The palace always felt cold, but today the chill was different. It clung to Kuro's skin like a warning. The throne room doors loomed before him, carved with scenes of conquest and fire, his father's victories, his father's myths. He stepped inside after the journey of two days.
King Ryo Oji sat upon the obsidian throne, still as a statue, but the air around him vibrated with restrained fury. His eyes, sharp, calculating, tracked Kuro's every movement.
"So," Ryo said softly, dangerously. "My son returns from his... excursions."
Kuro bowed his head. "Father"
"Silence."
The word cracked through the hall like a whip. Servants flinched. Ryo rose slowly, each step echoing with the weight of a man, who believed the world itself bowed beneath him.
"My spies tell me," he said, circling Kuro like a predator, "that you have shown kindness." He spat the word as if it were poison. "To a boy in private going against the image, I've curated for you."
Kuro's breath caught. Who was the spy?
"You are an Oji," Ryo hissed. "Kindness is weakness. Weakness is treason. And you know what happens to those who betray the image I have built."
Kuro said nothing. He knew better this wasn't the first 'correcting he'd received'.
Ryo's voice deepened, shifting, the Butcher King emerging like a second skin sliding over the first. A persona. A monster. A legacy.
"And Valeria," Ryo continued, "was sent away because you disobeyed me. You returned to Higaru when your purse was returned. You engaged with lesser beings. Footnotes. Debris." He stepped closer, his shadow swallowing Kuro whole like the night sky, Kuros world going completely dark. "You debased yourself."
Kuro bowed lower. "I apologise, Father."
The apology did nothing. The first blow was a closed fist to the solar plexus. It wasn't about pain, not initially; it was about air. About the shocking, humiliating vacuum that followed, leaving Kuro on his knees, gasping like a fish on stone, dignity ripped away with his breath.
"Get up," Ryo said, his voice devoid of anger. It was a command, flat and clean.
It went on for an hour. A meticulously orchestrated lesson in dissolution. A backhand that split his lip against his own teeth, the copper taste of blood flooding his mouth. A kick to the thigh, not hard enough to break bone, but perfectly placed to deaden the muscle, so that standing was a trembling ordeal. Ryo used his hands, his ring, the hard edge of the obsidian throne's armrest. He was a craftsman, and Kuro's body was the material. He never shouted. His breaths remained even.
"This," he'd say, gripping Kuro's hair and forcing his head back to stare at the carved ceiling, "is for the purse. For lowering your hand to gutter filth." A sharp, stunning slap. "This," he continued, driving a knee into Kuro's side as he doubled over, "is for the stories. For letting their poison myths fill your ears."
Each reason was a nail, each blow the hammer driving it home. It was the cold precision that made it visceral. The absence of rage made it feel inevitable, like weather. By the end, Kuro was propped against the dais, a tapestry of throbbing, hot aches. A deep, plum coloured bruise was already flowering along his jawline. His ribs screamed with every shallow breath. His left eye was swelling shut. The pain was a universe, and he was lost in its centre.
Ryo finally stood over him, wiping his knuckles with a silk cloth. "The bruises will fade," he said, as if discussing a minor inconvenience. "The lesson must not. You will carry these marks until they vanish, and you will remember with every twinge: sentiment is a luxury that leaves you bleeding on the floor. Now. Apologize."
Before Kuro even mutter the words, he seized Kuro by the collar, dragging him forward. The servants looked away, some trembling, some frozen. No one dared intervene, except one.
Anya was twenty four, old enough to know better but still young enough for empathy to override survival instinct. She'd been in palace service for her whole life, long enough to perfect the art of becoming wallpaper. But watching the Prince, a boy she'd seen grow from a sullen child into this broken figure taking his father's calculated violence, something fractured inside her polished silence.
When Ryo wiped his hands and told Kuro to apologize to the floor, she moved. It was two steps, a rustle of grey linen. "Your Majesty," she said, her voice clear and foolishly calm. "He cannot speak if you have broken his wind. The lesson is etched in the bruises. Any more, and you risk damaging your heir beyond utility." She wasn't pleading. She was stating a tactical error, appealing to the king's cold logic. It was her only gambit.
