There is no name for this place.
Not yet.
Just a long, low stretch of field where the wheat is coming back—gold and ghost-thin, stubborn as memory.
The table sits at the center, bare but for a candle, a few dark bottles, and the weight of things unsaid.
Three chairs.
Three figures.
Three kinds of silence.
The Queen sits in the middle, not to rule, but to anchor, spine regal but tired, eyes storm-shadowed, fingers interlaced before her. She wears black like a habit, not a performance. Her hair is pinned back with precision—
Not because she needs control.
Because she's earned it.
Velin. Pale, sharp, composed.
Velin—ink-eyed, unreadable, bearing his usual silence like a blade not yet drawn. His coat collar is high.
His hands rest on the table, but his weight is nowhere near it.
He is present but not grounded. Still, but never simple.
There is ink under his fingernails. There is history in his breath.
He does not blink.
Jack. The knife at rest.
But not forgotten.
Jack—lean, bruised-knuckled, a ghost of blood near the cut of his wrist. Not fresh, but not forgotten. His eyes burn—not with hate, but with the kind of vigilance that has already calculated all seven ways this could end.
His sleeves are rolled. His posture says ready.
There’s a bottle at his elbow, untouched.
The crown he doesn’t wear is heavier than it looks.
They aren’t talking yet.
Not really.
The Queen’s fingers rest lightly on the candle glass, turning it.
Velin watches the reflection flicker.
Jack watches him.
A gust of wind presses through the wheat like a spine stretching.
Somewhere behind them, the Court stirs.
The crows adjust their perches. The seamstress lifts her head.
Bunny pretends he’s not eavesdropping through the hedgerow.
This is not a war council.
Not exactly.
The wind carries no birdsong, only the rustle of dry stalks and the hum of something unsettled. A table stands alone in the open field—dark wood, legs sunk a little into the earth, as if it has waited there too long.
No plates. Just glasses. One candle. No script.
The Queen breaks the silence.
“You both think you’re here to protect me.”
She glances first to Velin, then to Jack.
“But neither of you stayed through the fire.”
Jack shifts—just barely—but it’s enough. Velin doesn’t move at all.
She continues, voice low, not cruel. Just tired of waiting.
“He was hurting me. You knew. And you left.”
She speaks it to Jack, not as a blade but as a record.
“You disappeared. And I forgave you. I still do.”
A long silence.
Velin finally speaks, voice smooth, steady.
“I didn’t disappear. I waited for the pen.”
A glance toward the Queen.
“And you gave it to me.”
Jack scoffs under his breath. Not mocking—just angry at fate. At himself. At how it wasn’t him.
“So you wrote her out,” he mutters. “And I wasn’t even in the margins.”
The Queen stands, pushing her chair back with the soft scrape of wood against dirt. Her eyes flash—not with rage, but with the impossible burden of having survived while loved ones fled.
“You were both there. You just didn’t hold the door.”
Another silence. The candle flickers.
Velin speaks again, lower.
“We hold it now.”
Jack looks away, jaw flexing. But he nods—just once.
No one moves when the candle flickers.
But something changes.
The Queen’s hand stills on the glass, but her thumb tucks in, just slightly—like a pause being chosen.
Not withheld. Held.
Jack notices it.
He notices everything.
He’s not here to be polite.
He’s here because she asked him to be.
He didn’t ask why. He never does.
But he counted the chairs.
He doesn't like this kind of stillness.
Not from her.
He doesn’t trust the man who sits next to her now.
Not fully.
He doesn’t hate him.
But he’s clocked every word he hasn’t said.
Every step he hasn’t taken.
Every look that lingered on her one second longer than comfort could explain.
Velin, for his part, doesn’t touch the bottle before him.
He doesn’t need to.
He knows this isn’t about drink or ease or history.
It’s about permission.
About proximity.
About Jack.
The Queen finally looks up. Not at one. Not at the other. Through.
And Velin feels it first—
that crown she wears without wearing.
That impossible gravity that makes men sit straighter and ghosts hush.
She says nothing.
Because she’s not ready to say it yet.
So Jack does what Jack does best.
He breaks the silence like a blade dragged lightly across a stone.
“You sure this is the table for it?”
Not angry.
Just verifying the coordinates.
Just making damn sure this doesn’t become a funeral by mistake.
And Velin’s eyes flick to him—
not as challenge,
but as record.
He would not deny Jack a word.
But he would write it down.
Jack’s voice doesn’t echo.
It lands.
The way a blade does when it’s not meant to draw blood.
Just to remind you it could.
The Queen doesn’t look at him.
She already knew he would ask.
Instead, she drags her thumb along the side of the glass again, a single, deliberate pass, and sets it down—
on the table, not the question.
Outside, the field breathes with that dusk-kind of light.
The gold that forgives everything for one minute longer.
The kind of hour that wants you to believe nothing terrible ever happened here.
But they all know better.
She leans back in the chair—military cut coat folding at the hip, boots scuffed from a different war, one none of them had the decency to die in.
Her crown’s not visible.
But that’s the trick of her, isn’t it?
Jack rests his arm on the edge of the table.
His tattooed fingers tap once—then stop.
The kind of stop that means he won’t do it again.
Velin does not move.
He was already exactly where he meant to be.
This wasn’t his table to call,
but it will be his name they write in the margins of the aftermath.
The Queen finally speaks.
Not loud.
Not slow.
But cut-clean clear.
“We build from here.”
Just that.
Jack doesn’t nod.
Not yet.
But the tension changes hands.
And it does not go back.
Jack doesn’t flinch when he speaks.
He knows how to throw words like knives.
“Build what.”
“From what.”
“There’s nothing here.”
Not bitterness—clarity.
He’s not trying to wound. He’s just tired of ghosts being told they’re blueprints.
The Queen doesn’t answer right away.
She leans forward, slow—forearms on the table, fingers interlaced.
A soldier's pose.
A woman who has seen what burns and still keeps the matches.
Velin speaks before she does.
Not interrupting.
Not correcting.
Just adding ink to what was already written in the silence.
“There will be.”
He doesn't look at Jack.
He’s watching the page in his ledger that doesn’t exist yet—his gaze just slightly off-center, like he's reading from a script still being etched into the air. Like he's studying the air around her.
“I write the promise of it. That’s what I do.”
"Even when it’s just a breath that no one else heard.”
Jack scoffs, low. But he doesn’t argue.
The Queen lifts her eyes to the horizon—not as a question, but as declaration.
“This is what’s left.
And I’m still here.
That’s enough to build from.”