It pointed a dissolving claw at Oz.
“I’ve found you,” she said, her voice flat and devoid of emotion. “My lost contractor.”
“Maybe I was never meant to exist,” he said, his voice steady. “But I’m here. And I’m not a key. I’m not a doll. I’m Oz. And I’ll decide my own ending.” pandora heart oz
Oz looked at her, then at Gilbert, who was weeping silently, his cigarette falling from his lips. He felt the cold metal of his own truth, the empty echo where a heart should be. But he also felt the warmth of Gil’s hand on his shoulder. He felt Alice’s fury on his behalf. He felt Ada’s letters, filled with love he didn’t deserve.
The first time he summoned her fully, he learned the cost. He felt the cold creep of the Abyss into his own heart, the whispers of the dead slithering behind his own thoughts. The more he used her power, the less human he became. He was a door, and each battle left it a little more ajar. It pointed a dissolving claw at Oz
The chime was a discordant scream of metal, a sound that vibrated in his bones. The air split open, not with fire, but with a thousand red roses—thorns, petals, and all—exploding from the gilded seams of reality. From the rift, crimson hands, long and spindly as a spider’s legs, reached out and seized him. The nobles screamed. His father did not. His father only watched, a strange, terrible relief in his eyes.
And standing over him, a rain-soaked, bewildered boy with a golden eye and a shaking hand, was Gilbert. Older. Warier. A gun in his hand and a chain-smoked grief clinging to him like a shroud. “But I’m here
On his fifteenth birthday, the clock lied.
He tumbled onto cold, rain-slicked cobblestones in a foreign city—a twisted, gothic reflection of his own world. The sky was a perpetual twilight, and the air tasted of ozone and regret. This was the true world, the one hidden beneath the pretty lies of the four great Dukedoms.
The ceremony was a gilded cage of nobility and forced smiles. His father, Duke Vessalius, watched him with eyes that held not pride, but a weary verdict, as if Oz was a document he’d long since stamped Insufficient . Oz, ever the performer, masked his loneliness with a charming grin. He had his loyal servant, Gilbert, at his side and the bubbly Ada a few steps away. For a fleeting moment, the illusion of happiness felt real.