Why won't you die.

  His sword was lodged in the creature's core and it still wasn't dying. The darkness was holding itself together through something that had no business working, tendrils writhing around the blade like it was trying to push him out, and Peter's arms were shaking from the resistance.

  He pushed harder.

  And then, without warning, his mind dragged him somewhere else entirely.

  Peter Edencrown.

  Born out of wedlock, son of a palace maid and the Emperor of the Kruzen Kingdom. His mother was never recognized as a concubine. That one fact set the shape of his entire childhood.

  He wasn't a prince. He wasn't a commoner. He was the thing in between that nobody wanted to acknowledge, which meant he got all the contempt of both and the protection of neither.

  From the moment he could walk, people made sure he knew it.

  The noble children spat at him. The palace staff sneered. The other servants — people who were supposed to be below him in rank — treated him with open contempt because there was no one to stop them. He was the bastard. The mistake. The living proof of something the Emperor had done and never bothered to clean up.

  His mother got it worse.

  She was the one who'd borne the child nobody wanted, and the palace punished her for it every single day. Every task she was given was a punishment. Every whisper in the corridor was aimed at her. Peter endured what came at him. Watching what came at her was different.

  He couldn't stop it. That was the thing he could never shake. He was right there, every day, watching her get smaller and smaller, and he couldn't do a single thing about it.

  She died of an illness nobody bothered treating.

  Peter found her in their quarters. Cold. Still. The palace doctors had better things to do than care for the mother of the Emperor's unwanted child.

  He was twelve years old.

  Something broke in him that day. He never bothered trying to name it. He just knew that after that, he stopped caring about whether anyone liked him and started caring about something simpler.

  Being strong enough that no one could do that to him again.

  The baptism came a year later.

  It was supposed to be another humiliation. The court gathered to watch the bastard child of a maid hold the measuring ball and get a result everyone could laugh at. Peter had gone in with no expectations. He'd learned not to have them.

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  The ball turned gold.

  The room went silent.

  9th-tier swordsman potential. The highest rank possible. The same nobles who had spent years making his life hell were suddenly very interested in being respectful.

  Peter had stood there and felt nothing.

  Not relief. Not satisfaction. Nothing.

  Because he knew — he knew immediately — that none of it was real. They weren't treating him differently because he'd proven himself. They were treating him differently because he'd become useful. Because he was powerful now, and powerful things were worth being afraid of.

  It wasn't loyalty. It was just fear wearing a different face.

  His rise after that was fast and bloody. Duels. Missions. The Emperor sending him to kill things in the empire's name because he was good at it and didn't complain. Each victory added to his reputation. Each victory felt like nothing.

  He was a weapon. That was what he'd become. The worthless bastard had been replaced by the Emperor's attack dog, and somehow that felt like the same thing dressed up differently.

  What does any of this matter, he'd thought, after his tenth mission, his twentieth, standing over something he'd killed on someone else's orders. Without this, I'm still nothing.

  He knew that. Lived with it. Kept fighting anyway because what else was there.

  And then Josephine.

  He'd expected a villain. He'd gotten — something else. A woman shunned by her own family despite everything she'd built, fighting for recognition from people who'd already decided she wasn't worth it. Sound familiar.

  But unlike Peter, she'd stopped.

  She'd stopped chasing it. Stopped performing for an audience that was never going to applaud. She'd just — turned around and walked in a different direction, and built something for herself anyway.

  "Don't chase what's not meant for you," she'd said during training, when he'd pushed too hard and telegraphed every move trying to prove a point. "You'll die before you find it."

  She'd seen through him immediately. Probably from the first day.

  Peter had admired her. Then he'd needed her. Those two things had happened close enough together that he hadn't noticed the shift until it was already done.

  He was aware of it now. Painfully aware. The obsession — the way he kept gravitating toward her, the way every fight had quietly become a test of whether he was getting closer to being someone who could stand next to her without embarrassing himself. It wasn't healthy. He knew it wasn't healthy.

  He also didn't know how to stop.

  Because she was the only thing, in a life full of hollow victories, that felt like it meant something. Not because she needed him — she didn't, she'd made that spectacularly clear — but because she was the first person who'd treated him like a person instead of a weapon or a stain.

  And that, apparently, was enough to ruin him.

  Back in the present.

  Peter's sword was still in the creature. Still not dead. His arms were burning.

  He thought about his mother. He thought about twelve years old and a quiet room and not being able to do anything.

  He thought about Josephine standing thirty feet away on a throne that had apparently materialized out of nowhere, watching this with that look on her face that meant she thought he could handle it.

  Fine.

  He stopped trying to overpower the creature and started using his weight instead — leveraging the blade sideways, finding the internal structure of the darkness and working against it rather than through it. Something shifted. The resistance changed quality.

  There.

  He pushed.

  The creature came apart.

  Peter pulled his sword free and stood in the silence, breathing hard.

  He wasn't fighting to prove anything anymore. He'd figured that out somewhere in the middle of the flashback, or maybe before it, or maybe he'd known it for a while and just needed a Darkness Incarnate to sit still long enough for him to catch up.

  He was fighting for her.

  Not to impress her. Not to make her notice him. Just — because she was there, and she mattered, and that was apparently enough to make him push past things he couldn't push past before.

  He lowered his sword.

  I'll stand by your side.

  Whatever it takes.