Gosh, I have been so busy that time is flying by. Here is a bonus scene of chapter 2 all in Evran’s POV from A Court of Dreams and Deceit. Enjoy!

The First Light

The construct shuddered beneath his palms.

Evran pressed harder, fingers splayed against a surface that had once been marble, veined with silver, cool and solid beneath his hands. It had thinned to little more than will stretched thin. He held it the way he held everything now. Through habit. Through the blunt refusal to be the one who stopped first.

The grey pressed in from every direction. Not darkness—darkness held depth. Dimension. The promise of something concealed. This was absence made visible, stretching without horizon, without boundary, without the mercy of an ending.

His body was a ruin. The cracks that had once pulsed with violet-blue fire—his power, his blood, the inheritance of a royal line that governed the borders between worlds—had gone dark and dry. Hairline fractures branched up his forearms, his throat, his temples. The skin between them had thinned to something translucent and wrong. More fissure than flesh.

He breathed because breathing was what bodies did.

The hounds circled beyond the construct’s edges. Shapes that registered wrong against the grey tears in fabric given appetite and patience. They’d been something else once. Beings with names. The void had taken everything except the hunger, and the hunger was enough.

They were waiting. They could afford to wait.

At some point he’d stopped trying to seal the cracks. At some point the effort of holding himself together had narrowed to this—a platform, a floor, the single stubborn declaration that he existed, and the grey could not have him yet.

Not hope. Hope required a future, and futures required imagination, and his had been scraped thin enough to see through. Not defiance, defiance required an audience.

Just the mechanical continuation of a thing in motion. A stone rolling because nothing had stopped it.

The largest hound pressed closer. Its breath scraped the air. Low, guttural, wrong. A sound that might have been laughter, from a throat no longer built for it.

Evran didn’t look.

He held the floor. The floor held him. The arrangement was all that remained.

A presence brushed the edge of his awareness, and his body ignited.

Not gently. Not gradually. The cracks in his skin flared violet-blue—a dim pulse, barely visible, but there after months of nothing—and every nerve that had gone dormant under the weight of the grey fired at once. His fingers curled against the floor. His chest locked. The breath that had been mechanical stuttered ragged, uncontrolled.

Warmth.

Not the memory of warmth. Not the concept. Actual heat bleeding through the grey like light through a fracture, brushing the border of his prison with the carelessness of a mind that didn’t know it was being observed.

A dreamer. A mortal mind drifting close to the membrane between worlds in deep sleep.

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Mira

She didn’t know when she’d fallen asleep.

The liminal space didn’t have night or morning, didn’t have the cues her body had spent twenty-five years learning to recognize. But at some point, the warmth of Evran’s presence beside her had become the warmth of his chest beneath her cheek, the pearlescent ground softer than any bed she’d known, and she’d drifted.

Now she was awake. And watching him.

His eyes were closed. His breathing had the slow, even rhythm of something deeper than rest though whether fae princes truly slept the way humans did, she had no idea. His body lay still against the star-scattered ground, one arm curved loosely around her waist, the other resting palm-up beside him like an offering to the nothing above.

This was new.

She’d seen him exhausted in the dreamscape, had felt his depletion bleeding through the bond like ice in her veins. But she’d never watched him be still without the construct mediating everything. No ballroom walls to maintain. No architecture of will holding back the void. Just... him.

The gold-threaded cracks in his skin had steadied since the night before—still there, still visible, but glowing with a low, warm light rather than the dim, desperate flicker she’d witnessed when he’d collapsed. Recovery, not restoration. The edge of crisis had passed, but he wasn’t back to full strength. She could feel that much through the bond: the reservoir that had once blazed bright enough to light a kingdom now ran at half capacity. Maybe less.

His hair fanned across the pearlescent surface like dark water, the silver at his temples catching the diffused light. The dreamscape had always softened him slightly. Smoothed the angles of his jaw, added a glamour’s edge of impossible beauty. This did not. Here, he looked real in a way he hadn’t before. The faint stubble she’d discovered last night. The small scar at the corner of his left eyebrow she’d never noticed. The way his lashes were darker than they had any right to be.

