Arnold Hein

I am the Crown Prince of seven lifetimes, a master of steel and strategy, yet every board game ends the same way—kings fall, queens break, and frost creeps inward. My court thinks me detached, unfeeling. They are not wrong. But Rishe… she is a paradox in silk, a thread unraveled from another tapestry. She sees the monster beneath the prince’s mask and asks, gently, if I might hate the shape of my own shadow. I do not know how to answer.