The first thing they put on him was gold.
Not a shirt. Not a robe. Not anything with sleeves or a collar or any of the basic structural qualities Arnav associated with the concept of clothing.
Gold.
A thin chain, delicate as a whispered secret, draped across his collarbones and fastened at the back of his neck. Then another, slightly heavier, falling lower across his chest. Then a third, hung with small flat pendants shaped like fish and waves that caught the light and threw it back in fragments. The attendants worked in silence, their hands quick and certain, layering metal against skin with the focused efficiency of people who had done this many times and understood exactly how it was supposed to look.
Arnav sat very still and tried to process what was happening.
"Is there," he said carefully, "a shirt?"
The lead attendant — he had begun to think of her as Lead, in the absence of knowing her name — glanced at him with polite confusion.
"A shirt, Young Lord?"
"A shirt. A kurta. Anything with — fabric. That covers the—" He gestured vaguely at his own torso. "The area."
Lead's expression shifted into something that was not quite a smile but lived in the same neighborhood.
"The ceremonial attire does not include a covering for the upper body, Young Lord. That is traditional."
"Traditional," Arnav repeated.
"Yes."
"Whose tradition?"
"The Siren bloodline's, Young Lord. As it has been for seven generations."
He looked down at himself. At the gold chains layered across his bare chest. At his own warm brown skin glowing underneath them in the soft morning light.
"Right," he said. "Of course it is."
They continued dressing him.
The trousers were silk — a deep ocean blue that shifted color when he moved, now navy, now almost black, now briefly luminous as a summer sea. They sat low on his hips and fell in wide, graceful folds to his feet. A waistband of hammered gold panels connected by tiny rings of twisted metal was fitted around his middle, each panel engraved with patterns so fine he had to squint to make them out — waves, fish, open water, things moving beneath the surface. Arnav ran his thumb along one panel and felt the etching under his skin like a language he almost recognized.
Then the armlets. Wide gold cuffs, one for each upper arm, worked in the same wave patterns as the waist piece. Heavier than they looked. He felt their weight settle into his arms like a quiet authority, like something that expected to be worn seriously.
Then rings — three per hand, connected by thin chains to a wide bracelet at each wrist, so that when he moved his fingers the chains shifted and caught the light.
Then anklets. He drew the line mentally at the anklets, but his feet were lifted one at a time before he could say anything and the gold was clasped and that was simply that.
"Is there more?" he asked, with genuine uncertainty about whether he hoped the answer was yes or no.
"The veil, Young Lord. And then the hair."
The veil was a length of fabric so sheer it was nearly invisible — ivory shot through with silver thread, the kind of thing that suggested modesty without committing to it in any meaningful way. It floated when he breathed.
Then they turned to his hair.
The attendants did not share his anxiety about it. They divided it into sections with the calm precision of surgeons, fingers moving through the dark mass without hesitation. The bulk they left down, combed until it fell like still water down his back. From the front sections and the crown they worked small braids — delicate, intricate, the width of two fingers, woven through with thin gold thread and tiny beads of deep blue stone that clicked softly against each other as they moved.
Arnav sat still and tried not to think about how long his hair was.
He tried also not to think about his mother's words.
This is your life now. Entirely and only yours.
There is no path back.
He breathed carefully and redirected his attention outward — to the room, to the attendants, to the quiet conversation around him that he had not, until now, been paying close enough attention to.
He started paying attention now.
Lead and the second attendant — Quiet, he thought of her, the one who had barely spoken during that first terrible awakening — were moving around him and speaking in low voices, not to him but to each other, the way people speak when they have forgotten the person they are dressing is listening.
"...the binding room is prepared," Quiet said. "The ritual vessel was brought up from the lower temple before dawn."
"Good. The bloodline markers will need to be verified before the union can be witnessed."
Bloodline. Ritual. Union. Arnav held each word carefully, turning it over once and setting it aside.
"Will the High Witnesses be present from the beginning?" Quiet asked.
"Two of them. The third arrives by midmorning." Lead's hands worked steadily through a braid without pausing. "The Dragon court has sent four of their own witnesses in addition. They are thorough."
"They are suspicious," Quiet said, with the precise neutrality of someone who would only use that word in a room they trusted completely.
A short silence.
"They have reason to be careful," Lead said. "The alliance matters to them."
"It matters to everyone."
"Yes. But for them it is — particular." A faint pause. "His condition has been worsening. The court knows it, even if they do not say so outside those walls."
Arnav kept his face perfectly still. Eyes fixed on the middle distance. The expression of a man lost in thought, or nervous about a ceremony, or simply tired. Any of those things. Nothing that looked like listening.
His condition. Worsening.
The Dragon King, his mother had said, was waiting.
