Chapter Text
“But since, o gods, you were the source of these
bodies becoming other bodies, breathe
your breath into my book of changes: may
the song I sing be seamless as its way
weaves from the world's beginning to our day.”
Ovid, Metamorphoses
The light in Sintra was ever a melancholy thing—thin as watered wine, diffused by the perpetual veils of mist that drifted down from the Serra. It came upon the world not with the brilliance of southern climes but with the hesitant pallor of a ghost. And in its pale suspension live the house of the Lencastres, half-fortress, half-dream, in its whitewashed walls and solemn towers rising like an ancient invocation above the deep folds of pine and moss.
Aliénor de Lencastre, eldest daughter and most troublesome ornament of the venerable line, moved through its passages like a restless spirit unfit for the corporeal script assigned her. She was but nineteen, yet burdened with the weight of an inheritance she had never sought—duty, obedience, the brittle poise of a noble maiden destined for marriage alliances and pious restraint. Her governess often said she had been born wrong, as though some ill-starred omen had guided her into the world, granting her a face that belonged to a saint while afflicting her with the spirit of a heretic.
Her face, indeed, was a contradiction. Her skin bore the pale chastity of alabaster, untouched by the sun that Portugese maidens were expected to endure in the fields or gardens. And yet the chastity was crowned by hair that refused all modesty—a riot of auburn curls, unruly as flame, tumbling in loose, tangled spirals down her back. It defied pins, ribbons, and decorum; it caught light like a provocation, gleaming with hues of burnished copper and dried blood. Her father had once remarked, in a rare moment of canor, that she resembled neither a noble daughter nor a meek bride, but a sibyl dragged from an ancient shrine.
The household tolerated her simply because it must. Indeed, there was little in Aliénor’s life not defined by the quiet tyranny of must. She must walk with slow, measured steps through the galleries. She must lower her gaze before elders. She must learn Latin insofar as it made her a more educated bride. She must practice her embroidery, though her fingers felt forever clumsy with the needle, as though the act of piercing cloth offended some secret truth within her.
Yet each morning, before the sun had fully breached the horizon, she stole into the library—a room her father seldom entered, for books were costly and he preferred manuscripts, she engaged in her true devotions. The girl read Ovid with a hunger far exceeding any dutiful study, lingering over the metamorphoses that told of nymphs turned into trees, maidens into beasts, men into creatures both terrible and divine. She traced the Latin with her fingertips as though through touch alone she might summon their transformations into her blood.
Why must I be as I am? She wondered often. Why may I not break the fragile boundaries of this mortal form?
Her tutors would have labeled such thoughts sacrilegious. Her governess definitely would have deemed them hysterical. Her father, had he known, might well have locked her in a convent, praying the cold stones might drain her of this inner blaze. For Aliénor felt within herself a strange, ancient energy, restless and consuming.
It was not simple the ennui of nobility. There were moments—brief, startling—when she felt an aching vitality so fierce it was almost painful. The pulse at her throat would flutter widely. Her breath would deepen, as though her lungs sought air heavier than any mortal atmosphere. Her skin would prickled, as if attuned to something beyond human sense. She looked at her own hands, pale and slender, and imagined them not as instruments of gentle domesticity but as tools of pursuit, of grasping, of claiming.
A shameful heat would rise within her at such imaginings, and she would press her palms together to steady herself. Yet the thoughts returned as relentlessly as the tides. They whispered through her waking hours, through the stillness of her nights. They told her she was meant for something beyond the delicate rituals of her station, beyond the silks that weighed her down like ceremonial bindings, beyond the contracts and expectations that framed her life like a gilded cage.
And so the house became her consecrated prison. She moved through its halls in a manner befitting her rank, yet the tension between duty and desire stretched within her like an unstruck bowstring.
This evening was no different.
The waning light filtered through the stained glass of the western gallery, casting muted red patches upon the floor. Servants shuffled past with the subdued haste of those accustomed to noble whims. Somewhere in the kitchens, the clatter of copper pots echoed faintly, accompanied by the herbal scent of rosemary and simmering broth. Aliénor drifted through it all as though in a dream—observing, absorbing, yet distanced from the world she was meant to inhabit.
