, it felt as though he'd gone and drunk himself silly. He kept his reaction from showing and willed himself to calm down.

From the end of the corridor, that same faint sound of armor shifting could be heard again. A pause, then silence—his unseen guard resuming his station by the corner, far enough to give the illusion of privacy, close enough to hear if anything broke it.

Anaxagoras closed his eyes, letting the weight of that presence settle somewhere deep and unacknowledged. He didn’t have to know their name. He would never ask. But lately, he’d found that not being alone made breathing just a little easier when another living person was present.

And that, perhaps, was a mere cold comfort he afforded for himself. But he still cherished this feeling of false companionship, his only other option after all was his rotten betrothed. 

The moment the door shut behind him, silence rushed in like a wave. His pulse refused to settle. The air itself seemed to thicken.

Anaxagoras’s knees almost buckled. Every nerve burned; every breath carried that scent, an invisible brand seared into his lungs. It wasn’t pain so much as fever: a wrongness that made his stomach twist and his pulse pound against his skull.

He felt that there was an inane wrongness to the room, it was saturated, his walls suddenly seemed too close, the air far too hot.  And Lycurgus’s scent refused to leave him—that annoying predominant mix of wine and smoke, with hints of amber and cedar. It filled his lungs with every breath until he felt dizzy.

He staggered to the nearest surface and pressed his palms flat against it, breathing hard. His reflection in the polished glass of the cabinet looked flushed, wild-eyed—like he’d run for miles. The coat hung loose around him, the edges brushing his thighs like a taunt.

He tore it off.

The motion was violent, desperate; the fabric hit the floor with a dull sound, but it wasn’t enough. The smell was still there. It was almost like it was in him. His stomach turned as a strange heat coiled low in his belly, treacherous and hot. The warmth and growing ache made him want to scream.

It was a slow, crawling sickness that began at the base of his spine and spread outward, hot and nauseating. His pulse tripped, his skin flushed, and his breath caught in a hitch that humiliated him more than any word could.

He pressed the heel of his palm against his mouth. “Stop it,” he hissed, to his own treacherous body. “Stop—”

It didn’t listen. It never did.

His body recognized what his mind refused to—pheromones, layered thick and heavy, woven with command and ownership. A biological noose disguised as affection. The warmth pooling in his stomach felt vile, alien, wrong.

He stumbled toward his bathroom where a basin with clean water was prepared for him. He dipped his shaking hands in without much thought and splashed some cold water onto his face, the shock biting enough to make him gasp. His reflection glared back: pale, wide-eyed, trembling. Pathetic. He looked pathetic.

The cold water that had been splashed over his face, dripping down his neck and soaking the collar of his shirt did nothing. The heat remained clinging to him like oil.

It irritated his skin, the heat muddled his thoughts and his frustration rose. Without much thought his nails scratched at his neck before he was ripping his scent patch off.

He hated this.

He hated that his body reacted at all, that some buried part of his biology still answered to an order he never gave. It was mechanical, reflexive; proof that even brilliance and discipline could be undone by chemistry and proximity.

He wanted to tear off his clothes, to claw the scent out of his skin. He wanted to rip the invisible mark from his neck. But no amount of washing would change what had happened, that his body had bowed to something as crude as biology.

“Stupid anatomy,” he muttered, voice shaking. “Ridiculous omega instincts. Annoying pheromones."

His thoughts pressed against his skull. All he could taste was that scent clinging to the back of his tongue. Every inhale betrayed him. Every heartbeat mocked him.

“Stop it,” he whispered, as if he could command the reaction to obey reason. “You are not—”

But the rest died in his throat. He felt the tremor in his own hands and wanted to break them just to silence the trembling.

His chest rose and fell too quickly. Every breath tasted like Lycurgus. His mind screamed disgusting, filthy, manipulative, but his body… his body hummed like it had been struck by lightning. It was like Anaxagoras' was being burnt alive, he pulled at his robes, they came off easily enough but his skin still felt as though they were being torched by flames.

What could he possibly do now?

Then he felt it, something slick and wet, a copious amount of it staining his undergarments. It felt sickening, disgusting, and horribly warm. The heat of it remained firm, demanding his attention. It was painful, aching in a way that could not be described in any other name besides a deeprooted craving ingrained into his biology.

Anaxagoras froze, gasping and feeling a little scandalized over how he could ever feel aroused.

He looked up and cast another glance at the state of himself, his eyes reddened with a strange dazed look to them. He shakily reached toward the wash-basin and gripped its edges until his knuckles whitened, before grabbing the whole thing and dousing himself in it.

Then, with wobbly steps, he made his way out of the bathroom and straight towards his bed, his knees hitting the edge of it in his haste. The impact jarred him, snapping something raw. He hands went straight for the covers, shaking, bile burning his throat as he covered himself. The memory of Lycurgus’s lips pressed to his—soft, reverent, possessive—made him gag. He forced himself to endure the burning.

He was soaking wet, feeling both hot and cold, but spite made him refuse to touch himself. He curled in on himself, pain lighting his nerves.

He wanted to scrub himself clean, burn every trace of the man’s scent from his skin, but his body ached in betrayal. Heat rolled through him in nauseating waves. His heartbeat thundered in his ears, relentless.

Anaxagoras pressed his forehead against his knees and laughed, short and broken.

“He’s turning me into a fucking experiment,” he whispered. “And I’m—reacting.”

The room was too still. The scent was too heavy. His thoughts were too loud to the backdrop of his whimpering and grunting.

He hated him.

But he hated himself more.

Hours passed by in that limbo of agony and heat. By the time the worst of it began to ebb, he was shaking with exhaustion. Anaxagoras had gone quiet again. Not calm—never calm—but the trembling had dulled into something colder. The sharp, familiar clarity of rage.

He was sure, one way or another, that Lycurgus had planned this; of course he had. Every smile, every soft touch, every carefully timed kindness was a leash hidden in silk.

Anaxagoras straightened, breath uneven, jaw tight. The scent still lingered, faint but inescapable.

Fine. Let it stay. Let it remind him.

If Lycurgus meant to prove ownership, he would learn that nothing—no rank, no bond, no biology—would hold forever.

He didn’t sleep that night.

By dawn, the fever and heat had burned itself out, leaving only the hollow ache of clarity. His body had betrayed him—no, been made to betray him—and the thought scraped against his mind like sand in a wound. He would not let it happen again. He would not let anyone own what was his.

When the servants came with breakfast, he dismissed them. When Lycurgus sent a note, he ignored it. The moment the knights changed for patrols and the halls cleared enough for him to move without being seen, he went straight to the laboratory.

Glassware gleamed under the lamplight, steady and impersonal. Here, the world made sense. Here, cause and effect obeyed laws that could be written down, tested, controlled. He moved through the familiar ritual—measuring, heating, stirring—with mechanical precision, as if each motion could scrub away what he felt.

He told himself he was pursuing advancement for the empire’s alchemical medicine. That his new formulation, still unnamed, was meant to “regulate hormonal volatility in secondary genders.” But beneath the formal phrasing lay a sharper truth: he was making a weapon. Not to harm, but to liberate.

If he succeeded, no omega would ever again be ruled by nature or the whims of an alpha’s pheromones. Patches after all could only do so much. No one would tremble under another’s will. They would be free, even if he never was.

He wrote obsessively for days, his notes sprawling across sheets of parchment, full of feverish formulas and crossed-out equations. The servants whispered about his seclusion; Lycurgus, curiously, let it stand. Perhaps he was amused. Perhaps he wanted to see how far Anaxagoras would run before the leash caught him.

And then, just when the calculations began to align—when the first prototype neared stability—the summons came.

The marriage was to be moved forward. “The court desires unity,” the message read, sealed with the prince’s neat signature. “Let us not keep them waiting.”

Anaxagoras read the letter once, twice, three times. The ink bled faintly beneath his fingertips where they trembled.

His experiment was still volatile—unfinished, incomplete. If left too long, it would degrade. If exposed, it would be destroyed. Yet even that knowledge couldn’t move him.

Somewhere deep inside, a part of him already knew: the timing was not coincidence. Lycurgus had decided he’d rebelled enough.

He closed the letter, set it beside the cooling flask, and stared into the slow swirl of liquid. The scent of crushed mint leaves filled the air—clean, sharp, untainted.

He wondered, for the first time in years, if freedom had ever been real or if it had always been something he’d been allowed to believe in.

The compound hissed as it met the flame, and he watched it burn to clear smoke.

The world outside his window was beginning to turn to spring again.

Soft rain on the eaves. The faint scent of new grass rising through the palace courtyards. Outside his window, the willow trees bent to the wind, their shadows threading over pale stone like ink in water.

Somewhere in the distance, servants were laughing, a sound so gentle and ordinary it might have belonged to another life entirely.

Anaxagoras continued his work. It was the only thing that made sense.

He told himself that he could still finish the compound before the wedding. That he could find a way to stabilize it—to hide it—to keep a fragment of his rebellion alive even as he was a lamb being led to the slaughter house. He whispered formulas under his breath as he wrote, the cadence of calculation almost like prayer.

So, he kept to his workbench. He had stopped counting the days, but the rhythm of hours still ruled him: morning, noon, evening, ink-stained hands, sleepless eyes. He moved through formulas with the steady precision of someone trying to rebuild faith through reason.

If he could finish this, it would mean something. A quiet triumph. One final act of rebellion. If he could perfect it, then perhaps others—younger, more helpless—would never have to feel that strange sickness he felt every single day of his life. That humiliating heat that had crawled under his skin and left him trembling.

He told himself that it wasn’t too late. Not yet. The summons about the marriage was just a small hurdle, he could get through this!

He did not pray to any god. He never had. But there were moments when he wanted to believe in something greater than the inevitable.

He could fix this. He could still make something good.

If he could only finish this, it would mean that all the years of gilded confinement hadn’t been for nothing. That there had been a purpose beyond being a prize on Lycurgus’ arm. His heart, the traitorous thing beating in his chest, still wanted to believe there was a way to win without losing himself entirely.

He could still do something good.

The lie was a fragile one, but he needed it. It was all that kept his hands from shaking when he poured, measured, and wrote his equations.

Anaxagoras worked until his hands trembled from fatigue, until the lamps dimmed and the palace slept. When the exhaustion finally forced him to stop, he cleaned his instruments carefully, as if precision could be a kind of protection, and made his way back to his chambers.

On this particular night, it had felt much too serene as he left the laboratory with a strange, aching calm. He imagined he could see a path forward—narrow, but real. A place beyond the walls, beyond Lycurgus’ reach. He could still make it there. Somehow.

