James loved to explore. The golden palace was an endless world to him—a puzzle box of glittering corridors and hushed chambers. At eight years old, his curiosity seemed boundless. He prowled through forbidden spaces the way other children played games, following the lure of closed doors and the faint promise of secrets.

The adults never understood. They saw him as restless, perhaps spoiled, but to James the palace was alive. It whispered through its walls. It hid things. And he intended to find them.

That afternoon, he slipped away from his minders during a tedious exchange in the audience hall. They thought him occupied with the carved chess pieces at the edge of the table, but his eyes had already picked out an unattended archway across the room. The moment their attention wavered, he slipped into the shadows beyond.

The hallways grew colder the deeper he went, the air no longer warm with the breath of servants or the glow of sunlight. Dust dulled the gilding. Spiderwebs trembled in the corners like forgotten lace. His footsteps echoed differently here, sharper and more solitary.

It was in this quiet that he noticed the wall.

The pattern of carved blossoms was almost perfect—too perfect. His small hand brushed along it, fingers catching on a nearly invisible seam. He pressed. Something within the panel shifted with a groan of old hinges, and a draft of chill air slid out to greet him.

Inside was a narrow passage, barely wide enough for him to slip through. It ended in a room no larger than his bedchamber, its center bathed in an unsettling, pale glow.

He stopped.

Encased upright within a flawless column of glass stood a tall, blonde woman—utterly naked. The glass was so clear it was as if she stood in open air, yet perfectly still, perfectly posed. Her breasts were full and high, capped with pale pink nipples that seemed impossibly vivid against her luminous skin. Below, a neat triangle of golden hair crowned the soft, folded lips of her sex, the faint swell of her clitoris visible where the light curved over her. Her long legs ended in delicate feet, toes relaxed against the smooth glass floor.

Her hair was sunlight turned solid—thick waves spilling over her shoulders, brushing the upper swell of her breasts before cascading down her back. Her face was almost peaceful, eyes closed, lips just parted, as if she were caught mid-breath in a moment that might have been pleasure or repose.

James moved, circling slowly. At first it was perfection—then something shifted.

The light bent strangely at her hip. A hair-thin line. Another at her ribs. His steps slowed, his heart pressing against his ribs as the truth surfaced in pieces.

She wasn’t whole.

From crown to toes, her body was divided into impossibly thin slices, each sealed in its own pane of glass. Standing directly before her, the illusion held—but the moment he changed his angle, the separation became undeniable.

He let his gaze travel upward from her feet. The slices began at her toes, each segment of her foot perfectly preserved, each toe isolated yet aligned. Her ankles and calves followed, muscle and skin suspended as though they were parts of a model built with obsessive precision. Between the slices was nothing—only the faint shimmer of whatever force held her together.

Her thighs were cut into ribbons, each piece of her long legs perfectly parallel, the faint shadow of her pubic hair continuing slice by slice until it framed the delicate folds of her sex. The clitoris sat intact within its pane, glistening faintly in the cold light—preserved, yet no longer part of a whole body.

Higher still, her hips and stomach were segmented, the hollow of her navel divided neatly without a drop of blood, without any sign of violence but the sheer impossibility of it. Her breasts were each broken into their own perfect layers, the curve of her left nipple caught in one sheet, the right in another, both somehow still in alignment with her body’s shape.

Her shoulders, her neck, even the golden curtain of her hair—cut into shimmering vertical ribbons—followed the same inhuman perfection. Her face was the most haunting of all: lips parted in one pane, nose and cheeks in the next, the closed lids of her eyes divided but still managing to blink—each half moving just out of sync.

It was beauty dissected without gore, intimacy weaponized into something precise and inescapable.

James stopped, his mouth dry, the glow from the glass casting faint shadows across his face.

“Holy fuck...” he whispered.

Her eyes—split into two halves—shifted, and slowly, deliberately, they found his.

The sight froze him in place. She was alive.

He stepped closer, his breath catching as he traced the fine seams between panes. They were seamless to the touch, as cold as ice, yet the air between each section of her body shimmered faintly, like heat haze.

The silence was suffocating.

“Hello.”

The voice was soft, smooth, and far too calm for where it was coming from.

His brain caught up with his body in a violent rush, panic ripping through him. His mouth opened—not to answer, but to scream. It came out raw and sharp, echoing back at him in the glass chamber. He spun and bolted for the narrow passage.

The lights in the room died instantly, plunging the space behind him into a suffocating black. In that last heartbeat before it vanished, he heard her sigh—long and almost weary—and then the faint sound of her eyes closing again.

James didn’t stop running.

His small shoes slapped against the cold stone. The hallways blurred into streaks of shadow and pale gold. His lungs burned. His heart slammed in his chest. For all the maturity of the mind in his young body, in that moment he was nothing but a frightened child again, driven by pure instinct to get as far away as possible.

It was—without a doubt—some of the scariest shit he had ever seen.

He tore into the throne room, blinking against the sudden return of light. The great chamber was crowded—rows of courtiers in gleaming silks, stiff-backed generals in their dress armor, and the usual ring of polished flatterers that surrounded the throne.

His mother, the Queen, was standing near the dais, speaking to an advisor. She turned at the commotion, her expression shifting from irritation to faint alarm.