Nocturne for the Lost Sun by Chrysalis Veil

The Castle of the Crying Stones

In the crumbling, once-prosperous port city of Valerian, Romania, autumn did not arrive with a gentle sigh, but with a season of decay that mirrored the slow fading of Liam Valerius within the damp-stained walls of his family's townhouse.

Eléonore Valerius, his elder sister desperate to find a cure for her brother's illness in the city's medical circles. She had dragged her hope from one physician's office to another, her hems stained with the mud of the bustling, indifferent streets. The answers were always the same, delivered with a helpless shrug. It was not the plague. It was not a common fever. It was a strange and gradual weakness, stealing his strength for no clear reason. Her brother wasn't dying from a known sickness; he was just fading away. Each day was a battle against the inevitable. Eléonore struggled to manage the household, her brother's care, and the slow erosion of their finances, all while watching the light in Liam's eyes grow fainter.

Liam's soul was once of ink-stained fingers and whispered sonnets to the Carpathian mist. Now, the pen lay too heavy in his hand. The vibrant world he once dreamed of capturing was reduced to the four walls of his sickroom, the rhythm of his verses replaced by the ragged, shuddering cadence of his breath and to simply wake up and be able to stand at the window without the world turning grey at the edges.

His fever was a constant, malevolent presence, and a cold seemed to have settled deep within his bones, a chill no fire could ever hope to thaw. For Eléonore, the greatest horror was not the sickness itself, but the silence of medicine in the face of it. No one knew what was happening to him, and in that void of knowledge, a terrifying and final conclusion began to take root.

In its guttering light, Liam's face was the colour of old parchment. A sheen of sweat clung to his brow, though he shivered beneath a mountain of quilts.

"The draught, El?" His voice was a thread, barely audible over the spit and crackle of the logs.

"Here." She supported his head, her hand steady despite the tremor in her heart.

The vessel of bitter-smelling tea—a futile concoction of yarrow and feverfew—met his lips. He swallowed with a wince, his throat working painfully. Each of his swallows was a small, agonizing victory. She watched the fragile column of his neck, the skin so thin she could trace the frantic, struggling pulse beneath.

As she laid him back, her own reflection shimmered in the night-darkened window pane: a ghost with fiery hair and a face etched with a weariness that had settled deep into her bones. At twenty-two, she felt decades older.

"The physician came while you were gathering herbs," Liam whispered, his eyes closed. "He said... he said to make me comfortable."

Comfortable. A polite, useless word for dying. Eléonore's jaw tightened. She would not accept polite. She would not accept useless.

"Physicians see only what their dusty books tell them to see," she said, her voice firm despite the lump in her throat.

She smoothed the damp hair from his forehead. "They don't know everything." His eyes, too large now in his gaunt face, fluttered open. They held a poet's dreamy clarity, even now. "There's a frost coming. I can feel it in the air. You should bank the fire."

She merely nodded, her attention caught by the book lying open on her bedside table. It was not one of her modern medical texts, but her late mother's journal, its pages filled with a frantic, beautiful script and unsettling botanical illustrations. It had been her mother's life's work, a study of maladies that polite society refused to name. Eléonore's fingers, stained green from crushing leaves, traced a particular passage she had decoded just that morning.