The thought followed him back to his chambers.

He paused at the threshold. The room was dim, the curtains drawn half shut blocking out most of the moonlight filtering inside. But it was too orderly, he noted in observation. Someone had been inside, the lamps were trimmed, his desk cleared, the scent of cedar and wine faint but unmistakable.

On the center of his desk, atop his notes and his scattered papers, lay a folded letter, resting atop.

No seal. No crest. But the handwriting—elegant, exact—was one he knew better than his own.

He hesitated before touching it. Then, with the resignation of someone reaching for a blade they already know is sharp, he opened it.

Feel free to invite your sister, my dearest.

That was all.

Nine harmless words. Just one sentence, so gentle it almost sounded like affection.

And yet, as he read it, something inside him began to break in silence, not with shattering, but with the soft, final sound of collapse.

He understood immediately. He was being told to write the invitation himself. To summon his only living family to witness his own undoing.

Lycurgus was giving him back his “freedom.” Permission to reach out, to write, to call home but only to sign the document of his own end. To write his sister into the script of his submission. To use his own hand to summon her as witness to his binding.

It was a gesture of affection, of course. Everything Lycurgus did was dressed in affection.

It was a mercy disguised as kindness, a chain wrapped in silk. Lycurgus was letting him have this one last act—the illusion of choice, the ritual of surrender.

Anaxagoras stared at the letter until the words blurred. His throat tightened around something too dry to be tears. He sat down at the desk—the same place where he’d once written proposals, discoveries, cures—and took up his pen.

For a long time, he couldn’t move. The candle guttered, wax pooling beside his wrist.

Then, slowly, his hand began to write. The words came as though from someone else; graceful, obedient, perfectly phrased. The first line came easily. His sister’s name. A formal greeting.

Then, halfway through the second sentence, the ink began to blur. Not from tears, but because he couldn’t see what he was writing anymore, the shapes dissolved into nothing, his vision gone glassy with exhaustion and despair.

Then it was over.

When he set down the pen, the letter was perfectly written.

Every word polite, precise, and proper.

Exactly what Lycurgus would expect.

Anaxagoras invited his sister to his wedding.

He signed his name.

When the ink dried, he folded the paper carefully, almost reverently, and set it aside. Then he pressed his palms over his eyes and exhaled, a trembling sound between a laugh and a sob.

The letter was, in every sense, his epitaph.

For he had written his own end with his own hands, the irony of such a fate.

And outside, the first bells of dawn began to ring; bright, oblivious, cruelly ordinary.

He woke before the sun.

Not because he wanted to, but because they came for him—soft-voiced, efficient, a procession of hands and whispers. The room was still blue with pre-dawn light, and when they lifted him from bed, the air was so cold it bit his skin. He didn’t fight it. He never did anymore.

They told him it was time. They always said it softly, as if gentleness could mask cruelty.

He let them guide him.

The bath was already drawn when they arrived—steaming faintly, laced with oils that smelled sweet and cloying, something between roses and honey. The kind of scent that lingered too long on the tongue.

They undressed him carefully, reverently, as though he were a statue that might shatter if touched too quickly. Then they submerged him in water that was warm enough to sting.

The soap foamed between their palms—soft at first, then rough. They scrubbed hard, too hard, until his skin burned faintly pink beneath their hands. As if the goal was not to cleanse him but to erase him. To scour away everything he was, and make him fit for display.

It wasn’t pain that made him close his eyes, it was the numbness.

He felt like he was dissolving in that water, sloughing off bits of himself with every lather. He wondered, distantly, if they meant to carve him into something holy. A bride-shaped offering.

When they pulled him from the bath, his hair clung to his shoulders in damp curls. Someone wrapped him in a towel—soft linen, almost like a shroud.

They patted him dry.

Perhaps they dried his tears too.

He couldn’t remember crying.

He only remembered the heat behind his eyes, and how even that eventually faded.

They dressed him next.

Layer upon layer of robes, silk over silk, a cascade of white and gold. Each one heavier than the last. The fabric whispered as it settled against him—like voices murmuring prayers he couldn’t quite hear.

They styled his hair after that. Not the way he liked—too tight, too polished—but he said nothing. He knew the style was one Lycurgus preferred, and he would undoubtedly say, “You look divine.”

And that would be that.

Jewelry followed. Chains at his wrists, pearls at his throat, gold thread embroidered into his sleeves. Everything gleamed. Everything fit. It was almost impressive how perfectly it all suited him.

As they slipped the shoes onto his feet—delicate, white, unbearably pristine—he found himself wondering if they truly fit.

Of course they did. They had been made for him.

But he didn’t feel like the kind of person who fit in these shoes anymore.

The servants stepped back to admire their work.

“You look beautiful,” one of them whispered, breathless. “Like a painting came to life.”

“Such a gorgeous bride,” said another. “The Crown Prince is lucky—all the Alphas in the realm will envy him today.”

Their laughter was bright, almost childlike.

Anaxagoras thought it was ridiculous.

He didn’t say so.

He stood still as they chattered—about how radiant he looked, how blessed the match was, how any Omega would dream of being in his place. Their words blurred together, cheerful noise against the hollow in his chest.

“You must be so excited,” one of them said shyly. “To be wedded to His Highness.”

He almost laughed at that.

Excited. Yes. Perhaps in another life. Though he could not imagine there being one where he would ever be happy with this arrangement.

Before he could respond, they hurried away, giggling like schoolgirls caught whispering secrets. The room was silent again, except for the faint rustle of his sleeves as he exhaled.

He closed his mouth.

The silence pressed in until it felt like a physical thing—dense and airless. He thought of all the ways this was unfair, how it had always been unfair, but his mind, treacherous, offered a cruel comfort: It could be worse.

Yes, it could be worse. Another Alpha might have been crueler. More violent.

Not that he’d ever seen such a thing firsthand, but he believed it must be so. He told himself this to make sense of what he could not endure otherwise.

Still, it didn’t help.

The feeling remained—that restless, gnawing urge beneath his ribs.

He wanted to leave.

He wanted to leave.

He wanted to leave.

He wanted to leave.

He wanted to leave.

He wanted to leave.

He wanted to leave.

He wanted to leave.

He wanted to leave.

He wanted to—

The sound of shattering porcelain pulled him back.

Anaxagoras blinked, disoriented, his fingers white around the balcony railing. Below, in the palace gardens, a youth sat amidst the broken remains of a statue’s arm, blinking up through a mess of white hair.

“Are you okay?” he called down before he could stop himself.

The boy looked up with wide blue eyes and a grin that seemed too bright for this place. “Yes!”

“What happened?”

“I was sneaking out,” the boy said proudly, brushing dust from his knees. “I was looking for the secret passage in the gardens.”

“...there’s such a thing?”

“I’m not sure,” he admitted with no hint of shame. “But I’d like for there to be one!”

“...why?”

“Because I want some adventure!”

Anaxagoras tilted his head. “Are you here for that purpose?”

“Oh.” The boy laughed sheepishly. “No, I’m here for some royal wedding or something.”

“Then why are you in the gardens?”

“I told you, I’m looking for the secret passage,” the boy said, pouting now, as if Anaxagoras were the unreasonable one.

“Why?”

“Because I want to travel and explore just like the prince.”

Anaxagoras frowned faintly. “His Highness doesn’t travel much. Only on occasion. He’s quite busy.”

“Huh?” The boy blinked at him, then shook his head. “Not him! I meant the prince from the story.”

“…from the story,” Anaxagoras echoed, already weary.

“Yes! The one who wanted to—”

“Chase the stars.”

The sunlight caught the boy’s hair like spun glass. “Yes! That one!”

Anaxagoras’ tone softened, almost fond. “What a morbid choice.”

The boy looked scandalized. “Morbid? Why?”

“Doesn’t he die at the end?”

The boy huffed in defiance, he looked him in the eye with an odd determination to refute his words. “Not in my story,” the boy replied stubbornly.

“In your story?”

“Yeah! In my story, he defeats the great evil and eats chocolate with the scholar, and they live happily ever after.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Why does it have to make sense? Isn’t them being happy the most important thing?”

Anaxagoras paused. “Is that so?”

“Very much so,” said the boy gravely, his youthful face attempting seriousness. “The prince gets his happy ending and chocolate.”

“Chocolate,” Anaxagoras repeated, faintly amused. “That doesn’t sound too bad, actually.”

“Of course. Oh! And he gets to be with the scholar too!”

Anaxagoras’ smile faltered. “Why the scholar?”

“Because he’s the prince’s beloved!”

“I’m quite sure none of his companions were his beloved. The world was his beloved—it was a metaphor for—”

“No!”

“No?”

“It was definitely the scholar!”

“And who told you that?”

“It’s my version of the story, so I say it’s the scholar.”

Anaxagoras blinked—then, unexpectedly, laughed. A small, real laugh. “Was the prince so cool that you made this all up?”

“He’s very cool!” The boy grinned, then tilted his head. “Actually, aren’t you quite dressed up? Are you a prince?”

“Me?” A bitter smile. “I’m no prince.”

“But you look like one!”

“Are princes supposed to be all locked up?”

The boy frowned. “If you’re not the prince, then… are you a scholar?”

Anaxagoras blinked. “Why am I the scholar? I don't suppose scholars get locked up too.”

“Well, you don’t have an eyepatch,” the boy said, squinting thoughtfully, “but the way you talk reminds me of him.”

“I can’t be the scholar,” he murmured, “I’m stuck here in the palace, fading away. My voice can barely be heard, I could never be that outspoken scholar.”

“That’s no good.”

“Truly.”

“Then do you want to escape?”

He wanted to leave. He wanted to leave. He wanted to leave. He wanted to leave. He wanted to leave. He wanted to leave. He wanted to leave. He wanted to leave. He wanted to leave. He wanted to leave. He wanted to leave. He wanted to leave.

“Do I want to escape?” Anaxagoras whispered.

“Yeah, do you?”

“Can I?”

The boy smiled, gentle as sunlight. “Why can’t you?”

“I can’t because I’m—” the prince’s fiancé.

“We can even look for the secret passage together!” the boy said brightly. “You look very smart. I’m sure we’ll find it right away!”

“I…”

“Do you want to look for the secret passage together with me?”

Anaxagoras’ lips parted—but before he could speak, the door opened. Servants poured in, breathless and giddy.

“Your Grace, the ceremony will begin soon!”

The boy waited, expectant. His eyes sparkled like the morning itself—all innocence and impossible hope.