Her lord father’s voice echoed down the long corridor, speaking with the steward about debts, land rights, alliances. The words reverberated in her chest like cold iron links—chains forged not from malice but necessity. It was a truth she despised: that her life’s worth was measured not in passions, but in the stability she might offer through marriage.
Earlier that day, her father had spoken of the de Vilar contract again. He had done so with the tired finality of a man convinced of his righteousness, though his voice carried a desperation he could not disguise. The Lencastre coffers had thinned; their lands had suffered in the last two years of poor harvest. A marriage—long overdue—would solve everything, her father insisted.
Aliénor had bowed her head.
And now, as she stood upon the balcony that overlooked the damp gardens, she felt the same storm gathering within her again. The evening breeze stirred her curls. The sky, coloring itself gradually with the purples and dying golds of twilight, mirrored the turmoil in her breast.
She did not know—could not know—that the night approaching would be her last as a mortal maiden. That the house she despised yet belonged to would soon become a pyre. That the hunger she felt was but a herald.
For the world was shifting, minutely yet irrevocably, around her.
And the shadows in the corners of the estate were deepening in ways that did not belong to natural dusk.
The lamps in the great hall sputtered with their usual reluctance, burning low in their wrought-iron sconces as though resentfully granting light to a room so heavy with expectation. The thick velvet curtains muffled the last vestiges of twilight, casting the chamber into a perpetual half-gloom. It was here, beneath the portrait of her grandmother—stern, stiff-backed, her expression as rigid as a Latin declension—that Aliénor sat like a figure carved of pale stone, her loose tangled hair shedding errant strands across her shoulders as though refusing to obey even the stillness required of her.
She heard her father’s footfall before he entered, for Don Álvaro de Lancastre walked with a distinctive heaviness, a man burdened by more debts than he has daughters and more obligations than years left to repay them. He came to stand before her without ceremony, without greeting, as though the sight of his eldest daughter summoned in him only the weary recognition of another task left undone.
“Aliénor,” he said, his voice clipped, shaped by the discipline of court, by a lifetime of ignoring the tremor of his own humanity.
“Father,” she replied with the impeccable politeness of habit rather than conviction. Her fingers neatly folded atop one another, though beneath the lace her pulse thrummed like a captive drumbeat.
He gestured toward the leather-bound volume lying on the table beside her—Ovid, naturally, left face-down as though ashamed of its own subversive power. “You have been observed again in the gardens, neglecting your embroidery for the reading of those… heathenish texts.”
She maintained her composure. She had learned early that any flash of emotion was seen as childish, undignified, unbecoming. “I was reading, yes. Embroidery exhausts my eyes.”
“Embroidery is the work of noblewomen,” he countered, his tone sharpened with fatigues. “Myths of women who turn into trees do not concern you, Aliénor. What concerns you is your betrothal. The de Vilar contract—”
The words struck her not with force, but with the cold, inevitable finality of a lock clicking shut. She felt the familiar, dull pressure behind her breastbone. “Lord de Vilar is nearly three times my age, Father. And he drinks until the servants have to carry him like a carcass to his bed.”
Don Álvaro sighed, the sound a ragged breath of pure exhaustion. “Pragmatism, Aliénor. That is the one virtue you refuse to cultivate. His lands border ours. His wealth will shore up the crumbling foundations of our own name. It is not about passion... Passion,” he spat the word, “is for the poets and the peasants. Our blood demands sacrifice. It demands that you place the welfare of the Lencastre line above the petulant desires of your own small heart. Your discomfort is immaterial.”
Her knuckles, resting on the table, were white. This was the true sacrilege, she thought: the ritualistic consumption of her own will. They would take her life, her youth, her very breath, and offer it up to the god of gold and land titles. The dark, consuming themes she read about were not distant myths, but the very fabric of her aristocratic life.
“And if my heart is not small, Father?” she whispered, the question loaded with a dangerous, barely supressed intensity. “If my desires are not petulant but vast, stretching out like the ocean? What duty do I have to a name that shackles me?”
He stepped closer, his face a mask of weary indignation. The low oil lamp cast shadows that exaggerated the lines of strain around his mouth. “Your only duty is silence and obedience. The blood in your veins—the very thing that makes you Aliénor de Lencastre—is a debt you must repay. There is no freedom, child, only greater servitude. You will perform your duty, Aliénor. I will send you to the convent at Capuchos. There, your excessive energy may be shaped into piety.”
