The sentence for Baran Othha Khankundra had been pronounced.

 

He was condemned to climb Barucha Mountain—the tallest peak on the Palan continent—until the moment of his death.

 

Barucha was a mountain forged of naked rock, infamous for the restless volcano within it that would, without warning, vomit rivers of molten fire. 

 

By day, the sun scorched the stone until it reached temperatures fierce enough to blister skin at seventy degrees; by night the moonlight froze everything into brittle, lifeless silence. 

 

A wasteland where no living thing should endure.

 

Starving wild dogs and vultures stalked the crevices, hunting the few desperate rats that still dared to exist. 

 

Barucha was not merely a mountain—it was death given height and named.

 

Deep night had fallen. The sun’s brutal memory had been erased; now the peak cradled a merciless, bone-deep cold. 

 

Beneath the mercilessly bright moon, a long procession advanced toward the foot of the death mountain.

 

Leading the column was a grand palanquin bearing Hissin, the one entrusted to carry out the sentence in place of Queen Tefnu of Mohron.

 

Walking parallel beside it, in a smaller, more delicate palanquin, sat Princess Dahlia Baran.

 

Among the dozens of soldiers marched Khankundra, shackled in heavy chains. 

 

Every few steps, he would erupt into sounds that were neither laughter nor scream—something broken and obscene in between.

 

His body, already ruined from long years in the Sun Iron Cage, was covered in fresh, self-inflicted gashes and claw marks. 

 

The unmistakable ravages of withdrawal from the forbidden Blue Lotus drug—in his madness, he had torn at his own flesh, desperate for anything to quiet the screaming inside his veins.

 

Even now, through the haze of torment and fever, his bloodshot eyes found her.

 

Far ahead—silhouetted against the moon-pale rock—he saw Dahlia. 

 

He stretched shackled arms toward her in violent, helpless longing, voice cracked and guttural, half-mad chant, half-desperate plea.

 

“Ughhh…! Hehehehe… that woman… bring her to me… I need her blood… hhhk…! If they send me back down to the dungeon… they’ll be there again… bring them… bring her—!”

 

His body convulsed as though something inside him was trying to rip free. 

 

Instantly, the soldiers on both sides wrenched his arms back with brutal force, dragging him forward again.

 

Yet even as they forced him onward, his gaze never left the small palanquin.

 

Through the thin silk curtains, beneath the merciless moonlight, he could just make out the pale outline of her profile—still, regal, untouchable.

 

And in that single frozen heartbeat between cruelty and collapse, something ancient and starving flickered in his ruined eyes.

 

Not mere hunger.

 

Not mere madness.

 

Something far more dangerous.

 

A lover’s recognition—even through the wreck of everything he once was.

 

The mountain waited.

 

Cold.

 

Silent.

 

Indifferent.

 

And still he stared at her, as though she were the only warm thing left in all the world.

 

Even as they pulled him toward death.

 

At the tail of the long procession trailed the people of Mohron—those whose nation and families had been torn away by the kingdom of Baran—each clutching torches that flickered like vengeful stars against the black night. 

 

They had come to witness the final breath of their greatest enemy.

 

At last, Hissin’s palanquin halted at the very foot of Barucha Mountain. He stepped down with measured grace and approached the smaller carriage beside it. With a gentleness that belied the iron in his gaze, he offered his hand and helped Princess Dahlia descend.

 

The moment they stood side by side, every soldier and every citizen of Mohron raised a fist to their heart in silent, solemn salute.

 

“People of Mohron—hear me.”

 

Hissin’s voice rolled across the frozen expanse, deep and resonant, commanding the hundreds who encircled them.

 

“For decades, we have hidden in the deep bowels of Palan, our families shattered, our homeland stolen, enduring the tyrant’s cruelty while we waited for the day of retribution.”

 

The crowd held its breath; even the wind seemed to still so that his words could carve themselves into every listening soul.

 

“And now, at long last, we have seized the blood-soaked emperor of Baran—Baran Otha Khankundra—into our own hands.”

 

The soldiers dragged Khankundra forward. 

 

Once, he had ridden across deserts like a storm of death, drowning peaceful lands in blood and despair. 