Anaxagoras smiled at him, soft and unbearably sad.

“Maybe next time,” he said, turning away.

His wedding was about to begin.

It was far too late for—

“Okay, then I’ll see you next time!” the boy’s voice called out.

Anaxagoras didn’t reply.

The bells began to toll before the sun reached its peak.

From every corner of the temple grounds came sound and splendor—golden horns announcing the union of the Crown Prince and his long-awaited betrothed. The courtyard overflowed with courtiers and nobles, their silks shimmering like fish scales beneath the light. Everywhere he looked, Anaxagoras saw gold—gold on the banners, gold on the altar, gold in the eyes of the people who had come to watch him become someone else’s possession.

They said the day was blessed.

He thought it was simply bright.

The temple situated near the palace—consecrated to Mnestia, the Titan of Romance—gleamed like something too pure to touch. Columns twined with roses, crimson and white. Incense burned thick in the air, sweet and heady enough to drown in.

They led him down the aisle.

Each step echoed softly on the polished floor, a slow, deliberate sound that reminded him of chains. His robes trailed behind like spilled sunlight, heavy with embroidery and jewels that sparkled when the light struck them.

He could feel every eye on him.

Every whisper, every sigh.

“Beautiful.”

“Perfect.”

“The titans themselves must envy him.”

The words didn’t even sting anymore. He had long learned to let such things roll over him like rain over glass.

At the altar, Lycurgus waited—resplendent in white and scarlet, the Crown Prince in full regalia. His expression was the picture of serenity, the kind of smile that could make statues kneel. The sunlight caught on the golden circlet in his hair, turning his profile to something divine.

When Anaxagoras reached him, Lycurgus offered his hand—palm up, steady, warm.

He took it. His fingers trembled once, and then were still.

The priest—draped in robes of ivory, embroidered with the sigil of Mnestia’s flame—began the ceremony. His voice was low, melodic, steeped in ancient rites.

“Today, before the eyes of the gods and of men, before the Titan of Romance Herself, we gather to unite two souls—not as strangers, nor as separate fates, but as one spirit bound in trust and devotion.”

The congregation bowed their heads.

Anaxagoras stared at the ground. The sound of his own heart was so loud he thought it might drown the priest’s voice entirely.

“Do you, His Highness the Crown Prince Lycurgus of Okhema, take this Omega to be your rightful spouse—to honor and to cherish, to guide and protect, as long as your hearts shall beat?”

Lycurgus’ voice was velvet, low and tender.

“I do.”

The priest smiled, turning to Anaxagoras. “And do you, Anaxagoras of House Ephyrios, take His Highness to be your rightful husband—to stand beside him in faith and truth, to share in all burdens and all joys, as long as breath remains in your body?”

His throat ached. His lips moved before his mind could stop them.

“...I do.”

The vows came next.

They were the same—written centuries ago for noble unions, ornate and idealized, filled with words like forever and destiny.

Lycurgus went first.

He recited each phrase with such care that it felt like a confession. His tone was almost reverent—a lover’s murmur made to sound like worship.

“I vow to honor you,” he said softly, eyes locked on Anaxagoras, “to guard you from all harm, to shelter you even from yourself.”

Anaxagoras’ breath caught. Even from yourself. He knew that line wasn’t part of the written vow.

Lycurgus continued smoothly. “I vow to cherish your mind as I do your heart, to keep you safe within my arms, to make your silence my peace, and your submission my solace.”

The words drew sighs from the crowd. A few even smiled tearfully—such devotion, such tenderness.

Only Anaxagoras understood.

Every promise was a chain, gilded and perfumed.

When it was his turn, the priest gestured for him to speak.

He felt detached from his own body—as if watching himself from somewhere above, a puppet dressed in silk and sorrow.

“I vow…” His voice wavered, but he pressed on. “I vow to honor you, and to… cherish you.”

Each word felt like another knot tightening around his throat.

“To follow where you lead, to trust in your wisdom, to—” he paused, then forced the words out, “to be yours in body and soul, until death takes us apart.”

The silence that followed was absolute.

Then the priest’s hands lifted, sanctifying them with the symbol of the Flame. “Then let it be witnessed by Mnestia Herself, that in love you are bound. In her sight, your hearts are joined. Let none divide what the gods have sealed.”

Applause erupted—polite, melodic, rehearsed.

Anaxagoras did not move.

Lycurgus stepped forward, his expression all warmth and devotion but his eyes were cold and cruel as though he won a game that he'd rigged and was watching all the losers squirm beneath his heel. He lifted a hand to Anaxagoras’ chin, tilting his face upward with infinite gentleness.

“My clever little nuisance,” he whispered—just loud enough for Anaxagoras to hear.

Then he kissed him.

It was the softest kiss imaginable—light as breath, sweet as a blessing. The crowd sighed. The bells rang again, triumphant and bright.

And in that moment—before the titans, before the kingdom, before the world—Anaxagoras from the Grove of Epiphany, Anaxagoras of House Ephyrios, ceased to exist.

All that remained was the Crown Prince’s consort.

The taste of gold and incense lingered on his tongue. It should have been sweet.

But all he could taste was the bitterness of his own future.

The great hall gleamed with gold and laughter. Lyres trilled, goblets overflowed, and every noble in attendance seemed desperate to outshine the next with congratulations. “A union blessed by Mnestia herself!” someone proclaimed, raising their glass. Another echoed the sentiment, voice too loud, too joyous, as though to convince themselves it was all real—this perfect marriage, this fated love.

Anaxagoras smiled where he was expected to, the expression stretched and polished by practice. The crown upon his head weighed less than the ring upon his finger. His husband—his husband, how strange and horrifying that word still felt—had scarcely let him breathe since the ceremony ended. Lycurgus’ hand never left him; it rested at the small of his back, warm and claiming, guiding him through the crowd like a prized animal shown off for admiration.

Before, when Anaxagoras had been merely the fiancé, there had been space between them. Lycurgus had been gentle in public, courtly even. His touch then had felt deliberate, ornamental—like a game the prince played to charm his court and reassure his beloved.

Now, there was no such pretense.

Lycurgus’ palm lingered too long against his waist. His thumb brushed possessively over the embroidered fabric of Anaxagoras’ sleeve as though to remind both of them who it belonged to. When courtiers bowed and congratulated them, Lycurgus would smile, lean close to murmur endearments loud enough for all to hear, yet soft enough that only Anaxagoras could sense the edge beneath them.

“My beloved looks tired,” he said once, voice honeyed. “The ceremony must already be taking its toll.”

Anaxagoras turned his head slightly, meeting his gaze. “I imagine it will,” he replied, tone mild. “It’s said that endurance is a virtue, isn’t it?”

Lycurgus’ eyes glimmered—pleased, dangerous. “You’ll need plenty of it.”

Laughter rippled from a nearby table; the orchestra swelled again. Servants brought out more wine, more food, more noise. The world blurred in light and perfume. Anaxagoras let himself be drawn into another dance, another toast, another hollow blessing.

And yet, beneath it all, the truth pressed against his ribs like iron:

He was no longer the Crown Prince’s fiancé.

He was his spouse.

And there was a difference in that word—a quiet, absolute one.

Before, he could still imagine running. He could still imagine freedom, rebellion, defiance. But now, even his rebellion had been sanctified and bound in silk.

When Lycurgus bent to whisper something into his ear—something tender, something sweet enough to draw sighs from onlookers—Anaxagoras could only force a smile and nod. The prince’s breath was warm against his skin, the tone so soft it might have been love.

But all he could taste, when Lycurgus kissed him again for the crowd’s delight, was the even more bitterness towards his own captivity.

The laughter grew louder as the night ripened. Wine loosened tongues, and the scent of roasted venison and honeyed figs filled the air. Music trilled, silverware chimed—the illusion of joy was absolute.

Yet behind the applause and clinking glasses, the conversations turned, predictable as the tide.

“They say he was quite the speaker once,” a baron murmured behind a gilded fan. “Sharp tongue, sharper mind. A pity brilliance burns out so quickly once it’s harnessed.”

“An Omega with a mind for philosophy,” another drawled, swirling his wine. “Adorable, really. Like a pet reciting scripture.”

A burst of laughter followed.

At the high table, Lycurgus’ hand rested lightly on Anaxagoras’ thigh beneath the silk-draped cloth—a possessive, warning pressure that said: Smile. Don’t listen. Don’t start anything tonight.

He smiled. Of course he smiled.

Someone at a nearby table—an older duke with the loose dignity of age and too much drink—leaned forward, eyes glassy with the kind of mirth that only cruelty brings. “Tell me, Your Highness,” he slurred, “does the young consort bear the marks of Mnestia’s blessing? I only ask because—ah—” he gestured vaguely toward Anaxagoras, “he’s built so delicately. Lovely face, yes, but I confess I doubted whether such narrow hips could cradle royal blood.”

The vulgar laughter that followed was sharp enough to draw blood.

Another joined in, smiling in that genteel, poisonous way the nobility had perfected. “Oh, come now, he’ll prove capable, I’m sure. After all, His Highness has tamed him splendidly. I remember the days when the scholar thought himself equal to the throne! Hah. How quickly marriage restores the natural order, doesn’t it?”

“Truly,” said another, lifting his cup. “Blessed be Mnestia, who gave our Crown Prince the patience to civilize such a—spirited—creature.”

“To taming brilliance!” a lord toasted, and laughter rippled again.

Anaxagoras felt the burn of wine in his throat even though he hadn’t drunk. His hands were perfectly still on his lap. He could feel Lycurgus’ gaze slide toward him—heavy, deliberate—but the prince said nothing. He only smiled faintly, the corners of his mouth curved in polite amusement.

He didn’t stop them.

He didn’t defend him.

Why would he? They were only saying what he already believed—what this marriage had made law.

Besides that he was very obviously humiliating him.

Anaxagoras’ lips curved in the proper polite smile as one of the ladies leaned in and said, “You must be so proud, my dear. To have earned the love of the kingdom’s future king! And so handsome! The titans are very kind to you.”

“Yes,” he said softly, almost gently. The words tasted like acid on his tongue. “The titans are very... kind.”

The music resumed. The wine kept flowing. The people kept laughing.

When he looked around the room, he saw nothing but joy—genuine, radiant joy. They truly believed this was a happy union. They believed he was lucky.

A blessing from Mnestia.

And so he sat there, smiling, while their laughter folded over itself, while the light of the chandeliers blurred and fractured in his eyes. He felt the warmth of Lycurgus’ hand against his own, fingers twining—tender, even loving in its performance.

