Season 1: Awakening the Viliness

  Ch 2: The Viliness Awakens

  Warmth cocooned her from below—thick, decadent warmth, the kind that didn’t cling but cradled. Her fingers twitched against velvet, and the sensation made no sense. Not linen. Not polyester. Velvet. She hadn't touched velvet since st year's office Christmas party, and certainly not while horizontal and presumably concussed.

  The air was too still. Too warm. And it smelled wrong. Not bleach and blood and pstic tubes—but roses. And something older. Clove, maybe. Or incense burnt low in a room meant for silence.

  She blinked slowly. Her shes felt longer, heavier. When her eyes adjusted, she didn’t see ceiling tiles. No fluorescent strip lights. No comforting hospital beige.

  Above her, a canopy stretched in folds of wine-red and silver, embroidered with vines and thorned blossoms that shimmered when she breathed. Not a hospital, then. Maybe a dream. Or a coma.

  She shifted, and the sheets whispered across her skin like they’d been hand-washed in perfume. The bed dipped around her, sinking just enough to remind her it wasn’t a cot or a gurney. She sat up—easily. Too easily.

  Her body moved with a fluid grace, not the creaky, off-centre drag of someone who’d just survived a train crash. Her limbs felt lighter. No aches. No bruises. Her spine held perfect posture without effort. Her skin—what little she could glimpse through the gossamer sleeves of the robe she didn’t remember putting on—was fwless. Sculpted. Her fingers were long, elegant, manicured. Adorned with rings—rose-gold, set with stones that shimmered like dew.

  She flexed them. They moved. But they didn’t feel like hers.

  The panic seeped in, slow and creeping.

  She brought a hand to her throat. Her heartbeat was steady. Too steady. Her breath came easily. No chest pain. No vertigo. No confirmation of injury—no confirmation of life.

  Her voice, when she finally whispered aloud, didn’t sound like hers either.

  "Where the hell am I?"

  Not breathy. Not rasping. Smooth. Polished. Sharpened to command. A voice that had never fumbled a takeaway order or cracked from exhaustion at three in the morning.

  A vanity stood near the room's edge—low, carved from pale wood that caught what little light there was and turned it into a soft, silvery glow. Mira drifted toward it, half-dreaming, her bare feet silent against the carpet. Her body moved with fluid familiarity, as if it remembered a choreography she had never learned.

  The mirror above the vanity was tall and oval, framed in wrought silver that curled into thorns. She almost didn’t look. Some primal thread in her gut already knew something was wrong.

  But she did look.

  And the woman in the mirror was exquisite.

  Tall. Slender. Pale in the way expensive silk is pale—not bloodless, but luminous. Her hair was silver-blonde, between starlight and frost. It fell in perfect, polished waves. Her skin looked unreal, like bone china. Her eyes were pale too. Gss caught in shadow. Not warm brown, not hazel. And not Mira’s.

  Her lips parted. So did the reflection’s. The movement was slow. Regal. A little too smooth. No confusion—only stillness.

  Mira’s stomach turned.

  She knew that face.

  She had stared at it too many times—on book covers, in fanart, in forum debates about how much of a vilin she really was.

  Nysera.

  Viscountess Nysera Altherys. The viliness of the realm. The woman who chained the final trial in silk and kept his colr fastened with holy rites. The woman who made Luceran a monster.

  "No," Mira whispered, stumbling back from the mirror. Her hip knocked the vanity's edge. The gss wobbled but didn’t fall. "No, no, this—this isn’t—"

  The name echoed in her head like a curse.

  Nysera.

  The luxury around her shifted, shedding the illusion of comfort like a skin. The curtains hung too heavily. The bed loomed too rge. The silence stretched too perfectly, broken only by candlelight that flickered not with fme, but with steady, enchanted glow.

  Beside the mirror, a small table dispyed a marble basin veined in rose gold, its scented water shimmering untouched. No dust, no blemish, nothing to betray a human hand. A perfume bottle, stoppered in crystal. A pair of white gloves, wrist-length, fastened with pearl buttons. A hairbrush wrought of silver, its handle carved into the shape of a sleeping lion.

  Every item pced just so. Every surface curated. Not for comfort. For control. For image.

  Her gaze caught on a book near the bed. Bound in ivory silk. The title pressed in gilded, curling letters: The Doctrine of Restraint.

  Mira’s hands went cold.

  She hadn’t woken up in a hospital. Or a dream. She’d woken up in a cage disguised as a throne. And she knew exactly who was chained beneath it.

  The double doors opened without a knock, and Mira nearly leapt from her skin.

  Three women glided into the room, each dressed in gauzy ivory and blush, faces half-veiled. They moved like dancers or spirits, too graceful, too synchronised. Not taught to serve—taught to serve at a distance.

  Mira froze.

  She didn’t know if she should scream, stand, apologise. But none of them looked startled. One dipped into a curtsy so fluid it felt choreographed; the others mirrored her, heads bowed, hands folded.

  Not respect. Reverence. Deference. Or maybe fear.

  The first maid moved to the vanity, selecting something in a small gss pot. The second approached the bed with a basin of steaming water. The third turned down the sheets, revealing a robe Mira hadn’t seen—deep grey silk, embroidered with silver-threaded rose petals and thorns.

  No one asked how she was feeling. No one spoke. Not introductions. No expnations. Not even eye contact.

  Just quiet, efficient preparation.

  This wasn’t a question. It was routine.

  Mira sat perfectly still, heart pounding between her ribs. She didn’t dare break the illusion of control.

  Don’t flinch, she told herself. Don’t speak. Just watch.

  Let them believe the monster was still in the room.

  They didn’t ask her to stand. They simply reached for her, and her body moved with them—trained long before she arrived—her slip sliding from her shoulders in a sigh of silk, leaving her bare in a room that smelled of roses and restraint. The basin's steam curled around her as a soft cloth touched her skin—warm, floral-scented, careful. It should have felt like kindness. It didn’t.

  They bathed her like a statue being restored for dispy. One traced her jawline with perfumed oil, another combed her hair with slow, deliberate strokes. A third measured the distance between her colrbones before selecting a rose-gold chain with a single carved thorn.

  When they dressed her, it was with the precision of armourers: the corset cinched like a command, the gown soft but structured—yers of gauze and silk shaped to exaggerate stillness, not movement. Gloves slid up her arms, white and smooth, fastened with pearlescent studs, making her fingers look too long, too graceful. The finishing touches followed without pause—a dark wine tint pressed onto her lips, a shimmer brushed across her eyelids, her hair pinned into an elegant coil that felt precariously regal.

  Then—a hand mirror was lifted.

  Mira looked into it because she had no choice.

  She saw a stranger.

  Poised. Immacute. Beautiful in a way that was designed, not born. A mouth made for silence. Eyes that didn’t flicker. Skin that had never known grief or sleepless nights.

  A woman who could order executions over breakfast and never crack her teacup.

  Mira swallowed. Her throat dry behind the lipstick.

  This wasn’t beauty. It was weaponisation.

  This face wasn’t meant to seduce. It was meant to control. To demand worship. To scare the people who thought they might not kneel.

  And she was inside it.