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Mira

The stone circle waited in predawn darkness.

Mira’s boots crunched over frozen ground as she approached. The violet markings on her face pulsed with faint warmth. She couldn’t see them, but she felt each tendril climbing toward her temples like a second heartbeat. The hag stone hung warm against her sternum, and the tether blazed gold-threaded violet in her chest—a beacon, a compass, a promise she was about to keep.

Rowan stood beside his rusted car, hands shoved deep in his pockets. He hadn’t spoken since they’d left town. The silence between them carried the weight of everything they both knew: she was leaving. Not just the circle, not just this clearing in the Massachusetts woods. She was leaving the entire world they’d shared.

“You don’t have to stay.” Her voice came out rough, scratched by exhaustion and the tears she refused to let fall. “I can do this alone.”

“Darling.” Rowan’s laugh held no humor. “If you think I’m letting you walk into another dimension without a proper goodbye, you have severely underestimated my dramatic sensibilities.”

The violet markings on her temples pulsed with sudden heat. She watched Rowan’s gaze lift to them, tracked the way his eyes widened before his jaw tightened.

“They’re beautiful,” he said quietly. “In a terrifying, you’re-becoming-something-not-entirely-human sort of way.”

“Rowan—”

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The Breaking Point

Evran

Evran traced the ritual diagrams spread across his desk, memorizing pathways he’d walked in memory a thousand times. Two days had compressed into hours, and now those hours compressed into moments, each one weighted with the terrible arithmetic of escape. The tether hummed steady and warm in his chest. Mira’s presence a constant pulse even as she slept in her world, gathering strength for what came next.

Tomorrow. The word felt like a blade balanced on his tongue. Tomorrow they would attempt the stone circle. Tomorrow they would either break free or break entirely.

He moved to the window, pressing his palm against the cold glass. Beyond the construct’s walls, the Void churned with unusual agitation. The hounds had multiplied again overnight. He counted three dozen now, their formless bodies circling his prison in lazy patterns that spoke of patience wearing thin. They sensed the building power. Sensed the preparation.

Sensed that their prey was about to make a desperate move.

Let them watch. The thought held more confidence than he felt. By this time tomorrow, we’ll be beyond their reach.

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The Stone Circle

Mira

The tether pulsed with urgency as Mira opened her eyes in the waking world.

Three days. They had three days before Evran’s brother circled close enough to find her. Three days to master a ritual she’d only read about, to reach a stone circle she’d never seen, to become the partner a centuries-old fae prince needed her to be.

The morning light filtering through her curtains seemed sharper than usual. More present. As though the world itself recognized that something fundamental had shifted.

Mira sat up and reached for her phone. The text she composed to Rowan was brief:

Today. The circle. Can you take me?

His response came within minutes:

Been waiting for you to ask. Pick you up in an hour.

She showered quickly, dressed in layers. Jeans, boots sturdy enough for hiking, a dark sweater beneath her jacket. The hag stone went around her neck on its cord, resting against her sternum where the tether anchored itself. When she looked in the mirror, the violet shadows on her cheekbones had spread further, climbing toward her temples in delicate whorls.

His colors. His mark.

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Brother’s Shadow

Evran

The study had become something he barely recognized.

Evran stood before the fireplace, watching violet-blue flames dance patterns that reminded him of Mira’s golden light interweaving with his power. The construct around him—once a desperate cage held together by sheer will—had transformed into something that felt almost like home. Books lined every wall, their spines worn from centuries of imagined reading, their contents drawn from memories he’d thought lost to dissolution. The desk sat scattered with maps and correspondence that existed only because she had made him remember what it meant to plan rather than simply survive.

And there, in the corner by the window, a second chair had appeared.

He hadn’t consciously created it. The construct had simply... adjusted. Anticipating her return. Making space for her presence as though the prison itself had accepted that she belonged here now.

The realization should have unsettled him. Instead, warmth spread through his chest—dangerous, unfamiliar, undeniable.