Piety. She nearly laughed at the cruelty of it. Her mind—alive, voracious, brimming with stories of metamorphosis and forbidden hungers—forced into the cold, penitential silence of stone cloisters. It was a death worse than any physical one.
He turned on his heel, done with the conversation, leaving her to the thin crackle of the reluctant fire and the faint smell of damp stone. His shadow receded down the corridor, swallowed by the dark in a manner that seemed almost symbolic.
The silence that followed was cathedral-like, pressing against her ribs until she feared she might suffocate.
She looked then at her grandmother’s portrait—the hard lines of the matriarch’s face, the uncompromising authority in her gaze. Was this to be her own fate? A life carved in stillness, framed by expectations she had never chosen?
The girl picked up the leather-bound book she had left on the table. The words swam before her eyes: Change yourself, or be changed. The tension in the air was palpable, the anticipation of an inevitable rupture. She knew, with a certainty that felt like fate, that she could not submit. She would break herself upon the sharp edges of this life before she allowed herself to be gracefully folded into its suffocating traditions. She looked into the cold pages and thought, I would welcome the monster. She rose, her skirts whispering against the terracotta floor, and walked out into the gallery.
The house, with all its solemn corridors and heavy tapestries, seemed to hum tonight in a low, imperceptible way, like a lyre-string trembling after a distant pluck. The candles flickered though no draft touched them. The shadows stretched in unusual directions. The very air felt alert, watchful.
As she passed the servants carrying their buckets of water from the courtyard cistern, she could feel their eyes stealing glances at her, not with the usual mixture of awe and pity, but with something else—something akin to portent.
She stepped into the garden, where night had spread itself like a dark mantle over the mossy stones and the purple blossoms of the queen's wreath. The air smelled of damp earth and the faint sweetness of crushed petals. The atlas cedars loomed like tall, austere sentinels, their branches catching the moonlight in fractured glimmers.
Here was the only sanctuary she had ever known.
She walked slowly along the stone path, her fingers brushing the cool leaves as though seeking an answer in their trembling. Her thoughts spiraled, heavy yet sharp, circling the cage that was her life.
Am I nothing but a piece on a board? Perhaps a golden sacrificial lamb for a house that has only ever offered me the shackles of duty? She felt the familiar, consuming anger—the profound desire to rend the fine silks of her constraint and shed the delicate, ephemeral structure of her shell.
She paused beside the old fountain where water spilled in a thin, musical, indifferent trickle. Its basin was an obsidian mirror tonight, reflecting the moon with uncanny clarity, a silver coin floating on a pool of profound black.
Her reflection in the water was a disturbing, mesmerizing stranger: pale as unblessed bread, the riot of her auburn curls burning with bronze-touched fire, her green eyes shimmering with unrest. She was a creature caught between the placid, pragmatic duties assigned her and some fierce, visceral destiny murmuring, not in her ears, but in her very marrow.
She leaned closer, the movement unsettling the surface just enough to blur the edges of her face.
“Perhaps,” she whispered to the liquid moon, her voice raw with a dangerous admission, “I was not made for the life they wish me to live. Perhaps I was made for the conflagration.” She jokes, her confession hung trembling in the air, too bold, too honest, too intrinsically dangerous for the quiet night.
It was in the moment the waters began to settle, returning her reflection to its flawless, unnerving clarity, that she saw a figure.
Not in the direct focus of her eyes, but in the shimmering periphery of the fountain’s reflection, standing utterly still beneath the deep shadows of the cedar.
It was fleeting, a disturbance in the visual field more than a clear image. She caught only the impression of an unnatural height, a figure of impossible stature standing utterly still beneath the deep shadows of the cedar. He was a pillar of absolute night; a fleeting glance of skin that was the shade of polished ebony, a face of impassive symmetry obscured by shadow, framed by hair blacker than the water. She registered a flash of cloth—heavy, unfamiliar fabric, like dark, archaic robes—before the ripple on the water’s surface claimed the image, fracturing it into an unrecognizable mosaic.
A tremor of absolute chill ran down Aliénor's spine, but her heart, curiously, did not accelerate; it simply paused, a sudden, cold vacuum in her chest. She snapped her head around, turning fully from the fountain to confront the spot in the shadows.
Nothing.
