I hadn’t yet given up on my dream.

  Not really.

  Some quiet, stubborn part of me still longed for the fantasy I clung to—to be treated like a true princess. Not in the symbolic sense, not through metaphor or ironic cruelty. I wanted devotion. Reverence. Beauty sculpted around my comfort and desires, a place and person that revolved entirely around me.

  And it showed, of course, in how we rebuilt our house.

  From a distance, it looked almost identical to the one that had burned—same modest structure, same sloping roof, same wraparound porch shaded by a weathered awning. But we changed a few things. The kitchen was larger, because I wanted more space to cook when I felt like pretending I was normal. And we added a moat—at first.

  It circled the house like a protective ribbon, but we never filled it with water. It was a dry trench for almost a year, absurdly useless and symbolic, like an unfinished thought I kept forgetting to complete. Eventually, we gave up on the idea of water and instead filled it with soil. Flowers bloomed soon after—but, of course, not ordinary ones.

  I insisted we plant only poisonous varieties. Foxglove. Oleander. Belladonna. Delicate things with beautiful petals and deadly consequences. It was the perfect compromise between elegance and deterrence.

  In that way, I thought I had grown. That I had learned. I told myself I wouldn’t make the same mistake again. No more misplaced intelligence. No more guards who learned to love instead of obey.

  I had aimed too high the first time—wanted someone who could read my every desire just by watching my lips move, someone with both intellect and loyalty, a servant so perfect that obedience would look like adoration.

  But I realized too late that giving someone enough mind to understand you also gave them the mind to deviate. To desire.

  That was my mistake.

  So, the next time, I adjusted the formula.

  “I want someone stupid,” I told Aska plainly one morning, dragging a blunt spoon through a bowl of oats I had no intention of eating. “Obedient. No imagination. Nothing beyond the instructions I give.”

  Aska didn’t even look up from the blade he was polishing. “Can’t do,” he said simply, voice flat. “Humans usually don’t come down here.”

  His refusal felt like a slap, a denial of something I thought was entirely within reach. I sulked for a full week, cooking without spice, deliberately over-boiling the tea, and ignoring him whenever he spoke. But I knew it wouldn’t change anything. Aska didn’t respond to pettiness, and he certainly wouldn’t bring a human just to appease a whim.

  Then came my eighteenth birthday.

  Nothing happened.

  We both forgot. No cake, no celebration, not even a sarcastic remark from Aska about me aging terribly. Only in hindsight did I feel the sting of it—how quietly it passed, how forgettable I’d become even to myself.

  A week later, Aska seemed to remember. Not with gifts or apologies, of course—he wasn’t the sentimental type—but with instruction. He handed me a sword and began to train me.

  I hated it.

  The sword was heavy, unbalanced, and utterly uninteresting. It clanged dully against the ground when I dropped it and did nothing to spark even a flicker of joy in me. Swords were for heroes, for valiant idiots charging into castles to save damsels in distress. I wasn’t the one being saved. I was the castle.

  And so, one day, I dropped the weapon in the dirt and used my fists instead. It wasn’t graceful, but it was honest. Brutal, immediate, and deeply satisfying in a way the sword could never be. I lost every match against Aska, of course. He laughed each time I hit the ground, but he never told me to stop.

  As the years blurred into each other, I kept training. Two decades passed like pages in a book I wasn’t really reading. When I neared forty—not that age meant anything down here—Aska gave me another weapon: a spear.

  Spears were practical. Long reach, good defense. But I hated it even more.

  Do you know who dies first in a battle, after the idiot who charges in screaming? The spearmen. Always the spearmen. Linear, obvious, replaceable.

  I was already dying every night. I wasn’t about to die in battle, too.

  So I discarded the spear ten years later, ceremoniously placing it near the edge of the dry moat where the belladonna had begun to wilt, and waited for the compass to spin again. My next chapter was coming—I felt it.

  And it did. Like fate answering a summons.

  It didn’t take long to find her. A human woman, around twenty-four. Strong, cautious, and armed to the teeth. Her posture said soldier, her eyes said survivor. She didn’t fall for my usual tricks—no honeyed words, no false tears, no illusions of kindness.

  So I adapted.

  I broke a few of her bones to humble her. Smashed her helmet with a jagged stone to take away her sense of superiority. She fought, of course. But eventually, she bled. Eventually, she fell.

  And when she did, I carried her back to the new shack—nearly identical to the last one, with a few more locks this time—and began her training.

  Because I had learned.

  Because I was still chasing the same dream: to be treated like a princess.

