The grave was fresh.
Earth still dark and loose, piled high in a mound that would settle over time into something gentler—something that looked less like violence and more like rest. The headstone bore a name that had meant so many different things to so many different people: Lady Viremont of House Wood. Mother. Wife. Lioness.
Now it was just stone.
Elaine stood before it with red roses in her hands.
Twelve of them. One for each year her mother had spent making her life miserable before finally, impossibly, choosing to save it instead. It should have been ironic. Perhaps it was. But grief didn't care about irony, and love didn't care about logic, and Elaine had stopped trying to make any of it make sense somewhere between watching her mother take an assassin's blade and holding her while she died.
Behind her, the Alice Dome stretched toward a sky that couldn't decide if it wanted to weep or shine. Clouds gathered in the distance—dark, heavy, pregnant with something that felt too appropriate for words. The estate that had been her cage, her battlefield, her birthright now belonged to her completely.
It felt like ashes in her mouth.
"Are you ready?"
Carmine's voice came from beside her. Steady. Present. The one solid thing in a world that had turned liquid around them.
Elaine looked down at the roses. At their crimson petals, velvet-soft and delicate as skin. At the way they caught the gray light and held it like embers refusing to die.
"No."
She dropped them anyway.
One by one, they fell onto the fresh earth. Onto the grave of the woman who had shaped her through cruelty and redeemed herself through blood. Twelve roses for twelve years of damage. Twelve roses for one moment of grace.
It wasn't enough.
It would have to be.
Then Elaine reached into her pocket.
Pulled out what remained of her hair—the golden-brown locks she'd severed with her own hand after defeating Tisdale and Gladis, cutting away the symbol of everything her mother had tried to make her into. The hair that was supposed to grow back. The promise she'd made to Carmine, sealed with a kiss and a laugh and the kind of hope that only new love could sustain.
She let it fall onto the roses.
Onto the grave.
Onto the past.
"Goodbye," Elaine whispered. "I forgive you. I think I forgive you. I'm going to try."
Carmine's hand found hers. Squeezed once. A silent promise: I'm here. I'm not going anywhere.
A single tear slipped down Carmine's cheek.
Elaine saw it. Felt something crack in her chest—not break, exactly, but shift—and squeezed back just as hard.
They stood together at the grave while the others filed past.
The mourners moved through like ghosts.
Colden, pale and hollow-eyed, his sister's absence a wound he refused to discuss. Marco at his side, fingers interlaced with his, the only anchor keeping either of them upright. Francis, whose expression revealed nothing but whose eyes tracked every corner, every shadow, every potential threat. Gladis and the remaining maids, dressed in black, their battle-weariness layered beneath their grief. Isabelle, who stood apart from everyone else, whose gaze never quite landed on anyone for long.
And then there were the others—the ones who had come to pay respects to a woman most of them had feared or hated or both. Servants from the Alice Dome who remembered Lady Viremont's cruelty and chose to come anyway. Representatives from houses that had been enemies mere weeks ago. Faces familiar and strange, united by the peculiar mathematics of death, which made equals of queens and servants alike.
They each approached the grave.
Each left something.
Words, mostly. Some spoke aloud. Others whispered. A few said nothing at all, simply stood in silence before moving on, carrying their private griefs back into a world that continued turning despite its losses.
By midafternoon, the crowd had dispersed.
The Alice Dome settled into quiet—a different kind of quiet than it had known in years. Not the oppressive silence of Tisdale's rule, nor the tense hush of political maneuvering. Something softer. More exhausted. The quiet of people who had used up all their words and were running on empty.
They gathered in the great hall.
Elaine poured wine.
Red wine—the color of roses, of blood, of everything this day represented—and drank deeply from a crystal glass that had probably cost more than most families earned in a lifetime. Around her, the others found their corners. Their positions. The particular configurations of grief that suited them best.
Colden sat by the window, staring at nothing. Marco beside him, a warm presence without demands. Francis stood guard at the door—or perhaps guarded them from something worse than physical threats. The memory of their own mistakes.
