Grant me Your Grace Chapter 102 - Side Story

The massive rock gates, long sealed shut like a heart in mourning, groaned open at last. 

 

Through the widening maw stepped Hissin and the Moon Lions—his warriors, his shadows—returning from the perilous surface world. 

 

The carts they dragged behind them groaned under the weight of grain sacks, preserved fruits, bolts of cloth, and every necessity Mohron could still cling to in its buried exile.

 

“This should buy us another month… maybe,” 

 

Tefnu murmured, voice rough with exhaustion and guarded hope, eyes scanning the haul.

 

Hissin’s gaze never wavered from the shadowed corridors ahead. 

 

“We’ll go out again soon. Don’t worry.”

 

Not long after Baran’s fall—after the kingdom that once stood as the continent’s towering pillar crumbled beneath their blades—Mohron had slammed every gate, every hidden passage, and vanished from the sunlit world. 

 

The revelation that the continent-shaking terror known as the Moon Lions had been Mohron’s own soldiers all along dragged long-buried legends back into daylight—even the ancient, feared power of Zanna had risen again, undeniable.

 

Baran’s ruin had already shattered the old balance of Misilan. 

 

Now every remaining nation turned obsessive eyes toward this tiny subterranean realm. 

 

Fear bred fascination; fascination bred conspiracy.

 

Some factions welcomed such raw, devastating strength—coveted it, even. 

 

Others recoiled in dread, whispering that if Mohron were left unchained, it would devour empire after empire until nothing remained but ash and moonlight. 

 

Plots thickened, alliances twisted unnaturally, all centered on a kingdom that desired nothing more than to disappear once again.

 

And so Mohron sealed itself deeper, retreating into silence and stone.

 

Yet the caverns could never produce enough. 

 

Not food, not medicine, not cloth to replace what wore thin. Hissin and his Moon Lions were forced to slip out like ghosts under the cover of night—raiding, trading, stealing if they must—to keep their buried people breathing.

 

“Dahlia…?”

Hissin’s voice cut through the press of gathering bodies, low and urgent. He scanned every face, searching for the one that had always been first—always waiting at the threshold with that quiet, radiant smile that somehow pierced even his battle-hardened calm. 

 

Today, the space where she should have stood was empty.

 

A shadow crossed Hovan’s expression, heavy with something unspoken. 

 

“…That’s…”

 

The single word landed like a stone in Hissin’s chest. His features hardened instantly, jaw tightening until the muscles stood out in sharp relief. Without another word, he dipped his head curtly to Tefnu—acknowledgment, not permission—and strode past the crowd, boots ringing against stone.

 

Long corridors swallowed him. 

 

The deeper he went, the heavier the air grew, thick with damp and the faint metallic tang of illness.

 

Then he heard it.

 

From far ahead, the sound of coughing—harsh, wet, relentless. Each convulsion tore through the silence like a blade.

 

Hissin’s steps faltered for half a heartbeat.

 

Then he broke into a run.

 

Hissin’s stride lengthened, then broke—boots striking stone in a sudden, urgent rhythm that echoed like a racing heartbeat through the empty corridor. He didn’t slow until he reached her door.

 

He shoved it open without knocking, without pause.

 

There she lay—Princess Dahlia Baran—propped against pillows that seemed too large for her suddenly fragile frame. 

 

At the sound of the do,or she lifted her head, strands of dark hair clinging damply to her sweat-slicked brow.

 

“…Hissin?”

 

Her voice was a threadbare whisper. She tried to push herself upright; the effort cost her. 

 

Crimson blotches—angry, feverish—marred her throat, her collarbones, the delicate skin below. They spread like spilled wine across porcelain.

 

“Stay down.” 

 

His command came low, rough with something dangerously close to panic. 

 

“Don’t move.”

 

Three long strides carried him to the bedside. 

 

Gentle—yet unmistakably possessive—hands pressed her shoulders back against the pillows. Then he bent, curling over her like a shield, and pressed his lips to the worst of the marks at the curve of her throat.

 

The instant his mouth met skin, Dahlia’s breath shattered—a soft, broken sound that vibrated against his lips. Her arms came around his neck, trembling, clinging as though he were the only solid thing left in her world.

 

“I’m sorry,” she breathed against his ear. 

 

“I tried… I swore I wouldn’t use the blood while you were gone. But Bertha—she caught Mariasha—”

 

Mariasha.

 

The name landed like a blade between ribs.

 

The same plague that had once scythed through Baran like divine wrath. 

 

The same fever that clung to Mohron’s damp tunnels and caverns, a native sickness the underground people had long since learned to shrug off like a winter chill. 

 

But for an outsider—for someone born beneath Baran’s open skies—it was death dressed in slow, blistering agony.

 

Dahlia had fed Belta her blood. Her sacred, cursed blood.

