But the room was getting smaller. And the fog was getting thicker. And the voice that used to remember jasmine and starlight and the way she laughed when she was truly happy was growing quieter with every passing day.
Not silent. Not yet.
But soon.
CHAPTER 32
THE PROMISE
Ada
I hadn't slept in four days.
Every time I closed my eyes, I saw my father's face in those final moments—his divine light guttering like a candle drowning in its own wax, his hand going cold in mine between one breath and the next. The warmth leaving him so suddenly I'd looked down at our joined fingers, confused, as though I might find the heat pooled on the sheets beneath us.
It wasn't there. It wasn't anywhere.
The Palace of Light grieved with the rest of us. Courtiers wept in the halls. Nobles arranged their faces into sorrow and calculated their next move. My father had held the divine mark for over two thousand years — and so far, the Light Realm had chosen no one to replace him. No new mark had appeared. No heir had been blessed. The throne was empty in every way that mattered.
The eternal golden glow that had bathed these halls for two millennia flickered at the edges now. Shadows gatheredin corners that had never known darkness. Servants moved through the corridors in white mourning robes, and I couldn't look at them without feeling the wrongness of it — shadow, here, in my father's halls, in the spaces he had kept golden for two thousand years.
Everyone wanted something from me. The council wanted decisions. The priests wanted ceremonies. The nobles wanted assurances their petty empires remained intact. I couldn't give any of them anything. I was too broken to think about the future, too hollowed out to hold anyone else's grief alongside my own.
But Hakan kept them all away. "I'm handling the council," he told me each morning, pressing his lips to my forehead. "When you're ready — when the grief isn't so raw — the seat is yours. You're your father's heir. Nothing changes that. I'm just keeping it warm."
I wanted to believe him. I was also glad, in a way that shamed me slightly, that he was dealing with the council so I didn't have to face them yet.
What I wanted most was my father. I wanted to be six years old, sitting on his lap in the empty throne room, listening to him sing lullabies in a voice that could shake mountains but chose, in those moments, to be nothing more than soft.
I couldn't remember the melody anymore. Four days. Only four days and already the notes were blurring toward silence. If I lost this, everything else would follow — his laugh, the way he said my name, the particular weight of his hand on my hair. I'd be left with nothing but the rattle of his last breath on an endless, merciless loop.
* * *
I was sitting in the dark of our chambers with my knees pulled to my chest, my father's old shawl pressed against my face — it still smelled faintly of him, fading, even that was fading — when the door opened.
Hakan. Tray balanced on one hand. Sliced fruit. Fresh bread. Tea with steam curling from its surface.
"You haven't eaten in two days, Ada."
"I'm not hungry."
"I heard you. And I'm choosing to ignore it."
He sat on the edge of the bed — not too close; he'd learned that proximity sometimes felt like suffocation — and bargained with me over bread and tea with that infuriating, patient stubbornness until I ate, until I drank, because I didn't want him to worry. The tea was perfect — brewed exactly how I liked it, strong and sweet. Of course it was. Hakan remembered everything about me. Every detail, every preference, every passing comment I'd forgotten making. He'd been paying attention his entire life. Something about that — the smallness of it, the care — cracked me open.
The tears came. Not the dignified public weeping I'd performed at the funeral, at the ceremonies, at the endless procession of courtiers offering condolences they didn't mean. These were the other kind. The private kind. The ugly, gasping, animal sounds of a girl who would never hear her father call her name again.
He held me. Didn't speak. Didn't try to fix it. His shadows wrapped around us both while I fell apart, and I pressed myface into his chest and wept until my ribs ached, until I couldn't breathe, until I was nothing but salt water and grief.
When the worst had passed, I said the thing that had been eating me alive.
"I can't remember his voice when he was well. All I hear is the end."
He went quiet for a long time. His hand stilled in my hair.
"I want to try something," he said finally. "I don't know if it will work. I don't even fully understand it."
Shadows pooled in his palm — not aggressive darkness or idle tendrils, but something deliberate. They coiled into tight spirals that pulsed with dim, careful light.
