Season 1: Awakening the Viliness

  Ch 5: Tea and Thorns

  The halls of the estate were quiet, but never silent. Footsteps echoed softly on marble far out of sight, and the ever-burning sconces along the walls cast long, curated shadows. Mira wandered without direction, trying to stay calm, to feel like the kind of woman who walked simply because she could—not because she had just dismissed a kneeling man who looked at her like salvation was a leash away.

  What does a viliness do when she’s not actively plotting? Moisturise and intimidate?

  The weight of the morning clung to her like perfume. She couldn’t stop repying it. The way he had leaned forward. The way he had looked back. The way she had almost… touched him.

  She needed air. Real air.

  The doors to the garden opened at her approach, tall and ornate, carved with motifs of roses and stars. The hinges didn’t creak. Of course they didn’t. Even the estate’s groaning was elegant.

  The warmth hit her first. Not oppressive, but cultivated. Sunlight poured through tall gss panels and nded in wide patches on the fgstone paths and the rose beds beyond. It should have been beautiful. The book had called it the blooming heart of the estate, Nysera’s personal Eden, fed by divine trickles and arranged with the precision of a woman who never made mistakes.

  Instead, she stepped into silence.

  The air was warm, perfumed—but not fresh. The scent clung too tightly, roses and something else beneath it. Incense, maybe. Smoke. Like a holy pce that had been burned and rebuilt without clearing the ash.

  She moved down the path slowly, heels tapping softly against worn fgstone. The roses fnked either side of her, tall, orderly, immacute by design—but wrong when you looked too closely.

  Their colours were dull. Reds muddied toward rust, whites edged with grey. Some petals curled at the ends, not from frost or age, but from being tired. Like the bloom had been forced too many times and finally refused. Even the leaves seemed stiff, their green faded under a fine powder of dust or divine residue that shimmered faintly when it caught the sun.

  Mira stepped closer to one of the rger blossoms, a pale gold rose perched high on its stalk like a trophy.

  It didn’t smell like anything.

  She reached out, brushing a petal with one gloved finger.

  It cracked.

  Not loudly. Not violently. Just a small, brittle sound—the way old parchment breaks when folded too many times. The petal fked away, drifting to the ground in silence. A few more followed, sloughing off like they’d only been holding on out of obligation.

  Her throat tightened.

  She knelt beside the pnt, pressing her palm gently to the soil. It wasn’t dry. It was perfectly tended. Cared for in every visible way. But there was no divine current in it. No warmth. No glow. No pulse of power thrumming beneath the surface. It had all been pulled up, not into.

  “She drained them,” Mira whispered. “Sucked power straight from the roots.”

  The book had never said that. It called this pce a sanctuary. A shrine to composure and cultivated restraint. The flowers always blooming. The pathways always swept. Nysera always composed.

  But it hadn’t said who paid for that perfection.

  Mira stood slowly, brushing off her skirts, though no dirt had clung to her. Her eyes scanned the garden again, and now she couldn’t stop seeing it—the shape of something beautiful preserved not for joy, but for power. For image. For control.

  “She didn’t grow things,” she murmured. “She preserved them. Like she pnned to sell the illusion ter.”

  And for the first time that morning, Mira wasn’t just afraid of being exposed.

  She was afraid of becoming the kind of woman who could walk through this graveyard and think it was a masterpiece.

  She stood for a long time in the dead garden, surrounded by flowers that had been too loved in all the wrong ways. Or maybe not loved at all. Just used.

  Okay, she thought. Think. Plot. Survive.

  The book. Start with the book.

  She closed her eyes and summoned the parts she could still remember—not the smut (though, let’s be honest, that was the easiest to recall), but the early chapters. The ones she’d skimmed the first time for pacing but reread ter because they were weirdly loaded in retrospect.

  Nysera had only been on-page for five chapters. Five short, chilly, silk-draped, socially lethal chapters. And yet she’d left a bigger mark than the heroine’s first kiss. That was the kind of woman she had been.

