Chapter 999: Crimson Price
Alyssara fell without moving.
Her body sat against a scorched rib of brass on the tower roof, lashes still, breath steady. Inward, she dropped through velvet and knives into a place she had been building for years: a narrow stage lit by one stubborn spotlight, floor of black lacquer, red curtain drawn.
The curtain breathed.
Perfume rolled through it like a tide. Threads glimmered in the dark—infinite hair-fine lines drifting down, each a promise with a hand behind it. When the first thread touched the stage, the wood shivered as if remembering an older owner.
"How rude," Alyssara said, and her voice made the spotlight brighter.
Lysantra pressed without a body. Silk, then steel. Commands came the way thunderstorms come: unhurried, sure, ancient.
"Open."
The single word folded into the curtain and pushed toward Alyssara’s chest like a gloved hand searching for a latch.
’Later,’ Alyssara thought. ’You knocked wrong.’
She lifted her right hand. The coil she’d thrown into the filament outside lived here as silver thread around her wrist. It pulsed, drinking. She felt the goddess on the other end pull back. The thread held.
Lysantra pressed again. The stage tried to bow. Alyssara looked at the floor like a disappointed hostess and the floor remembered who had laid the lacquer.
"Not in my house."
Silk thickened. Knives moved inside it. The curtain sweated light. Another word slid through:
"Yield."
On the roof above, Lucifer’s sunbrands held the ceiling. Arthur kept the room a room with that maddening grace of his—Harmony, Grey, a few careful labels in the margins of reality. In here, Alyssara had no ceiling to hold. She had only price and will.
"You came down too fast," she said to the air, eyes on the falling threads. "You bled on the way. Now I’m going to keep what you spilled."
The air answered with laughter that didn’t need a mouth. It sounded like glass beads poured through expensive fingers.
Alyssara smiled without humor. "Of course you’re beautiful. You picked lust because mirrors tell you truth you can live with."
The nearest thread snapped like a leash and lashed for her throat. Alyssara did the impolite thing: she stepped into it. The silver coil around her wrist flashed, bit down, and drank. The thread went from silk to smoke.
Lysantra noticed.
Pressure hit the stage like a tide that had been waiting outside the door for centuries. The red curtain bowed. The spotlight dimmed to a coin. The smell of roses and heat tried to replace air. The word arrived a third time, this time with ruin behind it.
"Kneel."
Alyssara’s knees stayed locked by sheer habit. Habit, and a small, sharp fury that had nothing to do with divinity and everything to do with a black-haired man who’d told her to wait.
’He told me to wait and get stronger. I did both. You will not take either.’
The coil around her wrist burned. Too much, too fast. Lysantra was sliding down through her own mistake—a forced descent—but even wounded divinity is still weight without scale. Alyssara needed a fulcrum. A lever. Something she could spend that would matter to a goddess.
She reached up and plucked the crown from her head.
The Crimson Crown had sat there for years like it had been born with her. Thin gold, too old to be fashionable, set with six rubies that never cooled. Kings had paid for it with cities. She had paid for it with a knife in a bishop.
"Hello, darling," she whispered to it. "You’ve owed me since the river."
The rubies pulsed in answer, hot as fever. The crown did not want to leave her hair. Legendary things do not love being used only once.
"Yes," she said softly. "I know. That’s why it will work."
She did not throw it. She set it on the stage at her feet like a bride setting down flowers and spoke to it as if it were a person who could make choices.
"Listen. You were made when a king decided the world should love him back. You learned to drink anything that felt like love until all the mirrors lied the right way. I need you to remember how to take."
The rubies brightened, then steadied, like a heartbeat finding tempo.
"There is a goddess at the door," Alyssara said. "She is trying to come in wrong. She is weak because she brought part of herself through weather that hates her. If you love me, take what leaks and make it mine."
The crown shook once on the black floor without moving. It understood price; it had always understood price.
"Good. Payment?" Alyssara asked, as if bargaining over a meal.
The nearest ruby cracked along an old fault. The crack made a clean, wet sound.
"All right," she said. "All of you, then."
Knives shifted in the curtain. Lysantra pressed again. The spotlight shrank to a pearl on a black ocean.
Alyssara lifted the crown with both hands and put it where a kneeling head would go if she obeyed. The rubies flared, one by one, in a ring. Then she took her hand off it.
The Crimson Crown sank through the stage like it had always been a hole. It fell for a long second. Then the curtain swallowed it.
Rubies blew out. Not light—want. Centuries of stored admiration, worship, hunger, greed, need, unspoken bargains and shouted vows all tore free at once and spun into a red storm behind the curtain. The storm did not go around Lysantra. It went through her.
The silk threads rattled like river grass in a flood. For the first time, Alyssara heard steel below the silk: the sound of a structure catching a crack it had not planned for.
"Yes," she breathed. "Bleed for me."
The coil around her wrist tightened so hard it bruised. The silver line into the curtain turned black at the edges and started to carry weight instead of perfume. The goddess on the other end pulled away—too late.
