**Flash!**
A bolt of lightning tore through the impenetrable darkness, flooding the forest with blinding white light for a single, violent heartbeat.
A sudden wind surged through the trees, ruffling the man's black hair and exposing his forehead—brows furrowed in stubborn concentration, eyes the color of cooling embers. Cold. Unblinking. *Red.*
Before him, a giant centipede reared to its full monstrous height, its severed head dangling by threads of sinew, body still twitching in its death throes.
**Bang!**
Lightning flashed again as the creature collapsed, its massive form crashing against the forest floor with a sound like falling timber. Lennox blinked slowly, deliberately—like a man surfacing from a dream.
Yet he felt no surprise at finding himself standing in the heart of a forest that breathed darkness and teemed with abominations.
His thoughts drifted, unbidden, to the woman who hated storms.
---
*"When will you be back?"*
The fact that Juliet feared thunderstorms was nearly impossible to detect.
For the simple reason that Juliet Montague was utterly fearless in all other respects—a woman who carried herself with glacial dignity and unwavering composure, as if confidence had been stitched into her very bones.
Moreover, in the North, violent storms were rare. Thunder and lightning visited those frozen lands perhaps once a year, arriving only in the brief summer months—and during that season, they always relocated to the summer palace.
So perhaps Juliet's memories of storms held horrors he knew nothing about. He could only account for what he himself had witnessed, after all.
The Duke who ruled the harsh northern territory was perpetually consumed by duty. He left her alone far more often than he stayed.
*"There's a storm approaching. So..."*
If she had asked him—just once—not to leave. If she had requested his company, or simply asked him to return sooner, he might have understood. But instead, she had only said:
*"Be careful..."*
That was all. She needed only to *tell* him, yet she remained stubbornly, infuriatingly silent. Not a single word of confession passed those guarded lips.
*How foolish...*
Her determination to hide this weakness irritated him in ways he couldn't fully articulate.
Despite her obvious dread of thunder and lightning, that stubborn woman had maintained her composure throughout their conversation, her expression carved from marble. And so, for all those years, he had remained utterly ignorant of her fear.
She likely didn't *want* anyone to know. Fear of storms was a childish thing—the terror of children who still believed shadows held teeth. A grown woman, a Duchess, admitting she couldn't bear to be alone on stormy nights? Unthinkable. Unacceptable.
And yet—Lennox *had* discovered her secret. Only recently.
He had returned early one stormy evening, arriving while darkness still pressed against the windows. He found Juliet curled on the floor beside the bed, knees drawn to her chest, a lamp burning steadfastly nearby. She had spent the entire night in that wretched position, the light her only companion against the howling sky.
"I'll turn off the light," he had said, carelessly, already moving toward it. "Otherwise you won't sleep well."
The moment darkness swallowed the room, he heard it—a small, sharp cry. Not quite fear. Closer to shock, as if the darkness itself had struck her.
*That* was when he understood.
The night her parents died, there had also been a storm.
Something about her desperate attempt to hide her terror stirred an unexpected tenderness in him. Her face had been pale as bone, yet she continued her futile performance—pretending normalcy, scrambling into bed, fidgeting beneath the covers like a restless child.
So he had pretended not to notice. He gave her that small mercy.
After that night, he sometimes wondered: what did Juliet do during storms when he wasn't there?
But he never asked.
Most likely, she simply left the lamp burning until dawn, waiting for the thunder to exhaust itself. Or perhaps she summoned the maids, filling the room with warm bodies and idle chatter to keep the loneliness at bay.
It wasn't something he needed to investigate further.
And truthfully? He hadn't *wanted* to know more.
---
**Flash!**
Lightning split the sky once more, and Lennox's gaze fell to his feet.
A white bone gleamed against the dark earth.
The wild grass was littered with them—dozens of pale, scattered remains that appeared human at first glance. But not all of these bones had once belonged to unfortunate travelers who'd wandered down the wrong path.
Some were the remnants of mutated creatures, twisted and corrupted by the forest's poisonous miasma.
Even the air here was venomous.
Strangely, this poison proved harmless to most animals. But its effects on humans varied wildly—for some, it induced vivid hallucinations, seductive and terrible as any drug. For others, it possessed peculiar medicinal properties that bordered on miraculous.
Few people knew these facts, but Lennox did. The North was riddled with mountains, and where there were mountains, there were corrupted forests. One of the Duke's knights' sacred duties was to cull the monsters that poisoned these lands—and to reduce the number of unfortunates who became addicted to the miasma's narcotic embrace.
Lennox had always been curious: what would it feel like to fall under the spell of hallucinations?
The corrupted forest's poison had never touched him. His body rejected it completely, as it rejected so many things.
*If my mind were susceptible,* he wondered, *what would I see?*
He had visited countless poisoned forests throughout his life. Never once had he glimpsed a spirit or a ghost.
---
Through the damp, curling fog, Lennox peered into the pitch-black depths of the forest.
And then—among the dark pillars of trees where nothing should exist—a smoky white shape materialized.
It began as formless mist, then gradually coalesced. Flowing hair. The soft curve of a dress. The rounded silhouette of a woman taking shape like a memory given flesh.
Soon he could see her clearly: a lone figure wandering through the darkness, her movements agitated, searching.
The silhouette was painfully familiar. So achingly clear that he felt he could simply reach out and *touch* her.
But Lennox did not smile.
*Absurd,* he thought. *I wished to see her, and so she appears.*
He couldn't determine whether this was a true hallucination or merely his imagination tormenting him.
The woman looked around with frightened eyes, her head turning frantically—and then her gaze found him.
