The doctor who examined Juliet declared it simple exhaustion. The fever would break on its own, he assured them, once she rested properly.
But the next day, the fever had not subsided. If anything, it burned hotter.
Isaac and Helen exchanged glances — the kind that required no words — and their expressions hardened into something grim.
"Well — before we draw any conclusions, it may be best to wait another day and observe whether the young lady's condition improves," the doctor offered when he was summoned back to the carriage, his confidence visibly thinner than it had been the day before.
Juliet did her best to ease their worry.
"Everything is fine. Please don't fuss — I'll feel better tomorrow."
She knew her own body. These fevers were not new to her. They rose without warning and without apparent cause, blazed for a day or two, and then vanished as mysteriously as they'd arrived. She'd lived with them for years.
But although no one voiced their concern aloud, the eyes that watched her told a different story. Every gaze that fell on Juliet carried a weight that words were too careful to bear.
They came in shifts throughout the day — Helen, Isaac, Gray, guild members she barely knew — each one finding a reason to check on her, to refill her water, to adjust her blankets, to linger a moment longer than necessary at her bedside.
The last visitor of the day was Ethelid.
---
He sat beside her in silence for a long moment, studying her face with an intensity that had nothing to do with bedside manner. Then he lowered his voice deliberately.
"Is it because of the butterflies?"
"No."
Juliet laughed — a thin, fragile sound.
It was the first time Ethelid had mentioned her abilities since he'd witnessed her confront the serpent in the dungeon. He'd been careful until now. Patient. But curiosity, it seemed, had finally won.
"This has been happening long before I could summon anything."
"It sounds like a divine fever," Ethelid said quietly, his eyes narrowing.
"A divine fever?"
"You've never heard of it?"
He chuckled — a low, knowing sound — and continued with a faintly teasing edge.
"That strikes me as odd, Miss Juliet. You command spirits I've never encountered before, you seem remarkably comfortable with the Lycan people of the Silver Forest, and yet you've never heard of a divine fever? I'd assumed you knew *everything*."
"Is it really so entertaining to sit at a sick person's bedside and make sarcastic observations?"
When Juliet grumbled, Ethelid shrugged — entirely unapologetic — and continued.
"Whenever a priest in the temple exhibits symptoms like yours, it causes a great commotion. You know that the temple's clergy possess divine power, yes? Well, some among them believe these fevers are a manifestation of that power — a sign that it's awakening, or surging, or changing." He paused. "A kind of sacred gift, if you will."
*A gift.*
Juliet said nothing, turning the idea over in the quiet of her mind.
Divine power and magical power. Two forces that existed in perpetual opposition — like oil and water, like flame and frost. It was precisely this fundamental incompatibility that made priests and wizards so deeply uncomfortable in each other's presence.
"But as far as I'm aware," Ethelid continued, his tone shifting from casual to clinical, "you have no connection to the temple, Miss Juliet. And to summon a spirit — or a demon — one must possess *magical* power. Which means your illness cannot be a divine fever." He leaned back, studying her. "So what is it?"
"...Do you think *I* know?"
Juliet's voice trembled — just slightly. At the same time, a cold awareness surfaced in the back of her mind: *he is a wizard of the Magic Tower.*
This man, driven by nothing more than intellectual curiosity, would drag her into some lightless basement and dissect her like a bird pinned to a board without a single twinge of conscience.
"Are you certain it isn't connected to your spirit?" Ethelid pressed, his expression skeptical. He could sense that she hadn't been entirely honest.
"No. I promise you — it isn't."
Juliet yawned softly and began adjusting the pillows beneath her head — a delicate, wordless signal that the conversation was ending and sleep was being invited in.
"How can you be sure?"
"Because..."
She tapped the pillow once, settling it to the right height.
"This has been happening since early childhood. Long before I could summon butterflies."
Another yawn. Her words grew slow, blurred at the edges by encroaching sleep.
"It started after I had something like measles — or chickenpox. One of those illnesses only children catch."
"...But that's an infectious disease."
"Regardless. The fevers started after that. Rising for no reason. No pattern. No explanation."