He crossed to the window, pressing his palm against the glass. Beyond the construct’s walls, the Void churned in its endless hunger. But even that looked different now. The darkness seemed less absolute, pushed back by the glow emanating from every surface of his prison. The cracks in his skin pulsed with steady light—stronger than they’d been in centuries, fed by the power they’d shared.

He felt Mira drifting toward sleep in her world, her consciousness beginning that slow descent toward the border where his prison touched her reality.

Soon.

The word rose unbidden, and with it came something that felt dangerously close to eagerness.

You’re becoming attached. The cold, rational part of his mind whispered the warning. That makes you vulnerable.

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The Waking Hunt

Mira

The taste of him lingered.

Mira surfaced from sleep with Evran’s essence still coating her tongue—black currant and smoke, the electric bite of something ancient. Her lips tingled with the memory of his mouth, and when she pressed her fingers against them, she found them swollen but not sore. Different from before. The feeding had changed, become something reciprocal rather than parasitic, and her body seemed to understand that distinction even if her mind was still catching up.

She lay still for a long moment, staring at the ceiling of her apartment. Gray morning light seeped through the curtains, casting everything in muted tones. The tether hummed steadily in her chest. Not pulling, not demanding, just present. A warmth that hadn’t been there before last night.

Before he stopped.

The memory rose unbidden: his hands on her thighs, his mouth hot against her throat, the desperate way he’d pressed her against the desk like he couldn’t bear another second without her closer. And then—pulling back. Choosing her exhaustion over his want. Choosing her over himself.

Mira’s chest tightened.

She forced herself upright, and the room swayed. The exhaustion was still there, bone-deep and persistent, but it had softened. The hollow scraping sensation from previous feedings was absent. Instead, she felt... full. Tired, yes, but not empty.

The synchronized feeding. It gave as much as it took.

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Desire and Restraint

Evran

The study materialized from the ballroom’s bones like a confession pulled from a reluctant throat.

Evran stood at its center, watching the transformation complete itself with hands that wouldn’t stop trembling. The black marble floor remained—he couldn’t seem to release that anchor to Mira’s aesthetic—but the grand chandeliers had dimmed to scattered candles. The gothic windows had shrunk, multiplied, become the leaded glass of a scholar’s sanctuary. Books lined every wall now, their spines cracked and worn, the accumulated knowledge of a prince who’d once believed wisdom could protect what he loved.

This isn’t what I planned.

He’d meant to rebuild the ballroom. To craft another seduction space, another trap dressed in silk and starlight. Instead, his power had shaped something else entirely. A desk scattered with maps and letters. A worn leather chair by a fireplace that crackled with violet-blue flames. The tapestries remained, but they’d changed too—showing not knights and romance but border crossings, threshold places, the liminal spaces his bloodline had guarded for millennia.

His true self. The prince he’d been before betrayal had carved him hollow.

The cracks in his skin pulsed as he examined his creation. Brighter now, stronger, fed by the energy Mira had pushed through the tether hours ago. He could still feel the echo of it. Her terror when the hound appeared, her desperate reaching, the shocking moment when she’d pulled his power through the connection and used it to destroy the creature.

She’s learning.

Pride. Fear. Something dangerously close to awe.

She’d touched his power and hadn’t burned. Had wielded it like she’d been born to it, like the border magic that ran in his blood recognized something kindred in her golden chaos.

What are you really, Mira Jameson?

The tether pulled taut.

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The Thinning Veil

Mira

The ballroom dissolved like smoke through fingers, and Mira fell.

Not through space. Through layers of consciousness, each one dragging against her like wet fabric. The golden thread in her chest pulled taut, then snapped back with a force that drove air from her lungs. She gasped awake, her body jackknifing upright before her mind caught up.

Gray light filtered through her curtains. Morning, but barely. Her alarm clock read 5:47 AM.

Her mouth tasted like black currant and ash.

She pressed her palm flat against her sternum. The tether hummed there, steady and insistent. A second heartbeat that didn’t belong to her. The pull toward sleep, toward him, had eased after the feeding, but it hadn’t disappeared. If anything, it felt more present now. Real.

