Not with hers still waiting.
His fingers hovered over the scroll Cedric had stolen for him. Then he unrolled it slowly, the parchment whispering.
Evelyne's name was still there. Uncrossed and waiting.
Just below Dasmon’s.
Just above another.
Aerenne Valis.
He hadn’t seen that name before. It was crossed out now. She had died at night in the ruins of the Ivory Bastion.
Alaric’s stomach turned. She died in Evelyne’s place. Speaking prophecy in the dark with sigil carved on her mouth. She had stepped out of her death and spoken words that should have belonged to Evelyne.
He saw the pattern now. Rituals happened always during the full moon, when the magic was strongest. The setting was always in some Old Bones. Bodies were sacrificed, because magic demanded payment. And the most potent price was life.
Each ritual was meant to channel the energy into one person—the vessel. The one who would receive the prophecy and survivelong enough to speak it. The one who wore the Circle of Binding on their lips.
And then… another name on the scroll would be crossed out.
Alaric looked at Evelyne's name again then folded the parchment with deliberate care. He slipped it into the inner lining of his coat—close to the heart, where secrets went to fester or survive.
The door creaked, then slammed open behind him.
Cedric stepped through, his shoulders taut, the fire in his expression hadn’t dimmed since the ritual.
“The carriages are ready,” he announced.
It was the kind of statement that should’ve meant motion, escape, forward momentum. But it landed like a sentence.
Alaric gave a slow nod.
Cedric had been like this for days: pared down to essentials, no room for anything that didn’t directly serve the mission or the grief. His usual wit had gone dormant, buried under ash and bone.
Alaric understood. He felt the same.
But what he didn’t say—what he hadn’t dared to speak aloud—was worse.
Evelyne.
Everything in him kept circling back to her. Not just the way she’d looked in the aftermath, but the power that had coiled around her like it belonged there. He had once called her a storm in disguise. He hadn’t known how literal that was.
He thought of the signs: the lunar eclipse at her birth, the fever that should have ended her life, the massacre she survived. The sigils. The silence. The way she hated magic because something in her recognized it not as myth, but mirror.
He used to think the prophecy was about someone to find. But now it was clear. It was her.
She didn’t just live among the old stories—she anchored them.
She didn’t know.
But he did.
“Of course,” he muttered under his breath. “Of course it had to be you.”
She wasn’t the key to the secret. She was the secret.
An Echo.
