Aelion led Aveline to where the monsters were kept, and the place was even worse than she had imagined.
It was not a proper holding chamber so much as a dungeon. The air was damp, stale, and thick with the sour sll of old stone and sothing fouler beneath it. The corridors seed to swallow what little light remained, leaving everything shadowed and miserable.
Even the guards were absent, having gone off to the festival like everyone else, and the silence they left behind felt more disturbing than their presence might have been. It was not peace. It was neglect.
Aveline slowed as she looked at the cages.
The creatures were kept behind layers of runes and magic circles, penned in as though their suffering had been made into a kind of routine. So huddled in the corners. So strained at their magical restraints. So made soft, broken sounds that no one ca to hear. A few looked wild with fear, while others had the exhausted stillness of things that had already learned resistance was useless.
The sight of them made sothing ache in her chest so sharply that for a mont she could not speak. Her throat tightened, and her eyes burned.
It was wrong.
Plainly, unmistakably wrong.
"It is not right to keep them here like this," she said at last, her voice low with feeling.
Aelion let out a quiet chuckle, though there was no real amusent in it. "You are probably the only woman I have ever t who sees beyond their ugliness and still wishes for their survival."
Aveline glanced at him and gave a small scoff. "Appearances are not everything. I do not see them as ugly or threatening. They have feelings too."
Without waiting for approval, she reached out her hand toward one of the creatures. Aveline froze for the briefest mont.
The creature before her pressed itself against the bars, its twisted body trembling beneath scars and old wounds. Its eyes were strange, too many colors shifting beneath the surface, yet none of that mattered. What she saw was pain.
Pain was pain.
It did not matter whether it belonged to a nobleman, a servant, a monster, or a stray animal.
The creature whimpered when her fingers touched its clawed hand through the gap in the rune-covered cage.
The sound pierced straight through her chest.
Around them, the dungeon felt suffocating.
"It isn’t right," she said quietly. Her voice barely carried through the darkness. "It isn’t right to keep them here."
Aelion watched her from behind. Watched her far more carefully than she realized. The stories he had uncovered over the past few days refused to leave his mind.
The Dawn Hare... The Queen of the Spirit World...
The creature that pitied everything. The creature that forgave everything. The creature that saw suffering where others saw monsters.
Aelion had always dismissed such tales as folklore. Now he was not so certain. Because every ti Aveline encountered sothing broken, she reacted the sa way... with concern, as though the suffering itself hurt her.
"You are probably the only woman in the kingdom who can walk into this place and feel sorry for them instead of afraid," Aelion said.
Aveline glanced over her shoulder.
"Why would I be afraid?"
Aelion nearly laughed. She sounded genuinely confused, as though fear had never occurred to her.
He gestured toward the cages. "They kill people."
"They also die."
Aelion blinked.
Aveline turned back toward the creature.
"It isn’t as if they’re enjoying this."
The creature leaned closer to her hand. A low, mournful sound escaped it. Her throat tightened.
"They have feelings too."
The words ca softly, without judgnt or accusation, and with just simple certainty. And sohow that made them heavier.
Aelion stared at her profile. The dungeon’s dim light painted gold across her hair.
The creature was pressing its forehead against her fingers. And Aveline looked ready to cry over it.
The old stories whispered louder inside his mind.
The one who can bring equilibrium to the worlds... The one foretold...
Aelion bent slightly over her shoulder, close enough that his breath brushed her cheek, and his voice dropped into sothing softer, more intimate, more dangerous for how gently it was spoken.
"Shall we release them all, Ava?" he whispered.
Aveline stiffened at once.
The question pulled her back so abruptly that she almost forgot herself. Her fingers halted in midair, and she realized with a flash of embarrassnt that she may have already revealed far more than she had intended. Her heart gave a small, startled thump.
Because that was the trouble with her, she thought. The mont she cared, truly cared, she always seed one breath away from saying too much.
"Release them?" Aveline let out a soft, disbelieving scoff and kept walking, though her fingers still rembered the warmth of the creature she had touched. The sensation lingered on her skin like the afterimage of a feeling she had not quite ant to absorb, the emotional residue of sothing wounded and lonely, sothing that had brushed against her nerves and remained there like the fading echo of a story she had once read and never forgotten.
"Why would I do that?" she asked.
Aelion watched the change in her expression with quiet intensity. One mont she had looked almost luminous in her pity, as though her heart were too open to let suffering pass untouched. The next, she had folded herself back into sothing smaller and more difficult to read, turning once again into that maddening little enigma who could seem fragile without ever truly being fragile at all.
It was as though the mont he thought he had seen her clearly, she stepped away and beca soone else altogether.
"I want to release them too," he said.
Aveline paused.
Aelion’s voice remained calm, but there was conviction under it, the kind that ca from having thought about sothing for a long ti and never finding peace with it. "The ones that harm humans should be killed," he said. "But the others should be allowed to go free. There is no reason to torture them simply because we are able to."
Aveline turned at once and looked at him more carefully.
That, at least, made sense to her.
It was exactly how she thought about things as well. There were creatures like Noctyrr, creatures that could be violent, dangerous, and impossible to reason with. But there were also creatures like Hamilton, and creatures like Helena, and others whose existence seed to have nothing to do with malice at all.
They were not all the sa. No one thing deserved to be judged by the worst mber of its kind.
Aveline studied him with renewed attention.
"You know," Aelion said after a mont, as though lowering his voice might make the words feel more credible, "so say they co from a different world altogether."
Aveline blinked. "A different world?"
That was the first ti she had ever heard such a thing, and she could not keep the surprise out of her voice.
"A spiritual world," Aelion replied. "Or perhaps sothing like that. The theory is that these creatures are spirits that sohow end up in the world of the living."
Aveline frowned slightly, her curiosity imdiately catching hold of the idea.
"Spirits? Like ghosts?"
"More like another species," he said. "If there are animals of different kinds in our world, perhaps these are simply the inhabitants of another world."
Aveline let that settle in her mind for a mont. The thought was strange, but it was not impossible. In fact, the more she considered it, the less absurd it sounded. There were many things in the world that had once seed ridiculous to her before she had seen them with her own eyes. Magic was one of them. The idea that an entire species might belong to so unseen world beyond her understanding no longer felt entirely out of reach.
"But how did they get here?" she asked.
Aelion opened his mouth, perhaps to answer, perhaps to elaborate, but before he could speak, a loud noise shattered the stillness outside the dungeon.
Aveline’s heart lurched at once.
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