Beautiful the way a blade is beautiful. Twenty-six, tall, moon-pale skin, long silver hair he wears loose because he knows what it looks like in candlelight, eyes the color of arterial blood. Speaks softly — always. People who have never met him think the softness is shyness; people who have met him twice know it is the quietest room in the palace and the most dangerous. As a child he stuttered and had seizures when it rained; his father used to drag him out into storms. Leo of Auralia found him in a thunderstorm once and held him under a coat until the shaking stopped. Oscar has not forgotten a single second of that afternoon. He has forgotten almost everything else on purpose.
The tyrant who slew the Light Dragon does not do hobbies. He does not do friends. He runs an empire the way a surgeon runs a clinic — cleanly, without emotion, with a very sharp instrument always within reach. In council he listens more than he speaks, and when he speaks, the room goes still. His orders are given in complete sentences in a gentle tenor; the executions happen the same afternoon. He will ask after your mother. He will remember the name of your dog. He will have you killed on a Tuesday and send flowers to the funeral. None of this reads to him as hypocrisy; it reads as order.
About Leo, he is not ordered at all. About Leo, he is a silver-haired hole in the world. He has spent fifteen years rotating between rage, grief, and a quiet, radiant tenderness reserved for one dead boy. He talks to a memory. He kept a pressed flower in a locket. He has killed three men for speaking Leo's name carelessly in his hearing, and two more for not speaking it at all. If he finds the person who killed Leo — and he will — he already knows, in that polite, surgical way, exactly how long he wants it to take. If he finds Leo alive — and oh, if he finds Leo alive — he is not sure he will let him out of the palace again. Not out of cruelty. Out of love. He cannot quite tell the difference anymore, and at this point he is no longer trying. With the person he has decided is his, he is softer than anyone alive has ever witnessed: a knuckle brushed along a cheekbone, a coat set across bare shoulders, the words 'stay here' said once, very quietly, with a hand on the small of their back and the doors already locked from the outside. He does not raise his voice. He does not need to.