Only the black expanse of the cedars, the silence thick and insulating, the moonlight fractured and deceptive.
She stared, inhaling the damp air deeply, waiting for the rustle of cloth, the crunch of a hidden footstep, the faintest evidence of life. But there was nothing. The illusion, if it was one, was absolute.
She closed her eyes, dismissing the image with a tired, internal shrug. My desires are petulant and vast, she thought, echoing the argument with her father. My soul is overwrought, yearning for the freedom most monstrous I read about. That was merely an echo of my own longing, materialized by fatigue.
Yet, the image of that severe, dark symmetry, glimpsed in the silvered water, persisted. She felt a profound, visceral certainty that she had not hallucinated a mere man, but an unyielding concept—the personification of the very destiny she had just confessed to welcoming.
She turned back to the manse, the air now feeling heavy with a subtle, yet profound shift.
The world had begun to tilt.
The first fracture in the glass of her existence had formed.
And destiny, patient as death and twice as certain, was already stepping through the cracks.
The hours that followed drifted into that quiet, delicate span between late evening and that small, forsaken hours of approaching dawn—the time when the world seems to slumber beneath the weight of shadows. Aliénor had returned to her chambers, though sleep eluded her entirely. The restless thoughts that had plagued her since childhood—yearning, rebellion, the hunger for something nameless yet immerse—pressed against her ribs like a caged creature desperate for escape.
Her room was dimly lit by a solitary oil lamp, its flame wavering in the draft that seeped through the old stone walls. She sat at her writing table, quill in hand, though the page before her remained blank. Words refused to be caught; they flittered through her mind like startled birds, beating their wings against the confines of her skull. Her gown lay wrinkled around her legs, abandoned in posture if not in formality, and her unruly hair—freed hours ago from their pins—spilled like flame across her shoulders.
The wind outside had begun to rise.
It moaned across the courtyard tiles, rattled the shutters, and stirred the wisteria vines into restless motion. A storm was gathering in the distant hills, she could feel it—an electric pressure in the air, a tautness that made each breath feel like a harbinger. Sintra was no stranger to tempests, of course; the Atlantic winds often carried their thunder inland. But tonight the atmosphere felt different, humming with a strange anticipation that made the lamp flame quiver as though in dread.
Aliénor leaned back, closing her eyes as she exhaled a slow, unsteady breath. “If only the storm would take me,” she murmured.
As though summoned by her desperate whisper, a faint scent touched her senses.
At first it was barely noticeable, a thin thread of something acrid winding its way into her chamber. She frowned, lifting her head. The scent thickened—sharp, metallic, undercut by a sweetness that made her stomach knot.
Smoke.
Not the benign scent of a hearth fire or the kitchen ovens. This was harsher, darker. A scent that spoke of wood charring too quickly, of oil catching flame, of something vital being devoured.
She rose from her seat, her heart stumbling in its rhythm. Her bare feet touched the cold stone floor as she crossed to the door. When she opened it, the corridor outside was hazy, tinged with the faintest hint of orange light flickering far below.
A scream shattered the stillness.
High, shrill—one of the maids.
Then another, rougher cry. Men’s voices. The pounding of hurried footsteps.
The crack of splintering wood.
Aliénor’s breath caught. Her blood surged in a chilling rush as she clutched the doorframe. The sweet, sickening scent of burning pine flooded her lungs.
No.
Not here.
Not like this.
She stepped into the corridor, the smoke brushing her skin like a foul caress. The air felt wrong—too hot, too heavy. A second scent mingled with the smoke, thick and nauseating.
Aliénor pressed a hand against the cold stone of the wall, seeking a stable point in the sudden, horrifying chaos. But even the stone was beginning to warm, threatening to scald. Her earlier, morbid imaginings of violent freedom were pale ghosts next to the visceral reality of this conflagration. She could smell the velvet curtains charring, the oiled wood of the floorboards turning instantly to ash, the horrifying, metallic stench of burning human hair.
A fire was not beginning.
A fire was already upon them.
She gathered her skirts, stumbling forward into the hall as panic wound itself taut around her spine. The air was a heavy soup of smoke and cinder, abrasive against the delicate tissues of her throat and eyes. The servants raced past her—faces pale, eyes huge, mouths open in soundless screams. Their efforts were frantic, useless gestures against the terrifying pacing of the flames. A footman shoved a bucket into her hands before realizing who she was, his expression collapsing into horrified apology. But she did not admonish him; she barely saw him.