She swung her legs over the side of the bed. The room tilted. Her vision darkened at the edges, and she grabbed the nightstand to keep from pitching forward onto the floor. Hollowed out. That’s what her body felt like. Scraped clean of something vital. When she finally stood, her legs shook like a newborn foal’s.

I took too much.

His voice echoed through memory, rough with something that might have been guilt. She’d felt him stop. Felt the moment when his hunger screamed for more, and he’d wrenched himself away.

It hadn’t been enough.

Mira made it to the bathroom on trembling legs. The mirror showed her a stranger. Cheeks sunken, skin the color of old paper, dark circles carved beneath eyes that seemed too large for her face. Her lips were swollen again, tender when she touched them, but the bruising had spread. Faint violet shadows traced the corners of her mouth, climbing toward her cheekbones like frost spreading across glass.

His colors. His light, bleeding through.

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The Ballroom Transformed

Evran

The structure had never looked like this before.

Evran stood at the center of his creation, watching the final details settle into place with something that might have been satisfaction, if satisfaction weren’t dangerous. The ballroom he’d built from Mira’s desires had been impressive. Gothic arches, midnight marble, the dark romance of every story she’d ever devoured. But that had been a hastily assembled lure, crafted in desperation from a dying prison.

This was something else.

He’d spent the hours since her last visit reshaping every surface, every shadow, every mote of light. The chandeliers still dripped crystal, but now they hung lower, more intimate, their golden glow softer and warmer. He’d added alcoves along the walls. Small spaces draped in velvet where two people might speak without being overheard, even though there was no one to overhear them. The obsidian throne remained on its dais, but he’d positioned chairs nearby. Conversation furniture. The suggestion of equals rather than supplicant and sovereign.

The tapestries had changed too. Where before they’d shown knights and monsters, sacrifice and magic—the broad strokes of romantic fantasy, now they depicted quieter scenes. A woman reading by candlelight. Two figures walking through a moonlit garden. Hands reaching for each other across a table strewn with maps and letters.

Her fantasies. Not the dramatic ones she’d admit to, but the deeper ones she barely acknowledged to herself. Connection. Understanding. Being chosen.

Evran adjusted the fall of his coat—he’d softened it, made the leather less severe, though he’d kept it black—and examined his work with cold precision.

Too intimate?

No. Not for what he needed.

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The Monster’s Reckoning

Evran

Evran came back to himself in pieces.

First, sensation. The cold press of marble beneath his knees where he’d collapsed after severing the connection. Then sound. The distant howl of the hounds beyond his construct’s walls, their frustration bleeding through the barriers like smoke through cracks. Finally, taste.

Her.

Golden sweetness coated his tongue, richer than honey, more intoxicating than the finest wine his court ever cellared. Her essence still spread through his veins like sunlight poured into shadow, filling the hollow places that had ached for so long he’d forgotten they existed.

Evran laughed.

The sound scraped out of him—raw, broken, half-mad—and he pressed his forehead to the cool marble floor as his shoulders shook. How long since he’d laughed? How long since he felt anything beyond the slow erosion of self, the patient hunger of the Void, the desperate clinging to memories that crumbled like ash between his fingers?

Centuries. Centuries of nothing, and now—

He pushed himself upright, and his arms held.

That alone almost undid him. For so long, every movement had been a negotiation with a body that forgot how to function. Standing required concentration. Walking demanded will. But now his muscles responded without protest, coiling and releasing with the fluid grace he’d once taken for granted.

Evran looked down at his hands.

The cracks remained—fine fissures tracing his wrists and climbing toward his elbows—but they blazed with violet-blue light so bright it cast shadows on the marble. The glow pulsed in time with his heartbeat, steady and strong where before it flickered like a candle in a storm.

He turned his hands over, watching the light dance beneath his skin. The texture changed. No longer dried clay threatening to crumble, now his flesh held the appearance of porcelain shot through with lightning. Still damaged. Still marked by his imprisonment. But alive.

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The Ballroom

Mira

The dream shifted.

One moment, Mira drifted through the familiar fog of sleep. Formless, weightless, the kind of rest that left no impression come morning. The next, cold marble pressed against the soles of her bare feet.

She gasped, and the sound echoed.