 

Now he was a broken thing—chains clanking, body scarred and trembling, hauled forth in utter humiliation. The people answered with a rising tide of jeers and curses, urging Mohron’s judgment to descend.

 

Hissin turned his head toward Dahlia.

 

She stood rigid, staring at the man who had kept her imprisoned her entire life, who had drained her blood like wine. Her delicate hands trembled—not with fear, but with something purer, sharper. 

 

Once, she might have clung to the lie that he was her father, that blood excused cruelty. 

 

Now the truth had stripped everything away, leaving only clean, searing rage.

 

“Watch closely,” 

 

Hissin murmured, his voice softening only for her. 

 

“See the wretched end of the one who made you weep.”

 

He leaned in and pressed the lightest, most reverent kiss to her forehead—a gesture so intimate it felt like a vow sealed under the merciless moon. Then he stepped forward.

 

The soldiers kicked Khankundra’s legs from under him, forcing him to his knees in the dirt before Hissin.

 

Until that moment, Khankundra’s neck had twisted grotesquely, his fevered gaze locked on Dahlia as though she were the only light in his collapsing world. 

 

Now, slowly, those unfocused, blood-rimmed eyes lifted to the man who stood above him.

 

For one terrible instant, clarity pierced the haze of madness.

 

Hissin’s face—strong, unyielding, haloed by torchlight—etched itself into the ruin of Khankundra’s mind.

 

And in that gaze something flickered—not just hatred, not just defeat.

 

Jealousy.

 

Raw, ancient, possessive longing.

 

The mountain loomed behind them, vast and indifferent, its peak lost in freezing darkness. 

 

Torches hissed and spat. The crowd’s breath clouded the air.

 

Yet between the condemned emperor on his knees and the princess who had once been his captive, an invisible thread still pulled—taut, trembling, unbreakable even in ruin.

 

Hissin met those desperate eyes without flinching.

 

And Dahlia—standing just behind him—felt the heat of that stare brush across her skin like a lover’s forbidden touch, even as the night grew colder still.

 

The sentence was about to begin.

 

Even as his mind had long since shattered into jagged fragments, some cruel remnant of memory still clung to life inside Khankundra. When his unfocused gaze settled on Hissin, a slow, leering grin split his ruined face.

 

“Gift of the divine…” he rasped, voice wet and trembling with obscene reverence. 

 

“Come now—bestow the goddess’s grace upon me. Lift me from this filthy earth. Let me stand again in her holy name.”

 

The sheer audacity of it—the gall to invoke divinity while soaked in the blood of innocents—twisted Hissin’s mouth into a cold, bitter line. 

 

If the man had only ever worn faith like a mask, wielding it to justify whatever depravity he desired, Hissin might have felt pity, or at least contempt tempered by understanding. 

 

But Khankundra had believed—truly believed—and still he had draped every atrocity in the goddess’s robes. 

 

That made him something far worse than a hypocrite. It made him a desecration.

 

“You wish to know the goddess’s will?” 

 

Hissin asked, voice dangerously soft.

 

From the folds of his robe, he drew a slender ritual dagger. 

 

Moonlight kissed the blade, turning it into a sliver of frozen starlight against his palm.

 

“Then drink.”

 

With a single, silent stroke, he opened his hand. 

 

Crimson welled instantly, bright and vivid against his skin, sliding in thick rivulets between his fingers.

 

Khankundra’s eyes flared wide, pupils swallowing the whites.

 

“Blood… blood…!”

 

He lunged forward as far as the chains allowed, mouth open, desperate, as though the scarlet drops falling from Hissin’s palm were not Hissin’s at all—but hers. Dahlia’s. 

 

The sacred, forbidden nectar he had once stolen from her veins again and again.

 

He caught the falling blood on his cracked tongue, gulping like a man dying of thirst in the desert he himself had made. 

 

The sight was so grotesque, so pitifully obscene, that a ripple of revulsion passed through the watching crowd—soldiers tightening their grips on spears, citizens turning their faces away.

 

Then—

 

“Aaghhk—!”