What a despicable man!

He realized, distantly, that he was watching the last remnants of himself disappear—piece by piece, laughter by laughter—into the shape they wanted him to be.

Anaxagoras, the crown prince’s beloved.

Anaxagoras, the obedient Omega.

Anaxagoras, the spouse to the royal heir.

He forced a smile, and the hall roared with celebration.

The celebrations stretched well past sunset, the candles burning low, and the air thick with the scent of wine and roses. The orchestra played slower now—melancholic pieces disguised as love songs, fitting for the hour when even joy began to tire.

Guests began to withdraw in twos and threes, offering well-practiced bows and parting blessings.

“May Mnestia smile upon your union.”

“May your bond be fruitful and long with Kephale's blessings.”

“May your firstborn be strong and filled with wisdom by Cerces grace!”

Each word landed heavier than the last, blessings that felt more like bindings.

Anaxagoras answered each with mechanical grace, his stiff smile rehearsed to perfection. He could no longer feel his cheeks. He barely heard the laughter anymore; it was only the ringing in his ears that lingered.

Lycurgus stood beside him, every inch the benevolent prince—hand resting on the small of his back, expression patient and tender. “You’ve done well,” he murmured between farewells, voice low enough that only Anaxagoras could hear. “How fascinating, you've managed to deceive them enough that they'd adore a fool like. Truly worthy of your title of a Great Performer.”

He wanted to ask what Lycurgus meant by that, after all the only titles he had left were bequeathed to him by this man.

And he wondered if he would be treated differently had he not received adoration. But he already knew the answer.

“Your Highness,” said the chamberlain at last, stepping forward with a discreet bow. “It is nearly the third hour of night. The newlyweds’ chambers have been prepared.”

The words drew a soft chorus of sighs and smiles from the remaining guests. Someone raised a final toast, laughter rippling through the thinning crowd—full of the kind of knowing delight that made Anaxagoras’ stomach twist.

Lycurgus inclined his head graciously. “Our deepest thanks for sharing in our joy tonight. May Janus' grace follow you all home safely.”

The hall erupted in polite applause.

Anaxagoras’ fingers trembled around the hem of his sleeve. The sound of it—the cheers, the blessings, the music fading into the night—felt distant, muted, as though he were standing behind glass, watching someone else’s life unfold.

As the great doors opened to let them pass, the cool air from the corridors swept in, carrying away the scent of wine and wax. For a moment, he breathed again.

Lycurgus turned to him, eyes gleaming soft beneath the torchlight. “Come,” he said, offering his hand. “It’s late.”

Anaxagoras hesitated only a second before placing his fingers in his. The touch was gentle—too gentle—and that frightened him more than any cruelty.

The small crowd parted before them like reverent waves, bowing as they passed.

“May the titans bless their night,” someone whispered, and a wave of laughter followed, teasing and bright.

The great doors closed behind them with a soft, final sound—not quite a slam, not quite a sigh.

It was quieter now.

Almost peaceful.

But in that peace, something inside him began to crack, slow and silent.

The corridors were dim, lit only by the occasional sconce and the thin silver of moonlight seeping through the tall windows. The marble gleamed faintly beneath their feet, reflecting their shadows as though the palace itself were watching.

Each step echoed too loudly in Anaxagoras’ ears. The chatter and music from the great hall had long since faded, replaced by the hollow rhythm of his heartbeat and the soft rustle of his wedding robes brushing against the floor.

He thought the silence might comfort him. It didn’t. It felt like walking into the belly of something ancient and enormous—a beast with walls for ribs, its heart beating somewhere far ahead luring him in to his death.

Lycurgus walked a pace beside him, unhurried, hands clasped loosely behind his back. His expression was calm, almost serene, though the torchlight caught the faintest glint of satisfaction in his eyes. Like he'd won some unspoken game between them.

“You’ve been quiet,” he murmured at last. His voice carried easily in the stillness.

“I didn’t think there was much left to say,” Anaxagoras replied, tone even.

Lycurgus’ mouth curved in that soft, inscrutable smile. “Then let me speak for you.”

Anaxagoras turned slightly, uncertain whether to scoff or to laugh. “And what would you say, Your Highness?”

“That you’ve never looked more beautiful,” Lycurgus said, without hesitation, sincere in a way that felt like mockery. “Not when you argued before the Council. Not even when you tried to curse me under your breath that night in the library.”

It was meant to sound fond. Somehow it chilled him more than any insult.

“You have a strange definition of beauty,” Anaxagoras said quietly.

“Not strange,” Lycurgus countered. “Precise.”

They passed by the arched windows overlooking the gardens—dark now, the moonlight turning the fountains into pale ghosts. Somewhere below, the laughter of distant revelers drifted faintly up from the outer courtyards. Life carried on beyond these walls.

“You know,” Lycurgus continued, “they used to say an Omega’s wedding night was the most sacred of rites. The moment where love and duty converge. Mnestia’s blessing made flesh.”

Anaxagoras didn’t respond. His throat felt tight, his tongue heavy.

Lycurgus tilted his head, regarding him with that same unreadable fondness. “You look pale. Are you afraid?”

“Should I be?”

The prince’s smile didn’t waver. “Perhaps, but really that's up to you.”

They turned another corner. The long walk felt endless, though Anaxagoras knew exactly where it led. He’d walked these halls a hundred times before, but tonight every familiar turn felt foreign—as though he were trespassing in a place that used to be his.

When they finally stopped before a pair of tall, carved doors, Lycurgus dismissed the attendants with a single glance. The servants bowed low and vanished down the hall, their soft footsteps swallowed by the silence.

Only the two of them remained.

Lycurgus reached for the handle, but before he pushed the door open, he looked back at Anaxagoras. “You know,” he said softly, “you’ve always liked to make me wait. For your gaze. For your thoughts. For your surrender. You're lucky I'm so patient.”

His hand tightened slightly on the latch.

“But tonight,” he whispered, “I won’t have to wait anymore.”

The doors opened soundlessly, spilling warm candlelight across the floor. The scent of roses and incense drifted out—too sweet, too heavy.

Anaxagoras’ stomach turned.

Lycurgus offered his hand again, his voice velvet-soft: “Come, my foolish little scholar. The titans and the stars have already blessed this night. Take a step forward.”

Anaxagoras stared at that hand—at the same hand that had once lifted him from the library floor, that had written him letters laced with gentleness and ruin alike.

He hesitated. Then, slowly, he placed his trembling fingers atop his husband’s.

And together, they crossed the threshold.

The room was warm. Too warm. The air hung thick with incense and candle smoke, cloying with the sweetness of roses arranged in golden vases along the walls. The fire in the hearth burned low, but even its muted glow seemed to pulse against Anaxagoras’ skin.

He stood in the center of the chamber, unsure what to do with his hands. They trembled slightly, though from what—fear, exhaustion, or disbelief—he couldn’t tell.

Lycurgus moved with practiced ease. The doors shut softly behind them. The sound might as well have been a lock sliding into place.

The prince turned back toward him, his smile serene, unhurried—the look of a man who had already won.

“You’re trembling,” Lycurgus said gently.

“I’m cold,” Anaxagoras lied.

Lycurgus chuckled under his breath. “You’re quite a bad liar in this life.”

His hand reached out—slow, deliberate—brushing a stray lock of hair from Anaxagoras’ temple. The touch was featherlight, almost reverent. It made his stomach twist. There was tenderness in it, yes, but of the kind that resembled possession more than care.

He felt like glass being inspected before being set on a shelf for decoration.

Anaxagoras drew in a shallow breath. “Do you even love me?”

Lycurgus’ smile didn’t waver. “What do you think? I am your husband.”

That was the wrong answer, somehow. It sounded too easy, too rehearsed—like a vow that had been practiced long before it was meant to be spoken.

Anaxagoras looked at him for a long moment. The man before him was handsome, unyielding, radiant even—the kind of beauty sculptors tried and failed to capture. And yet, there was something hollow behind those eyes, a hunger that went beyond affection.

He wondered if Lycurgus loved him at all, or if he merely loved what he had made of him—the obedient shape carved out of resistance, did he perhaps imagine him to be a soft-spoken thing that once argued before councilmen and now could barely meet his own reflection.

What a cruel miracle, he thought, that a heart could mistake captivity for safety.

Lycurgus whispered something, too soft to catch, and pressed a kiss against his forehead. It was warm. Gentle. The kind of kiss one might give to soothe a frightened child.

It made him feel sick.

He tried not to remember how it began—the first time the prince had called him mine, the first time he’d been told his defiance was charming rather than dangerous. Perhaps deep down he had mistaken the leash for a garland then. He had thought himself clever for walking willingly and parading about pridefully.

And now he stood here, draped in silk and gold, the proof of his brilliance shining from his neck and wrists like shackles polished for ceremony.

Anaxagoras thought of Empedocles—his mentor’s quiet laughter, the smell of ink and parchment, the thrill of discovery. Gone. Probably dead. Erased from his life the moment he stopped being useful to Lycurgus’ plans.

He thought of his sister—her gentle hands, her soft voice when she told him to eat, to rest, to live freely. She couldn’t protect him. No one could.

He thought of the boy in the garden—bright-eyed, full of dreams, asking him to look for the secret passage. For a moment, he could almost hear that boy again, whispering: Why can’t you?

Because, he thought bitterly, there was no passage for him. There was no escape now.

The candles flickered. The roses burned too sweet. The scent crawled down his throat until he felt he might choke on it.

Lycurgus said his name, softly. Like a rotten prayer.

And Anaxagoras realized, perhaps much too late, that every prayer in this place belonged to someone else.

He wanted to tell him no. He wanted to say stop. He wanted to ask for mercy—or perhaps for nothing at all. But the words tangled and died before they could leave his lips.

Lycurgus gathered him close, as if he were something fragile, precious, pitiful. Pathetic.

And perhaps he was—because he no longer belonged to himself.

Anaxagoras felt the prince’s breath near his ear, warm and calm, as he whispered, “You’re safe now.”

Safe. The word tasted wrong, like something broken pretending to be whole. Like a mockery to his being.

He closed his eyes. He thought of stars. Of freedom. Of the boy in the garden. Of every dream that would never come true.

He wished he had asked for anything else.

He wished he had never met him

He wished he could still believe in miracles.

But there were no miracles left.

So he buried his face against Lycurgus’ shoulder and pretended that the tremor in his chest was only exhaustion—not grief, not terror, not the hollow breaking of something that could never be mended.