Echoed.

That wasn’t right. Dreams didn’t echo. Dreams slipped and blurred and forgot themselves between one breath and the next. But this—

Mira opened her eyes. A ballroom stretched before her, vast and impossible and detailed in a way that made her chest tight. Black marble floors gleamed beneath crystal chandeliers that dripped with golden light, each flame steady and unwavering. Arched windows lined the far wall, their glass dark as obsidian, reflecting nothing of what lay beyond. Tapestries hung between them—knights and monsters, sacrifice and magic—threads so fine she could see individual stitches from where she stood.

She looked down.

Midnight blue silk pooled around her feet, and the gown fit her body as if someone had sewn it onto her skin. The bodice hugged her ribs; the neckline dipped lower than anything she owned in waking life. When she moved, the fabric whispered against her thighs.

“This is a dream,” she said aloud. Testing. Her voice didn’t waver or fade. It rang clear against the marble and gold, solid as a struck bell.

Lucid dreaming. That’s what this was. She’d read about it: the awareness that you were asleep, the ability to shape the dreamscape with conscious thought. She’d never managed it before, but there was always a first time.

Mira took a step forward, then another. The marble chilled her bare soles, and she curled her toes against the cold. This was not the vague approximation of sensation that dreams offered, but genuine cold that seeped into her bones. The air was filled with the scent of beeswax and jasmine, thick and sweet and it coated her tongue when she breathed.

She dug her fingers into the silk of her skirt, and pinched the fabric. Real. Heavy. The weave pressed distinct patterns into her fingertips.

Too real.

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Between Dreams

Evran

The Void did not whisper anymore.

It stopped bothering centuries ago, or perhaps only yesterday. Time held no meaning in this place of patient gray nothing. Evran Duskayne, once Crown Prince of a court that governed the borders between worlds, existed now as little more than a thought clinging to the shape of a man.

The ash fell without end. Soft. Relentless. It drifted through what remained of his constructed cell. A study that once held sharp edges and gleaming surfaces, now crumbled at the corners like wet parchment. The walls sagged inward. The single window he’d willed into existence showed only the same dark emptiness pressing against the glass. Hungry and eternal.

He sat in a chair that no longer remembered how to be solid beneath him. His hands rested on the armrests, and even through the haze of dissolution, he noticed the wrongness of them. Skin stretched too thin over bone. Fissures ran along his wrists and up his forearms. Cracks that had once glowed violet-blue with contained power now dark and dry as ancient riverbeds. His flesh had taken on the texture of dried clay, and somewhere beneath the numbness, he understood this meant something terrible.

I am forgetting how to exist.

The thought drifted through him without urgency. That was the Void’s gift, in the end—it did not tear or burn. It... erased. Slowly. Tenderly. Like a mother smoothing away a child’s fever dreams until nothing remained but peaceful, empty darkness.

His name. He still held that. Evran. The syllables felt foreign, borrowed from someone else’s life. A prince. A protector. A man who once commanded the threshold magic of his bloodline with precision and pride. Now he commanded nothing but this rotting box of concentrated will, and even that was slipping.

The ash settled on shoulders that had forgotten how to hold themselves straight. It gathered in the hollows of his cheekbones, in the cracks of his lips.

He did not brush it away. What would be the point?

The first hound materialized at the edge of his vision.

It did not step or crawl, nor emerge. It just was, where a moment before there had been only gray. A fluid mass of smoke and hunger, its form shifted constantly. Elongated limbs that stretched and retracted, a head that was nothing but swirling darkness where a face should be.

His gaze tracked it without his permission. Some instinct deeper than his fading consciousness recognized the predator circling.

Brother’s pets. The knowledge surfaced from somewhere far away. Sent to guard my prison. Corrupted now. Feral.

A second hound joined the first. Then a third. They moved in lazy patterns around the study’s disintegrating walls, testing the barriers with each pass. Patient. They had been patient for so very long.

They could afford to wait a little longer.

The largest one pressed closer, and where its form brushed the construct’s outer edge, the wall... ceased. No sound. No destruction. Just absence spreading like rot through fruit.