Isabelle had vanished.
Elaine noticed absently. Filed the information away. Didn't have the energy to care.
Let her go, she thought. Everyone leaves eventually.
She finished her wine.
Set down the glass.
Walked.
The fountain had been her mother's pride.
Viremont had commissioned it herself—had overseen every detail of its construction, from the marble basin to the sculpted nymphs that poured eternal water from stone vessels. She had brought Elaine here once, years ago, to show off her accomplishment, and Elaine had hated it even then. Hated the beauty. Hated that her mother could create something lovely while being so utterly cruel.
Now she stood before it again.
And someone else was already there.
Marco.
He sat on the fountain's edge, feet dangling above the water that caught the gray light and shattered it into a thousand silver fragments. His golden hair lifted slightly in the wind. His shoulders curved inward—the posture of someone carrying weight they hadn't figured out how to put down.
"Fuck."
The word escaped before Elaine could stop it. She turned to leave. To find somewhere else to be. Somewhere that didn't require conversation or connection or any of the exhausting work of being human.
"Wait."
His voice. Quiet. Rough-edged.
She stopped.
Every instinct screamed at her to keep walking. To not do this. To not open doors she'd spent months learning to close.
But she was tired.
So tired.
And maybe—just maybe—she was also lonely enough to try.
Elaine turned.
"Yes?"
Marco looked up at her. His eyes were red-rimmed. Wet. Filled with something that looked uncomfortably like shared understanding.
"I'm sorry." His voice cracked on the second word. "For what happened. For June. For—for everything."
Something inside Elaine snapped.
The slap echoed across the courtyard like a gunshot.
Marco's head snapped to the side. His hand rose automatically to his cheek—to the place where Elaine's palm had connected with a force that surprised both of them.
Elaine's hand trembled.
She stared at it. At him. At the red mark blooming across his skin like an accusation.
"Don't lie."
Her voice came out broken. Shattered into pieces that she couldn't put back together.
"You're not sorry." Tears spilled down her cheeks—when had she started crying? "You can't be sorry. You don't even know what you're apologizing *for*. Nobody does. Nobody understands what it's like to—"
She couldn't finish.
The words dissolved into sobs that wracked her whole body. Great, ugly sounds that she would have been mortified for anyone to hear just hours ago. Now she didn't care. Couldn't care. There was only this: the fountain, the gray sky, the boy she'd slapped who was looking at her with eyes that held no anger, no defense, only—
Only recognition.
"That's not true, Elaine."
His voice was soft. Gentle. The voice of someone who had learned, through terrible experience, how to hold space for another person's pain without trying to fix it.
"I am sorry. I'm sorry you lost your mother—even a mother who hurt you. I'm sorry today is hard. I'm sorry I don't know the right words to say. I'm sorry I'm standing here when maybe you need me to leave."
Elaine's knees gave out.
She hit the ground—knees striking stone, palms catching her weight, hair falling forward to curtain her face in a golden-brown shield. The sobs intensified. Became something primal. Something that came from the place where children live, the part of her that had always wanted her mother's love and received only conditions instead.
"When this is over—" Her voice emerged ragged, torn. "—I never want to see you again. Don't you ever come near me. Don't you ever—EVER—"
Arms wrapped around her.
Marco.
He'd crossed the space between them without her noticing. Had knelt beside her on the cold stone. Had pulled her into an embrace that held tight enough to feel like safety and gentle enough to feel like choice.
"Yes," he said against her hair. "Okay. I promise."
Elaine fought it.
For one second—two—she stayed rigid in his arms, refusing the comfort, refusing the surrender.
Then she broke.
Completely. Totally. The way she hadn't let herself break even when her mother died, because there had been battles to fight and enemies to defeat and a throne to claim. All of that was done now. All of it was over.
There was only this.
Only the feeling of someone holding her while she fell apart.
Only the sound of her own voice, muffled against Marco's shoulder, saying the word over and over like a prayer she'd never learned:
"Mother. Mother. Mother."
