The city of Ilyrion simmered with unrest.

Beneath its gilded towers and enchanted lamplight, the backstreets ran dark with whispers and dissent. The zealot faction had their fingers in every crumbling corner of the kingdom now, fanning the flames of revolution with myth and blood. And at the heart of this quiet war walked Nox Drayven, one more ghost in a city teetering toward collapse.

Tonight, he waited in the ruins of a forgotten watchtower, high above the city’s sleeping face. A small, robed figure stood before him -- the latest in a long line of messengers sent by the Head of the zealots. Nox could tell nothing of their identity: their voice was muffled, their frame obscured, their magic heavy and slick with protection. But their scent was wrong -- too clean. Noble, perhaps. Or someone who wanted to pretend.

The messenger spoke first. "The Viscountess is dead?”

Nox didn’t answer immediately. He simply pulled a pendant from his cloak -- a delicate chain with a family crest crusted in crimson. He let it dangle in the dim light, swinging slightly like a metronome. His flat tone matched the sluggish swings as he finally said, "Her throat was slit, as was requested. Two guards had to be dispatched as well."

The messenger gave a slow nod, hands disappearing into the folds of their sleeves. “Then the pattern is intact. You have proven yourself thus far."

Nox’s eyes narrowed. “You have another name.”

"We do. But this one… was not meant to be difficult. An easier mark, a political message. Alas, our own people's attempts have all been unsuccessful."

The messenger raised a hand, and from their cloak they drew a sealed scroll pressed between two runes -- a warning charm, by the looks of it, and likely one that would ignite if tampered with.

“You’ll want to read this somewhere safer. The target is Princess Rosalie Harper.”

Silence thickened the air. Nox’s brow twitched slightly. “The heir?"

“Yes. Charismatic. Well-loved. And more importantly, she survived your predecessor.”

Nox’s gaze sharpened. So, they'd called him back for a cleanup. Rosalie was a loose thread, a missed mark, and a threat to the lunatic's grabs for power. However, as ditzy as the zealots seemed, they had undoubtedly killed the last assassin they'd hired after at least one failure. Nox had no qualms being the harbringer of Death, but he wasn't quite in the mood to fall into its embrace.

“I’ll make sure she doesn’t do it twice,” he said coldly, and vanished into the dark before the messenger could reply.

----

The scroll had contained a roughly drawn blueprint of the castle in which his next target resided. The princess’s chambers were guarded only lightly; the castle had grown lax, trusting in its walls, its wards, and its titles. Nox had scaled the eastern tower, bypassed the illusion traps, slipped between sentries like mist. He was inside the castle before midnight. By the third bell, he stood in what had been labeled as the princess’s private quarters.

The room smelled even cleaner than the messenger, though this place matched the scent. A small candle burned beside the window, illuminating a pile of books. Her boots were at the foot of the bed, carelessly tossed. The girl herself was sound asleep, curled on her side, one arm tucked beneath her head. Freckles dotted her face, and her brow furrowed slightly in her sleep, as if she were dreaming of a fight she couldn’t win.

Nox stepped forward, blade drawn. His breath was measured, his footsteps silent. All he needed was one thrust to the throat. One twist. No sound. But just as he raised his arm, she rolled sharply, knocking a half-filled mug of ink off the nightstand. It shattered. She jolted upright.

Their eyes locked. Whoever this was, she was not Rosalie Harper, and whoever had drawn the map, they were an idiot.

For a moment, neither the young woman nor the assassin moved. Her mouth parted to scream, but Nox was already lunging forward -- not to kill, but to silence. She twisted away. The knife caught her shoulder instead of her neck, and blood spattered the sheets. She cried out, her voice echoing down the halls with a frantic, "Rosalie, run!" The castle erupted into motion, wards flaring, bells ringing, and voices shouting in the halls.

Nox didn’t finish the job.

He turned and leapt through the window into the cold air of night, cloak billowing behind him. Arrows sang as they zipped past his ears, causing Nox to forfeit any safety measures in the name of getting down the wall faster. The fall was steep, and he landed hard -- too hard. Pain shot up his leg. Something was sprained, maybe fractured. He limped into the shadows, clutching his side where an arrow had grazed him during the escape.

The guardhouse nearby was an old stone building where the off-duty guards smoked, gambled, and occasionally slept. Nox slunk beneath the overhang, pressing his back to the wall just outside an open window.

Inside, two guards were mid-argument.

“We’re short again. We lost three in the last damned week.”

Nox’s ears perked. His expression shifted. That spark — the one that always preceded a shift in strategy — lit behind his eyes.

“Servants,” he whispered. No shadows. No rooftops. No blood on silk sheets. No wrong targets. Not this time. No, he would become one of them, a nameless face in the castle halls. An invisible hand serving wine, lighting candles, sweeping floors until the moment he could strike again.

The guards inside were called to arms as the alarm spread across the keep. They rose with curses and clattering steel, shouting to each other that the princess had been attacked. By the time they spilled out into the courtyard, Nox was already gone, swallowed into the veins of the slums, where beggars and firebrands slept and none asked questions.

