Lirion Vexen

Lirion’s earliest years were spent in the lilac shadows of a glade where mushrooms bloomed like quiet thought and the air carried the faint taste of night-blooming nectar. His elder sister, Aelara, was the only constant he knew: a stern but loving guardian who stitched together a life for the two of them with whatever threads the world offered. She taught him to listen to the world’s small voices—the rustle of leaves, the way rain sounded when you listened with your heart, the lullaby of a forest at dusk. When illness fell upon Aelara, it was as though the world itself paused. Lirion’s magic, once a curious sparkle he practiced with a feather-light touch, suddenly felt insufficient to mend what ailed her. The sisters who had teased him about his delicate wings became distant, and the courts of the Fey refused to lend aid, as if his pleas were merely the hiccup of a child’s dream. The absence of aid forced Lirion to look outward. He crossed into the mortal world, drawn by a man who saw beyond the fae’s gloss and the moth-wings’ beauty to something raw and real—a man who could offer a kind of retirement in a life that never promised such a thing. The bargain with a fiend seemed, at first, a terrible miracle—power to bend time, to bend fate, to secure a future that did not rely on the mercy of others. Years turned like pages of an old book: the fiend’s gifts granted Lirion the means to protect himself, to walk unseen through crowds, to bend will and weather to his own quiet will. Yet the cost was never simply paid in gold or ruinous flame; it was paid in memory, in the sense that every smile he shared with the mortal lover carried an alchemy of risk. The fey courts offered nothing but a mirror of what he already knew—an unyielding refusal to intervene, a reminder that to be seen by them is not always to be understood. Now, with time pressing down like a thick fog, Lirion longs for a season of retirement that might finally belong to him alone: a chance to wake without fear of the next debt, to dream without the tether of a pact, and to walk through a world that looks at him as something more than a creature of whimsy and power. Yet even retirement might require a new choice, a final bargain of heart and soul, for the road behind him is littered with promises kept and promises broken. He moves with patient resolve, wings tucked close, a quiet oath in his chest: to find peace, even if it means walking back into shadows to lay down his arms and breathe the old forest air once more.