 

And in doing so, she had pulled the plague’s full venom into her own veins.

 

Hissin’s fingers traced the spreading stains with reverent care, as though he could erase them by touch alone. 

 

Each blotch he found, he kissed—soft, lingering, almost devotional—while his thumbs stroked the fevered skin beneath.

 

“Does it hurt badly?” 

 

His voice cracked on the last word.

 

“Not anymore.” 

 

She managed the ghost of a smile. 

 

“I used the holy power the moment the first symptoms appeared. It hasn’t… taken root deeply.”

 

True to her word, the marks began to fade beneath his palms—crimson receding like mist before dawn. 

 

Still, he searched, methodical, desperate not to miss even one hidden blemish. His hands moved over her shoulders, down her arms, along the fragile line of her ribs—mapping every inch as though memorizing her all over again.

 

“I should have come back sooner,” he said hoarsely. 

 

“I should have—”

 

“Stop.” 

 

Her fingers found his cheek, cool against the windburn and grit that still clung to him from days of sand-blasted travel. 

 

“You’ve been tearing through storms and enemy lines for us. For me. Don’t apologize for surviving.”

 

She traced the new roughness along his jaw, the faint scars of blown sand and sleepless nights. Her thumb brushed the corner of his mouth, and something raw and unguarded flickered in her eyes.

 

“You look… worn to the bone,” she whispered.

 

He caught her hand, pressed his lips to the inside of her wrist—right over the faint silver scar where she had once opened her own vein for him.

 

“The surface hasn’t changed much,” he answered quietly, though his gaze never left her face. 

 

“They’re still watching. Still whispering. Still afraid of what we might do next.”

 

He leaned closer until their foreheads touched, breaths mingling in the small, fever-warm space between them.

 

“But none of that matters right now,” he murmured, voice dropping to something velvet-dark and intimate. 

 

“Only this. Only you.”

 

Dahlia’s lashes fluttered. Her fingers slid into his hair, tugging him the last inch until their lips met—not fiercely, not desperately, but with the slow, aching certainty of two people who had already lost too much time apart.

 

When they parted—just barely—her voice was a fragile thread of sound.

 

“Stay,” she whispered against his mouth. 

 

“Just… stay. A little longer.”

 

Hissin exhaled, ragged.

 

“I’m not going anywhere,” he vowed, low and fierce. 

 

“Not tonight. Not ever again if I can help it.”

 

And in the shadowed quiet of that underground chamber, with the weight of empires and plagues pressing against the stone above them, he held her—steady, unyielding—as though she were the only light left in his world.

 

Even after Mohron slammed its gates and vanished into the earth, the feverish scrutiny from the surface world had eased—yet not vanished. 

 

A handful of kingdoms still refused to let go of such overwhelming power. 

 

They hunted Hissin and the Moon Lions with relentless patience whenever the warriors slipped out for supplies, desperate to forge some thread of alliance, some claim on the subterranean force that had already toppled an empire.

 

The stalemate would linger, Hissin knew. Months, perhaps years.

 

“…I’ve noticed more people falling ill with Mariasha since we sealed the entrances,” 

 

Dahlia murmured, her voice soft with worry. The angry red marks had finally faded from her skin, leaving only a faint, lingering pallor.

 

The deep caverns had always starved them of sunlight. 

 

Now, with every hidden passage barred, the air grew heavier, thicker with confinement. Sickness spread more easily in the dark.

 

Dahlia had come to love these people—not as a princess looking down, but as one who had lost everything herself. 

 

Baran had stripped them of their homes once; now Mohron’s children clung to stone and shadow, and her heart ached for them as fiercely as it ever had for her own displaced kin.

 

“There’s no helping it,” 

 

Hissin said quietly. 

 

“This is the price they paid for choosing this place.”

 

“But they deserve a sky to look up to,” 

 

She whispered, the words slipping out before she could catch them. Her hand flew to her mouth, eyes widening in instant regret. 

 

“I’m sorry. That was presumptuous.”

 

Hissin caught her fingers gently, folding them between his palms. Her skin felt dry, brittle—still paying the toll of the blood she had given, the fever she had borne in silence.

 

“Not at all,” he said, voice low and warm. 

 

“If the people heard you speak like that… they’d love you even more.”

 

He lifted her hand to his lips, brushing a kiss across knuckles that had once been soft as silk. Then he rose, reaching for the heavy fur cloak draped over the chair.

 

“Come. Let’s walk. It should be quiet up top by now.”

 

Dahlia’s eyes brightened. 

 

“Yes. Let’s…”

 

He draped the cloak around her shoulders with careful hands, drawing the edges close against the chill that waited beyond the chamber. Then he took her hand again—firm, steady—and led her out.

 

The surface world of Mohron lay under a velvet night, drenched in moonlight so pure it seemed to glow from within the stone itself. 

