A flicker passed through her hollow eyes.
Not warmth. Not shared moments. Just fragments — thin, trembling memories she had no right to hold.
She remembered how he kept his distance at first. How he watched her with guarded, wary eyes, always ready to retreat. How he never reached for her, never trusted her fully, never returned the strange pull she felt toward him. And yet, even in that distance, she sensed something honest — something unpolished and real — in the way he existed near her.
But she also remembered the quiet things.
The way he stayed near her even when he feared to. The way he didn't run, even though everything inside him warned him to. The way his presence steadied something deep within her, even when he refused to meet her gaze for too long. And the way he treated her like a person — a real, breathing person — when the rest of the world had already decided she wasn't one.
In the royal kingdom, she had been a ghost long before the demon touched her. A princess by blood, a destined sacrifice for demons. People bowed to her title but never to her existence. Servants drifted around her like she was a cold draft in the hallway. Her father walked past her as though she were nothing more than a shadow cast by someone else. Her "friends" clung to her only for palace favor, their smiles sweet, their whispers venomous. They called her cursed. Born to die. A vessel with no soul. A girl whose only worth was the moment she would be offered up.
She carried that silence like a second skin. She learned to breathe quietly, move quietly, exist quietly — because no one had ever shown her anything different. Her heart had grown used to emptiness, to the ache of being unseen, to the quiet terror of knowing she could vanish and no one would notice.
Until him.
He never bowed. Never flattered. Never pretended. He simply acknowledged her — quietly, reluctantly, but truthfully. He never mocked her. Never spoke ill of her. Never reduced her to the fate others chained to her name. And in a life where every kindness had been a lie, his indifference was the closest thing she had ever known to honesty.
And that alone made something bloom in her void‑hollow chest — something fragile, reckless, and painfully alive. Because of him, she wanted to live another day. Even if only to see him. Even if only to exchange a few stolen words. Even if he never returned the feeling — the wanting itself was enough to make her feel human.
She remembered feeling close to him for reasons she couldn't explain. A closeness he never asked for. A closeness he never gave back. But also a closeness he never backed away from — even when fear told him he should.
And that closeness — that trembling, desperate desire to live — was exactly why the demons had entered her so easily.
Her soul had been empty for so long. Hollowed by neglect. Starved of affection. Stripped of purpose. Inside her, there had been nothing but darkness and silence… until Mandle fed her that faint spark of divine power. A spark so small it barely glowed — yet it was enough to form a single, fragile bloom deep within her soul.
A tiny flower of light. A trembling sprout in a wasteland of shadows. A flicker of life surrounded by demons and darkness.
The demons rushed into her without hesitation because there was space — too much space — inside her. But that small, glowing bloom refused to die. It held on. It fought. It kept her from collapsing into madness entirely.
It was the only thing keeping her sane. The only thing keeping her sanity.
And it existed because of him.