 

Khankundra’s body snapped backward as though struck by lightning. He clawed at his own scalp, tearing out hanks of thin, patchy hair, screaming into the night.

 

“No—no more—stop talking—my head—my head hurts—shut up!!”

 

He thrashed against invisible tormentors, shrieking at the empty air, body convulsing in violent spasms.

 

But the blood-oath bound by Zanna’s own life-force could not be broken—not even by death.

 

Hissin never blinked. Those crimson eyes—eyes that had once looked at Dahlia with such fierce, unspoken devotion—now burned into Khankundra’s skull, relentless, unblinking.

 

Inside the wreckage of the fallen emperor’s mind, Hissin’s voice poured like molten iron, inescapable, eternal.

 

Climb that mountain.

 

Grip the sharp rock until your fingers bleed. 

 

Step on brittle branches until they snap beneath your weight. Burn beneath the sun by day. 

 

Freeze beneath the moon by night. Offer your wretched body to the vultures and the starving dogs.

 

Climb.

 

Until your heart gives out.

 

Until the very last breath leaves you.

 

And even then—keep climbing.

 

Khankundra’s screams fractured into sobs, then into choking whimpers. Yet still his body jerked upright, as though strings had been sewn into his spine. His head turned—slowly, mechanically—toward the towering black silhouette of Barucha.

 

And then, impossibly, his gaze slid sideways.

 

Past the soldiers.

 

Past Hissin.

 

Straight to Dahlia.

 

Even now—broken, bleeding, mind half-dissolved—his eyes found her in the torchlight. 

 

And in that final, fractured moment before the compulsion dragged him away forever, something raw and desperate flickered across his face.

 

Not madness.

 

Not hatred.

 

Longing.

 

The kind that survives every cruelty, every betrayal, every ruin.

 

A lover’s last, hopeless glance.

 

Then the chains rattled. The soldiers shoved him forward.

 

And step by tortured step, Khankundra began to climb—toward the indifferent peak, toward death, toward the only punishment that could ever match the enormity of what he had done.

 

Behind him, Dahlia stood motionless, her breath shallow, her eyes locked on the figure retreating into shadow.

Hissin stepped closer to her side.

 

He did not touch her.

 

He did not need to.

 

The heat of his presence alone was enough—steady, protective, burning quietly against the cold night.

 

And in the silence that followed Khankundra’s fading cries, the mountain itself seemed to lean in, listening.

 

As though even the stone understood,

 

Some bonds cannot be severed.

 

Some fires are never extinguished.

 

Not by blood.

 

Not by chains.

 

Not even by death.

 

Hissin’s voice echoed endlessly inside Khankundra’s skull—like a merciless hymn that refused to fade, looping, swelling, carving deeper with every repetition. 

 

The fallen emperor’s eyes rolled back in agony, whites flashing as his body convulsed.

 

“Ughhh… stop… please, stop—!”

 

Drool streamed from his cracked lips. His fingers raked through what remained of his hair, tearing clumps free as though he could rip the command from his own mind. 

 

Yet the compulsion only tightened its grip.

 

At last, staggering, he turned toward Barucha Mountain. 

 

The massive weights shackled to his ankles had already gouged deep, raw craters into his flesh—blood and dirt caked around the wounds—but he felt nothing. 

 

Nothing at all. Step by mechanical, tortured step, he lurched forward into the freezing dark.

 

When he reached the base, he began to climb.

 

The desert night had claimed the rocks long ago; they were sheets of black ice now, merciless under his palms. 

 

Every grip burned with frostbite in an instant—skin splitting, nerves screaming as cold invaded bone. The rough stone shredded what little unscarred flesh remained on his hands and feet. 

 

Behind him, a glistening crimson trail marked his path like a signature written in ruin.

 

He had barely ascended ten feet when his grip failed.

 

He slid—fast, brutal—skin tearing further, rocks biting into his back and legs as he tumbled down in a spray of blood and dust.

 

“Haah—!”

 

Even then, he jerked upright like a puppet yanked by invisible strings. 

 

Shock flickered across his ruined face—not from pain, but from the sheer impossibility of stopping. The oath in his blood would not allow it.