She liked this place.
She had always hated it. Had associated it with her mother's vanity, her cruelty, her endless capacity for making Elaine feel small. But now—in this moment, with this person holding her while she wept—she understood why Viremont had loved it.
The water kept flowing.
No matter what happened above it, the fountain never stopped.
"We all liked this place," Marco said quietly. "Now."
Elaine laughed.
The sound startled her. Wet and broken and barely recognizable as joy—but laughter nonetheless. The first real laugh she could remember producing in longer than she wanted to count.
"I missed you," she admitted.
Marco's arms tightened. "I missed you too."
She cried a little longer.
Then she pulled back. Wiped her face with the back of her hand. Gripped the nearest pillar and hauled herself to her feet with whatever dignity she could muster.
Which wasn't much.
But it was enough.
"Do you know where Arthur went?"
The question came out steadier than she expected. Businesslike. The voice of a queen who had just remembered she had responsibilities beyond her own grief.
Marco's expression shifted. Darkened.
"I don't know." He shook his head. "But I have to find him. There's something I need to tell him—something I should have said when I had the chance."
Before either of them could say anything else—
The ground moved.
Not metaphorically. Not poetically. Actually moved—a deep, grinding shudder that traveled up through the stone floor and into Elaine's bones, rattling teeth and unsettling balance and sending the fountain's water sloshing violently over its edges.
"What—"
Arrows.
They came from everywhere and nowhere—black shafts with fletching that gleamed dark against the gray sky, raining down on the courtyard like death given physical form. They struck the water. The stone. The pillars. One buried itself in the ground inches from Elaine's foot, quivering with residual force.
"DUCk"
Marco's hand closed around her arm. Yanked her down behind the fountain's basin just as a second volley tore through the space where her head had been.
The world became noise.
Screaming—from inside the mansion, from the grounds, from throats she recognized and throats she didn't. The crash of breaking glass. The heavier thunder of something that sounded like doors being smashed in. And beneath it all, growing louder, the unmistakable rhythm of boots on stone—hundreds of them, thousands maybe, an army pouring into the Alice Dome like water into a cracked vessel.
"We need to get inside." Marco's voice was sharp. Urgent. The voice of someone who had survived worse than this and knew what survival required. "Find the others. Figure out what's happening."
Elaine nodded.
Her body moved on instinct—training taking over where terror threatened to paralyze. Up from behind the fountain. Through the archway. Into the corridor that led toward the great hall.
And into hell.
Blood.
So much blood.
The hallway that had hosted her victory celebration mere hours ago was unrecognible. Bodies lay scattered across the marble—servants, guards, faces she knew and faces she didn't, all of them equally dead, equally still. The walls bore witness in splashes of red. The tapestries she had admired that morning hung in tatters, stained beyond recovery.
Elaine ran.
Past the bodies. Through the blood. Toward the great hall where she had left the others—toward Colden, toward Carmine, toward anyone who was still breathing.
She checked the faces as she passed.
Dead. Dead. Dead.
"Please no please no please no—"
Then she saw it.
A brooch.
Small. Delicate. Made of silver wire twisted into the shape of two intertwined hearts—one gold, one copper—catching the dim light like a tiny star fallen to earth.
She had made it.
With her own hands. Had spent weeks crafting it, bending the metal with clumsy fingers, presenting it to Carmine on the morning after their engagement with a blush and a stammer and words she couldn't remember anymore because none of them mattered compared to the look on Carmine's face.
*That brooch.*
*Here.*
*On the floor.*
*In the blood.*
"Please no."
She turned.
Carmine.
Lying against the wall. One hand pressed to her side where dark liquid seeped between her fingers. Eyes half-open. Breathing shallow. Wrong. Everything about her position was wrong—the angle of her body, the pallor of her skin, the way she didn't react when Elaine called her name.
"NOO!"
Marco's scream came from behind her. He must have followed. Must have seen. Must be seeing it now, same as Elaine, same horrible impossible reality—
Carmine's eyes focused.