The drowsiness was becoming irresistible — the fever reducer she'd taken earlier pulling her under like a warm, heavy tide. Ethelid's persistent questioning, which had been merely irritating, now felt like a mosquito buzzing at the edge of unconsciousness.
Juliet raised a limp hand in a gesture that clearly meant *leave*.
Ethelid paused. Then, just before rising from his seat, he leaned forward one last time.
"Miss Juliet."
"*What?*"
"I don't mean to be intrusive. But I feel obligated to tell you this, because I'm genuinely concerned."
*If you don't want to seem intrusive,* Juliet thought, her eyes already half-closed, *then stop talking.*
"Among wizards who practice spirit summoning," Ethelid said carefully, "it is extraordinarily rare to find those who can also manipulate the mind. Illusion magic — true illusion magic — is something else entirely."
"Yes... I know..."
The whisper was barely audible. Her eyes had closed.
"Miss Juliet?"
Silence.
Her breathing had steadied into the deep, even rhythm of sleep.
Ethelid regarded her for a long, unreadable moment. Then he rose, crossed the carriage in two quiet steps, and eased the door shut behind him.
---
## — Ethelid —
The smile vanished from his face the instant the door clicked closed.
*Spirit summoner?*
In truth, Ethelid had doubted Juliet's identity from the moment they met. Something about her had never quite aligned — the way she moved, the things she knew, the careful precision with which she concealed herself.
Now, standing alone in the cooling night air, a name drifted unbidden into his thoughts, and a chill crawled down his spine. Sweat prickled across his palms.
*No. It can't be her.*
Juliet Montague.
It was obvious she had never encountered another spirit summoner. If she had, she wouldn't have been so calm — so dangerously, naively *calm* — about what she could do.
*Phantom Butterfly.*
The words echoed in his skull like a struck bell.
*This isn't fair.*
Very few summoners in recorded history had mastered the art in its true form. And yet Juliet — this girl, barely twenty-five, with no formal training he could identify — hadn't merely summoned a single spirit. She had summoned *dozens*. She had multiplied them freely, effortlessly, as though pulling threads from an infinite spool.
The moment he'd watched a cascade of phantom butterflies pour from her fingertips in that cave, Ethelid had bitten down on his own tongue hard enough to draw blood — the only way to keep the shock from reaching his face.
*This is a scam.*
If he hadn't witnessed it himself — if someone had merely *described* it to him — he would have dismissed it as fantasy. Impossible. A lie.
But he *had* witnessed it. And the implications terrified him.
The art of summoning was, at its foundation, the act of forging a contract with a being from another dimension — borrowing its power or authority in exchange for the summoner's mana. Unlike wizards, who relied entirely on their own reserves, a summoner needed only enough mana to open the door and maintain the connection. The summoned creature supplied the rest.
Simple in theory. Nightmarish in practice.
In reality, only an infinitesimal fraction of people possessed the unique mana wavelength required to open a multidimensional gate. The vast majority of self-proclaimed summoners throughout history had been frauds — charlatans who used a dangerous trick to simulate the ability.
The trick involved forcibly implanting fragments of sacred relics — objects imbued with divine power — into their own bodies, artificially disrupting their mana wavelength to mimic the frequency needed to crack open a door.
Most of them died in the attempt.
And for the rare, lucky soul who survived — who managed to pry open a gate and not be destroyed by the process — the difficulties had only just begun. The next challenge was determining *what* lay beyond the threshold. What manner of creature answered when you knocked.
They were called spirits for convenience. In truth, they were beings that existed outside dimensional boundaries — entities with no allegiance to human morality or comprehension.
They came in infinite varieties. Some were small, almost whimsical — a lizard that could kindle a modest flame, a songbird that could carry messages on the wind. Others were catastrophic — sea monsters capable of dragging a warship to the ocean floor in minutes.
But Ethelid had *never* — in all his years at the Tower, in all his research, in every text and testimony and firsthand account he'd ever studied — heard of a spirit that could enter a living mind and fill it with visions of terror, feeding on the fear it created.