Ryo stopped. He turned his head, the movement slow, utterly focused. The room's temperature seemed to drop. He didn't speak. He simply crossed the space between them in three strides. His hand shot out, not to slap, but to encircle her throat. His grip was immense, lifting her onto her toes. The air cut off with a tiny, choked gasp.
"Utility?" Ryo whispered, his face inches from hers. Her eyes bulged, her hands flying up to claw uselessly at his immovable wrist. "You speak to me of utility? You are a cog. A silent, turning cog." He leaned closer, his voice an intimate, venomous thread. "If a cog presumes to advise the engine, it is not repaired. It is pulverized."
He held her there for a lifetime of seconds, watching the panic dawn in her eyes, before he opened his hand. She dropped, collapsing to her knees, sucking in ragged, shuddering breaths.
"Akuma," Ryo said, not looking away from her.
The shadow detached from the wall. Anya scrambled back, a low whimper escaping her. Akuma's hand tangled in her elaborate braid, a vanity from her village, a piece of home she'd kept, and he yanked. Not to pull her up, but to drag her. Her scream was cut short as her head snapped back, her body scraping across the polished stone floor as he hauled her towards the servants entrance like a sack of grain. Her fingers scrambled for purchase, nails scratching soundlessly on the seamless stone, her earlier courage obliterated by raw, physical terror. She disappeared into the dark. The only evidence of her existence? Just a few strands of brown hair left on the gleaming floor.
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Ryo watched the servant disappear into the shadows with Akuma, his expression one of mild, academic interest. He turned back to Kuro, who was still staring at the empty space where she had stood.
"You think me cruel," Ryo stated, not asking. He gestured broadly at the vaulted throne room, the carvings of fire and conquest. "This is all a story we tell to keep the dark at bay. Order. Legacy. Divine Right." He spat the last phrase like a rotten seed. "There is no right. Only will. And fear is the purest expression of will."
He descended the dais steps until he was level with Kuro, his eyes devoid of the performative fury, now flat and endlessly cold. "Love is a fable. Loyalty is a transaction. 'Goodness' is what the powerless call their fear of taking what they want. I have torn the world apart and looked at its guts, boy. There is no meaning in the stars, no justice in the heavens. There is only chaos. And in that chaos, only one law is true: He who controls the narrative, controls the reality."
He leaned in, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper that was more terrifying than any shout. "I do not rule Astralon because I am best. I rule because I have made everyone believe that the alternative is a demon queen and eternal night. I have made my violence 'necessary.' My corrections 'divine.' Your little friend in the slums, his sister... they are ants in a colony I will burn if it amuses me. Their lives, their hopes, their 'crooked stars'... they are nothing. Less than nothing. They are mere footnotes."
Ryo straightened, brushing an invisible speck from his sleeve. "You wish to be a person? A 'good' man? That is the true fantasy. I am gifting you the only truth that matters: you are either the author of the story, or you are ink on its page. And ink... can be blotted out." He smiled then, a thin, joyless stretch of lips. "Your mask of cruelty is not a burden. It is the first true lesson I have ever taught you. It is the understanding that everything is a mask, and the greatest power lies in choosing which one to make them all see."
Kuro swallowed hard. "Please... bring Valeria back."
Ryo smiled a cold, delighted thing. "You want your guardian returned?"
Kuro nodded, desperate.
"Then earn her." Ryo leaned close. "Be the Butcher's son. My Black Prince. The sharpest blade in the Academy. Wreak chaos on the students. Prove you are my heir."
Kuro's voice cracked. "I'll do anything."
"I know."
Ryo turned away, dismissing him like a servant. "And Kuro... stop searching for her."
Kuro froze. His heart stopped.
Ryo chuckled. "Yes. I know. I know everything. And the fact you haven't found her, despite her name being right in front of you, is... exhilarating. It shows me exactly how naive you are."
Kuro staggered out of the throne room, the weight of the command crushing him. Servants rushed to steady him, whispering his name, but he barely heard them. The walk back to his chambers was a phantom journey. The servants' whispers, "Your Highness..." "Prince Kuro..." were sounds heard through deep water. His cheek throbbed, his palm burned, but these were mere echoes. The real pain was inside, a vast, hollowed out chamber where every good thing he'd ever touched was now screaming.