Slowly. Painfully. Like surfacing from deep water.
"Not..." Her voice came out as a whisper. Barely audible. "...look at me. Look at... Colden."
Elaine's head snapped up.
Marco was already moving—running past the bodies, vaulting over obstacles, following some instinct or knowledge or desperate hope toward the main entrance, toward the doors that had been smashed inward, toward—
Toward the courtyard.
Toward the scene unfolding there.
Arthur stood in the center of the chaos like a conductor orchestrating symphony of destruction.
His armor was splattered with blood—some his, most not. His face bore fresh wounds, including a vicious gash across one cheekbone that leaked steadily. But his eyes. His eyes were alive in a way they had never been during his imprisonment. Alive and hungry and triumphant.
And in his grip—
Colden.
Held by the neck. Lifted nearly off his feet. Feet kicking uselessly at air. Hands scrabbling at Arthur's forearm, leaving scratches that might as well have been caresses for all the effect they produced.
Arthur was smiling.
"NOOO!"
Marco's voice tore through the noise of battle. He sprinted across the courtyard—past fighting figures, past falling bodies, past everything that should have slowed him down but didn't, couldn't, wouldn't—
He drew the knife.
The one he always carried at his waist. Small. Practical. The tool of someone who had learned that safety was never guaranteed and protection was always personal.
Arthur saw him coming.
Didn't flinch.
Didn't release Colden.
Just smiled wider and said:
"This is for the Lavenders."
And drove his sword forward.
Through Colden's body.
The blade entered below the ribs. Exited clean on the other side. Carried on its edge a spray of bright arterial blood that painted the gray stones in vivid crimson.
Time stopped.
Marco's knife connected with Arthur's face a heartbeat later—burying itself to the hunk in his cheek, slashing upward through flesh and muscle and the place where a smile had been moments before. Arthur's head snapped back. His grip on Colden loosened.
Colden fell.
Like a puppet with cut strings. Crumpling to the ground in a heap of limbs and fabric and spreading blood, eyes wide and unfocused, mouth working around words that wouldn't come.
YOU BASTARD!
Marco's scream didn't sound human. Didn't sound like anything that should come from a throat capable of gentleness and love and the soft whispers he'd shared with Colden in the dark.
He wrenched the knife free.
Stood over Arthur—this monster, this creature who had hurt everyone he loved, who had destroyed Windmere, who had just—just—
Arthur grabbed his neck.
One-handed. Casual. Like swatting a fly.
Marco's vision blurred. Spotted with darkness at the edges. But he could still see—could still see Arthur's ruined face, could see the way the wound he'd inflicted was already knitting wrong, could see the smile that returned despite the damage, despite the blood, despite everything.
"You can scratch all you want." Arthur's voice came out gurgling, wet, wrong—but somehow still intelligible. Still mocking. "But you will never know what happens to your Princess."
He released Marco.
Let him gasp and cough and drag air into lungs that had forgotten how breathing worked.
And Marco looked.
Looked past Arthur. Past the chaos. Past the carnage.
At the figure standing there.
Watching.
Smiling.
"Jeremy."
The name fell out of Marco's mouth like a prayer to a god who had long since stopped listening.
Jeremy.
*Jeremy*, who had sacrificed himself in the Lavender Estate to give Marco time to escape. Jeremy, whose death had haunted Marco's hallucinations for months. Jeremy, whose ghost had appeared in his darkest moments, a reminder of survival's terrible cost.
Standing here.
Alive.
Working with Arthur.
Smiling like he'd never died at all.
Francis moved through the chaos like a man possessed.
His crossbow sang—once, twice, three times—each bolt finding its mark with the precision of decades of practice. Soldiers fell. Screamed. Died. He didn't stop to watch.
Protect them. Protect them all. This is your fault. You let Arthur escape. You failed. PROTECT THEM.
The thought looped endlessly through his mind as he reloaded, fired, reloaded again. His arms burned. His legs burned. His soul burned.