Mind manipulation was a domain of magic that even the Tower's highest-ranking wizards refused to touch. Not out of inability — out of *fear*. Every recorded attempt had ended the same way.
Madness. Then death.
And yet this girl — twenty-five years old, untrained, *smiling* — wielded it as casually as breathing.
Ethelid's skin prickled with gooseflesh that had nothing to do with the night air.
*This is not a spirit.*
The temple's classification surfaced in his mind — the word they used for entities that defied all known categories, that operated beyond the boundaries of what summoning theory could explain.
*Wouldn't it be more accurate to call this creature a demon?*
---
## — A Summer She Couldn't Forget —
Juliet's consciousness drifted in a warm, formless haze — suspended somewhere between dream and memory, unable to distinguish one from the other.
Voices reached her from far away, then faded. The carriage swayed gently beneath her. And gradually, without resistance, she sank into the past.
---
It was a memory of summer.
As she'd told Ethelid, these fevers visited her regularly — unwelcome guests on an annual schedule. She was not frail by nature, but once a year, without fail, a temperature would rise like a tide. A mild cold, nothing more. Two days, perhaps three, and it would pass.
But last summer, the malaise had been different.
---
"We're going back."
That year's summer holiday ended before it had even begun — cut short by his fury over an uninvited guest.
Returning to the ducal palace, Lennox left Juliet the moment they arrived and went hunting. No explanation. No backward glance. Just the sharp finality of a door closing — not in her face, but worse: past her, as though she weren't there at all.
While the servants bustled through the halls, unpacking trunks and restoring the palace to order, Juliet sat alone in the corridor.
Perfectly still. Perfectly quiet.
Like a piece of luggage that no one had remembered to carry upstairs.
*Was I the one who brought him a child?*
It hadn't been her fault. She knew that. And yet the punishment had found her anyway — not delivered in words or blows, but in the vast, echoing silence of a palace that felt emptier than any room she'd ever known.
*Why am I still here?*
She watched the servants collect the remaining bags from the hallway, their efficient movements a quiet rebuke to her own stillness.
*I knew this from the very beginning.*
She had known before the first night. Before the first kiss. Before the first time she'd allowed herself to believe that perhaps — *perhaps* — this story might end differently than she'd been told.
The brutal truth had always been the same. The ending would not change. It had never been hers to change.
***Did you expect something else, you fool?***
The voice in her head was cruel, and it was laughing.
Juliet's fingers tightened on the fabric of her skirt, knuckles whitening against the silk.
*It will be better for everyone. I've endured enough. I've earned the right to be free.*
*Leave this place. Don't look back. No regrets.*
She stood — abruptly, impulsively — as though the decision had been made by her body before her mind could intervene.
She ran to her room. Dropped to her knees beside the bed. Reached underneath and pulled out a small suitcase.
It had been there for a long time — packed, waiting, hidden. Prepared for exactly this day. The day she would finally run.
She tore open the dresser drawers one by one, gathered her few remaining belongings — the things that were truly *hers* and not gifts, not possessions tied to this place — and shoved them into the case. She changed her clothes. She snapped the clasps shut.
And then she ran down the steps of the ducal palace.
Dozens of times. Hundreds of times. She had rehearsed this moment in her mind for years — every step, every turn, every breath mapped out with the precision of someone who had been planning her escape since the day she arrived.
Everything happened exactly as she had imagined.
*Everything — except the fever.*
It struck without warning. One moment she was running; the next, the world tilted sideways, her vision dissolved into white heat, and her legs simply stopped obeying.
"***Young lady!***"
That was the last thing she heard.
After that — darkness. Complete, absolute, swallowing.
---
The next time Juliet opened her eyes, she was lying in a bed she recognized.
Familiar vines carved into the ceiling overhead. Dim, amber lighting that softened every edge. The faint scent of cedarwood and smoke.
His bedroom.
"You're finally awake."
The voice came from somewhere low — below the level of the bed. Juliet turned her head.
A man sat on the floor of his own bedroom, dressed in simple clothes, his long legs stretched out before him as though he'd been there for hours.
As though he'd been waiting.