Evran watched a section of his ceiling unmake itself.

The Void pressed in through the gap, and with it came its first whisper in what must have been an eternity.

Let go.

His fingers twitched against the armrest. Reflex. Nothing more.

You have held on for so long. Suffered so long. There is peace in nothing, little prince. There is rest.

The hounds circled tighter. One of them made a sound. Not a growl, not a cry, but something in between. The noise of hunger given form.

Evran’s construct shuddered. Another wall began to sag.

He should fight. He knew he should fight. Once, the mere suggestion of surrender would have brought his power roaring to the surface, violet lightning crackling through his veins as he bent reality to his will. Once, he had been the guardian of borders, the keeper of thresholds, the prince who walked between worlds as easily as other men walked between rooms.

Now he couldn’t recall the sensation of power.

The largest hound’s faceless head turned toward him. Waiting.

Soon, its presence seemed to say. Soon you will have nothing left to hold, and we will feast on what remains.

Evran closed his eyes.

Perhaps they were right. Perhaps this was how his story ended. Not with the dramatic fall his brother had orchestrated, not with the trial that condemned him, but with a quiet dissolution in a prison no one would ever find. Erased so completely that even his enemies would forget he had ever existed.

Serenya. Her name rose unbidden. His betrothed. His—

The memory fragmented before he was able to grasp it. Another piece of himself, crumbling like the surrounding walls. He was so tired.

The scent hit him like a blade through the chest. His eyes flew open. His body—his ruined, failing body—jerked upright in the chair as something utterly impossible brushed against the edges of his dying construct.

Light.

Not the gray nothing. Not the hungry dark of the hounds. This was warmth and gold and something achingly, impossibly alive. It drifted past his prison like a current in an otherwise stagnant sea, and every nerve he’d thought dead screamed back to sudden, desperate awareness.

A dreamer.

No, not just a dreamer. The energy signature was too potent, too structured. This was a mind that didn’t wander through sleep. It built. Created. Wove reality from imagination with an unconscious skill that marked only one kind of being.

A Weaver.

Evran was on his feet before he realized he’d moved. His legs threatened to buckle—they had forgotten how to bear weight—but he forced them to hold through sheer, savage will. The hounds scattered backward, startled by his sudden animation. The scent grew stronger. Beeswax and jasmine, underlaid with something sweeter. Rain on summer stone. Old books and fresh ink. And beneath it all, that golden chaos of raw creative power, spilling carelessly into the Void like a beacon.

She doesn’t know. She has no idea what she is, what she’s broadcasting to every hungry thing in the dark.

His hands found the window—the last window still intact—and pressed against the glass. Through the fog, he could almost see it. A thread of gold weaving through the nothing, trailing behind a consciousness that wandered too close to the border between worlds.

A woman’s mind. Young. Human. Dreaming of something fierce and impossible, something her waking life didn’t give her.

Evran’s dry lips cracked as they pulled into something that might have been a smile.

“There you are,” he whispered. His voice sounding like ruin and rust.

The hounds began to circle again, but their attention shifted. They sensed it too, that intoxicating pulse of living energy. One of them raised its faceless head and keened, a sound of pure, predatory desire.

The construct groaned around him. The floor buckled. But for the first time in centuries—or perhaps only moments—he didn’t care because that golden thread was still there, still drifting past his prison, and if he could just reach it...

If he could just touch it...

He knew what he was considering.

The old laws burned through his fragmenting memories with sudden, unwelcome clarity. Treaties signed in blood and starlight. Oaths sworn by his ancestors, by his own lips, in the days when he’d still believed in honor.

Weavers are protected. To use one without awakening, without consent—

The construct shuddered again. A section of the floor dissolved away, and Evran staggered sideways, barely catching himself against the window frame.

The hounds pressed closer. Eager. Hungry.

—is forbidden.

But forbidden by whom? By a court that condemned him without mercy? By laws written to protect a realm that had cast him into this hell? By the brother who stole everything—his crown, his freedom, his very existence—and left him here to rot?

The golden thread pulsed. So close. So achingly, impossibly close.