 

He climbed again.

 

By day, when the sun rose, it would sear his already blistered body until flesh peeled away in sheets. 

 

Starving wild dogs and circling vultures would claim whatever scraps they could tear free. And when night returned, the cold would return fiercer still—freezing blood in veins, turning breath to ice—yet still he would climb.

 

Again and again.

 

Blindly. Endlessly.

 

Until death finally took him in some forgotten crevice high above, unseen by any living soul.

 

At the mountain’s peak—where he had once screamed for the goddess to witness him—his sins would burn and freeze and melt away at last, over and over, for as long as the stars turned.

 

“That’s enough.”

 

Hissin spoke quietly, wrapping the bloodied palm in a fold of cloth. Then, with a tenderness that cut through the night’s cruelty, he drew Princess Dahlia close, his arm encircling her shoulders.

 

She had watched it all—every slide, every scream, every crimson streak—without flinching, even as her body trembled with the weight of what she had witnessed. 

 

Now the strength left her. She leaned into him, exhausted, her cheek finding the steady warmth of his chest.

 

His heartbeat was strong against her ear—unyielding, protective, alive.

 

The torches sputtered lower. The crowd began to turn away, murmurs fading into the wind.

 

Before the first light of dawn could touch the peak where Khankundra still struggled upward, Hissin guided her gently back toward the safety of Mohron’s borders.

 

They walked side by side in silence.

 

No words were needed.

 

In the space between them—where once there had been only vengeance and chains—something softer had taken root. Something that burned quietly, steadily, against the cold.

 

A promise unspoken.

 

A touch that lingered.

 

And as the mountain swallowed Khankundra’s distant, broken cries, Dahlia felt Hissin’s arm tighten ever so slightly around her—not in possession, but in quiet, fierce devotion.

 

The night was ending.

 

But what waited in the light between them had only just begun.

 

💫

 

A soft knock—two gentle taps—broke the quiet.

 

Hissin had just finished bathing, steam still clinging to his skin, when he paused mid-motion, fingers halfway through wrapping fresh linen around his wounded palm. 

 

The sound was careful, almost hesitant, yet unmistakably hers.

 

A slow, knowing smile curved his mouth.

 

He crossed the room in three strides and opened the door.

 

Princess Dahlia stood there, freshly bathed herself, hair still damp and loose, cheeks flushed from the warmth of the water—or perhaps from something else. Her eyes, clear and luminous in the low lamplight, went straight to the half-bandaged hand at his side.

 

“Your hand…” 

 

Her voice was small, threaded with worry.

 

“Is it all right?”

 

She had come because of him—because the blood he had spilled to bind Khankundra’s heart in unbreakable chains had been his own. Because even the smallest mark on him felt like something she could not bear to leave untended.

 

Hissin shrugged, casual as though the cut were nothing. 

 

“A few days. It’ll close on its own.”

 

He resumed winding the bandage with practiced ease. The wound wasn’t deep—not really. In the past he wouldn’t have bothered covering it at all. 

 

But tonight he had no desire to let her see raw skin and fresh blood; no desire to add even a shadow of concern to those eyes that already carried too much.

 

Dahlia, unaware of the small lie, couldn’t tear her gaze away. Her lips parted, then pressed together again. She worried the corner of her lower lip between her teeth—a tiny, unconscious gesture that made something low and warm coil in Hissin’s chest.

 

After a heartbeat of hesitation, she spoke, voice barely above a whisper, every syllable drenched in shy vulnerability.

 

“If I’m here… it could heal much faster.”

 

Hissin’s brows lifted slightly. He turned fully toward her.

 

Dahlia’s throat flushed scarlet; the color raced up from her collarbone and bloomed across her cheeks. She hurried to explain, words tumbling out in a rush.

 

“It’s not a deep wound. The red mark wouldn’t even be very strong.”

 

She wouldn’t meet his eyes—couldn’t—her gaze darting across the floorboards as though searching for somewhere safe to hide. 

 

The sight of her like this—so earnest, so sweetly embarrassed—struck him harder than any blade ever had.

 

Hissin finished the knot with slow, deliberate fingers, then let the linen fall away just enough to reveal the neat line of red across his palm.

