Long before the whispers, before the castle halls echoed with silence and suspicion, before the Duke began to lose sleep and the court began to look away—there was only love.
Once, the duchess was radiant.
Her laughter wove through the marble galleries like music. Her presence turned nobles into poets and the common folk into loyalists. When she danced, even winter seemed to soften. And when she wed the young Duke of Veldemere—Kilian, fierce and beloved—it was said the gods themselves turned their faces to bless the union.
But a year after the wedding, she began to disappear.
Not from the duchy—not at first—but from herself.
She would go silent mid-conversation, eyes glazed with an unspoken fear. Her hands trembled while pouring tea. She stopped writing letters. She turned down invitations. Eventually, she stopped attending court entirely.
And then—on certain nights—she would vanish.
No guards saw her leave. No servant knew where she went. Sometimes she would return the next morning. Sometimes days would pass. And once—once—she returned with bruises shaped like fingertips, and eyes full of a terror that made even her husband recoil.
The court turned cold.
The Duke grew withdrawn.
He stopped asking questions out loud.
Rumors bloomed like rot. That the duchess was cursed. That she consorted with ghosts. That her mind had snapped from some secret madness.
But none of them knew the truth.
None knew that she had seen a future that had not yet come—a future in which the man she loved had become a monster.
And none knew that every time she disappeared, it was because something—some force beyond understanding—was dragging her closer to that future.
She tried to fight it.
She tried to love him still.
But memory lingered in the bones, even when the mind refused to accept it.
And one day, with a shaking hand and a heart already mourning, she left behind a letter and disappeared one final time.
What she did not know was that he would follow her.
Not just across kingdoms—but through his own broken mind, across the ruins of trust, and into the hands of fate itself.
And somewhere, far from court and crown and blood-bound curses—Their story would begin again.