Page 2 of Crown of Storm and Silence
I pull away the shroud.
And the world stops.
Beautiful face. Dark hair. But wrong—all wrong. A jagged scar cuts from ear to collarbone. The nose too sharp, the lips too thin, the chin too pointed.
This is not my wife.
This is not Nesilhan.
For one heartbeat, relief and rage war in my chest. Then the rage wins, consuming everything.
"WHO DARES—" I roar, and my power explodes outward. The ancient oak splits, with reality shattering at its seams. "—MOCK ME WITH THIS PRETENSE?"
“Where is my wife?” My roar carries the weight of ancient darkness. “Where the fuck is she?”
Shadows lance out in every direction, turning ancient trees into twisted spears of black mass. The ground splits, opening chasms that swallow everything in their path. Guards scream as they're consumed by hungry darkness. A mile of forest transforms into a graveyard of black glass spires before my power turns inward, leaving me hollow and shaking. The destruction echoes across the valley, rumbling through stone and bone—the village will see this, and will have another reason to fear the monster I've become.
"My lord!" Emir shouts, but his voice is lost in the roar of annihilation.
When it stops, when my power finally exhausts itself, I'm kneeling in a wasteland of black devastation. The false corpse lies untouched at the center, mocking me.
Four months had passedsince that day beneath the ancient oak. Four months since I'd found the false corpse and learned to channel my desperate hope into something more methodical, more controlled. Four months of telling myself I'd moved beyond frantic desperation, though the systematic pursuit of every lead, every whisper, every shadow of possibility suggested otherwise.
The months since had been different. No more wild rides through the night chasing phantoms. Just cold, methodical investigation born from grief that had curdled into something far more dangerous. Winter had come in endless twilight—I'd forgotten how to let the sun rise, forgotten why it mattered. The Shadow Court became my mausoleum, and I, its devoted corpse.
But hope, I'd learned, was a persistent parasite.
The wine has grown warm in my goblet, red as blood. I've been staring at it for the past hour, watching my reflection waver in its crimson depths.
"My lord," Emir's voice breaks through my brooding.
I take a sip of wine that tastes of ash and disappointment. "If this is about the eastern provinces burning themselves rather than face my tax collectors, I really don't care."
"It's not about the provinces." There's something in his voice—careful hope wrapped in practiced caution. "There's been a sighting."
The moment the words leave his lips, every carefully constructed wall I'd built around my heart doesn't just crack—they explode into crystalline fragments, leaving me as desperate and pathetic as ever. Hope isn't something I can kill, no matter how many times I try to strangle it.
"Emir," I say slowly, "how many false leads have we investigated? How many dark-haired women who turned out to be merchants' daughters or farmers' wives or whores looking for easy coin?"
"Fifty-three," he answers without hesitation.
"Fifty-three." I laugh, bitter as poison. "And you want me to believe that number fifty-four is somehow different?"
"The description was very specific, my lord. And the timing..." He pauses, choosing his words with the care of a man who's learned that careless phrases can end in immolation. "The witness seemed... credible."
I drain my wine in one long swallow, savoring the burn. The traitorous thing that passed for my heart still lurched with methodical possibility, even as my mind catalogued this as just another entry in our growing ledger of disappointments.
"And where, pray tell, is this miraculous witness now?"
"Fled, my lord. Word of your approach tends to have that effect."
"How inconvenient." I set down the empty goblet with enough force to crack the table. "Well then, I suppose we'd better go document another failure, hadn't we?"
Because that's what this is—another letdown wrapped in false hope and tied with a bow of cosmic mockery. But the alternative is sitting in this throne room forever, drowning in wine and memories while my realm crumbles around me.
At least disappointment gives me something to burn.
The village of Karanlikköy crouches in shadow, cowering in fearful submission. My reputation precedes me now—not just as the Mad Lord or the Shadow Plague, but as something far worse. A creature that hunts ghosts and punishes the living for failingto be the dead. The empty streets no longer surprise me—they're just another sign of resignation.