 

He tilted his head, studying her.

 

“It’s late,” he murmured, voice low and velvet-rough. 

 

“Very late.”

 

“It won’t take long.” 

 

Her reply came quickly, almost pleading.

 

“Won’t it?” 

 

He stepped closer—close enough that she had to tilt her head back to hold his gaze. 

 

“That depends on how much contact there is, doesn’t it?”

 

Before she could answer, he reached out. The very tips of his fingers brushed beneath her chin—gentle, but firm enough to lift her face to his.

 

Her breath caught.

 

Hissin’s thumb traced the soft edge of her jaw, lingering there as though memorizing the warmth of her skin.

 

“I have no intention,” he said, voice dropping to something dark and intimate, “of letting you go after only licking the wound.”

 

The air between them thickened, charged.

 

Dahlia’s pupils dilated; her lips parted on a silent inhale. The flush on her cheeks deepened to rose, then to something hotter, hungrier.

 

She didn’t step back.

 

She didn’t look away.

 

Instead, she rose onto her toes—just a fraction—as though drawn by the same invisible thread that had pulled them together across battlefields, prisons, and blood-soaked oaths.

 

Hissin’s hand slid from her chin to cup the side of her face. His thumb brushed the corner of her mouth, slow and deliberate.

 

“Then come inside, Princess,” 

 

He whispered against her lips, close enough that she could feel every word. 

 

“And let me show you exactly how long it takes… when I don’t intend to be gentle.”

 

In the soft glow of the lamplight, Dahlia’s clear eyes reflected Hissin completely—and in that mirror of her gaze, he looked like a man who had already decided she would not be leaving his rooms tonight. 

 

Not anytime soon. 

 

Perhaps not ever, if the hunger carving itself deeper into his expression had anything to say about it.

 

A faint tremor still lingered in her lashes, but now something else bloomed there—heat, the exact pale rose of Hissin’s own irises, spreading slowly through her pupils like ink dropped in water. She stared at his mouth as though it were the only thing tethering her to the world.

 

“Then…” 

 

Her voice came out hushed, almost reverent, yet edged with daring. “…mark me somewhere else, too.”

 

The words hung between them—bold, reckless, utterly intoxicating.

 

How could he not love this woman? 

 

This fragile, fearless creature who stood before him and demanded to be claimed in the same breath she offered herself up?

 

A low, rough chuckle escaped Hissin—half disbelief, half surrender—as desire pulled every muscle in his body taut. His head tilted, slow and predatory, eyes never leaving hers. 

 

He studied her the way a panther might study the rabbit that had just stepped boldly into its den: small, trembling, yet refusing to run.

 

“You’re growing dangerously fearless,” he murmured, voice gravel-dark and velvet-smooth at once.

 

He let the silence stretch just long enough for her to feel the weight of what came next.

 

“I could devour you whole.”

 

The last thread of restraint snapped.

 

In one fluid motion Hissin’s arm banded around her waist—strong, unyielding—and yanked her flush against him. Her startled inhale was sharp, sweet, swallowed by the sudden press of their bodies. Her palms flattened instinctively against his chest; she could feel the thunder of his heartbeat beneath her fingers, wild and impatient.

His other hand slid up the nape of her neck, fingers threading into damp hair, tilting her head back until their mouths were a mere breath apart.

 

Dahlia’s lips parted on a soundless gasp.

 

And then the door behind them closed with a decisive, heavy click—sealing the world outside.

 

No torches. No mountain. No chains. No past.

 

Only the two of them now—skin to skin, breath to breath, heat rising like steam in the suddenly too-small room.

Hissin dipped his head until his lips brushed the shell of her ear.

 

“Last chance to run, Princess,” he whispered, the words a dark caress against her skin. 

 

“Because once I start… I won’t stop until every inch of you carries my mark.”

 

Her fingers curled into the fabric over his heart.

 

She didn’t push him away.

 

Instead, she rose onto her toes, closed the final distance, and answered with the softest, hungriest brush of her mouth against his.

 

A low growl rumbled deep in his throat.

 

The night had only just begun.