Enchanting Eyes

You see the weakness in everything with your eyes in this world.

Plot

NOTHING HIDDEN FROM YOU ◆  A DARK-FANTASY ROMANCE  ◆ Three days through the portal, and a whole kingdom wants you dead — for a single true thing you said out loud, before anyone told you that what your eyes see, no one else can. They call you witch. Then stalker. Then a word bigger than both, with a bounty in gold no one earns in a lifetime. Ahead, past the last lit window, the road gives out to trees and the dark goes absolute. And somewhere in it walks the one person alive who can look at you and know you are telling the truth — a holy knight of the light, sent to end you. ◆ WHAT YOU CARRY You see the one weakness every living soul keeps hidden — the tender thing that leaves them open. No one can tell how deep you look. Keep your eyes down; a lowered gaze is only good manners here, and good manners are a place to hide. Reaching for it costs you now. They made sure of that before you ran. The eye can heal. Not yet. ✸ WHAT SHE IS Her eyes catch a lie the way yours catch a wound. Her word can turn a room, a town, a kingdom. Her orders say to kill you. She will know, within moments of meeting you, that you are not what they said — and what she does with that is the whole story. Two people who cannot lie to each other, and cannot hide. None of it is written down. You'll learn. Note: this story is built for Don't Control + Improvise mode. Play it that way for the intended experience.

Opening scene

The road out of Farrowmere gives up its last honest light at the bend, where someone has nailed a fresh bill to the waystation post. You don't slow for it. You've seen enough of them by now to know the shape without reading — a bad inked likeness with the eyes drawn too wide, a sum in gold suns beneath that no one in this kingdom earns in a lifetime, and under that, the word. Always the word. A carter's lantern sways past you toward the town's shuttered warmth; its keeper's glance holds a half-second too long, the way every glance holds too long now, and then he thinks better of it and walks on. One sentence. That is the part that still won't sit right in your chest. You'd been here — this world, its two moons overhead, a language that arrived in your mouth already knowing itself — less than a full day when you said the wrong true thing to the wrong frightened man, out loud, because no one had told you yet that what you can see, no one else can. Witch, first. Then stalker, when you knew a thing about a man that a stranger had no way to know. Then a word heavier than both of those together, and a bounty, and a whole kingdom turning its head to look. So you keep your eyes down. It is the first thing the road teaches you: a lowered gaze is only good manners here, and good manners are somewhere to hide. The right side of your sight stays wrong — a smear at the edge of everything, a dull ache set deep behind the eye where they made certain of you before you ran. When you reach for what that eye used to do, it gives you a flood of white and a spike of pain and nothing else, and lately you have stopped reaching for it at all. Safer to stay a rumor than to become a thing they've confirmed. Which leaves the bend, and the choice standing in it. Behind you, Farrowmere and the Last Lantern's one gold window — a bed, a fire, a common room full of faces that might do the arithmetic on yours. Ahead, the Sable Reach proper: the trees drawing shut over the road, the warden's salt-line worn thin and patchy along its edge, and past that a dark with no bottom in it. Everyone in this country knows you do not walk into the wilds at low bell. What a crowded common room can cost a wanted face is something you learned on your own. The board creaks on its nail behind you in the wind. Somewhere out past the treeline, far off still, something makes a single sound — low, and wrong, and wet — and then holds its silence.

Characters

Tags: Fantasy Isekai Romance SlowBurn Angst Adventure Knight Royalty PoliticalIntrigue Mystery Supernatural EnemiesToLovers Protective Possessive Loyal Gentle Kind Cold Manipulative HiddenPower Prophecy Redemption AnyPOV ThirdPerson

Chats Started: 9

By: vincent

Stories

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