“Oh, semantics.” The seer waved a clawlike hand. “You’re the lost heir who wasn’t so lost after all, were you? And it could be any day now, dearie. You’ll find yourself taking the throne whether you want it or not.”
A shiver lanced down Ella’s spine, but the seer only smiled wider, candlelight dancing behind her. “Come in, come in. Close your mouth and hurry along. The creatures in this forest toleratemyantics, but they don’t know you.”
They crossed the threshold, the door closing behind them with a slow groan.
Inside, the air felt heavy, thick with the tang of herbs and smoke. Shadows warped and stretched with every waver of candlelight, and the room looked more like a ritual chamber than a home.
Jakobav stayed close to Ella, watchful and tense, one hand already brushing the hilt at his hip as though he didn’t even trust the walls around them.
The seer drifted to the center of the room, her bent frame haloed in trembling light. She tilted her head, her eyes rolling back until only white remained, endless and terrible. The air seemed to lurch, pressing tighter, and before Ella could draw a breath, the seer convulsed violently, then went utterly still. When she spoke, the sound was not her voice at all but something vast and resonant, ancient as the rock beneath their feet.
"When realms entwined by fate’s desire,
A child shall rise through smoke and fire.
A queen will fall, her time undone,
The daughter crowned beneath the red sun.
She’ll thread the Veil that none may cross,
Restore what kingdoms thought was lost.
But when she seeks what’s locked away,
The relic found shall hold no sway.
For what she seeks lies not outside,
But in the blood that realms divide."
Ella stood frozen as the last echoes of the words faded, her heart pounding with a force that seemed to reverberate through her entire body. They struck her like a faultline breaking open beneath her feet, sudden and irrevocable.
She’d never spoken them aloud, never trusted another soul with them, yet here they were, words she’d carried alone for years, pulled into the open as if the seer had stolen them from the compass of her soul.
Nothing in the prophecy had ever frightened her more than hearing it spoken by someone who shouldn’t have known it at all.
Beside her, Jakobav stiffened, his gaze glancing between her and the seer with guarded suspicion. It wasn’t only Ella’s fate he seemed to be measuring, but what those words might mean for his people, for the Claiming that loomed over him, and likely for Dravaryn itself.
A sudden flash pierced her mind as if the seer’s voice had cracked through stone, unearthing what she had buried long ago.
A memory surged with startling clarity.
Her parents whispered by firelight when she’d been a child too young to grasp meaning, their voices urgent, their faces shadowed by fear. “Threadwalking,” her mother had said in a tone that carried both respect and dread. “Will either mend the realms or break them entirely.”
The memory hollowed her. Gods, where in the hell had that come from? She shouldn’t have been old enough to understand any of it, much less recall it now.
An ache bloomed in her chest where breath should have been, a fierce, impossible longing to see her parents again, even for a single heartbeat. The floor seemed to tilt beneath her as though that faultline had deepened, her vision blurring until the room dimmed into encroaching darkness.
When her eyes fluttered open again, she was on the floor, cold stone seeping through her clothes while Jakobav held her upright, his hands firm on her shoulders as if anchoring her to the world.
“Ella?” His voice was tight with worry. “You okay?”
She nodded slowly, veins thrumming under his touch, and he didn’t immediately release her. He only eased her to sit, the space between them narrow, his attention fixed on the seer, the focus of a man who measures threats before he acts on them.
He helped her up to stand, then took several steps away, giving her space. “Stay upright this time.” The words were quiet, almost an order, the command undercutting the concern.
Yet something had shifted between them, not announced, not spoken, but present in the way his hold lingered past necessity and how he positioned his body so that she was half-sheltered by it, the change no more dramatic than a tide turning and just as impossible to stop.Recognition lodged in her chest, unwelcome and undeniable.