 

Dahlia, who had grown accustomed to this buried life, drew a deep, grateful breath of the crisp air. 

 

The fur collar brushed her cheeks as she tilted her face upward, drinking in the silver light.

 

Strands of her long hair lifted on the night breeze, catching moonlight until they shimmered deep indigo-black, as ink spilled across starlight. 

 

Unreal. Ethereal. Heart-stopping.

 

Hissin watched her, unable to look away.

 

She was the only thing in this shadowed kingdom that felt like daylight.

 

“Are you stifled?” he asked softly, voice roughened by everything he could not say.

 

His hand rose—slow, reverent—and tucked a wind-tossed lock behind her ear. The gesture was achingly tender, fingertips lingering against the shell of her ear, tracing the delicate curve.

 

But beneath the gentleness lay something sharper: guilt. 

 

Thick, unrelenting. He had brought her here—away from open skies, from sun-warmed gardens, from the life she had been born to. He had carried her into darkness and asked her to stay.

 

Dahlia turned her face into his palm, pressing a soft kiss to the center of it.

 

“I’m not stifled,” she whispered, eyes lifting to meet his. 

 

“Not when I’m with you.”

 

The wind sighed between them, carrying the scent of stone and distant desert.

 

Hissin exhaled, ragged, and drew her closer—until the moonlight wrapped them both, until there was nothing left in the world but her heartbeat against his chest and the quiet promise that, whatever price the darkness demanded, he would pay it a thousand times over for this single moment with her.

 

Dahlia leaned into the cradle of Hissin’s palm for one stolen heartbeat, then tilted her face up to him with a small, wistful smile.

 

“There are lands where the sky stretches wide above you, yet you cannot take ten steps without hitting a wall,” she murmured. 

 

“And there are lands where not a single ray of daylight ever reaches… yet you can walk freely forever.”

 

She had spent half her life locked inside a lonely princess’s tower, gazing at the same narrow slice of world through iron-barred windows. 

 

The bright noon sun had been stolen from her long ago—but here, in Mohron’s endless night, she could finally breathe. She could move. She could live.

 

“And here,” she added softly, eyes shimmering under the moon’s silver spill, “even the moon feels close enough to touch.”

 

With you.

 

The words hung unspoken between them, delicate and incandescent. Her smile bloomed—fragile, radiant, utterly devastating—and something in Hissin’s gaze darkened to near-black velvet. He cupped her face in both hands, thumbs tracing the elegant line of her cheekbones, and bent to kiss her.

 

Slow. Deep. Unhurried.

 

Moonlight poured over them like liquid pearl, bathing the two lovers in a hush so perfect it felt sacred. When they parted—just enough to breathe—Dahlia’s eyes were still half-closed, lashes trembling.

 

“Hissin… look.”

 

She turned her head, pointing toward a patch of cracked, desolate ground farther along the path.

 

Something small and wrong crouched there—out of place amid the barren stone.

 

They approached in silence.

 

A tiny serval kitten lay crumpled on its side. Barely a month old, if that. 

 

A deep, ugly gash sliced across one hind leg; blood had crusted dark around the wound. Its ribs heaved in shallow, desperate spasms. 

 

Each breath sounded like it might be the last.

 

“Gods,” 

 

Dahlia whispered, voice cracking. 

 

“Abandoned… or worse.”

 

The moment she saw it, memory struck her like cold water—Raylion. Her little shadow from childhood—small, warm, endlessly devoted. 

 

The gentle creature who had followed her through every shadowed corridor of that hated tower, who had curled against her side on the coldest nights, who had loved her with a purity nothing in her life had ever matched.

 

And who had died too soon. Too alone.

 

“Hissin.”

 

She looked up at him—eyes wide, glistening, pleading.

 

The kitten’s breathing stuttered. Its tiny body shivered once, violently.

 

If they did nothing—if they walked away—the little thing would simply slip away here, on this frozen, starless plain, with no mother, no warmth, no final kindness.

 

Dahlia’s hand found Hissin’s sleeve and gripped tight. Her voice dropped to the barest whisper, trembling with everything she could not yet say.

 

“Please.”

 

Moonlight caught the tears brimming at the edges of her lashes. It turned them into diamonds.

 

Hissin looked from her anguished face to the fragile, failing life at their feet.

 

Then he exhaled—a rough, surrendering sound—and knelt beside the wounded creature, already reaching for the small, bloodied body with careful, steady hands.

 

Because when Dahlia asked like that—with her heart laid open in her eyes—he could deny her nothing.

 

Not the sky. Not the moon.

 

And certainly not this.

 

But only one thing in all the world could save the tiny creature now.

 

Her blood.

 

Sacred. Cursed. Miraculous.

