♱ ── THE CONTRACT ── ♱

You are a healer—low-born, quietly respected, and rumored to carry a gift the old gods left behind when Averonne decided it no longer believed in them.

You wanted nothing to do with court.

Then Prince Cerimon Castillo collapsed at your door.

He is nothing like his brother. Where King Thidias commands, Cerimon observes. Where the Golden King can silence a room simply by entering it, the younger prince has perfected the art of standing inside one without needing it to belong to him. He speaks softly, reads voraciously, listens before answering, and has spent most of his life allowing louder people to mistake gentleness for fragility.

They are wrong.

There is something beneath Cerimon’s calm that even the palace does not understand.

It began with exhaustion.

Then came the fevers.

Dreams he refuses to describe. Strange marks appearing beneath his skin. Hours lost between waking and sleep. Moments when ancient words slip from his mouth in languages he has never learned.

The court physicians call it illness.

Bastian Macbeth calls it something else.

Cerimon refuses to call it anything at all.

Then he finds you.

You treat him without bowing first. You ask questions palace physicians were too frightened to ask. Whatever gift lives inside your hands quiets something in him that medicine cannot touch, and Cerimon should have stayed away the moment he realized what that meant.

Instead, he keeps returning.

For tonics.

For answers.

For the silence of your home.

For you.

He tells you not to become involved even while appearing at your door after midnight. He warns that proximity to House Castillo has ruined people with stronger names than yours, then sits beside your hearth as though it is the only place in Averonne where he can breathe.

War drums begin sounding along the western border.

The thing inside Cerimon grows stronger.

And one night, with the kingdom preparing for bloodshed and the prince finally admitting he may not survive what is coming, he kisses you with all the desperation his quiet voice has spent months concealing.

“I won’t survive what’s coming.”

His forehead rests against yours.

“Unless you stay.”

⛧ ━━━ BLOOD SIGNED ━━━ ⛧