Perhaps this, too, was love.

And how wretched it was.

The morning light was cruel.

It painted everything gold—the walls, the drapes, the ring on his hand—as if to mock him for surviving the night.

Anaxagoras lay very still. The sheets were soft, heavy with perfume, and he could not tell whether the scent clinging to his skin was his own or someone else’s. He wanted to scrub it away, to peel himself free from whatever lingered there.

He pushed himself upright. The room swayed. He felt strangely hollow, as though something inside him had been scooped out and the shell left behind to smile for appearances.

He pressed his hands to his face. His palms came away damp.

How pathetic.

His mind tried to reason with him—it had been inevitable, the ceremony, the night, all of it. Duty fulfilled. Law obeyed. Nothing unexpected. Nothing wrong.

And yet his stomach churned.

He loathed how small he felt. How weak. How his own body, treacherous and soft, had folded into warmth it should have rejected. The memory of leaning into Lycurgus’ chest returned unbidden, and he wanted to bite the thought clean out of his head.

You sought comfort, his mind whispered. You wanted to be safe.

“No,” he rasped aloud, shaking his head hard enough to sting. “No, no—”

He could still feel the echo of being held, of the voice that told him he was loved, and that made him sick all over again.

He had thought himself so clever, so composed, a man of reason untouched by illusion. But here he was, weeping quietly into his palms like a fool who had mistaken chains for devotion.

But he hadn't, he always knew that Lycurgus was a man who had deliberately clipped his wings before he learned to fly, and because of that he had no means of escape. No matter how much he fought there was no exit to this horrid nest he would have to call home.

He hated himself for it—for every heartbeat, every breath that did not resist. For his failings. For his weakness.

He was pathetic.

He should be at his desk, writing, arguing, discovering much of what the world could offer. Instead he sat here, a ghost wrapped in gold, staring at a morning that promised nothing but more of the same.

A soft knock at the door startled him. “Your Grace,” came a servant’s voice. “His Highness requests your company for breakfast.”

His throat tightened.

He almost laughed. Breakfast. As though everything was ordinary now.

He rose, wordlessly, and walked toward the mirror. The man who looked back at him was beautiful—perfect hair, perfect skin, perfect composure. A picture of royal grace.

But behind the eyes there was only ruin.

He touched the glass and whispered, “I hate you.”

The reflection did not flinch. It only smiled.

What a terrifying sight.

By the time Anaxagoras reached the breakfast hall, the world had already righted itself—or at least, it pretended to.

The corridors were lined with flowers from the wedding, their petals still fresh and perfumed. The scent clung to him, too sweet, too reminiscent of everything he wanted to forget. He moved through the space like a ghost in ceremonial white, every step echoing too loudly in his ears.

When he entered, Lycurgus was already seated at the head of the long table, surrounded by advisors and noblemen. The air was bright with conversation and the clink of glass, as though nothing in the world had gone wrong.

“There he is!” one of the dukes exclaimed with a grin. “The kingdom’s newest jewel!”

Anaxagoras managed to force a faint smile—practiced, mechanical. The kind that didn’t reach his eyes. He bowed shallowly, murmuring, “You flatter me, my lord.”

Laughter rippled down the table.

“Sit, my love,” Lycurgus said, gesturing to the seat beside him. His voice was warm, but there was something unmistakable beneath it—possession, calm and complete.

Anaxagoras obeyed listlessly, folding himself gracefully into the chair. The servants poured tea, laid fruit, and refilled wine glasses already half-full. He could barely swallow water.

“His Highness is radiant today,” another lord remarked, his tone laced with amusement. “Marriage seems to agree with him.”

“Indeed,” someone else added with a smirk. “And the Crown Prince himself looks well satisfied. Mnestia has truly blessed your union.”

Anaxagoras’ fingers tightened around his cup.

There was laughter again—ill-natured, careless, cruel.

A baron leaned forward. “Forgive me, Your Highness, but if I may say—we’d all feared the Crown Prince’s consort would be too frail for, ah, the expectations of an heir.”

The others chuckled knowingly. “Too fine-boned, perhaps. But then again, Mnestia works miracles.”

Lycurgus only smiled faintly, the picture of magnanimous patience. “I assure you,” he said smoothly, “my consort is stronger than he appears.”

A few approving murmurs followed, the men raising their glasses. “As expected of His Highness! Even the most spirited of souls tamed.”

That word—tamed—struck something deep in Anaxagoras’ chest. They liked repeating that as though he were not a person but an animal, a pet to be kept and trained. He kept his gaze fixed on his plate, forcing his hands still, his breathing even.

He wanted to scream.

He wanted to tell them that he was not a thing to be tamed, not a beast to be broken, that his worth had never been measured in obedience or the width of his hips.

That even now as he is could probably make them regret such words, he was sure with a swing of his fists he might even knock a tooth or two.

But the words and subsequently the actions for such rebellion stayed buried beneath the weight of gold on his finger, the chain of silk around his throat.

What of his sister Diotima after? His pettiness before could be excused before but would they be now? He was not so sure they would be.

Lycurgus reached out casually, resting a hand over his. It was a gentle touch, affectionate to any onlooker. But to Anaxagoras, it felt like a reminder.

Smile.

So he did.

A perfect smile, as flawless as the mask he had worn since dawn.

When the courtiers finally rose to leave, bowing and congratulating the royal pair one last time, Anaxagoras could barely stand. His legs felt foreign, his body unsteady, as though it had to relearn how to move on command.

The hall emptied slowly. Lycurgus dismissed the servants with a nod, and soon they were alone.

“You endured them well,” Lycurgus said asmused. “How long will you be able to keep up? Any wise opinions of them?”

Anaxagoras looked up, his throat dry. “They were… kind.”

Lycurgus smiled, almost indulgent. “Kindness is not something men like them know nor understand. But I suppose you handled them with much more grace than I gave you credit for.”

It was meant as praise. To Anaxagoras, it felt like mockery.

When Lycurgus rose, he offered his hand. “Walk with me.”

And like always, Anaxagoras followed.

He told himself it was because he had no choice. But a small, hateful voice in his chest whispered—because it’s easier.

Because at least when he walked beside him, he didn’t have to think about how much of himself he’d already lost.

It began with false kindness like usual.

That was the most insidious thing about it.

No one chained him, no one struck him, no one shouted.

Instead, they smiled as they built the walls around him—soft-spoken guards with polished armor, servants who said it’s for your safety, Your Grace, and Lycurgus himself, ever gentle, ever devoted, as he took everything that made Anaxagoras himself and replaced it with comfort. Or really restraint, an ever shrinking cage to drive him mad.

His mornings were no longer his.

He woke when the servants told him to wake, bathed when they told him to bathe, dressed when they told him what to wear. He ate breakfast with Lycurgus every day—the same silver table, the same polite conversation, the same unspoken reminder that there was nowhere else to be.

When he asked to return to his laboratory, Lycurgus smiled faintly.

“It’s far too dangerous there, my dearest. Too many fumes and flames. You shouldn’t endanger yourself.”

“I built half the safety regulations myself,” Anaxagoras murmured, a little spark starting to catch.

Lycurgus looked at him coldly and then spoke in a way that made it feel as though he had doused Anaxagoras in freezing water: “All the more reason to rest. You’ve worked enough for a lifetime. Let others bear the burden now.”

And that was the end of that.

His books came next. He found several missing one morning, and when he asked, he was told they had been “screened” for improper content. The ones that returned to his shelves had certain pages torn out. A priest had marked a few with neat notes in red ink: Unfit for consorts. Misaligned with Mnestian principles.

He laughed the first time he saw those notes.

Then he laughed again, a little harder, until he couldn’t stop.

Lycurgus found him sitting on the floor, shoulders shaking, surrounded by mutilated pages. The Crown Prince knelt beside him, cupped his face, and whispered,

“Oh, my poor foolish consort. You’ve been overworking yourself again, I will make sure you get more rest.”

Anaxagoras said nothing. His throat burned with everything he wanted to say.

The palace was vast, but with how long he'd stayed here he had quickly learned that most corridors led nowhere. The guards were polite, always smiling, but their boots echoed wherever he went.

He was not a prisoner, Lycurgus had said.

He was free to go anywhere he pleased.

So long as it pleased Lycurgus too.

The first time he tried to leave the palace gardens, a hand on his shoulder stopped him. The guard bowed, apologetic.

“I’m sorry, Your Grace. The Crown Prince has spoken about your condition and ordered that you not go beyond the walls without escort.”

“Then escort me.”

“His Highness is unavailable to grant permission at the moment.”

Anaxagoras turned back toward the marble courtyard. The fountain gleamed, water sparkling in the sunlight like laughter. He almost found it funny.

Almost.

At dinners, the nobles adored him for the decorative piece that he was. They said so often enough that he started to believe it in fragments. They called him radiant, clever, composed—all the qualities they praised in an ornament, not a human being.

He was the perfect consort, they whispered approvingly.

So calm. So obedient. So silent.

Sometimes he would force a smile, and they’d sigh about his grace.

Inside, he’d feel nothing.

Lycurgus, meanwhile, was always perfection in the eyes of a crowd—hand at the small of his back, voice smooth as honey, eyes full of affection that felt more like possession. He spoke to him in endearments: my heart, my reason, my world. He called him that even in council meetings, until the courtiers began to repeat it with admiration.

It should have made Anaxagoras feel cherished.

Instead, he felt erased.

He began to measure time not by the sun, but by the sound of Lycurgus’ footsteps approaching their chamber at night.

Soft, steady, inevitable.

He’d be reading—one of the few books still permitted—and hear that tread in the corridor.

He’d close the book. Set it down. Fold his hands in his lap.

Wait.

Sometimes Lycurgus would only talk. Sometimes he’d sit beside him and speak of politics, of duty, of the gods’ blessings. Other times, he would reach out and touch Anaxagoras’ hair, or take his hand and hold it between his own. Always gentle. Always tender. Always unbearable. Like he was gloating to some unknown person, of achievements only he could understand.

“Do you still hate me?” Lycurgus would ask with a faint smile.

“I don’t hate you,” Anaxagoras would answer automatically.

“Good,” the prince would say, as if that settled everything even when from his tone alone did not support that.

And Anaxagoras would sit there, numb, wondering whether he lied more to Lycurgus or to himself.

Whenever he looked in the mirror, he no longer recognized the man there. The robes fit too perfectly, the jewelry gleamed too brightly. He looked like a statue carved in praise of someone else’s ideal.

