thanh.nguyenhoang.1403@gmail.com
Stories
168
Chapters
1,512
Words
3.2 M
Comments
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Reading
11 d, 4 h
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The brass latch of the leather satchel snapped shut, the sound sharp and final in the dead quiet of my conductor's suite. My hands were shaking. I pressed them flat against the polished mahogany of my desk, digging my manicured nails into the wood until the trembling stopped. I was making a choice. I was making the exact same choice I had made ten years ago, and the copper taste of self-disgust flooded the back of my throat. Inside the satchel lay the evidence. I had spent the hours since the chandelier…-
23.3 K • Completed
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The absolute silence that followed the acoustic ghost was heavier than the stone walls closing in around us. I have listened to that recording every single night for ten years. Vesper’s words did not echo. They simply sank into the freezing, damp air of the corridor and died, leaving only the crushing, undeniable weight of the truth. My knees gave out. I didn't gracefully lower myself; I collapsed, the rough wooden floorboards biting into my shins. The heavy leather satchel containing my betrayal…
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23.3 K • Completed
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The blistering heat of the Breath Vault pressed against my skin, but the blood in my veins had turned to absolute ice. To grant me immortality. I stared at the heavy parchment of the master ledger, the frantic architectural lines drawn in Lord Morvan's hand blurring before my eyes. The massive iron lungs of the sub-basement pulsed around us, glowing with the iridescent, sickly blue light of a hundred thousand stolen breaths. The scale of the betrayal was paralyzing. The Council didn't want to execute me.…
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23.3 K • Completed
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The auditorium of the Théâtre Nocturne was a velvet-lined lung, filled to capacity and waiting to inhale. Three thousand aristocrats sat in the tiered balconies, their jewels glittering sharply under the gaslight. They were breathless with anticipation for the Winter Solstice debut. They did not know that the heavy iron doors at the rear of the dress circles had already been sealed from the outside by the Patron enforcers. They did not know they were sitting in a slaughterhouse. I stood on the…
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23.3 K • Completed
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The Théâtre Nocturne was choking on its own breath. I dragged myself up from the freezing dirt of the lower catacombs, my lungs burning with the taste of pulverized stone and ancient dust. The heavy steel fire-door we had breached hung off its warped hinges, a twisted monument to the force of the blast. I reached back into the dark. Vesper’s bare, scarred hand locked onto my wrist. I hauled her up beside me. We stumbled forward, navigating the labyrinth of the lower corridors as the foundation of…
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23.3 K • Completed
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PERSEPHONE The absolute darkness of the warded chamber returns, heavy and suffocating, but it does nothing to erase the silver light still burning into my retinas. I sit frozen on the black velvet dais, the chill of the subterranean air sinking directly into my bones, freezing the sweat that still slicks my skin. Beside me, Hades is entirely still. The violent, earth-shattering heat of our physical collision has evaporated, leaving only the catastrophic ruins of our true nature. We were going to use the…-
25.0 K • Completed
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PERSEPHONE The void is a crushing, absolute absence of sound, a sensory vacuum that threatens to tear the mind apart before the body even registers the fall. We plummet through the center of the collapsing timeline. The silver cyclone of the temporal paradox roars around us, a blinding hurricane of unspooled memories and fractured cosmic laws. I am clinging to Hades, my fingers dug deep into the heavy leather of his coat. Above us, the rift is feeding. The raw, unfiltered magic of the True Names that…
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25.0 K • Completed
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Seven Hours Before the First Seal The petition bites me before I sign it. Silver fire races from the parchment into the pad of my thumb, tastes my blood, and decides I am telling the truth. The page relaxes beneath my hand. Across the tribunal chamber, three hundred dead advocates exhale as one. Queen Persephone of the Underworld has formally asked to divorce its king. I should feel triumph. Instead, I feel the precise absence of a year. The gap lives behind my eyes like a missing stair. I remember…
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25.0 K • Completed
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HADES Three hours ago, her nails were drawing blood from my shoulders. Now, she sits exactly forty feet away, perfectly encased in armor of woven nightshade and black iron, looking at me as if I am the architect of her execution. The Court of the Moirai is not a room designed for mercy. It is a vast, circular amphitheater carved into the bedrock of the deepest abyss. The galleries are packed. The entirety of the Underworld’s elite—the lords of the Asphodel Meadows, the ferrymen of the Styx, the…
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25.0 K • Completed
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HADES "Lies." The word tears out of my throat, harsh and absolute, vibrating with enough dark magic to rattle the petrified branches above us. I do not lower the black iron broadsword from the throat of the temporal anomaly wearing my wife’s scarred face. My mind, a lethal engine honed over millennia of ruling the dead, violently rejects the premise. My unborn child did not travel back in time to amputate my memory. My bloodline did not commit temporal suicide to stop me from becoming a…
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25.0 K • Completed
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