  She didn’t rule with magic. Not overtly. She didn’t need it.

  She leeched it.

  Salons. Masquerades. Afternoon teas. Every ritual of performance and etiquette had been a siphon. She pulled divine current through other people’s restraint. The way they lowered their voices around her. The way they wanted things they weren’t allowed to say. Desire, repackaged as reverence. Affection twisted into obedience. She fed on the repression like it was nectar.

  And she’d built an empire out of it.

  “Divine denial,” Mira muttered. “Weaponised virtue. A world that runs on love, and she hoarded it like oil.”

  She remembered one line from Fae’s perspective, bright and na?ve in the early pages: ‘Lady Nysera’s presence filled the room like perfume and prophecy. We all stood straighter when she entered, as if our spines remembered they weren’t allowed to bend.’

  It had sounded elegant at the time. Now it made her stomach twist.

  That’s what you are now, she thought. The spine-stiffener. The one who ruins the party by entering it.

  She looked down at her gloved hands, pristine and useless.

  She didn’t have power. Not yet. She wasn’t the Saintess. She wasn’t Fae, glowing and chosen. She was the other one. The woman who died in Act I so the plot could begin.

  Unless…

  Unless this wasn’t just a story anymore.

  Unless she wasn’t asleep. Or dreaming. Or in a coma from a train crash in the real world, lying in a hospital while someone changed her drip and tried not to say we’re losing her.

  What if this was the afterlife?

  What if this was her life now?

  Her stomach turned.

  What if she had to finish the book to wake up? What if she couldn’t go home until she made it to the end—and what if the end was still Luceran, broken, bleeding, begging the world not to be afraid of him before he died anyway?

  She didn’t know the rules. She didn’t know the path. But she knew one thing: Nysera had died before the real plot ever started. If Mira wanted to live—if she wanted to do more than py dress-up in a vilin’s body—she had to rewrite the story from the inside.

  The next morning arrived with noise.

  Not chaotic, but orchestrated. Footsteps in the halls, maids moving with clipped urgency, the faint ctter of trays being adjusted and ribbons being steamed ft. Mira stood at the edge of her bedroom’s open balcony, half-watching the light roll over the estate roofs like spilled milk, half-listening to the careful hum of high society being prepared behind the scenes.

  No one had asked if she wanted to see her pet that morning.

  She didn’t know whether to be relieved or unnerved. Probably both.

  The absence of the question felt like a kind of mercy—though it was hard to believe anything in this pce was unintentional. Still, she’d been left to her own devices after breakfast, ghosting through rooms that smelled of rosewater and ritual, with nothing but the weight of silk and looming expectation on her shoulders.

  The estate was being dressed as carefully as she had been.

  Fresh white linens id across every low-slung table. Polished silver teapots gleamed on mirrored trays. Arrangements of pale-petaled roses—this time from the greenhouse, she hoped—had been pced with obsessive symmetry. Even the air seemed tighter, more fragranced, like the walls were holding their breath.

  Mira didn’t ask questions. Just observed. Filed things away.

  The women of the White Veil were coming.

  Nysera’s faction. Her faithful. The ones who believed in cold power and high colrs and veils so thin they could cut gss. They weren’t just guests—they were witnesses. Guardians of image. Keepers of the lie that had kept Nysera alive longer than she should’ve been.

  And now they were coming to see if she still held the mask.

  She was just starting to think about how she might slip away for five minutes of not being perceived when one of the senior housemaids appeared—sharp-boned, gloved, and efficient as ever.

  “My dy,” she said softly. “The first guests have arrived.”

  Of course they had.

  Mira smoothed the front of her gown, adjusted a pearl earring that didn’t need adjusting, and followed her down the hall toward the sunlit salon.

  Every step clicked neatly into the marble like she belonged there. Every breath reminded her she didn’t.