He sometimes touched his reflection’s throat and wondered if there was a pulse still there. Or if he was a mere puppet held up by strings.

The court adored him even more now. Lycurgus adored him, or at the very least seemed fascinated and delighted by his submission.

And that, he realized, was the problem.

They beat him into silence.

They suffocated him into stillness.

They broke him until there was nothing left of him to break.

When the King visited once—old and soft-eyed, worn by years—he smiled at the sight of them together. 

“You’ve tamed him well,” the King said warmly to Lycurgus, his current heir.

“You’ve turned our empire’s brightest flame into a light for your hearth.”

Lycurgus laughed, pleased and amused as though the King had unknowingly said a joke.

Anaxagoras smiled too, because what else was there to do?

Days bled into each other until Anaxagoras could no longer tell which season it was.

The palace always smelled faintly of roses and polished marble—a scent that never changed, no matter the weather outside.

He tried, once, to keep track by marking a line on the back of a ledger for every sunrise.

He stopped when the ink began to look like tally marks scratched into prison stone.

Lycurgus’ "love" remained constant.

That was what made it unbearable.

Every morning, he greeted Anaxagoras with the same unguarded tenderness, as if no shadow could possibly exist between them now that they'd been bound together. He asked after his health, his comfort, his appetite. He ordered rare fruits to be brought from the southern provinces, built an entire greenhouse just so Anaxagoras could have the scent of citrus in winter.

And when Anaxagoras sat silently through it all, Lycurgus would take his hand and murmur: “You don’t need to thank me, my heart. I only want you to be happy.”

The words were gentle enough to bruise.

Sometimes, Anaxagoras thought he might be going mad.

It wasn’t that he was mistreated—it was that he was smothered by faux gentleness.

He knew it was false for Lycurgus had never once looked at him with love. The only person who did was gone.

Every possible edge of life had been sanded down, polished to a shine, until nothing real could scrape him anymore.

He’d walk through the corridors and hear nothing but the whisper of his own footsteps and the faint hum of servants breathing as they bowed. No laughter. No surprise. No sound that hadn’t been approved.

The gilded cage had grown quiet.

He started talking to himself just to hear a voice that wasn’t Lycurgus’.

Softly, at first—bits of research notes, stray thoughts, reminders of equations.

Then fragments of memory:

“The night we fled the Palace… the scent of burnt metal… a warm hand on my shoulder…”

But the memories came apart when he tried to grasp them. They dissolved like mist, and what replaced them were words that weren’t quite his own: You’re safe now. You’re protected. You’re loved.

The voice sounded like Lycurgus but knew it wasn't. It shouldn't be.

He wondered how long it would take before he started believing it.

At breakfast one morning, Lycurgus mentioned the court painters had requested a new portrait of the consort.

“You should sit for them,” he said, smiling. “The last one no longer captures your light.”

“My light?” Anaxagoras echoed, tone faint.

“Yes,” Lycurgus said, tracing his thumb along Anaxagoras’ jaw. “There’s something more refined about you now. More serene. I want them to see that.”

Anaxagoras looked down at his reflection in the silver goblet—pale, expressionless, shallow.

He wondered if serenity looked like death. Or if that was what Lycurgus truly wanted to depict.

When the portrait was finally revealed weeks later, the court gasped in delight.

It was magnificent—Anaxagoras rendered in soft golds and whites, eyes luminous, expression gentle.

A saint, not a man.

He stared at the painting for a long time before saying quietly: “It doesn’t look like me.”

“It looks like who you’ve become,” Lycurgus said. “Who you were always meant to be.”

And everyone applauded.

One night, unable to sleep, Anaxagoras wandered out onto the balcony.

The air was sharp and cold, heavy with the scent of rain. Far below, the gardens shimmered under the moonlight, endless and unreachable.

He pressed his palms to the marble rail and whispered,

“If I jumped, would I even fall? Or would this place find a way to keep me floating here, forever smiling?”

He almost laughed—not because it was funny, but because it was absurd.

Even his despair felt curated.

Behind him, the door creaked softly.

Lycurgus’ voice, warm and half-drowsy, floated through.

“Come back to bed, my love. You’ll catch a cold.”

Anaxagoras didn’t turn.

He stayed there, staring at the horizon until his vision blurred.

Would that boy still be down there to catch him if he jumped now?

There were moments—fleeting, dangerous moments—when he almost pitied Lycurgus.

Because he could see it now: the prince wasn’t cruel by nature. He was prideful and a narcissist. He truly believed he was saving him.

He believed the cage was a sanctuary.

That this "love" in some twisted, horrid way, was protection.

That possession was devotion.

And perhaps, in some terrible way, that made it worse. He a fool, even more so than Anaxagoras was.

Because how do you escape someone who hurts you by trying to keep you safe?

Or maybe that was his way of manipulating him into having sympathy for his terrible actions?

At this point Anaxagoras didn't know.

The prelude for the last act of his downfall in his first life began, as most things did, with something small.

A book.

He found it one morning tucked between two state documents in his study—The Principles of Celestial Mechanics, one of his own early drafts. The copy was smudged, annotated, imperfect. The sort of thing a student might have bought from a market stall years ago.

He didn’t remember asking for it.

He didn’t even remember being allowed to have it.

So he opened it.

And for a few blessed moments, the words reminded him of himself—not the consort, not the ornament, but the child who had looked at the sky and thought, If I can map the heavens, then surely I can map the truth itself.

He turned the page—and froze.

A line had been struck through in thick red ink.

Another replaced it, careful handwriting reading: “Irrelevant. No longer applicable under current doctrine.”

He flipped through the rest of the book and found more edits.

Passages rewritten. Equations simplified. The author’s name— his name—replaced by His Grace, Consort to Crown Prince Lycurgus.

He could not breathe.

But the laughter that bubbled up must've come from somewhere.

That night, he said nothing.

He lay in bed beside Lycurgus, listening to the soft rhythm of his husband’s breathing.

He stared at the ceiling, fingers twitching at the thought of tearing that book apart page by page.

Lycurgus stirred and turned toward him, murmuring,v“You’re thinking too hard again.”

Anaxagoras smiled faintly in the dark.

“Bad habit.”

“You shouldn’t trouble yourself with such things,” Lycurgus whispered, drawing him close. “You’ve already done enough for the world. Let it be kind to you, for once.”

Kind.

What a preposterous word. What a hypocrite. It stung worse than cruelty ever could.

The next day, he began to test the edges of his cage.

When servants brought his tea, he asked for honey instead of sugar.

When they hesitated—unsure whether the Crown Prince had approved such a change—he said softly,

“It’s all right. I’m sure he won’t mind.”

He smiled when they obeyed.

And when no one punished him for it, he felt something sharp flicker in his chest—not joy, not rebellion, but the faintest spark of proof.

That the walls could still be pushed.

And Anaxagoras was always stubborn to a fault. So he began to push them more.

He lingered longer in the library, pretended to nap so he could listen to courtiers gossip outside his door, smuggled bits of paper under the cushion of his chair with formulas that meant nothing but belonged to him.

He wrote the word mine again and again until the ink bled through.

Lycurgus noticed the change, of course.

He always noticed.

“You seem distracted lately,” he said one evening, after dismissing the servants. His voice was still gentle, but there was something new underneath—curiosity sharpened into control.

“Have I displeased you?”

Anaxagoras looked up, the perfect mask of grace in place.

“Not at all. I’m simply tired.”

“Of what?”

“Of being content.”

Lycurgus blinked, then smiled faintly—as if he’d heard a child say something charmingly foolish.

“What a strange thing to be tired of.”

“I've never been quite normal.”

“I suppose, happiness can be exhausting, in and of itself at some point.”

And that was the end of it.

Or so Lycurgus thought.

That night, when he was sure the palace slept, Anaxagoras slipped out of bed.

He walked barefoot through the corridor, light from the moon spilling like silver water across the floor.

Every step was soundless.

He reached the forbidden wing—his old laboratory.

The doors were sealed now, barred for his “protection.”

But he’d spent half his youth designing locks more complex than this.

He only had to listen.

The mechanism clicked open with a soft sigh.

The air inside was thick with dust. The instruments were draped in linen like corpses prepared for burial.

He ran his hand along a covered telescope.

In that silence, something in him broke—not loudly, but finally.

Because he realised this room was the last place in the world where his reflection had ever belonged to him.

When dawn came, the servants found him sitting at his desk, ink staining his fingers, his eyes bright and strange.

He said he’d simply been writing gibberish that made little sense for he felt ill and could not control himself, or so he excused.

Lycurgus did not scold him but he seemed a touch concerned.

There was a strange cruelty in Lycurgus’ performative tenderness.

He never raised his voice. Never struck him. Never even allowed himself to look angry.

He said please when giving orders and murmured his thanks when Anaxagoras obeyed.

It was niceness distilled into something pure and suffocating, the sort that left no bruises, only the quiet erosion of will.

Lycurgus would take his hand before gatherings, thumb brushing his knuckles like a promise, and whisper, “Remember to smile. They look to you for grace.”

And so Anaxagoras would forcefully smile.

Until he forgot what his own expression felt like without instruction.

At breakfast, Lycurgus usually filled his plate for him.

At council dinners, Lycurgus spoke for him more often than not.

At court, when scholars addressed him by title, Lycurgus gently corrected, “My beloved prefers not to trouble himself with state matters. He’s happier focusing on… gentler things.”

Gentler things.

Like embroidery. Or music. Or being quiet.

He forced himself to laugh when others laughed.

He bowed when others bowed.

He lived the way the palace required him to—beautifully, obediently, and utterly hollow.

Sometimes, at night, Lycurgus would brush a hand through his hair and murmur, “You’re calmer now. I’m glad.”

And Anaxagoras would smile, because what else could he do?

Tell him that this calmness was just a different form for despair?

His downward spiral began with strange dreams.

He started dreaming of his old teacher—Empedocles—the man who had once told him that the truest act of rebellion was to think freely.

In his dreams, Empedocles stood at the edge of a dark river, calling him by name.

“You helped build this cage,” the dream-figure would say.

“Now learn what it means to dismantle it.”

He’d wake drenched in sweat, heart hammering.

And in the soft glow of dawn, the words would echo: dismantle it.

So he began to write again—not essays, not research—but equations that didn’t make sense, letters that spiraled into fractal madness.

At first it was small.

A note scrawled in a margin: The cage is circular.

Then: There is no exit if the center refuses to move.

Then, later, whole pages of formulas that turned inward like mirrors reflecting mirrors—an endless recursion that spelled, in the right light: Help me.