  But not by someone who chose to.

  By someone who simply couldn’t imagine doing anything else.

  At first, everything was perfect. Too perfect, even. She submitted with ease—too easily, really. Her resistance had melted away under pressure and pain, and what remained was pliable, docile, and eager to please. Just the way I wanted.

  Her brainwashing progressed smoothly. She followed commands with the soft-eyed obedience of a doll still being stitched together. I had plans for her—a simple role, really. She would be my maid. A clean, orderly presence at my side. Someone to brush my hair, and dress me in silk like I deserved. Someone to call me "milady" and bow without irony. No affection, no attachment. Just structure. Ritual. Control.

  But I didn’t even make it that far.

  The cracks began to form the moment her intelligence started to resurface. It was faint at first—an occasional question asked too curiously, an observation too detailed. She didn’t try to run. She didn’t look for weapons or maps or weaknesses in the doorframe.

  She just looked.

  And that should’ve been fine. Curiosity was natural. Expected, even. But her gaze didn’t linger on me like it should have. No—her eyes drifted elsewhere.

  To him.

  It started with a glance, a momentary flicker of interest as Aska passed through the room. His expression remained blank, of course—he probably hadn’t even noticed. But I had. I saw the slight turn of her head, the way her gaze trailed him for just one second too long.

  It was harmless. She meant nothing by it. That’s what I tried to tell myself. And yet, something inside me twisted.

  I knew Aska was handsome. Too beautiful, really. He had that kind of ageless, cruel elegance gods seemed to wear like armor. But that wasn’t the issue. The issue was that he was mine.

  He wasn’t my lover. Not really. Not officially. But he belonged to me in ways no one else could understand. I knew the way he drank his tea, how many steps he took before vanishing, what each twitch of his eye meant. We had a bond, fragile but undeniable. That meant something.

  Didn’t it?

  And then I looked at her. Really looked. Tall, statuesque. Hair like woven gold. And that chest—full and soft, perfectly curved in a way that made me want to retch. She looked like the kind of woman Aska kept in his naughty books—the ones he thought I hadn’t found, tucked beneath a loose floorboard in the hallway. But I had. I’d flipped through every dog-eared page, taking mental notes, tallying each busty brunette or voluptuous warrior maiden.

  She was exactly his type.

  And I wasn’t.

  I still looked like a child. Slight, sharp-featured, with a body that refused to grow in the ways society worshipped. No matter how many decades passed, I stayed the same. Like a porcelain doll someone forgot to finish carving.

  I told myself I didn’t care. That I had transcended vanity long ago. That I didn’t need to be anyone’s type, because I owned people. I controlled them. Desire was a weakness for others, not for me.

  But it still stung.

  The next day, she died.

  A tragedy, really. Such a promising maid. Who could have predicted that the flowers I sprinkled into her food—delicate belladonna petals—would prove so deadly?

  Honestly, I’d forgotten how toxic they were.

  Or perhaps I hadn’t.

  Perhaps, deep down, I’d chosen those flowers for a reason. Not because they were beautiful or rare, but because they were final. A quiet, elegant way to end something before it could truly begin. Before her glances became whispers. Before Aska looked back.

  She died quietly. No screams. Just a soft sigh and a fall to the floor like a marionette with its strings cut. Aska didn’t say anything when he saw her corpse. Just looked at me in that way he does, half-amused, half-aware.

  I said nothing either.

  Because there was nothing to say.

  It wasn’t her who finally broke my will to keep creating these “toys.”

  Not the sultry maid with wandering eyes.

  Not the idiot brute who choked on his own incompetence.

  Not the clever one who played the game too well until I had to end it.

  Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

  No. The one who undid me was a child. A little boy. No older than eleven.

  He didn’t fight when I found him. He just cried. Big, heaving sobs that rattled in his chest like he’d never learned how to hold grief quietly. I expected fear—maybe even a desperate plea for life—but instead, he looked at me with eyes wide and wet, like he’d already accepted the worst and didn’t have the strength left to resist.

  “Come with me.”

  He obeyed.

  His small hand trembled in mine the entire walk back to the shack, the way only the truly powerless tremble—those too young to understand what they’re about to lose but old enough to feel the danger in the air like static.

  Aska didn’t even bother to follow us this time.

  It was strange—usually, he hovered close, watching with that unreadable smirk on his lips, offering commentary, judgement, amusement. But not this time. He lingered elsewhere, apathetic. Like he already knew how this would end.