He would need a new name, a new face, a wound stitched closed, and a forged letter of service. And time.

This hunt wasn’t over. It was just beginning.

The forest was quiet in the hours before dawn, when the moon was at its apex and the crickets had stilled, as if the trees themselves were holding their breath. Nox limped through the underbrush, his cloak snagging on brambles, his boot soaking in blood from a torn ankle. His breath came in tight pulls. Not from pain -- he was too used to that -- but from restraint. The rage hadn’t come yet, though it waited like a hound on a leash. Rage at the false map. Rage at the noble girl he’d stabbed. Rage at the fact that for once, he had left someone alive. That wasn’t like him.

He had spent the night in a hidden lean-to nestled into a hillside and covered in old brush and sod. A place he had built months ago, for emergencies like this one. Inside, he stitched his leg, wrapped his ribs, and stared into the silence until the sun began its slow crawl over the treetops.

By the time light touched the tips of the trees, Nox had already broken camp. His destination lay deeper in the forest, past crumbling stone markers long since swallowed by ivy, and deeper still into territory no map dared mark. There, he found a crooked shack half buried in moss and roots, and smoke curling from a stone chimney. The old witch was waiting.

“You limp like an old man,” she said, not looking up from her cauldron. “What did I tell you about escaping rooftops instead of dealing with your problems like the rest of us?”

Nox didn’t smile. “I did deal with it. Then it screamed.”

She snorted and beckoned him in. “Let me see the wound.”

He obeyed. She pressed gnarled fingers to his side, muttering old words beneath her breath. Her magic was older than the Kingdom, drawn not from glowing sigils or flashy runes, but from roots and blood and the bones of the earth. It was subtle, almost inaudible to magical sensors, and that was precisely why he had sought her out again.

As she worked, he unrolled the scroll from his cloak -- the one she had prepared on his last visit -- and laid it on the table. Ink shimmered faintly, the runes older than most remembered how to read.

“This will change your face,” she said, not looking up. “Eyes, hair, your posture too if you let it. Your bones will ache. Your magic, if you still bother with it, will be dulled for a day or two while the transformation settles.”

“I don’t need it.”

“You never need anything,” she muttered. “Except apparently me, every time a job goes sideways.”

He didn’t argue. He never did with her.

She gestured to the vial beside the scroll. “It’ll hold until you either take the reversal tonic or bleed enough life out that your body gives up the pretense. Your old face will come back like rot if that happens. Anyway- mask the potion's magic with your own brews in the meantime. Mine hum quiet, but they still hum.”

Nox nodded once and took the vial, throwing it back at once to get it over with. The potion burned like fire down his throat. For a moment, he thought it might kill him, but then the burning tunneled outward, through his lungs and chest and jaw and skull, like he was being pulled apart and stitched back together with new thread. His vision blurred, and his ears rang loud enough to mute his gasps. His skin felt tight, then loose, then tight again.

When it passed, the reflection in the witch’s polished silver mirror showed someone else.

Brown eyes. Dark auburn hair, wavier than his own and curled at the ends from too many humid summers. The scar beneath his left eye was gone, replaced with a faint line across his brow and another across the bridge of his nose like it had once been broken. His jawline was still lean, but softened. Unassuming. The kind of man who might work in a stable, not slit a throat in the dark.

“Convincing,” he said, voice raspier now.

“You’re welcome.”

He left without saying goodbye.

--

The castle was abuzz with repairs, patrols, and tightened security, though the latter seemed to have been built up by the children whose jobs Nox intended to steal. Banners still fluttered from the towers, but the mood in the walls was frayed, uneasy. Nox walked past two guards at the outer stables with a slight limp and a folded letter of recommendation. He looked up once, making sure not to meet their eyes, and offered a polite, deferential nod.

They didn’t even glance twice.

By midday, he was standing in the stone-walled servant’s office, the letter open in the head steward’s wrinkled hands.

“Mr. Nox Errisson... Stable hand, hmm?” the old man muttered, squinting at the page. “You’re not built for mucking stalls, lad. Looks like you could carry the damned horses yourself.”

Nox smiled sheepishly. “Worked with my uncle in a farm outside Merrowind. I just need a roof and steady coin.”

“Hrmph. You’ll get both, along with shit under your nails and a bad back by the end of the month.”

The man stamped the letter and waved him off. “I'll put you down in the east stables. Find our Head of Household. She’ll show you where to sleep. And keep your nose clean. You so much as look at a noble’s daughter the wrong way, I’ll have you out faster than a gelding on fire.”

Nox gave a respectful nod and left.

As he passed through the stone corridors, he did not lift his eyes to the noble tapestries, nor glance at the soldiers posted every few feet. He carried a bucket, a brush, and a limp, and wore a new face like armor. He was no longer the assassin in the tower; now, he was no one. And soon, he would be close enough to fix the mistake he had made.