The great hall of Castle Târgoviște was a mausoleum of silence, the air dense with the weight of ghosts unspoken and truths denied. The shattered mirror lay scattered like a constellation of jagged stars across the cold stone floor, each shard catching the flicker of firelight from the distant hearth. The fractured reflections mocked him, showing glimpses of a face and a form that did not belong—an amalgamation of identities he could not reconcile.

Nauthiz sat naked on the edge of the long banquet table, his fur-lined cloak cast aside like the discarded remnants of a life he refused to claim. His broad shoulders slumped forward, the musculature of his new form taut with tension and something darker—something unspoken. His breaths came shallow and uneven, the rise and fall of his chest betraying the tempest within.

His glowing eyes, twin embers in the dim room, fixed on his hands as though they belonged to someone else. He turned them over, tracing the rough callouses and blunt strength that had replaced the slender delicacy he remembered. They were not her hands. They could never be. And yet, the memory of their touch haunted him, a phantom sensation lingering at the edges of his consciousness.

“She’s gone,” he murmured, his voice hoarse, as though speaking the words might make them true. But even as he said it, his fingers curled into fists, trembling with the weight of denial. “She’s gone, and I’m what’s left.”

His gaze dropped to his chest, the broad expanse of muscle and sinew alien beneath his own scrutiny. It was a body built for war, for dominance—a form that radiated power but felt hollow, bereft of the softness he once knew. It was her absence that defined it, her ghost woven into the fibers of his being.

Slowly, hesitantly, his hands began to roam, tracing the contours of his chest and abdomen. The motion was deliberate, almost reverent, as though searching for some thread of familiarity in the foreign landscape of his flesh. His touch lingered, his breath catching as his fingers ghosted lower, brushing over the undeniable proof of his transformation.

It was there, undeniable and unyielding—a symbol of everything he had gained and everything he had lost. His hand hovered for a moment, trembling, before he let it settle, his fingers curling around the heat of his own form. A shiver ran through him, sharp and electric, as though the act itself was an invocation of something forbidden.

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“She’s gone,” he said again, his voice thick with desperation, the words a prayer and a curse. His movements were tentative at first, exploratory, as though testing the boundaries of this borrowed body. Heat bloomed beneath his touch, the cold of the room retreating as sensation began to take hold.

It wasn’t pleasure he sought—not entirely. It was something deeper, more primal—a reclaiming of power over the flesh that felt more like a prison than a home. His strokes grew firmer, more deliberate, his breath quickening as his head fell back. The firelight danced across his skin, illuminating the tension etched into every line of his body.

Yet with every motion, her presence loomed larger. She was there, in the fractured mirror, in the aching hollows of his chest, in the trembling of his own hands. Her grief, her sorrow, her love—it all clung to him like a second skin, suffocating and inescapable.

The tension coiled within him broke like a wave, crashing against the hollow shore of his soul. His grip tightened, the friction of his hand a futile mimicry of something that once felt natural, intimate—alive. His body responded, yes, but only in the mechanical way of a clockwork creature, gears turning without a spark to drive them. The warmth that flickered within him felt stolen, artificial, a cruel parody of the fire that had once burned freely in her—the fire that was hers, and hers alone. As his strokes quickened, his breath hitched, the fragile illusion that he might reclaim even a shadow of that passion shattered like the mirror on the floor. The rise of heat turned to ice, the crescendo of sensation faltering into a hollow silence that left him gasping for air and drowning in absence. No release came, only the aching, empty reminder that what he sought had been buried with her.

His pace faltered, frustration surging through him like a tide. His free hand clawed at the edge of the table, the sharp wood biting into his palm as his voice rose in a snarl. “Why won’t you leave me?” he hissed, his glowing eyes snapping open, ablaze with an unearthly light. His chest heaved as he glared into the darkness, his grip tightening in defiance.

“You’re dead!” he roared, the words echoing off the stone walls, their force reverberating through the hollow chamber. “You’re gone!”

But the silence that followed was deafening. No matter how fiercely he tried to drown her out, she was there, as much a part of him as the blood that now sustained his immortal form. The act, far from exorcising her ghost, only solidified her presence, her memory entwined with his every breath, his every motion.

His hand fell away, trembling, as he doubled over, his forehead pressing against the cool surface of the table. The fire at the end of the hall crackled softly, indifferent to his struggle, as he whispered one last, broken plea into the void:

“Why can’t I be free?”