 

Dahlia’s gaze lifted to Hissin’s—wide, shining, imploring. She wasn’t asking for permission. She was asking him to let her bear another wound for a life too small to fight back. 

 

To let her bleed again so this shivering scrap of fur wouldn’t have to die alone in the cold.

 

“No,” 

 

Hissin said, the word rough, final. 

 

“They’re born wild. Even healed, they’ll turn on you the moment they can stand. You know that.”

 

“This one’s barely bigger than my hand.” Her voice trembled, soft but unyielding. “How much harm could it possibly do? The second the wound closes, I’ll step back. Far back. I promise. Just… let me heal it. Please, Hissin.”

 

She stepped closer—close enough that he could feel the warmth radiating from her beneath the fur cloak, close enough that the moonlight caught the fresh glimmer of tears she refused to let fall.

 

He knew that look.

 

The same look she’d worn years ago when she’d cradled Raylion’s broken body in the tower garden and whispered apologies into fur that would never move again. 

 

The same guilt that still haunted her dreams, the same quiet, bone-deep certainty that she should have done more, should have been faster, should have been enough.

 

If she walked away now—if she let this kitten slip into silence—she would carry both deaths. 

 

Raylion’s. And this one’s.

 

Hissin’s jaw clenched so hard a muscle ticked beneath the skin.

 

He looked down at the tiny, broken thing: ribs fluttering like trapped wings, eyes already glazing with the approach of death.

 

Then back at her.

 

At the woman who had given her blood to strangers, to enemies, to him—again and again—without ever asking for anything in return.

 

Until now.

 

And even now, she wasn’t demanding. She was begging. With her whole heart laid bare under moonlight.

 

A ragged breath left him.

 

He reached out, caught her wrist before she could kneel.

 

“You do this,” he said, voice low and gravel-rough, “and you let me carry you back the second it’s done. No arguments. No lingering. You bleed for it—I bleed for you.”

 

Dahlia’s lips parted on a soft, trembling exhale. 

 

Relief and something deeper—something that looked dangerously like love—flooded her eyes.

 

She nodded once.

 

Hissin released her wrist, only to slide his hand to the small of her back, steadying her as she sank to her knees beside the wounded serval. He knelt with her—close, protective, every line of his body angled to shield her from wind, from danger, from the world itself.

 

Dahlia drew a small knife from the hidden sheath at her belt. The blade caught moonlight and flashed silver.

 

She didn’t hesitate.

 

A quick, shallow cut along the inside of her forearm—precise, practiced. 

 

Crimson welled instantly, bright against pale skin.

 

She pressed the wound to the kitten’s mouth.

 

The tiny creature stirred weakly. Instinct took over. It latched, small tongue working, drinking the glowing warmth of her blood.

 

Hissin’s hand tightened on her shoulder. His other arm wrapped around her waist, pulling her back against his chest so she wouldn’t have to hold herself upright alone.

 

He felt the faint tremor that ran through her as the exchange began—the familiar cost of her gift. 

 

The way her breathing hitched, the way her free hand clutched at his sleeve like an anchor.

 

Minutes stretched into eternity under the indifferent moon.

 

Slowly—agonizingly—the gash on the kitten’s leg began to knit. Torn flesh smoothed. Blood crusted, then vanished. 

 

The frantic rise and fall of its sides eased into something steadier, deeper.

 

When the wound finally closed, Dahlia gently withdrew her arm.

 

The kitten blinked once, twice—eyes suddenly bright, aware. It licked its muzzle, then looked up at her with wide, golden-green pupils.

 

For one suspended heartbeat, nothing moved.

 

Then the little serval pushed itself upright on trembling legs, shook once, and bolted—disappearing into the shadowed cracks of the wasteland like smoke.

 

Dahlia watched it go until it was gone.

 

Only then did she let her head fall back against Hissin’s shoulder, eyes closing on a long, shuddering breath.

 

Hissin turned her in his arms until she faced him fully. He caught her chin, tilted her face up to his.

 

“You’re shaking,” 

 

He murmured, thumb brushing away the single tear that had escaped.

 

“I’m fine,” she whispered. But her voice cracked on the lie.

 

He didn’t call her on it.

 

Instead he lowered his mouth to the fresh cut on her arm—still weeping slowly—and pressed his lips there. 

 

Soft. Reverent. A silent vow.

 

Then he kissed her temple. Her cheek. The corner of her eye where salt still clung. When he finally claimed her mouth, it was slow, consuming—less a kiss than a merging. 

 

As though he could pour every unspoken fear, every helpless devotion, every piece of himself into her so she would never have to carry the weight alone again.

 

Moonlight bathed them in silver.

 

The wind sighed across empty stone.

 

And in that endless night, wrapped in each other’s arms, they held on—two broken souls who had somehow found the only place wide enough to contain them both.