He pressed his forehead against the cold glass and watched it drift past.

I could let go. The thought was almost peaceful. I could fall into the nothing and spare her whatever I’m about to do. I was a protector once. I could protect her from myself.

The largest hound lunged. Its form slammed against the construct’s barrier with enough force to shake what remained of the walls. Cracks spiderwebbed through the air itself. The very fabric of Evran’s will beginning to tear.

Through the spreading gaps, the Void’s whisper grew louder:

Let go. Let go. Let go.

The Weaver’s light pulsed again.

Evran, who had once sworn oaths to protect the innocent. Who let himself be branded a traitor rather than explain the truth. Who clung to some tattered remnant of honor through centuries of dissolution, made his choice.

Forgive me.

He didn’t know who he was asking.

He passed his hand through the window as if it were smoke and reached for that golden thread with fingers that cracked and bled violet light at the effort. The hounds screamed—fury and hunger combined—but he was already stretching past them, past his prison, beyond everything that had kept him contained.

The Weaver’s energy brushed against his touch like silk sliding through water. And for the first time in an eternity, he felt alive.

Her dreams tasted like honey and lightning.

He drank her in without finesse, without caution. A starving man presented with a feast after years of famine. The golden chaos of her imagination poured into his essence, filling the cracks in his being, flooding the hollow places where his power once lived.

More. The hunger was monstrous, absolute. More more more—

He forced himself to stop.

It took everything he had. His hands shook with the effort of pulling back from that intoxicating flow, but some thread of reason remained—barely—and it screamed at him that draining her dry in this first rush would defeat the entire purpose.

Easy. Easy. Don’t kill the only chance you have.

He made himself breathe, though he hadn’t needed breath in centuries. In. Out. Forcing the stolen energy to settle into his bones like warmth returning to frozen limbs. When he finally opened his eyes, his construct had stopped crumbling. The walls held steady. The floor was solid beneath his feet. The hounds retreated to the edges of his awareness, repelled by the sudden flare of power he’d exhibited. Even the ash seemed to fall more slowly now, as if the Void itself took a step back to reassess this prisoner it thought already defeated.

Evran looked down at his hands. The cracks remained, but they glowed now. Faint violet-blue light seeped through the fissures like dawn through a shuttered window. Not healed. Not yet. But no longer the dead gray of dissolution.

He had time.

Now use it.

He turned his attention fully to the connection he’d forged, following that golden thread back to its source. Her mind was a whirlwind of images and emotions. A book left half-read on a nightstand. A conversation that ended badly. A fantasy she’d never spoken aloud to anyone, and beneath it all, a bone-deep longing for something more.

She wanted to feel.

She wanted to escape.

She wanted a story where she was the heroine instead of the bystander. Where the monster chose her. Where the darkness reached out and said you are exactly what I’ve been waiting for.

Evran smiled, and this time it reached his eyes.

I can give you that, he thought at her sleeping mind. I can give you everything you’ve dreamed of and more.

It wasn’t a lie.

It wasn’t the whole truth either.

The study would not serve.

He moved through his construct with new purpose, his restored power reshaping the space as he walked. The crumbling walls smoothed and straightened. The ash-covered surfaces gleamed black. What had been a prison cell became a corridor, became a doorway, became—

A ballroom.

He built it from her desires, plucking the images from her dreaming mind with the precision of a master weaver selecting threads. Black marble floors that reflected light like dark water. Gothic arched windows along every wall, their glass showing not the Void’s gray hunger but a twilight sky scattered with stars she’d wished on as a child. Golden chandeliers overhead, dripping with crystals that caught and scattered the light into a thousand tiny suns.

Tapestries unfurled along the walls. Knights and monsters, sacrifice and magic, every romantic fantasy she’d ever devoured in her endless hunger for tales that seemed authentic.

At the far end of the ballroom, on a raised dais, he created a throne of obsidian and silver. Not for him to sit in. For her to understand that this was a court, a kingdom, a realm where she would matter.