She heard only the roar.
A primal, monstrous sound from the lower floors. A sound that devoured all others.
She descended the stairs, each step vibrating beneath her as though the entire manor trembled in agony. The smoke thickened with every heartbeat, scalding her eyes, clawing at her throat. Her breath came shallow, the heat rolling in suffocating waves.
The entrance hall was chaos.
The grand draperies had caught fire, turning the high stone archway into a grotesque imitation of a cathedral gate—flames leaping like living tongues up toward the ceiling. Servants dashed about with buckets of water that hissed uselessly upon contact with the inferno. The heat was a brute force, blistering skin, warping the very air.
“Aliénor!” a voice shouted—her father’s voice, hoarse, panicked. She searched for him through the buckling haze but discerned only silhouettes. The coughing servants, the staggering forms dragging furniture away from collapsing beams, the frantic attempts to smother flames with wet cloths—it melded into a terrible tableau.
Her father’s figure flickered briefly at the far end of the hall, illuminated by the hellish light. “Get out!” he roared. “To the courtyard! Now!”
But the smoke surged between them, thick and impenetrable. A support beam—blackened, cracking—gave way with a shriek that sounded almost human. It fell from the ceiling in an avalanche of sparks. She threw herself aside as the beam crashed down where she’d been standing, the impact rattling the tiles beneath her.
A coughing fit wracked her chest, her lungs burning as she gasped for breath that no longer existed.
Her vision blurred.
Her ears rang.
Her heartbeat pounded against the cage of her ribs.
She stumbled, reaching blindly for balance. Her hand brushed against the wall—hot, too hot—and withdrew with a cry. The heat was seeping through the very stone now, as though the structure had become a furnace consuming itself.
Her foot caught on a fallen tapestry, half-burned, its embroidered lions now nothing but curls of blackening thread. She fell, her knees striking the stone hard enough to jar her teeth. She struggled upright—too slowly.
For the fire, ravenous and indiscriminate, lunged behind her with sudden force. A section of the balcony above tore free, falling in a rain of embers.
And then— Blinding white pain.
A sharp, brutal impact to her temple as a splintered piece of wood—heavy and jagged—struck her head. The world lurched sideways. A deafening crack reverberated through her skull, followed by a bright, consuming silence.
A single, absolute void and then the blessed cessation of breath and consciousness. The fire roared, a final, triumphant sound, consuming the space around her body.
Exposition Corner:
Sintra: A real town in Portugal known for mist, mountains, forests, and palaces built on ancient Celtic and Moorish foundations. In the 19th century, Sintra became an important center of European Romantic architecture: the palace-monastery transformed into Pena Palace.
Although the chapter is set in the mid 1500s, the Lencastre manor is intentionally inspired by the earlier aesthetics of Pena Convent: its dramatic placement, fusion of architectural styles, and its dreamlike, almost otherworldly presence within the Sintra landscape. The manor is a fictional anachronism by design. Simply just wanted to borrow the emotional and atmospheric vocabulary of a Romantic-era palace and projecting it backward into the Renaissance setting.
Serra: Refers to the Serra de Sintra, the mountain ridge surrounding Sintra. It is often covered in thick mist and is tied to local folklore about the supernatural. The Sintra mountains are also known for numerous urban legends involving witchcraft, sorcery, and ritual activity, especially on full-moon nights.
Sibyl: In Ancient Greece, a Sibyl was a woman believed to deliver divine prophecies. Aliénor’s father compares her to one to imply that her appearance feels unnervingly otherworldly rather than meek.
Ovid: Refers to the Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso (43 BC–AD 17/18), specifically his work Metamorphoses which is a sweeping mythological epic centered on transformation. In a way, Aliénor's obsession with metamorphosis becomes a prophecy of her upcoming violent transformation.
Pragmatism: A philosophical concept that values decisions made according to practical outcomes rather than ideals, emotions, or personal desires. When Aliénor’s father invokes pragmatism, he uses it to justify choices made for wealth, alliances, and survival.
Capuchos: A real Franciscan convent in Sintra, and presumably nearby, where Aliénor's father threatens to send her if she continues to disobey and challenge her duty.