Montague Von Vexx's Arc

Chapter 1 of 11

Montague followed Wisteria down into the cavern, his red eyes adjusting to the dim light. He wanted her trust. He wanted to be worth the trouble his brother had taken to dig him up. So when she paused at a second throne carved into the wall, he kept his face still, even as his chest went cold. The throne was empty. Vines draped its arms like it had waited a long time for someone who never came. Beside it stood a stone wall pierced with small holes, built to pour pale water over a sarcophagus that wasn't his. Two beds. Two prisons. One had always been meant for someone else. Wisteria knelt and lifted something from the dust. A golden flute, notched along its length with a melody Montague had not heard in two hundred years. His own hands had made those notches. He had left it here long before the burial. Long before Alastair was told any version of the truth. "You've been here before," Wisteria said. It wasn't a question. Montague met her eyes. The silence he had carried for two centuries cracked down the middle, and he understood, finally, that he could not protect his brother from it anymore.