The moment their eyes met, her expression transformed. Fear melted away, replaced by something that struck him like a blade to the chest: ***love***. Pure, radiant, deeper than anything he had ever seen on her face.
Before he could think, Lennox extended his empty hand toward the woman running to meet him.
*You came back...*
He truly believed, in that suspended moment, that Juliet had returned. That she was about to throw herself into his arms.
But the woman passed through him like smoke through fingers and continued running. When he turned, she had already vanished into the darkness.
---
**Flash!**
Lightning illuminated the forest again.
He saw her once more—barefoot now, her feet pale against the dark earth. But she was no longer alone. She clung tightly to a stranger, her body pressed against his, and her face... her face held no trace of fear.
She looked like the happiest person in the world.
On her lips shone that same radiant smile she had so rarely—*so painfully rarely*—shown him.
Still smiling at her secret lover, she wound her arms around his neck and kissed him with a hunger that suggested she had been starving for this moment. Then she rested her cheek against the mysterious man's chest, gazing up at him with shy, childlike wonder, and whispered:
*"We're going to have a baby."*
Those charming lips—the lips that had once belonged only to him, that had tasted so impossibly sweet—parted again:
*"So let's run away together."*
---
**Whoosh!**
His sword sang through the air, slashing blindly through the intertwined figures—but the blade struck something solid, sparking against resistance.
The instant Lennox saw those tiny sparks, recognition flared. He seized his bow in one fluid motion, nocked an arrow, drew the string taut, and released into the darkness.
**Thud.**
The monster crumpled onto the grass, an arrow buried in its throat.
It was a bronze deer—a lowly creature common to these woods. The only difference was its coloring: pure, unnatural white. But such mutations were unremarkable in corrupted territory.
The creature must have emerged from hiding after witnessing the centipede's death, believing the apex predator gone.
Lennox regarded the fallen body with flat indifference. Crimson blood pumped from the white deer's throat, vivid against its pale hide.
The hallucination had long since dissolved into mist. But the image of Juliet remained branded in his thoughts, refusing to fade.
*"This is not your child."*
Unlike the vision—which was nothing but poison and imagination—Juliet's escape and her parting words had been devastatingly real.
Under normal circumstances, he would have questioned such a statement immediately. He rarely lost his composure; his mind was a fortress.
But this time, shock had breached his defenses. His thoughts had scattered like startled birds, unable to recognize the lie hiding in plain sight.
He hadn't given himself time to *think*. He simply accepted her words as truth, because he had believed—foolishly, blindly—that she would always remain by his side. The possibility that she might leave him first had never once entered his calculations.
***Damn it.***
It was nothing but a ploy. A desperate gambit to make him hesitate.
Lennox's handsome features twisted into something cruel—lips curling with disdain, eyes hardening to polished stone.
He could have stopped her with laughable ease. A single extended hand, and she would have been his again. Those pathetic butterfly illusions held no power over him; Juliet's magic had never worked on his body.
But in that moment, he had frozen.
Because of her *tears*.
It was the first time he had ever seen Juliet cry. In all their years together, she had never once wept before him.
---
**Clink.**
He withdrew the necklace from his cloak pocket—the gift he had intended for her, the treasure he still carried everywhere.
His fingers closed around it with savage force.
The magnificent piece was called "Tears of the Sun," a legendary jewel worth the price of ten noble mansions.
But Juliet had fled without taking anything. Not a single coin, not a single gem. As if everything connected to him—no matter how precious, how beautiful—had become something poisonous. Something she couldn't bear to let remind her of his existence.
The white deer gave one final, feeble twitch, the arrow still quivering in its ruined throat. Then it lay still, and its breathing ceased.
*Maybe I liked her,* Lennox thought, his mind finally cooling to something resembling clarity.
But he did not yet realize that he was hoping for something he himself had never given Juliet.
---
## — At the Forest's Edge —
"Sir..."
Hardin waited at the entrance to the black forest, holding the horses' reins with practiced steadiness. But when the Duke emerged from the trees, the knight's composure cracked.
Hardin was a son of the southern territories—dark-skinned, sharp-eyed, commander of an elite force loyal only to the Duke. His devotion was absolute; he executed every order without question or hesitation.
Yet even he shuddered at the sight before him.
The Duke emerged like a specter of war, drenched head to toe in monster blood, dragging the white deer's corpse behind him by one antler. He bore not a single scratch.
"Listen, sir..."
Hardin forced his gaze away from the dead creature, his mouth working awkwardly around the words.
Delivering news to the Duke was not his responsibility—that duty belonged to Elliot, the secretary, or at minimum the household servants. But circumstances had stripped away all others. Only Hardin remained at his master's side.
"Some time ago, I received an urgent message from the imperial palace." He swallowed. "The lake has turned red."
In the capital, beside the imperial palace, lay a sacred lake. Access was restricted to a select few—royalty, high priests, the most trusted advisors.
The lake appeared ordinary at first glance: small, unremarkable, its waters still and dark. But it was considered divine for one terrible reason.
It predicted catastrophe.
Once every few decades—sometimes centuries—the waters would flush crimson. And whenever this occurred, disaster followed swiftly, inevitably.
This time, the omen had appeared the very morning after the grand New Year's celebrations.
Small wonder the Emperor had dispatched a midnight messenger to the Duke of Carlisle.
"Your Mightiness?"
But Lennox Carlisle, who had carelessly tossed his kill to the ground and was now methodically wiping dried blood from his hands, showed no interest in omens or imperial anxieties.
He dragged the back of his hand across his chin, smearing crimson, and lifted his gaze to meet Hardin's.
When he spoke, his voice was flat. Precise. Utterly cold.
"Where is the Earl of Montague's mansion located?"