Down in the Fortress of Meropide, time moved differently. The artificial lights never truly dimmed, the distant rumble of machinery was a constant heartbeat, and the weight of the ocean above pressed on every soul like an unspoken sentence. Wriothesley had been here for seven years now—long enough that the name “prisoner” no longer fit. He had become something else entirely.

  It started small.

  The previous administration had been rotten to the core: production quotas inflated to line private pockets, coupons hoarded by guards and sold on the black market, inmates worked to exhaustion while the “rehabilitation” programs existed only on paper. Wriothesley had watched it all from the pankration ring, where he fought not for glory but for survival—and for the chance to speak when others couldn’t.

  One day he challenged the warden to a duel. Not a death match, but a public pankration bout over the fairness of the coupon system. The terms were simple: winner sets the new rules for distribution. The old warden laughed—until Wriothesley stepped into the ring with calm, mechanical precision. No rage. No showmanship. Just controlled, devastating strikes that ended the fight in under three minutes.

  The crowd—hundreds of inmates—roared. Not for blood, but for the first real victory many of them had seen in years.

  Word spread like steam through the vents. Inmates who had once feared him now looked to him. Guards who had once ignored him now hesitated before giving orders. When the old administration tried to retaliate, they found the entire lower levels quietly refusing to work until the coupons were redistributed fairly. Wriothesley didn’t lead a riot; he led a standstill. And when the Palais Mermonia sent investigators, they found not chaos, but order—rough, inmate-enforced order—under the reluctant leadership of Convict #W-001.

  Impressed (and perhaps relieved to avoid a full uprising), the Court officially recognized the change. The title “Duke of Meropide” was bestowed—not as a pardon, but as a pragmatic acknowledgment. The former inmate became the Warden. The man who had killed his adoptive parents to stop a trafficking ring now ran the prison that had once been his punishment.

  Under his rule, things began to shift.

  Coupons became transparent. Work shifts included actual skill training. The infirmary was stocked properly. The pankration ring remained, but matches were regulated—no needless maiming. Melusines were hired as support staff, their gentle efficiency a quiet revolution in morale. Wriothesley brewed tea in his office late at night, blending herbs smuggled in by grateful former inmates, and he kept a small corner of green plants under hydro lamps—tiny acts of defiance against the gray.

  He cared. Deeply. The Fortress became, in his hands, a place of rebirth rather than mere punishment. He knew what it was to be discarded. He refused to let anyone else be treated the same way.

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  But there was one visitor request he never granted.

  Every six months, like clockwork, a formal letter arrived from the surface: Clorinde, now officially the rising star of Fontaine’s duelist circuit, requesting an audience with the Duke. The letters were polite, professional, stamped with the Gardes seal. Sometimes they included updates—her latest victory in a high-profile duel, her promotion to elite status, her impending candidacy for Champion Duelist.

  Wriothesley read each one in silence, fingers tracing the elegant script that still carried echoes of the girl who he used to tease about her “pretty ponytail”. Then he set them aside in a locked drawer, unopened beyond the first reading.

  He refused every single one.

  Not because he hated her. Not because he blamed her for staying away. But because shame burned hotter than any prison floodlight.

  He could still see her face in that alley—wide violet eyes full of trust as she tore her bread in half and handed it over. The way she’d laughed when he brewed terrible tea. The way she’d promised endless spars until one of them truly won.

  And now? He was a murderer who ruled a prison. A man whose hands had ended lives in the name of justice, whose name was whispered with both fear and grudging respect. How could he face her? How could he look into those same eyes and explain that the boy who hated unnecessary violence had become the one who dealt it out when the law failed?

  He told himself it was kindness. She had a bright future—duels under Furina’s spotlight, the Champion title within reach. Letting her see him like this would only drag her down. Better she remember the scrappy kid with dreams of fairness than the Duke who had blood on his ledger.

  So he refused. Every time.

  The guards knew better than to question it. The Melusines who delivered the mail gave him sympathetic glances but never pressed. Even Sigewinne, the head nurse, only once ventured a quiet, “She keeps trying, you know.”

  “I know,” he’d replied, voice low. “And she shouldn’t.”

  Up on the surface, Clorinde never knew.

  She assumed the refusals came from bureaucracy, from the Fortress’s notorious red tape, from the Duke’s rumored aloofness. She didn’t know the letters reached him. She didn’t know he read them. She didn’t know he kept every one.

  So she kept climbing.

  She won duel after duel. She earned the right to wear the Champion’s black coat with silver trim. She stood before Lady Furina in grand ceremonies, blade raised in salute as the Archon proclaimed her “Fontaine’s unyielding instrument of justice.”

  And every time she returned to her quarters, she wrote another letter.

  Another request.

  Another promise to herself: One day, the gates will open. One day, I’ll walk in as the Champion Duelist and demand to see him. Not as a visitor begging at the door—but as someone who belongs on equal ground.

  She trained harder. She dueled fiercer. She waited.

  Down below, Wriothesley brewed another cup of tea—stronger now, blended with rare herbs sent as tribute—and stared at the latest unopened envelope on his desk.

  He traced the seal with one scarred finger.

  Then he slid it into the drawer with the others.

  Not yet.

  Maybe never.

  But the drawer grew fuller with each passing season, and somewhere deep beneath the shame, a small, stubborn part of him hoped that one day—when he was ready, when the darkness no longer choked him—he might finally open the door.

  For now, though, he remained the silent Duke.

  And she remained the relentless Duelist.

  Two currents circling the same abyss, drawn inexorably closer, whether either of them admitted it or not.