The mountain rose from the mist like a judgment.

I had walked three days to reach it. My feet bled through my boots; my throat burned from thirst. But I kept climbing because that was what I did. I sacrificed. I gave. I had been giving pieces of myself away since I was old enough to understand that others needed them more.

This was simply the last piece.

The village elders had explained it clearly. The curse came from the mountain. The Beast King who lived in the castle at its peak. He had been a man once, they said, before dark magic transformed him. Now crops failed. Children sickened. The river ran black with poison.

Three years of dying. The curse had festered on the mountain for longer than that, the elders said, but it had taken five years to creep down to our village. Once it arrived, it moved fast.

Only one cure: a bride for the beast.

I had watched my mother cough blood for six months before the sickness finally won. That was less than a year ago. Before her, it had been the miller's wife, and the tanner's eldest, and a dozen others. My younger brother went thin as paper, too weak to leave his bed. The village I loved withered into something gray and hollow.

So when the elders asked for a volunteer, I raised my hand before they finished the question.

It was, after all, what I was for.

The castle gates loomed ahead. Iron twisted into shapes that might have been beautiful once, vines and flowers and thorned roses. Now they were rusted, broken, hanging from hinges like bones from sockets.

I pushed them open. The metal screamed.

Beyond the gates, the courtyard stretched in silence. Weeds grew through cracked stone. A fountain stood empty, its basin collecting leaves and rain. The castle itself rose against the gray sky, all towers and spires and windows clouded and blank.

No servants came to greet me. No guards. Nothing moved but the wind.

I had expected terror. Instead, I felt a strange peace settle into my bones. This was what I had come for. Whatever waited inside, claws, fangs, death... at least my village would live.

My sacrifice would mean something.

I climbed the steps to the great doors. They stood slightly ajar, as if someone had left in a hurry and never returned. I slipped through the gap into darkness.

Inside, dust motes danced in the thin light that filtered through dirty windows. A grand hall stretched before me, high ceilings, faded tapestries, a staircase curving up into shadow. Everything was gray. Everything was still.

"Hello?" My voice echoed, small and swallowed by the vastness. "I am Serena, from the village below. I've come as the offering."

Silence answered.

I moved deeper into the hall. My footsteps rang against stone floors. Somewhere, water dripped. The air smelled of dust and age and something else, something wild. Animal. Alive.

"I know you're here." I kept my voice steady. "I won't run. I've come to end the curse."

A sound. Movement in the darkness to my left. I turned, straining to see.

And then he emerged from the shadows.

The stories hadn't prepared me.

He stood taller than any man I'd known, seven feet at least, maybe more. His body was caught between forms, neither fully human nor fully beast. Fur covered his arms, silver-black and thick. His hands ended in claws, curved and sharp as scythes. But he stood upright, broad-shouldered, powerful as a warrior.

His face was the strangest part. Human bones beneath inhuman features. A mouth that held fangs, but lips that could form words. Eyes that burned gold in the dim light, but eyes nonetheless. Human eyes, watching me with what looked like exhaustion layered over something fiercer.

He wore clothes. That surprised me. Dark fabric draped over his massive frame, simple but not savage. Civilized, despite everything else.

"You should not have come." His voice was a rumble, rough from disuse. Deep as thunder.

I lifted my chin. "My village sent me."

"Your village is foolish." He took a step back into shadow. "Go home. I do not accept offerings."

"But the curse..."

"Will remain." Another step back. He was retreating. Running from me, the small village girl with bleeding feet. "I have no use for sacrifices. I have no use for brides. Whatever your elders told you, whatever they promised, it was a lie. Go home."

"My village is dying."

He stopped. That amber gaze cut across the dusty hall and held.

"People are sick. Children are starving. My mother..." I swallowed. "My mother is dead. My brother, twelve years old and already an old man in his bones, may be next. I walked three days up this mountain because someone told me a bride would break the curse. If that was a lie, tell me what will work instead."

Neither of us spoke. The dust settled around us like snow. He didn't blink. Didn't move. Just watched me with those impossible eyes.

"Nothing will work." His voice came out quieter now. Hollow. "The curse cannot be broken by offerings. It cannot be broken at all."

"Then what..."

"Return to your village, Serena." He turned away, moving toward the shadows. "Forget this place. Forget me. There is nothing here but a monster and his punishment."

"Wait." I stepped forward. "If I leave, will the curse lift?"

He paused. Didn't turn.

"No."

"Then I'm staying."

Now he did turn. The gold eyes blazed brighter. His claws flexed at his sides.

"You are either very brave or very foolish."

"Probably both." I shrugged, though my hands trembled. "But I didn't walk three days to give up at the doorstep. You say the curse can't be broken by offerings, fine. Then I'm not an offering. I'm a guest. An uninvited one, perhaps, but a guest nonetheless."

"Guests leave."

"Eventually. When they're done being guests."

His brow shifted, heavy and unreadable. With those features, I could not parse what lay beneath.

"You are mad."

"Probably that too." I looked around the dusty hall, at the decay and the darkness. "This place needs work. When was the last time someone swept?"

"Years."

"It shows." I lowered my pack to the flagstones, the small bundle of possessions I'd brought from home. "If I'm going to stay, I'll need a room. And food, if you have any. And water. I've been walking three days, and I'd rather not die of thirst before the monster kills me."

For a long moment, he simply stared.

Then he made a sound I didn't expect. Low, rough, almost rusty with disuse.

He was laughing.

"East corridor, third door on the left," he said finally. "The room has a bed. The kitchen still has stores. Take what you need."

"And you?"

"I am not your concern." He turned again toward the shadows. "Stay if you insist. But do not seek me out. Do not try to 'fix' me. Do not ask questions you don't want answered."

"And if I do?"

He looked back one last time. In the dim light, his fangs gleamed.

"Then you will learn why they call me the Beast King."

He vanished into the darkness. I heard his footsteps, heavy, uneven, retreating into the castle's depths.

I stood alone in the grand hall, covered in dust and exhausted beyond reason. I had come to marry a monster. Instead, I had been dismissed like an unwanted guest.

But I was still here. And I had nowhere else to go.

I picked up my pack and went to find my room.