Outside this side of Ashford Estate, the night had folded itself over the estate in sheets of velvet blue, soft rain combing through the gardens while the lamps along the stone paths burned with patient gold.

The entire household had the stillness of a cathedral after confession, that solemn quiet rich families loved pretending was peace when in truth it was only wealth muffling its own sins beneath good architecture. Beyond the tall windows, trees moved in the wind like tired witnesses, their black branches scratching gently against the moonlit sky, and somewhere far the most important servants’ quarters slept beneath a faint silver mist.

Consort stood for a while beneath the outer balcony arch, wearing her maid uniform with the flawless discipline of an Ashford Head Maid, hands folded before her, posture straight, expression calm enough to fool anyone who had never made the tragic mistake of looking closely:

Consort’s world now revolved around two things unlike the first one she’d always lived by.

First was serving her mistress.

That was all. That was her everything. A clean purpose like a sacred chain and simple enough to hold a ruined woman together when the rest of her had long ago learned the uselessness of hope.

She had not needed dreams; dreams were expensive little poisons.

She had not needed romance: romance, from what history had shown her, was usually a trap wearing beauty and a man’s voice.

She had not needed a world of her own because her mistress had become that world, vast and lazy and impossible, a woman with plans too large for continents and a talent for refusing to lift a finger unless the collapse of reality itself required it.

Even then, Consort suspected her mistress would ask someone else to handle the collapse and then complain the bathwater had cooled.

Her duties, compared to the size of the plans surrounding her, were often strangely ordinary:

...She tended to her mistress day after day, dressed her, prepared her chambers, organized what needed organizing, and, far too often, bathed the lazy woman because her mistress was too lazy to do anything herself and insisted Consort’s hands were addictive for her to do it herself.

’Addictive.’

That was what she always said.

Consort had accepted it with the stoic dignity of a woman who could kill divine-blooded enemies across three realms but was somehow still bullied into washing someone’s hair because the apocalypse had apparently developed skincare preferences.

Apart from that, there were errands.

Consort traveled through different realms on her mistress’s behalf, passing through realm firmaments that divided the Earth from other realms, ruined sanctuaries, heavenly backdoors and ugly little places where ugly little men believed power excused manners.

Sometimes she delivered messages. Sometimes she collected information. Sometimes she acquired rare bathing elixirs and skin-care tonics from a very specific alchemist who believed charging immoral prices made their products more profound.

Not that an Immortal like her mistress needed a daily skin routine, but the time that woman had spent watching human women had left behind a few habits.

Earthly habits, naturally.

Which her mistress denied while ordering another jar of moon-lotus body cream.

The hypocrisy was almost artistic.

There were other errands too, less fragrant and more final. Killing this person. Silencing that one. Removing someone whose ambition threatened to disturb one of her mistress’s grand plans. She did not enjoy it. She did not hate it either. It was work, and Consort understood work. Work had shape, rules and work ended when the target stopped moving.

The most annoying duty, however, had always been dealing with legacy boys.

Their very presence irked her.

They were reirncanations of progenitors; a higher rank of beings she could never dream to reach and important pieces on her mistress’s board. Securing them to her mistress’s side was inevitable, even necessary, because they were crucial to the One Above’s great design.

Consort understood that, so she obeyed but she still despised standing near them for longer than necessary.

Men with importance were the worst.

But men with importance and destiny were even worse.

Above them? Men with importance, destiny and family names that made servants lower their eyes? A plague with better tailoring.

So, in one sense, she had something to thank Phei for.

The boy had become the entire Nexus of the One Above’s plan, the living center around which old routes, broken prophecies, bloodline arrangements and forbidden possibilities had begun to turn.

Because of him, Consort no longer had to remain so often in the presence of those bastards.

And then, in the same breath, the entire axis of her existence shifted again.

It began as observation.

That was all.

She had been sent to watch him.

At first, she had been certain he was no different. Perhaps gentler on the surface, perhaps naturally a good boy in ways that made others soften too quickly around him, but Consort knew better than to trust kindness before power tested it. Boys could be harmless when weak and men became honest when they had enough strength to stop pretending.

She had seen that lesson written in blood, swallowed cries, in the old places of her memory where even now she refused to look too long.

Phei would taste power, she’d thought.

And then he would change.

It would not take long before he became like the others. Like the men who had turned pieces of her life into something colder than hell before the One Above found her. Like the faces she had learned to erase from memory because remembering them gave them too much dignity:

Like everything she had seen and hated and buried beneath service because service, at least, never asked her to feel.

But slowly, treacherously, her view of him changed.

She did not know whether it happened because she realized she had judged him too soon, or because she watched him too closely, or because somewhere between his teasing words, reckless courage, tenderness toward the broken and ridiculous habit of flirting with beings who could probably erase cities, Consort’s heart had made an executive decision without consulting her dignity.

The result was the same.

Her world, once built around serving her mistress, began to develop a second orbit.

Phei.

The boy she had been ordered to observe became the boy she could not stop watching:

...The more she saw him, the more impossible he became. He could be arrogant, yes, shameless, dangerous, absurdly pretty in a way that should have been classified as a social hazard, and at times so reckless Consort wondered whether survival itself had filed several complaints against him.

But he was also warm. Loyal and soft in places power had not managed to rot.

He cared too much and pretended it was strategy.

He teased like a wicked little dragon and then looked at people with eyes that made old wounds remember they had once been skin.

And that was the part she could not forgive him for, not really.

She had built a whole theology out of men being monsters once they grew strong enough to stop hiding it..

...It was a clean faith and it had kept her safe for centuries, because she had expected nothing, and a woman expecting nothing could not be surprised into pain.

But Phei kept quietly committing heresy against it.

Every gentle thing he did was a small crack in a doctrine she had bled to build, and the most unforgivable part was that she had begun to want the doctrine wrong.

Her service became curiosity.

Curiosity became fondness.

Fondness became a feeling she refused to name until it had already colonized half her soul and started redecorating.

Soon, she could not spend a day without hovering near him, watching from a distance, hidden in folds of space or silence, pretending she was merely fulfilling orders while her traitorous heart sat beside her like a lovesick fool kicking its legs.

At least she did not wear a stupid smile.

Not like some ridiculous girl from a cheap romance scroll.

Consort, naturally, was above such things.

She was an fucking Transcendent...

...A servant of the One Above; a woman who had crossed realms, ended bloodlines, washed divine hair with all her will and survived things that should have killed the gentler parts of her.

She was not a lovesick idiot.

A quiet sound left her lips.

Half sigh...

...Half miserable little laugh.

"Well," she murmured to the empty balcony, "perhaps an idiot. But not a loud one."

Wasn’t that the tragedy though?

She had let her feelings get the better of her.

She had even worn a dress for him.

A fucking dress.

Consort pressed a hand over her face as if she could physically hold back the memory. She had worn something soft, feminine, foolishly beautiful, not because her mistress required it, not because duty demanded it, but because some part of her had wanted Phei to see her not the Head Maid, the shadow of her master or the silent servant moving at the edge of his destiny.

Her.

The thought alone was enough to make her ears warm.