She was nameless, a shadow among the marble pillars, a body to be used and forgotten. The king did not see her, not truly. To him, she was nothing more than flesh adorned in bruises, a thing to command, to break, to discard when her usefulness faded. The court whispered of her suffering, but no one intervened. Mercy was a phantom in this place, and she had long since ceased to believe in salvation.
The nights were the worst. The weight of the king pressed upon her like the inevitability of time, his breath heavy with wine and the scent of rotting indulgence. She had forgotten what it was to dream, for dreams were cruelty when waking was torment. The palace, with all its splendor, was nothing more than a gilded cage, and she was its trembling prisoner.
Then, on a night thick with the storm, Eve came.
She arrived not as a conqueror, not as a savior of legend, but as a woman burdened by the sins of an age long past. Her presence was soft, her voice a whisper against the wind, yet it carried the weight of millennia. The girl, broken and shamed, looked upon Eve with hollow eyes, expecting another cruelty, another command. Instead, Eve knelt beside her and traced a single symbol upon her wrist—the ouroboros, the serpent devouring its tail, an endless cycle of suffering and rebirth.
"You are seen," Eve murmured. "You are real."
The girl wept, not because she believed, but because she had forgotten what it was to hear words that did not wound.
But Eve had not come alone.
From the darkness beyond the palace walls, a shadow moved—a force shaped by wrath, tempered by sorrow. Cain. The cursed son. The executioner of empires. He had walked the world in silence, a witness to its ruin, a harbinger of justice without mercy. Where Eve had sought to ease suffering, Cain sought to end those who caused it.
The king awoke to fire. His palace, once a monument to his might, was consumed in the embrace of hungry flames. The cries of his guards were swallowed by the roar of destruction. And amidst the chaos, Cain strode through the inferno, his presence a specter of vengeance.
The king, adorned in silk and arrogance, staggered from his chambers, eyes wide with disbelief. He had built his throne upon the backs of the broken, believing himself untouchable. But Cain was not of this world, not bound by its laws. He was the blade that severed corruption, the storm that tore down false idols.
"Who dares—?" the king began, but his words died in his throat as Cain stepped forward, his gaze hollow, his hands slick with the blood of men who had called themselves rulers.
"The cycle ends," Cain said, his voice an echo of something ancient, something final.
The girl watched from the shadows as the king fell. Not with a scream, not with a curse, but with the quiet realization that he had never been divine, that he had never been anything more than a man who believed himself above consequence.
The fire swallowed his throne. The walls crumbled. The kingdom ceased to be.
At the edge of the burning empire, the girl turned. She saw Eve standing beneath the smoke-stained sky, her face etched with sorrow, her body frail from the weight of ages. And beside her, Cain—the cursed son, the destroyer, and the savior—stood like a monolith against the night, his duty fulfilled.
She took Cain's hand, not out of fear, not out of obligation, but because she understood now. The ouroboros had turned. The cycle had ended. And in the ashes of what was, something new could begin.