Reynold Antony hadn’t exactly lived a life of virtue.

He wasn’t wise, or kind, or gentle. He knew that. Perhaps that was how he ended up here, feverish, and restrained, and alone.

Dinner.

After all, what reason was there for the universe to save someone like him? He hadn’t dropped everything for the people he loved, or powered through his bad days with meaningless platitudes to put everyone else at ease.

That was what good people did.

But Rey had never been good. He kept to himself. He saved himself.

No one else would.

He didn’t think that mattered to the universe, though. Wasn’t that what he was taught? Good people were good no matter what. Good people were good even when it was hard to be.

If you asked him, ethics and empathy were for people who had the time and resources, not people clinging to life every day by the sheer effort of their aching fingertips.

And cling Rey did, with every ounce of his being.

It was obvious to anyone watching him struggle, sickly and scared and alone, how badly he wanted to survive.

But desperation was awkward to see, and no one wanted to “trouble” Rey, so eventually, almost no one bothered with him at all. Most people didn’t like the reminder that they were lucky to have what they did.

So, Rey wasn’t good. He wasn’t moral. He hadn’t really gotten the chance to be, even on the occasion he wanted to try. Maybe that hadn’t mattered in the end. After all, people had stopped asking him to be good, eventually.

What Rey was—what he had been, before all of this—was alive.

Rey had fought valiantly for every precious inch of his life, as small and fragile as it was. He’d clawed and bit and thrashed for his little apartment with the in-home nurse, and his weekly meals with his parents, and the pockmarked skin the doctors poked and prodded so carelessly.

He’d earned it.

So where was he now, awoken suddenly and violently by the sharp explosion of pain in his knees?

Why was he here?

Why had he lost?

Wherever this was, whatever this was, it wasn’t what he had been fighting for. It was foreign, and freezing, and fearsome. No one here was anyone he recognized. Not a thing between these enormous stone walls was familiar.

From what he could tell, his vision dim and his body weak, there was not a single human being that could be counted among the crowd that milled and loomed around him.

The entire assembly of them were willowy and ashen. Tall. Their glowing eyes—predatory, with pupils that were unusually catlike and fathomlessly dark—watched him like an errant beast. Everything—from their hair, to their nails, to their neat pant cuffs—was polished and perfect to a fault. They were like dolls: effortless and dispassionate and eerie.

Uncanny.

Rey’s fleeting disbelief that they could be something otherworldly, something other than human, wilted instantly in the face of the immediate and incontrovertible evidence. They weren’t…right. In fact, they were dangerously wrong.

They scared him all the way down to his aching bones.

Beneath him, the cold, creeping dread of winter seeped in through his threadbare clothes. His knees throbbed. He had been tossed carelessly to the polished floor in what looked like a throne room, with colossal, imposing gray walls and luxurious velvet fabrics draped over vaulted windows.

The curtains were all drawn open, pools of luminous moonlight leaking through and slotting long beams over Rey’s face. A lengthy strand of lustrous, alien hair was drawn over one shoulder, his strangely tan skin flushed and waxy with a low-grade fever.

Even with decades of failure and weakness laid bare in his mind’s eye, a rotating display of the injustices he’d accepted in order to cling to every accursed breath, there was nothing that approached the indignity of being trussed and served like a sacrifice to these waiting…monsters.

Rey watched them, face pale and drawn, as they conversed in a foreign language utterly incomprehensible to him. It wove and danced in his ears like poetry, lilting and delicate on its face. It was stranger still, because he’d had partial hearing loss for the better part of the last decade. He should scarcely have heard much of it at all.

That was the other problem.

Not only did he not know where he was, he didn’t know who he was.

Whoever it was was…relatively healthy. It wasn’t him.

Where was the long lingering aches of his scars, pulling his skin when he moved? Where was the muffled hearing, the bleary eyesight, the dry mouth?

Dreams weren’t cold. Dreams weren’t painful. They didn’t let the ice leach into your skin, and the lancing sting of pain sing up your leg like a sharp rebuttal.

Was this an afterlife?

Had he been reborn?

Rey wouldn’t have been surprised to die, but he had expected…warning. His entire life had been a prolonged, excruciating goodbye. There had never been anything sudden about it. Still, Rey thought he had…time. He’d expected to fade slowly, in the agonizing way so many people in his position did, one painful and lurching night after the other until the lights went out for good.

Instead, one moment he was reclined peacefully in the final, balmy hours of a summer evening, the next he’d felt a powerful surge of electricity and lost his senses to an overwhelmingly intense darkness and silence.

His body, his real body, had been weak and brittle. But it was his. He’d been determined to make the most of the time he had left, out of spite more than anything else. Rey lived the life he fought for as fully as possible because it was all he could do. He’d planned to enjoy it all until his very last moments, surrounded by the few people he knew would mourn him.

But now here he was, whole and strong and kneeling in front of the sort of creature he recognized only from legend.

The man in question looked bored, in the way that only the most regal and wealthy could manage. His coiffed, inky black hair was somehow both artful and effortless. It was topped with a gaudy silver circlet, his body dripping with an assortment of bright, glittering jewels.

The man’s gaze was sober, but he’d pursed his lips and wrinkled his nose the moment Rey had been dragged into the room. The timbre of his voice, so low it rattled Rey to his very bones, made him want to empty his stomach all over the frozen floor.

Did Rey know him?

He gestured at Rey, but Rey blinked, tilting his head to the side.

He hoped it successfully communicated his meaning: I don’t understand you. I don’t wish you harm. Please don’t hurt me.

With a weary sigh the stranger snapped his fingers, and with a violent lurch that made Rey think he was going to black out again, the sounds around him suddenly began making sense. His burly guards were murmuring to themselves about getting back to the dungeons, and his—captor?—was watching him expectantly.

“I said: What is your name, human?”

Rey’s eyes widened. They were dry and irritated from wherever he’d been, before. It certainly couldn’t have been anywhere nice. “Rey?”

The man hummed, resting a set of pale, slender fingers on the arm of his throne. His long legs were crossed, his opposite hand propping up his face. It was almost as elegant as it was terrifying. “You sound unsure.”

Rey shook his head, taking a deep breath of the stale air. It was dusty and old. He expected to begin coughing at any moment. Instead, his lungs accepted it without question. The burn never came. “No, I’m sure. My name is Rey.”

“You don’t know who I am, do you?”

Was Rey supposed to know who he was? At this point, with so little to go on, all he could manage was honesty. “No, I don’t.”

“You’ve wandered far from home, human, to somewhere quite dangerous.” The man’s somber expression took on an almost reminiscent quality. A pair of maroon irises pinned him with an assessing look. “Perhaps you are not who I thought you were.”

“Where am I?” Rey asked, before he could think better of it, earning a thump! to his back from one of the guards beside him.

“Only speak when spoken to!” The guard hissed. A thread of instinctual submission spiked through Rey, and he dipped his head, as if in apology.

But his captor smiled an unusual, menacing smile. His canines were white — sharp and unusually shaped. The look on his face was almost…hungry.

“How unusual,” the man said, but it sounded sad more than anything else. His eyes felt like blades pinning Rey to the stone. “But I don’t believe you are lying. Welcome to my home, Rey—perhaps we can get along.”