But he kept moving.
Because somewhere in this nightmare, there were people who needed him.
Somewhere, the family he had failed was still fighting.
And he would fight with them until his body gave out entirely.
Half the attacking force was down or retreating. He could see it in the patterns of movement—the hesitation, the glances toward the treeline, the slow realization that this assault had accomplished its primary objective and withdrawal was now the smarter option.
Francis pressed the advantage.
Drove deeper into the enemy ranks. Cut down anyone who stood between him and—
Movement.
At the edge of his vision. A figure on horseback, breaking away from the main group, riding hard toward the rear exit.
Hair streaming free in the wind.
Face turned away.
But he recognized the shape of it. The set of the shoulders. The particular angle of the head that he had memorized over years of service.
"ISABELLE!"
His shout carried across the battlefield. She flinched—he saw her flinch—but she didn't stop. Didn't turn back.
She looked at him.
Just once.
Over her shoulder. Despair written across features that had once commanded courts and terrified enemies. Despair and something else—something that looked almost like relief.
"I can't do this."
The words reached him faintly. Carried on wind that smelled of smoke and blood and ending.
Then she was gone.
Riding away. Riding hard. Riding toward whatever lay beyond the walls of the Alice Dome, beyond the war, beyond the family she had destroyed with secrets and lies and love that had curdled into poison.
Francis lowered his crossbow.
Stood alone in the wreckage of everything he'd tried to protect.
And for the first time in thirty years, he didn't know what to do next.
Marco fell to his knees.
The ground was wet beneath him—blood and rain and the tears he hadn't realized he was crying. Around him, the battle raged on. But it felt distant now. Muffled. Like something happening to other people in another world.
All he could see was Jeremy.
All he could see was that smile.
Arthur loomed above him. Broken-faced, bleeding, victorious. When he spoke, his voice carried the lazy satisfaction of someone who had waited a very long time for this moment.
"Be ready." He wiped blood from his chin with the back of one hand. "A full obliteration—Windmere, Velloria, everything you've built, everyone you love. I will finish what my father started."
His grin widened.
"Oh, I fucking love it here."
He turned.
Mounted a horse that someone had brought for him—when? how? it didn't matter—and began to ride toward the treeline. Toward escape. Toward whatever came next.
Jeremy followed.
But not before stopping.
Looking back.
Meeting Marco's eyes one final time.
And smiling—that same gentle smile Marco remembered from the Lavender Estate, from the moments before sacrifice, from the last glimpse of a boy who had chosen to die so someone else could live.
Jeremy raised his hand.
Waved.
Like they were old friends parting at a crossroads.
Like none of this had happened.
Like everything was going to be okay.
Then he turned and followed Arthur into the trees and disappeared.
Rain began to fall.
Softly at first. Then harder. Then harder still—a deluge that seemed to rise from the sky itself, as if the heavens had finally run out of patience with humanity's capacity for destruction and decided to wash it all away.
Marco knelt in the mud.
Around him, the Alice Dome crumbled—literally and figuratively. Walls breached. Bodies cooling. Fires starting where torches had fallen. The funeral that was supposed to honor one death had spawned dozens more.
Somewhere nearby, Carmine clung to life by a thread.
Somewhere else, Colden lay bleeding from a wound that might be fatal.
Somewhere in the distance, Isabelle rode toward an unknown future.
Somewhere far away, June galloped through the night toward whatever refuge she could find.
And here—at the center of it all—Marco knelt in rain and blood and ash, and let himself feel the full weight of everything that had happened and everything that was coming.
The dirt shifted.
Settled.
Fell in soft waves onto the casket of Lady Viremont, which lay open and waiting in the family crypt, its occupant forever beyond the reach of the storm that raged above.
The day ended.
And with it, the hopes for a better future—at least for now.
SEASON THREE — END
SEASON FOUR - The Fascian War Arc : OBLIVION and PROMISES ~ 2 Parts Back-To-Back...
COMING 2027