She wasn’t wearing the smile, or the linen, or the lowered eyes tonight. The real clothes hugged like a second skin—dark cotton and oiled leather. Her daggers were in place. The one shaped like a curling rosebud, beautiful and cruel. The other, an old favorite, was carved from the fang of something extinct.
The shrine wasn’t supposed to be open. But locks were only ever suggestions, weren’t they?
Three seconds and a whispered click. The door yielded with a sound like breath drawn through teeth. She was inside before the next heartbeat.
Moonlight slanted down through the open eye of the chapel ceiling and cut the room into silver slices. The statue of Rhyssa loomed at the center, something in her stone face looked tired tonight.
She moved quietly down the aisle, her fingertips skimmed the edge of the incense table as she passed, and then paused. She dipped her fingers into the cold ash left behind in the burner, rubbed the powder between her fingertips, and brought it to her nose.
Henbane.
The scent was sweet, with a bitterness that coiled up behind her teeth. She knew what it did. Hallucinations. Visions, if you were the poetic type. Slowed reflexes. Distorted perception. A feeling like falling inside yourself.
It was used by old sects in certain rites. People swore it brought them closer to divinity.
More often, it just brought them closer to madness.
Interesting.
She didn’t linger.
The chapel door clicked shut behind her, and she vanished into the winding dark of the corridor. She slipped out of the castle the same way she always had. The old stones didn’t whisper about her movements, and the guards who might have noticed had their attention elsewhere: like a princess to watch as if she might sprout a second head or start chanting in the old tongue.
She moved fast, boots silent on the cobbled streets slick with mist. By now, she could navigate the outer rings of the castle in her sleep.
They followed the Rule of Two. Always had. A student, a teacher. There were only so many people you knew by face and name. She wasn’t supposed to know more than that. But rules were just things clever people hadn’t broken yet. There were workarounds. Messengers. Small favors owed in the right corners of the world.
She reached the base of the hill just as the church bells marked the hour—two soft tolls, muffled by the fog. The city around her breathed in its sleep: a dog barking three streets over, a merchant rolling up a cart, a drunk sobbing into the cobblestones. The contact stood in the shadows beneath a broken archway, face cloaked.
“Punctually as always,” the figure said.
“The threads have gone still,” she reported. “Something is nesting in the warp.”
The figure tilted their head. “How long before it unravels?”
“It already has,” she replied.
A pause. Then a curt nod. A slip of paper exchanged hands, so quickly it could have been mistaken for a gesture. Not that it mattered. The real message had been delivered.
She turned without waiting for dismissal. And there, almost hidden in the wind, was a child’s voice. Singing. The tune was familiar, though she hadn’t heard it in years.
Moon and sun, crack and thread,
Silence dances with the dead…
She stopped and glanced towards the direction from which the voice came.
It had begun.
Epilogue
The clock ticked like a polite executioner.
Somewhere in the room, a string instrument whispered—distorted and slow, the recording aged enough to waver with breathless imperfections. The light did not so much illuminate as it permitted shapes: gilded frames on every wall, hung in precise symmetry, portraits rendered in oil and time.
A figure sat in the high-backed chair, unmoving but for the steady rhythm of fingers tapping against the armrest. He was draped in shadow, haloed faintly by the lamp on the desk before him. The chair was not a throne, but it might as well have been.
Someone knocked.