  Inside the shack, I readied the tools like always. Set the atmosphere. Controlled the stage. It was a dance I knew well by now. But something was off from the very beginning.

  I couldn’t touch him.

  I stood there, dagger in hand, and tried to steel myself—but something in me rebelled. My arm wouldn’t move. My fingers tightened, but the blade hovered uselessly in the air. Every attempt to lower it was met with a violent, inexplicable resistance. Not magical. Not divine.

  Just me.

  My body trembled. My knees locked. Even the idea of pain near him turned my stomach in ways I hadn’t felt in decades.

  I dropped the dagger. It clattered uselessly to the floor.

  And that was when he appeared.

  Aska. Silent as shadow. Unsmiling. Watching.

  “You cannot hurt him,” he said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “And you don’t even want to. Why bother continuing this charade?”

  I turned on him instantly, fury welling in my throat. How dare he speak like he understood me—like he knew what I felt before I even knew it myself? My rage was immediate, instinctive, even though I knew he was right. That was what made it worse.

  He hadn’t read my thoughts—I knew that. I made him promise, long ago, never to peel back my mind. He never had.

  So how?

  “How do you know?” I hissed, eyes narrowing. “How did you know I didn’t want to hurt him?”

  Aska didn’t flinch. He never flinched.

  “Because I’ve lived beside you for over a century,” he said, matter-of-fact.

  I hated that he said it like he wasn’t disappointed. Like it didn’t matter.

  “I don’t want to stop,” I whispered, half to myself.

  “But you already have.”

  The silence that followed was unbearable. So I broke it the only way I could—by trying to find a reason, any reason, to make sense of what had just happened.

  “Is he invincible?” I snapped. “Does he have a barrier around him or something? Because my dagger—”

  “It’s not a barrier,” Aska cut in, voice calmer than it had any right to be. “It’s the seed of life.”

  I stared at him. “The what?”

  He sighed like someone digging up an old, embarrassing story.

  “Long ago, the god of life and I… we had a disagreement.”

  “Disagreement?” I raised an eyebrow.

  “…A gamble, if we’re being honest. We argued over when humans should be allowed to die. I believed in freedom of choice—he, in divine timing. So, we made a bet.”

  I scoffed. “And let me guess, she cheated.”

  “She never cheats,” Aska muttered bitterly. “But yes. As punishment, every intelligent being is born with a seed of life embedded in them. A spiritual tether. Until that seed fades—until they lose their will to live or understand death—they can’t be harmed by my hands .” That chilled me more than I wanted to admit.

  “Whatever... and what does this have to do with me?” I asked the question with an edge sharper than the dagger I couldn’t bring myself to use. Aska glanced toward the boy, who was still crying—loudly, unabashedly—his small frame rattling against the shackles holding him to the table. His sobs didn’t stir guilt in me anymore, just a lingering irritation I couldn’t quite place.

  Aska didn’t answer at first. He kept his gaze fixed on the boy. When he did finally speak, his voice was low and hesitant—two things I rarely heard from him.

  “It seems that it is… hereditary?” He couldn’t even meet my eyes. Fiddled with the hem of his shirt like a guilty schoolboy caught lying. I stared at him flatly, piecing together what he meant before he even dared to clarify. I felt a blade of anger rising—not because of the boy, but because he’d hidden this from me. Because he’d known, and said nothing.

  “Ah,” I muttered and left the shack before my hand reached for the nearest sharp object.

  I needed something mundane to do—something repetitive, something grounding—so I cooked. For three.

  The boy joined us for lunch after I cleaned him up and dressed him in something that wasn’t stained with blood or tears. He was quiet now, sniffling into his food but no longer screaming. He ate well. I watched him the whole time, chewing over possibilities in my mind as he chewed his vegetables.

  None of the usual solutions felt right.

  I expected Aska to give me an answer—or at least provoke me into making one—but he was of no use. Instead, he sat cross-legged with a dusty storybook open in his lap, reading some ridiculous fairy tale aloud to the boy in a calm, steady voice. The boy leaned into the words like they were oxygen.

  I stared, stunned. And not just by the scene—by the unfairness of it. By how easily that little wretch was pampered.

  Later that day, I stood before a full-length mirror and examined myself with cold detachment. I didn’t look at one part of me—I looked at all of me. The childish proportions. The skin that never aged. The wide, young eyes that hadn’t changed in over a century.

  A breath left my lips, half a laugh and half a hiss.

  “Aska,” I called, my voice sharp, a knife through the quiet.

  He was sitting on the edge of the bed again, pretending to read—though I could feel his gaze on my back like sunlight through a magnifying glass.