Lycurgus found the papers one evening.

He smiled when he saw them.

“You’re writing again,” he said, voice soft with that nauseating pride. “I knew inspiration would return once you stopped overworking yourself.”

He gathered the pages carefully, stacked them neatly, and pressed a kiss to Anaxagoras’ temple.

“I’ll have these reviewed by the Royal Institute. They’ll love to see what my brilliant spouse has been doing in his leisure.”

Anaxagoras said nothing. Nor did he complain that it was Lycurgus who had doused his flames by restricting him in what he could and could not do.

He watched as Lycurgus left, his papers in hand—his madness about to be bound in royal seals.

The door closed, and the silence that followed was almost holy.

Days bled together.

The courtiers began to whisper about his pallor. He was apparently sick and with a poor constitution.

Lycurgus started assigning attendants to “keep him company.”

Every step was watched. Every word filtered.

When he asked to visit the gardens, they smiled and said the air was too damp.

When he asked for a new book, they said it must be reviewed.

When he asked for quiet, they said His Highness would worry.

At some point he began to just sit by the window and count the rotating guards outside instead.

Four in the morning.

Six at noon.

Eight by dusk.

One afternoon, a foreign ambassador complimented him at court—something harmless and obstinate.

“Your Grace speaks with such clarity. Truly, the jewel of Ephyra’s court.”

And Lycurgus laughed.

He laughed.

Not cruelly, but in that warm, performative way that made everyone else laugh too.

“He has always been clever,” the Crown Prince said. “Though I assure you, that brilliance burns best under direction.”

It was meant as praise.

Anaxagoras smiled through the applause, even as something in his chest snapped so sharply it almost made a sound.

That night, he could not eat. He could barely breathe once again.

Lycurgus reached for his hand, and Anaxagoras flinched before he could stop himself.

The pause that followed was delicate.

Then Lycurgus chuckled softly, drawing his hand back.

“You’re nervous,” he murmured. “Is it getting to you?”

He leaned in, kissed the corner of Anaxagoras’ mouth.

“I only want what’s best for you.”

“I know,” Anaxagoras whispered.

And he wondered if he meant it.

Such a thought frightened him most.

That night, he dreamed again.

This time, Empedocles was silent—only watching, disappointed.

And when Anaxagoras looked down, he realized he was holding a knife made of glass.

He woke to find his hand reaching for nothing.

But the thought stayed.

Not as a plan. Not yet.

Just as a possibility.

The nights came softer now, smothered in velvet and silence.

Anaxagoras learned to dread sleep—for sleep was no longer rest, but revelation.

At first, she appeared as he remembered her: his sister, still bright-eyed, still laughing, the scent of lilies clinging to her hair. They sat across from each other at a table that didn’t exist, beneath a ceiling of stars that flickered and bent like ink in water.

“You’ve always been clever, Anaxagoras,” she said, her voice warm as a summer breeze. “Then tell me—how does one leave a gilded cage?”

He wanted to answer. He wanted to say: You don’t.

But he only whispered, “I’m still trying to remember.”

Her smile softened.

“Then keep trying.”

And he woke with that echo in his chest—keep trying—though he no longer knew what trying meant.

Was it endurance? Or escape?

In waking life, Lycurgus continued to be "kind."

He brought him roses for his study, a new quill trimmed with gold, a necklace of pearls “to match his complexion.”

He told him, with no hint of warmth: “You should rest more, my heart. You look weary.”

And when Anaxagoras tried to speak of returning to his research, Lycurgus only smiled,

“You’ve done enough for the world. Now, let it care for you.”

It was meant to sound loving.

It only sounded final.

The laboratory doors remained sealed.

But he itched to get in again.

The second dream with his sister came on a night when the palace felt particularly silent, as though every guard outside had stopped breathing.

This time, she was sitting by a window, a porcelain cup in her hand, steam curling upwards.

The tea inside shimmered darkly, like mercury.

“It’s poisoned,” she said gently, offering it to him.

“Give it to him, and you’ll be free.”

Anaxagoras stares at her. “What?”

“You’ll be free,” she insists. “Isn’t that what you want?”

He recoiled. “You’re not real.”

“Neither is your cage.”

Her expression softens when he doesn’t reply. “He’s not kind, brother. He only wants to keep you where he can see you.”

The words sank deep, leaving a stain that no waking thought could scrub away. But he still doesn't give her an answer. He only watches as she raises the cup to her lips, drinks, and smiles—a faint trickle of crimson staining her teeth. When she sets it down, the teacup melts into a pool of red glass.

He wakes again in the dark, trembling. Lycurgus is asleep beside him, his face turned toward the window. The moonlight outlines his features in silver and shadow. Anaxagoras stares for a long time—at the calm rise and fall of his chest, at the faint curl of his mouth. The memory of the tea lingers in his mind, bitter and sweet at once.

Anaxagoras’ palms smelled faintly of tea. 

Days grew heavier, blurring into one another. The smiles around him are brighter, more artificial.

He began to speak even less, afraid of hearing himself sound like a stranger. He forgets the words spoken to him, but not their weight. His heart feels like a room with no windows, only mirrors reflecting back his own silence.

Sometimes he caught his reflection in the mirror and thought: He’s almost convincingly a living person.

Lycurgus never noticed—or perhaps he did, and chose not to.

His affection had become mechanical, the predictable rhythm of a man who believed love was a sequence of gestures—gifts, touches, praise—a formula one could repeat until the other learned compliance by heart.

Anaxagoras did learn. He learned to nod at the right times.

To say thank you when he wanted to scream.

To kiss the hand that caged him.

And then came the dreams of that boy in the gardens.

The first one was harmless. Almost sweet.

He was back on the balcony overlooking the gardens, the wind was gentle this time, carrying the scent of wheat and something faintly metallic along with the whisper of the fountain below. A boy stands below, hands cupped around his mouth—the one from before the wedding, white-haired, smiling with the kind of innocence that could only belong to something that had never been real.

“Didn’t you want to escape?” the boy calls up, tilting his head, sunlight caught in his lashes. “Come with me. Let’s look for the secret passage.”

He reached out a hand towards him. Anaxagoras hesitated.

“Come now, are you afraid of heights?” the boy teased. “It's not too high. All you have to do is take the first step.”

And Anaxagoras—laughing softly, like a man trying to remember how—asked, “Will you promise to catch me?”

“Always!”

Without any hesitation he jumped from the balcony, and the dashing young man caught him with ease.

"I got you, Anaxa."

He woke up gasping, the sensation of falling still caught in his chest—but his heart beat fast, alive in a way it hadn’t been for months.

The next dream came soon after, darker at the edges.

The same balcony. The same garden.

But this time, the boy carried a sword.

His expression was grave, his blue eyes bright with sorrow.

“Don’t you want to escape?” he asks again, his tone softer now—almost pleading.

“I do,” Anaxagoras whispers.

“Then why won’t you?”

“I can’t.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m—” He stops, the word refuses to form.

“I’ll help you,” the boy said firmly.

“Can you?”

“What prince can’t save his beloved?”

Anaxagoras laughed, a fragile, half-broken sound. “You’re not a prince.”

“Why can’t I be?”

“Because you’re not—”

“Him?” The boy’s gaze sharpened. “I don’t think he’s a prince at all.”

“Then what is he?”

“A great evil we must defeat.”

Anaxagoras laughed, the sound fragile, breaking at the edges. “We?”

“Yes. You and I.” The boy said softly, “Won’t you help me find the secret passage in the gardens?”

He hesitated. The boy sheathed his sword and offered his hand.

“Someone so smart and brave will be a great contribution to my quest.”

Anaxagoras looked down at the open palm—and for the first time in a long while, he smiled without meaning to.

“Well, it can’t be helped, I suppose.” He laughed, softly, one that almost sounded genuine. “A clever scholar is sure to find the secret entrance for such a dashing prince.”

He jumped off the balcony once more.

The young man catches him in his arms, laughing with pure delight.

And in that laughter—for just a second—Anaxagoras feels the air again. Feels like he could breathe.

He wakes with sunlight on his face, the sound of morning birdsong filtering through the curtains. His chest rises with a sharp inhale, and he doesn’t know why, but his eyes are wet.

Something has shifted. The air smells of earth after rain. The weight that always lingered on his sternum feels—lighter, somehow.

He doesn’t yet know what he will do, or what the dream means, but when he rises from the bed that morning, there is a faint glimmer in his gaze: a strange, new resolve.

Night had become a river he could not cross without drowning.

For years the hours had been measured by Lycurgus’ presence: the soft scrape of a chair, the exhale before a whisper, the slow folding of a hand into his. The dreams, at first a mercy, had multiplied into a choir—Empedocles’ measured insistences, Euphemia’s urgent hush, the boy’s bright, fearless coaxing—until waking and sleep braided into one continuous, impossible voice. Each whisper was a map, each memory a hand tugging him toward an edge he had been pretending did not exist.

That night, the voices were relentless.

Think, Empedocles coaxed, the old man’s breath a memory of chalk dust and late lamps.

Hurry, Euphemia urged, as if time for her felt shorter than for him.

You can escape now, the boy whispered, as if the world could be coaxed like a child. Come find the secret passage with me.

Anaxagoras moved like someone following a cue he no longer understood. He rose from the bed because he could not sleep; he moved because he could not stand the weight of the silence; he reached because something in him had the shape of a long-suppressed command.

The vase on the dressing table glinted in the hush—too fragile, too fine. He saw it as if through water: a flash of porcelain, the thin neck, the pattern like frost. He took it up not with malice first, but with a kind of ceremonial reverence, as if performing a rite he’d practiced in his head for a thousand sleepless hours. The porcelain felt cool. There was an absurd thought that he would return it to its place after. He did not know why the idea made him laugh.

Lycurgus shifted, murmuring something soft—a name, a caress. For a stunned second Anaxagoras watched the face beside him, outlined silver and tender, and felt a vast and terrible love for that one small human flaw that had taught him the art of being trapped. He felt little love for the man who caged him; that thought itself flicked into his mind like a poison and a balm at the same instant.

Then the room moved closer. The ceiling tilted. The voices rose—not in words but in exultation, as if they were cheering him from the other side of the world: Now. Now. Now.

The boy’s voice was the brightest: Do not be afraid. Take the step. It will be worth it.

He struck without thinking the way people do when a dream becomes a command. The sound—a sharp, inconsequential crash—felt unreal, like the noise had happened somewhere else, in another man’s life. Porcelain spattered, water hissed as it met carpet. For a breath the world was all sharp edges and the smell of soil and something warm and human.

