In the bowels of the Berkimhum palace, where even screams struggled to echo, Aurora worked.
Not with grace. Not with mercy. But with a hunger that scared even the rats from the walls.
She knelt over the limp, twitching body of Irene—the once-proud Prime now stripped of all titles, all armor, and nearly all humanity. Blood painted Aurora's fingers to the wrists, thick and sticky like hot tar. Bits of tissue clung to her gloves, still pulsing faintly with rejected life.
The dungeon reeked—burnt nerves, bile, and ancient stone saturated in generations of suffering. Iron sconces flickered weakly above them, casting moving shadows across the floor like ghosts pacing just outside reach.
Irene gargled on her own blood, half-conscious, the sound gurgling up from her open chest like a wet kettle rattling before boil. But Aurora didn't pause. Her blade worked deeper—past rib, beneath muscle, carving through the slick red terrain like a butcher seeking poetry.