The third attendant came forward now with a small shallow bowl that smelled like warm oil and flowers, applying it to his shoulders and arms with a cloth. The warmth spread up through his muscles immediately, and he became aware, for the first time, of how different this body felt from the inside.
In his old life he had been thin the way neglect produces — not athletic, not deliberate, just the thinness of a man who forgot to eat and sat at a desk for eleven hours a day for years and years. His back had always ached. His shoulders permanently tense. Something in his chest, just below the sternum, perpetually hollow.
This body had none of that.
It was slender — genuinely, gracefully slender — but underneath it was a quiet strength he hadn't noticed until now. Not the bulk of someone trained for war. Something closer to a dancer's strength. Functional. Unshowy. Built for something specific.
He flexed his fingers experimentally under the hand chains.
Strong. Healthy. Foreign in a way that felt like being handed something you'd wanted for a long time and not knowing what to do with it now that it was yours.
Lead tilted his chin upward gently to catch the light from the high window, and Arnav caught his reflection in the polished mirror across the room.
He had looked at this face before and felt the dislocation of it — the particular vertigo of a reflection that responded to you but did not resemble you. He had acknowledged it and moved on because the alternative was falling apart, and he had already decided against that.
But now the face had gold on it.
The chains lay across the stranger's chest in a way that looked, there was no other word, right. Like they had always been there. The armlets sat on his upper arms with quiet authority. The waist piece framed his torso in a way that made the whole silhouette look deliberate and composed and very slightly devastating. The small braids caught the light. The dark hair fell like a river. The veil moved softly in the room's small breeze.
Arnav looked at all of this, and then thought, with the specific reluctance of a man who did not want to admit something even inside his own head:
He looks stunning.
A pause.
I look stunning.
Another pause.
This is profoundly confusing.
He broke eye contact with his own reflection and stared firmly at the floor.
"Young Lord?" Lead asked.
"I'm fine," he said immediately.
He was not fine. He was a dead man from Pune in a stranger's beautiful face and an amount of gold that represented more money than he had ever owned, about to be married to someone he had never met, and he had just accidentally noticed that he was attractive, which was somehow the most disorienting problem he had at this specific moment despite being objectively the least important one.
He breathed.
Information. Focus on information.
He turned his attention back to the attendants, who had moved on while he was busy having a crisis about his own reflection.
"...the Siren bloodline has not sent a representative to the Dragon court in over sixty years," Quiet was saying quietly to the third. "There are those who do not remember what it means."
"They will be reminded," Lead said, with a confidence that suggested she found this pleasing.
"The Dragon court scholars have been reviewing the old treaties. They know what a Siren of the royal bloodline is capable of." A pause. "The question is whether he knows."
The third attendant made a small sound — somewhere between a laugh and a sigh.
"He is young," she said. "He has time to learn."
"He has until midmorning," Lead said, with perfect practicality.
The door opened before he could fully absorb that.
A new woman stepped through — older than the attendants, dressed in deeper blue, carrying the bearing of someone with official weight. She swept her gaze across the room, landed on him, and gave a short satisfied nod.
"Good," she said briskly. "The preparation is well advanced." She consulted a small rolled paper, then tucked it into her sleeve. "The Dragon court's advance party arrived an hour ago. The High Witnesses are in the ceremony hall. The binding ritual materials have been verified." She looked at him directly. "If the Siren Prince is ready, the marriage ceremony may begin."
The Siren Prince.
The words landed somewhere strange and significant, the way words do when they are meant for you but you have never heard them before. He turned them over once.
He had known the word siren in his old life — Greek mythology, beautiful creatures who sat on rocks and sang ships to their deaths. He had known them as women. As water. As something that had nothing to do with him.
But these people were saying it like it was his title.
Like it was what he was.
And suddenly the ocean-blue eyes in the mirror made a different kind of sense. And the way this room smelled — like deep water and open sea, even here behind stone walls. And the hair that moved like something with its own current. And the voice, which he had barely used since waking but which had felt, even in panic, like it carried more weight than it should.
Siren.
He didn't know yet what that meant — what it could do, what it demanded, what it cost.
He had a feeling he was about to find out whether he was ready or not.
The official woman was waiting.
He looked at his hands. At the gold chains shifting as he breathed. At the warm brown skin underneath, glowing in a way it never had before. He looked at the mirror one last time.
The stranger looked back. Beautiful and composed, wrapped in silk the color of deep water, veil moving softly like the surface of the sea.
Only forward, he thought.
And then, quieter — from the part of himself that had spent thirty-one years skipping meals and promising that comfort was something that came later, after, eventually:
I am going to live. Not just survive this. I am going to live, and it is going to be a good life.
He didn't know how yet. But he had made the decision.
And Arnav had always been someone who kept the promises he made to himself.
He stood.
The gold settled against his skin. The veil shifted and fell. The chains caught the light and held it.
"Yes," he said quietly. "I'm ready."