When I finally rise, Eira doesn’t speak right away. Her clouded gaze studies me with something akin to awe.
“Threadborn,” she murmurs with great relief.
Threadborn.The word echoes in my chest like a secret spoken too loud. I don’t understand what it means, but the way Eira looks at me and the weight in her voice tell me it’s not something taken lightly.
She turns back to the Flame and without hesitation, reaches into its opalescent heart. Her hand vanishes into the pulsing light, drawing forth a medallion hanging from a delicate, sinuous chain.
A veiled guardian steps forward carrying a small, rectangular board draped in shimmering silk. Eira carefully lays the medallion upon it.
“The Infinity Flame has spoken,” she intones, voice carrying like a low chant. “It has drawn forth the serpent stone known as Emberyn, to be the seal of your bond. Bring forth the cindralveil.”
My gaze drops to the serpent stone medallion.Emberyn.Even its name feels heavy with meaning.
It rests on the silk like something sacred. A coiled serpent carved from stone, no larger than the pad of my thumb, its surface smooth yet rippling with veins of glowing amber and deep crimson, like fire caught inside obsidian. The stone seems to pulse softly, not with heat, but with something deeper. A rhythm. A presence.
The chain it hangs from is delicate, metallic, forged in the likeness of overlapping serpent scales. It glimmers faintly in the low light, dark as dusk yet edged with a shimmer of bronze. Not just jewelry. Not just ornament. I can feel the weight of it from here.
It isn’t meant to adorn me.
It’s meant to bind me.
The veiled guardian holding Emberyn turns and glides silently from the chamber, the medallion cradled like a sacred relic. In her wake, two silent guardians enter, their presence signaling the next stage of the preparation.
Their faces hidden beneath soft veils that shimmer like fish-scale silk, they carry a folded garment between them. It unfurls in their hands. A long, layered wrap of crimson and black, threaded with metallic filaments that catch the low glow of the chamber. They drape it carefully over my white ceremonial robe, the crimson fabric a stark contrast against the pale linen beneath. The weave feels impossibly light as they arrange it, crossing the layers over my chest and fastening them with a small serpent-shaped clasp that settles just above my heart, pinching the white fabric underneath.
At last, one of them lifts a final piece: a veil so fine it seems spun from mist, its threads glinting faintly in the firelight. With careful hands, they lower it over my head, letting it settle across my face in a silken fall. The fabric smells faintly of spice and stone, cool at first before warming with my breath. The world beyond blurs, softened and strange, as though I am looking through water.
“The cindralveil is worn only once,” Eira murmurs, her gaze lingering on the shimmering fabric, “by the one Emberyn has chosen. By the one who chooses the blood bond.”
Chooses.
As if I ever had a choice. But I say nothing as my fingers brush the serpent clasp. Two tiny red stones peer up at me, eyes I could almost swear just blinked.
Chapter Two
VAROK
Istand within the grooming chamber of the Temple of Threads, its stone walls humming faintly with the resonance of ages. Before me is a panel of ancient serpentglass, its surface rippling like smoke disturbed by unseen currents. Through its shifting veil, I watch the human delegation approach our gates. The distortions blur edges and faces, yet not enough to conceal her, the offering, the sacrifice. The human female who will soon be bound by blood to me.
Leira Valen.
Even thinking her name feels like swallowing something bitter. She was not my choice, yet here I am, about to welcome the enemy into my world.
Into my life.
The serpentglass amplifies certain details while blurring others. An apt metaphor for diplomacy itself. I see her clearly: spine straight, chin lifted with defiance rather than fear. Her ceremonial white silks catch the wind, revealing glimpses of travel-worn leathers beneath. Not the trembling, weeping sacrifice I expected. Something colder. Harder. Her eyes scan the obsidian gates with calculation, not awe.
I press my palm against the cool surface of the serpentglass, the faint rasp of scales whispering across its ancient face. For a breath, it feels as if I could touch her through it—flesh to scale, past to present. Five centuries of blood and ruin halt here, suspended on the edge of this single exchange. The weight of it is vast, a tether binding not just us, but the future of two worlds.
Once, our lands stretched wide beneath open skies. Settlements, temples, and fields that wove harmony with the surface world. But the humans unleashed their weapon that scoured everything aboveground, leaving only ash and poisoned stone.
The palace unfurls beneath the earth like a sentient being, its crystalline corridors grown rather than built, spiraling upward from the ancient foundation stone placed by the first Serpent Crown a millennium ago. Once merely a royal refuge, it became salvation for our entire race on the day we traded sunlight for shadow and birdsong for the hollow music of underground rivers. Here we remain, our scales forgetting the kiss of daylight, our bodies no longer remembering the caress of wind through grass. The memory of verdant fields remains a phantom ache we can never touch again.
Above us lies the Ashlands, what remains of Vessan-Kar, our ancestral home. Where our hatchlings once basked on sun-warmed stones, only charred earth remains, a wound that refuses to heal across centuries. We retreated beneath the surface, carving existence from darkness, growing stronger in adversity as serpents do. Now I watch this human approach our gates, her white silks billowing like flags of surrender, and something coils tight within me. After five hundred years of spilled blood and stolen clutches, we offer peace through her. But peace and submission are not the same, and I wonder which we truly purchase with her presence.
Lord Halric Valen stands beside her, a diplomatic viper in human skin. I have studied reports of his negotiations, the way he twists words into weapons. He does not touch his daughter, does not offer comfort. His face remains a mask of political necessity. Disgust ripples through me at the ease with which he offers her up, as if she were merely a pawn on a chessboard.
Not that I should care about this human, or any human, after what they have taken from us.