He saw Shiro's face, not as the black prince saw it, a target, a game piece, but as his brother in him saw it, it was in the shack: alight with fierce curiosity over a star chart, softened by laughter at a clumsy carving. I made you a brother, Shiro had said with his actions, his trust. And I made you a fool, Kuro had answered with his every cruel word in the courtyard, the library, the classroom.
He thought of Valeria's hands, firm but gentle, pulling a blanket over Aki. The way she'd look at him, not as the Black Prince, but as her storm baby, and see the child drowning beneath the crown. He'd gotten her sent away. His one anchor, exiled because he couldn't stay away from the one place, the one person, that felt real.
And Aki... her voice from the shack, whispering truths about stars that were alive. He'd given her false hope, dragged her into his orbit, and for what? So he could feel human for a few stolen weeks? It was the most selfish thing he'd ever done.
The regret that came wasn't a single wave; it was the ocean itself. It was for the servant, Anya, whose life was now broken because of a moment of pity for him. It was for every student he'd "curated" out of the Academy to please his father, their confused, betrayed faces haunting him. It was for the boy he'd been in the shack, a boy who argued and laughed and carved tokens of freedom, because he had betrayed that boy most of all. He had handed him over to the Butcher King for execution.
He stopped in a deserted corridor, bracing himself against the cold stone wall, forehead pressed to the rock. A dry, heaving sob wracked him, but no tears came. He had no right to them. Tears were for the innocent. He was complicit. He was the cage, and the keeper, and the animal inside, all howling in the same silence. The mask wasn't something he wore; it was something he had become, and the face underneath was now so scarred and starved he wondered if anything of the real Kuro remained, or if he was just a collection of performances, echoing in an empty hall.
He did not remember the walk back. It was a blind, shambling pilgrimage through a palace that felt like a stranger's skull. Every jolting step sent fresh lightning through his ribs, where deep, blossoming aches promised spectacular bruises by morning. The split in his palm throbbed in time with his heartbeat, a raw, open counterpoint to the deeper, sickening pain in his gut. He was a tapestry of his father's displeasure, woven in throbbing purples and sharp, stinging reds.
When the door of his chambers closed behind him, the lock clicking into place sounded like the lid of a tomb sealing shut. The performance was over. The audience was gone. And what remained was not the Black Prince, but a shattered boy, alone in a gilded cage.
The first sob hit him like a physical blow, doubling him over. He stumbled to the edge of his canopied bed, its silks and furs an obscene parody of comfort, and collapsed. The tears came then, not the graceful sorrow of a prince, but ugly, heaving waves that tore from his throat ones he couldn't hold back, even if he knew he had no right to them. They were tears of pain, yes, his face was a constellation of fire, but they were mostly tears of a regret so vast it threatened to drown him.
He pressed his face into the cold, embroidered coverlet, the threads scratching his wounded cheek. Each gasp for air was a struggle. In the dark behind his eyes, he wasn't in a palace. He was back in the shack. He could smell it, woodsmoke and drying herbs, the faint, clean scent of Valeria's salve. He could feel the rough, splintery texture of the floor under his palms, the pervasive, humble chill that was so different from this sterile, monumental cold. He could hear the soft, rattling breath of Aki sleeping, the scratch of Shiro's knife on wood, the low, real sound of his own laughter, short and surprised at its own existence.
"Please," he whispered into the silk, his voice a broken, wet thing. "Please, let me go back." It was a prayer to nothing, to the empty, edited stars. "I don't want the crown. I don't want the throne. I want the floor. I want the soup. I want her stories and his... his wrong stars."
He choked on another sob, the memory of Shiro's amber eyes, alight with passion over a misdrawn constellation, a physical wound. He had traded that, the cramped, holy warmth of a family built from choice, for this: a cavernous room, a father's fists, and a mask that was now fused to his bleeding skin. He had dragged them into his orbit and then betrayed them to survive his own prison. The shame of it was hotter than any bruise.
"I want to be nobody," he wept, the words muffled and desperate. "I want to be Kuro. Just Kuro. In the shack. With my... family."
He curled tighter around the agony in his chest, each shuddering breath a plea for an impossibility. The tears soaked the expensive fabric, a futile offering to a past that was already a ghost. He cried until he was hollow, until the only thing left was the aching, silent vow in the ruins of his heart.
I would burn this palace to the ground for one more night of your firelight.
Will Kuro Ever Break Free Of His Mask, Or Is The Mask Too Deep?