  He didn’t look up. “Yeah? What is it?”

  “Do you… like how I look?”

  I took a step to the side, just enough to catch him in the mirror’s edge. His eyes flicked up, briefly meeting mine through the reflection.

  “Yeah. Of course I do. Why do you ask?”

  I turned to face him. Slowly. Deliberately. Watching him like a hawk. My voice was deceptively casual.

  “Is it because… because… are you a paedophile?”

  That hit the air like a hammer shattering porcelain. A pause. A silence that pulsed with something dark and brittle.

  He didn’t explode in anger. He didn’t laugh, or flinch, or recoil in horror. His brows twitched—just slightly—and his jaw clenched for half a heartbeat. The reaction was subdued. Controlled.

  Disappointing.

  “Is that what you think of me?” he said finally, his voice flatter than I expected.

  I didn’t answer.

  I wasn’t sure what I wanted him to say.

  I wasn’t even sure why I’d asked.

  But I was disappointed.

  Not in him—no.

  In the calm.

  In the absence of proof that something was wrong. Because if he was, I could hate him. I could destroy him. I could do something. But this strange, calm ambiguity? That was worse, at least until he cleared it up.

  “No I′m not. I prefer adult woman. If you mean your apparent age, no—I didn’t influence it.”

  Aska’s voice was even, almost bored, but I knew better than to trust his tone.

  “And by the way,” he added with a faint smirk, “you’re still a virgin after one hundred years of sleeping beside me. Do you really think I’m attracted to younglings?”

  I stared at him, blinking slowly. The words landed somewhere in the fog between disbelief and confusion. My body tensed, but not out of fear—just frustration. I didn’t understand him. At all.

  He was attracted to me. That much was obvious. The way his eyes lingered. The way he looked away when I caught him staring. The gifts, the patience, the way he listened even when I ranted like a lunatic. And yet…

  Was I an exception?

  Or was he lying?

  My mind spun in place, and rather than chase the answer, I dropped it.

  “No…” I said, taking this as the most sensible answer.. “But you didn’t want to hurt the boy either, did you?”

  His response came too fast.

  “Not really.”

  I exhaled slowly, closing my eyes. My shoulders sagged. Somehow, that answer—honest and indifferent—disappointed me even more than if he’d said yes or no with conviction. It confirmed what I already knew.

  “Aska…” My voice barely escaped my throat, quiet and bare. “Why are we so similar? Why is that seed of life thing impacting both of us and not just you?” The words surprised even me, but once they left my lips, I couldn’t stop them. “You knew from the very beginning I wouldn’t hurt him, didn’t you?” And it wasn’t just that.

  Our tastes—black and red. Our favourite foods. The way we approached problems. The fact that we both liked our knives clean and our vengeance quiet. I used to think I was simply adapting to him, a result of living in such close proximity for a century. But no. Even our instincts were the same.

  It went beyond mimicry.

  I knew what he would say before he opened his mouth.

  I could walk into a room and feel his thoughts.

  It was like living with a mirror that had grown tired of pretending to be different.

  He gave me that usual tired smile, the kind that said I know something you don’t and I won’t tell you even if you bleed for it.

  “My dear,” he said softly, “that is something you’ll have to find out yourself. But I swear—I haven’t read your mind.”

  And just like that, the conversation ended.

  He shut the door not with words, but with the finality in his voice. I asked again later. Twice. A third time. But it was like talking to a stone statue with a pulse. Eventually, I stopped asking—not because I stopped wondering, but because I feared what I might hear if he ever did answer.

  The next day, the boy was gone. Aska returned him to wherever he came from, though I noticed he took extra care to tangle the boy’s memories into knots. The child wouldn’t remember me. Or the shack. Or the way the blade had hovered just above his skin like a falling star that never landed.

  It should’ve been a relief.

  Instead, it left behind a strange, echoing silence inside me.

  That night, I sat alone for a long time. I didn’t sleep. I didn’t move.

  I wasn’t afraid of what I’d done. I wasn’t guilty about what I’d tried.

  But I felt—unmade.

  Like a sculpture catching sight of the artist’s reflection in its own marble skin.

  In the flickering candlelight, I realised I had no idea who I truly was. Not anymore.

  Not after him.

  Not after us.

  And maybe… I never really had.

  I had to start asking different questions now. Not about my next plaything or next house or next death.

  I had to ask:

  Who am I—outside of him?

  Who do I become—if I let myself change?

  And most terrifying of all:

  What if there’s more of him in me than I had realized?