The road was not meant for bare feet.
It was a wide, dust-worn stretch of earth where hooves thundered and iron-rimmed wheels carved their authority into the soil—a road for merchants, nobles, soldiers, and kings. A road that swallowed the careless.
Ezra ran into it anyway.
"Nunu!"
Her voice tore through the air just as the cat did—small, ash-grey, terrified—darting across the road in a blur of fur and fear. Ezra did not think. She never did when it came to him. She gathered her skirts in her fists and sprinted forward, mud splashing up her calves as the sky darkened with sound.
Horses.
Too close.
The carriage came barreling down the road like fate itself—black lacquered wood, gilded edges, six great horses charging forward with flared nostrils and flying manes. The riders shouted. Reins snapped taut. Hooves skidded violently against the earth.
"Stop–!"
The carriage lurched.
Ezra dropped to her knees in the road just as the world seemed to shatter around her. She scooped Nunu into her arms, pressing his trembling body against her chest, burying her face into his fur as if shielding him from death itself.
The carriage stopped inches from her.
Silence crashed down harder than the noise had risen.
One horse reared back, snorting wildly. Another stamped the ground, unsettled. Mud splashed across Ezra's face, streaking her cheeks and forehead, clinging to her pale skin and soaking her already ragged clothes. Her hair—once golden—hung loose and heavy with dirt, tangled around her shoulders.
She did not look up.
All she did was whisper, breathless and shaking, "It's alright… I've got you. I've got you."
Nunu mewed softly, alive.
That was all that mattered.
Inside the carriage, the prince sat utterly still.
For a moment—one sharp, unbearable moment—he had thought the world was about to end beneath iron wheels and screaming horses. His hand had tightened against the velvet seat, his breath caught somewhere between fear and disbelief.
He had not spoken.
He never did.
But his eyes—cold, observant, endlessly watchful—had widened just slightly.
"Your Highness," one of the riders said hurriedly, dismounting. "She…she ran into the road. The girl—"
The prince did not answer.
Instead, he leaned forward.
The carriage door opened.
Mud-streaked light spilled in, and with it, her.
Ezra finally lifted her head.
Her face was dirty, smeared with earth and tears. Her clothes were torn and thin, the kind worn by girls the world had long forgotten. Yet when she looked up—when her gaze met the carriage window—the prince forgot how to breathe.
Her eyes were glass-blue.
Not the blue of summer skies or shallow seas, but the blue of untouched snow beneath moonlight. Clear. Endless. Too pure for the road she knelt upon.
Even beneath the mud, her skin was impossibly pale, almost luminous, as though the light belonged to her and not the sun. Strands of blonde hair clung to her cheeks, catching faint gold where the dirt could not dull it.
She looked at him without fear.
Without knowing who he was.
The riders waited for outrage, for anger, for punishment.
The prince gave none.
He simply stared.
Something unspoken stirred behind his eyes—recognition without memory, longing without reason. As though he were looking at a story he had once known and somehow forgotten.
Ezra hugged Nunu closer, her gaze lingering only a heartbeat longer before dropping back to the ground. To her, he was only a stranger behind glass. A noble, perhaps. Nothing more.
To him—
She was everything.
His expression did not change. Only the faintest shift in his posture betrayed him. The world would never know what had passed through him in that moment.
But the road did.
And fate had already taken note.