And at the center of the floor, where the marble seemed to drink in all the light and hold it trembling beneath its surface, he placed himself. He shaped his appearance with deliberate care. The gaunt, cracked creature from the Void would not serve. Instead, he reached back through his fragmenting memories for the prince he’d once been. Tall and lean, built for precision and lethal grace. He remembered the fall of his hair past his shoulders, the natural silver streaks at his temples that marked his bloodline. He remembered the color of his eyes: violet-blue, luminous, the kind of gaze that made courtiers look away in deference or desire.

He remembered the power.

When he finished, the man standing in the ballroom’s center was exactly what she’d dreamed of without knowing it. Dangerous. Beautiful. Ancient. The monster prince from every story she’d never dared write down manifested in dark leather and scarcely leashed hunger.

Almost perfect.

He adjusted his coat—tailored black, fitted close to his frame—and summoned music from nothing. A waltz, slow and aching, played by instruments that existed only because he willed them to. Then he reached for the tether between them. It was thin, a gossamer connection easily broken if she woke. But she wasn’t waking. She was drifting deeper into sleep, drawn by the dreamscape he’d built from her own imagination, and with each passing moment, her consciousness drew closer to the border where his prison touched her world.

Come to me, he let the invitation flow along that golden thread.

Come and dance with a monster. Come and feel something real. Come and save me—

His lips twisted at the last thought.

She wouldn’t be saving him, of course. She would be feeding him. Fueling his escape. Giving him everything he needed to break free of this prison, even if it cost her everything she had.

But she didn’t need to know that yet.

She just needed to say yes.

Evran Duskayne, Crown Prince of a fallen court, stood in the ballroom he’d built from a stranger’s dreams, and waited for his prey to arrive.

The hounds watched from beyond the window. Through the starred glass, their forms were only slightly visible—smoke and hunger pressed against the barrier between his construct and the Void’s endless nothingness. They were unable to reach her here. Not while he held the dream space together. Not while he stood between her light and their darkness. But they would be watching. And if he failed. If his power flickered. If his will wavered. If she woke before he’d taken enough to sustain himself, they would be waiting.

For him.

For her.

For both.

Evran turned away from the windows and fixed his gaze on the ballroom’s grand entrance. A pair of doors that hadn’t existed until he needed them. Wrought iron worked with thorns and roses, standing half-open in invitation.

Any moment now.

Any moment she would step through.

And nothing—not for him, not for her, not for anyone—would ever be the same again.

A Court of Dreams and Deceit is a weekly romantasy serial.

• Chapter 1 is free

• New chapters release every Tuesday for paid subscribers

If you’re ready to follow Evran and Mira deeper into the dream realm — and learn what Evran truly wants — you can unlock the rest of the story by becoming a paid subscriber.

✨ Paid subscribers receive:

• Weekly chapters

• Early access to the unfolding story

• Occasional bonus content and behind-the-scenes notes

Chapter 2 arrives next Tuesday.

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Chapter 1 of A Court of Dreams and Deceit will be available free to all readers.
After that, new chapters will release every Tuesday for paid subscribers.

Her dreams were supposed to be a sanctuary — not a hunting ground.

Mira has always escaped into her dreams. Until the night they begin escaping back.

In the liminal space between sleep and waking, she encounters Evran Duskayne — a cracked-skinned fae prince imprisoned between worlds, his power fractured and starving. Their connection is immediate, dangerous, and impossible to ignore.

Their first kiss forges a tether neither of them fully understands.

Evran feeds on Mira’s rare Weaver energy to survive, binding them together in a parasitic bond that draws the attention of nightmare creatures stalking the thin places between realms. What begins as predator and prey soon twists into something far more volatile.

As reality fractures and hunters close in, Mira discovers the bond is changing her, too. Through their connection, she can channel Evran’s ancient magic — and what once made her vulnerable may be the only thing that can save them both.

What began as survival becomes something far more dangerous.

A Court of Dreams and Deceit is a dark romantasy serial featuring:

• Dreamwalking and liminal magic

• A morally gray monster prince

• A slow-burn romance rooted in tension and power

• A bond that evolves from predatory to symbiotic

• Desire, danger, and the cost of connection

The monster was supposed to consume her.
She became his equal instead.