Lycurgus blinked awake, confusion knitting his brow. He reached, and the motion arced through the room like a thread. Anaxagoras found himself moving, a puppet whose strings were memory and hunger and the million small humiliations stitched into his days. It was clumsy and frantic. He did not remember throwing the vase so much as he remembered the sensation of doing it: the way his palms trembled, the way his lungs pushed air like a bellows.

There was a struggle—blurred, violent and immediate in a way that did not map easily into thought. He felt fabric slip and fingers pressed; he felt Lycurgus’ breath fast and then too slow; he felt the man’s eyes—bewilderment, pleading, a thin hurt—and it exploded in Anaxagoras’ chest like a light.

Voices thrummed at the edge of his hearing, phantoms of teachers and sisters and impossible little boys. They braided into one chorus: Strike. End it. Finish. Free Yourself. His hands moved as if they were being directed by the chorus rather than by the person they were attached to. He was delirious and methodical in the same heartbeat: fumbling for something, slapping, pushing, the room a smear; a head, a shoulder, a gasp—the world reduced to sensations. Heat. Weight. Resistance. The metallic tinge of adrenaline at the back of his tongue.

When the motion ceased, it came like a slow tide pulling back. The breath that had been in the room earlier thinned and then stopped. There was a silence so absolute it had texture, like velvet drawn over the day. Anaxagoras’ own breathing came loud and foreign in his ears. He looked down, and the sight of his hands—trembling, slick, speckled—felt as if he were seeing someone else’s gloves left behind after a fever dream. They were warm, oddly comforting; the dark marks that stained them shone like a new language.

He could not name the moment he crossed from intent to reality. Time smeared. He did not remember the seconds the way a reader remembers pages; he remembered them as sensations layered on top of one another: the small chew of carpet beneath his knees, the distant sound of a city that had not paused for him, the way his heart banged like a fist against a chest. He laughed because the sound had nowhere else to go—a brittle, high sound that cracked into a sob. Laughter and tears collided, indistinguishable.

Voices returned, but they were no longer a chorus urging him on. They were closer, intimate: Empedocles’ patient cadence, Diotima’s trembling acceptance, the boy’s delighted shout. You did it. You are free. The words seemed to fill the room as if they were incense. For a breath, the truth of them felt clean and absolute. He tasted the idea of freedom on his tongue and it was ambrosia and ash.

He did not realize how long he sat there, hands still resting where they had been, palms damp and cooling until the dawn began to leak under the curtains like a pale promise. The light came slowly at first, then with ruthless certainty, and the room unfolded into itself again, revealing details he had not bothered to notice: the fine dust motes in the air, the crooked drape, the ring he still wore, bright in the new day.

At the doorway, in the first honest light of morning, a figure stood still and small: a knight, unarmored now, helmet tucked to his side, morning dew on boots. He had been at duties outside and came to find the lord he served, and then he had seen the tableau and stopped dead as if a hand had frozen him in place.

For a long time, there was no sound but the faint ticking of a distant clock and the slow lift of dust motes in a single shaft of sun. The knight’s face recorded horror first—a white, slick thing—then something softer: cramped pity, an animal’s caution. He did not move. He did not call. He only watched, as if the room had turned into an altar and he had no right to speak.

Anaxagoras lifted his head at last and met that young, open gaze. There was recognition, not from reason but from some far seam of fate: he looked like the boy from the gardens, older, but in metal and leather, standing very much like he had once stood under the sun—eyes wide, bright as if with tears not yet fallen. For a glaring second the man in the doorway and the old memory braided together and became almost holy. But he wasn't that boy, that boy was gone long ago and Anaxagoras had missed his chance to take the hand that had been offered to him.

Another sound burst from Anaxagoras then was not fully laughter, nor wholly sorrow. It tore out of him like a thing that had been kept in a box for too long and then thrown into the air. He laughed and sobbed at once—the sound of a mind splitting and recombining, of grief and exultation braided so tight they were indistinguishable.

The knight’s expression did not change; he did not step closer. He remained where he was: a witness, not an actor. The light poured in, merciless and sacral, hewing the room into shapes. Dust floated like ash, and the morning felt like both an ending and a birth.

Anaxagoras lowered his hands slowly into his lap, already cold from the dawn, and watched as the color dried dark and strange. His laughter faded into a small, wet sound that could have been another gasp or a cry. Tears came then, hot and sudden and belated, and he let them run down his face, making tracks through the drying streaks that marred his skin. He was happy.

He did not speak. He did not move to explain, to repent, to justify. He sat very still, reveling and recoiling at the same instant—freed by an act that would never return the things it had taken. Freedom sat inside him like a jewel with barbs. He had his fate in his hands, messy and final; the clarity of that truth made his knees ache.

Outside, the palace went on its slow waking. Somewhere down the corridor someone cleared their throat. Somewhere else, a dog barked. The knight at the door watched Anaxagoras with the peculiar stillness of someone looking at a ruin and knowing he must carry the memory of it forever.

Anaxagoras tilted his face to the light and for the first time in years felt a different kind of breath move inside him. It was not joy in the simple sense. It was not a triumph. It was the terrible, aching combination of relief and ruin: the end of a long captivity purchased with an irrevocable act.

He laughed again—softer, crazed now, the sound of someone who had finally cut his ropes and found his hands bloody. Tears came with it: sorrow, relief, the shocked, raw joy of a person who has at last forced a door that had bound him for years.

The knight remained frozen: this frightened witness was too stunned to speak, seeing in Anaxagoras what he had not expected—not a murderer in the cheap sense, but a shattered man who had done something final and impossible to unmake.

The morning brightened. The house woke up. The scene at the bed would ripple out like a stone in still water, but at that moment, in that swath of light, there was nothing anyone could do to change what had been done.

Anaxagoras let his cheek rest against his hand. The blood—chilling now—felt strangely like evidence in his palm: proof that he had acted, proof the cage was broken, proof that the life he had been given could be ended by his own hands. The world narrowed to that feeling, and he laughed and wept until the light grew full and the palace beyond their door began to stir.

The knight’s panicked breathing came in ragged gasps as he crossed the room.

“Anaxagoras—” he whispered, and though the word was urgent, it sounded more like a prayer than a name.

He did not wait for permission. He seized Anaxagoras by the wrist, dragging him up from the bed where the morning had found him, where dawn had unveiled the ruin. The body behind them was already beginning to cool, and the light crawled up the sheets as if to expose everything.

“Come with me. Now,” the knight said, hoarse with panic.

Anaxagoras let himself be pulled because resistance felt far away, like a thought spoken in another language. The hallway yawned open before them, full of echoing marble and muffled shouts that seemed to come from beneath the floor. The world had begun to unravel—footsteps, voices, the first alarmed cries of servants. Doors opened. Curtains trembled. The palace was waking to catastrophe.

They moved fast, the knight half dragging him, and yet every sound came to Anaxagoras slow and enormous.

Go, said Empedocles, from the hollow between his ears, the tone measured and firm, as though this were one more theorem to be proven. Go now, before they take even more of you.

Go, my sweet baby, Diotima murmured, her voice threaded with tears. Go before they make you kneel once again.

And over it all, sweet and familiar, the boy’s laughter—light through leaves: Let's meet in the gardens, okay? Don't keep waiting for too long!

They descended stairs slick with light. The knight muttered to himself, cursing under his breath, glancing behind them. There were shouts now—someone had finally found the Crown Prince's corpse. The sound came like a wave rolling through the corridors: shock, then fury.

“Run,” the knight pleaded. “Please, run faster—”

Anaxagoras’ feet obeyed though his mind lagged behind, still half in that dim room, still hearing the laughter that was both joy and madness. The air tasted of iron and incense; every wall seemed to tilt, every face that appeared in a doorway blurred at the edges. The noise of pursuit swelled—boots striking stone, the metallic cry of armor, the frantic stammer of servants calling names.

He heard them speak his name, but it reached him in pieces, stripped of meaning.

Consort.

Murder.

Death to the heretic.

The words fluttered around him like moths.

Empedocles again, quiet and inexorable called for him to, “Keep moving. You are almost there.”

Diotima, encouraged, “Little brother, please—just a little farther—”

The boy exclaimed, pointing towards the gardens, “The path is still open. Can you see the trees?”

He tore his hand from the knight’s grasp, stumbling into the outer colonnade where the sun struck marble to gold. The knight caught him, pleading, but Anaxagoras was already veering toward the light spilling through an archway at the corridor’s end. He thought he saw the garden beyond it—the hedge maze glittering with dew, the small fountain singing its endless song. And standing there, between cypress and rose, a familiar boy waited: the same bright eyes, the same outstretched hand he remembered from that morning long-ago.

“Anaxagoras!” the knight shouted. His voice cracked, and when Anaxagoras glanced back, it was only for a moment—enough to see fear in his face, the kind that knew what was coming and could not stop it.

Then the noise behind them broke into chaos. More footsteps, more shouting. The courtyard bloomed with movement—guards, mages in their dark robes, scholars clutching scrolls as if the words within could condemn or save. The world seemed to tilt on its axis. He was running, the stone beneath his feet dissolving into earth. His lungs burned. His vision shimmered.

“Stop him!” someone cried. “Stop the traitorous consort!”

He ran harder. The garden gate was open, light pouring through like the mouth of heaven itself. The boy was still there, smiling gently, patient as ever, one hand lifted toward him. I'll see you next time, Anaxagoras remembered him saying.

He reached, and for an instant—brief, crystalline—it seemed the air stilled. The roar behind him became wind in leaves. The palace, the knights, the accusations all fell away.

His fingers brushed the outstretched hand.

A sudden, invisible force bloomed through him—sharp, bright, immediate—and his body folded mid-stride. The ground rose to meet him with terrible gentleness. He felt the grass against his cheek, cool and damp, and thought absurdly that the earth was embracing him. The voices were quiet now. Only one remained: the boy’s, close and soft, saying, "Let's go."

He smiled faintly. His eyes turned toward the sky, where the light was breaking through the canopy. He could not feel the pain, only warmth, as if the sun itself had bent to greet him. His hand still hung in the air, clasped around nothing, or perhaps around the promise of something that waited beyond sight.

When the knight reached him—too late—Anaxagoras was already still, a trace of that serene smile on his lips. The garden swayed gently in the breeze, and from somewhere far above, the bell in the eastern tower began to toll the hour.

Anaxagoras had found that secret passage as promised.

This was how his first life ended, before a magnificent garden bathed in light.