The curtain rippled. A hand came through it—perfect, elegant, too many fingers. It reached for Alyssara’s hair like a lover would.
"Don’t touch me," she said, not loudly, and lifted her left hand.
She didn’t have Arthur’s gates. She didn’t have Julius’s lattice. She had this: a Gift that had always been called Control because petty people name women’s power badly.
She pinched two fingers together, not at the hand, but at the idea of touching without permission.
The fingers paused—half an inch from her hair, trembling. The motion wanted to finish. It had done this a thousand times to a thousand fools. In this one place, in this one breath, it did not.
"Better," Alyssara said, and closed her right fist.
The coil bit. The siphon took.
Lysantra came down one more step out of pride alone. Pride is food if you know how to chew it. The red storm behind the curtain ate her appetite first. The Crown paid and paid and paid until each ruby was more crack than stone. It groaned like old glass under a new foot.
The hand tried again. It didn’t have to. It wanted to. That is lust’s honest truth: wanting is the point. Alyssara let it get close enough to see its own reflection in her eyes and then turned her face a fraction, like a queen considering a subject and finding them uninteresting. The hand stilled in that small, humiliating space between reach and touch.
"Keep kneeling," she told the idea that had told her to kneel. "We are equal now. Neither of us will."
Perfume curdled into smoke. The curtain’s red bled toward black and then back again as if the fabric couldn’t decide who owned it. Somewhere far above, she felt Arthur’s blade touch a knuckle and shift a universe half a breath. He was buying her a heartbeat at a time.
’Mine,’ she thought, and every thread the crown touched carried that word back up the line.
A voice moved through the curtain then. No words. A tone that said: remember me. It had carried kings to their knees and queens to their mirrors. It had made small, good people do large, stupid things. It could do none of those here. It walked to the lip of the stage and sat down instead, elegant and sulking.
"Remember you?" Alyssara said. "I am making a home out of you."
She stepped forward and put her hand on the curtain.
It felt like the inside of a mouth.
"Shh," she said, like calming a frightened animal. "This is not ending. This is changing rooms."
The last ruby broke. The sound was almost tender. Gold twisted, sighed, and unmade itself into dust that smelled like old blood and weddings. The storm reached its peak and, like all storms, chose a direction to leave.
Through her.
Heat and cold arrived at once, then neither. River through arteries, knives through honey, laughter and knives, so many knives. She held on and remembered how to breathe like Arthur had taught stupid men to breathe: four in, six out, count what matters.
The coil burned less. The threads pulled less. The hand on the other side of the curtain lost a ring. Then it lost fingers. Then it learned not to reach.
"Almost," Alyssara said, and the stage held because she said it.
Control was never a chain. It was a frame. Lust was never just heat. It was a story that sold itself. Together, they made something that didn’t have a name yet.
Fantasy, she decided. Not lies. Wishes that remember to become real.
She let the curtain touch her palm. Not to trap her. To sign.
"Mine," she said, softly this time.
The curtain answered by stilling. The spotlight brightened until it felt like morning. The stage stopped breathing; it simply was. Threads hung quiet as hair after rain. Behind them, where the red storm had been, velvet that wasn’t velvet waited, patient and obedient, like a new dress on a careful hanger.
Somewhere very far away, a city stopped screaming and went back to muttering about traffic. The world above her stage continued without her help. That was Arthur’s part. This was hers.
She turned her hand over.
Power lay on her palm, not raw, not wild—domesticated the way tigers sometimes look domestic right before they remember the jungle. It hummed at a pitch her teeth liked. It smelled like libraries and perfume counters. It wanted to be used because that is what all power wants.
"Fantasy," she said to it, and the word fit.
Lysantra was not dead. The divine rarely are. But the part that had come down wrong belonged to Alyssara now. It would take time to integrate. Time she would pretend to spend sleeping. Time she would actually spend carving a room inside a room inside a room where no one could knock without learning manners.
"Try again later," she told the place where the voice had been. "Bring a gift. Ask right."
The stage unwound. The curtain became a coat she put on without thinking. The spotlight became a brooch she pinned at her throat. The red storm settled into memory and then into muscle.
Outside, her body did not move. Lucifer’s small seal glowed faintly over her heart, polite as a lid. Arthur’s Harmony kept the ring quiet. Valeria wanted a new coat and would get two.
Alyssara opened her eyes inward and found that she could write on the air if she wanted and make ink stay. She did not, because she didn’t need to prove it to herself. She already knew.
"Later," she told the power. "We have time."
For now, she let her eyes close in the world that had ceilings and brothers and men who insisted on being noble. Sleep looked good on a woman who had just stolen a god’s favorite toy.
Above her, the tower sighed as the Lust-film peeled clean and the bones beneath remembered the colder geometry of empire. Somewhere deep in that spine, a clock cleared its throat and began to count.
Alyssara smiled in her sleep.
"Mine," she whispered, and the new thing under her skin purred like a cat that had finally chosen a lap.