Not the phosphorescent kind that light the corridors—these are different. Larger. Clearer. Arranged on pedestals and shelves like a collection of precious artifacts, each one glowing faintly with trapped images.
Scrying crystals. I’ve heard of them but never seen one. The old woman in Ironhold used to tell stories about Fae magic, about how they could see across vast distances, watch people without being seen. I thought they were just stories.
I approach the nearest pedestal, and the crystal brightens at my presence. The image inside sharpens, and I see—
Ironhold.
My village, captured in perfect detail. The forge where my father worked, the anvil still sitting exactly where he left it. The market square where I used to trade rabbit pelts for bread. The defensive walls I helped repair a dozen times, the stones I know by touch. All of it frozen in crystal like a memory made solid.
My throat tightens. I haven’t seen home in—how long? Weeks? Months? Time moves strangely in Stone Court, and I’ve stopped counting the days. I press my hand against the crystal like I could reach through it, touch the cobblestones I used to walk every morning.
I move to the next crystal. Another view of Ironhold, but from a different angle. This one shows the training ground where I practiced with the other village defenders. I can see myself in the image—my hair pulled back, my practice sword raised, correcting the stance of one of the younger fighters.
Recent. This image is recent. Within the last year, maybe.
He’s been watching my village.
The thought should feel like a violation. He told me, didn’t he? That first day in his chambers, when he explained how he’d chosen me. He said he’d been watching for months. Three months, he said. Long enough to learn my fighting style, map my courage, decide I was worth claiming.
I believed him.
I move through the room, examining crystal after crystal. Most show Ironhold—different locations, different seasons. I see the tavern where I drank alone after particularly hard days. The hill where I buried my parents. The stretch of wall where I killed my first chaos-beast at seventeen.
My whole life, captured in stone. Every place that mattered to me, every corner of my existence, recorded and stored like specimens in a collector’s cabinet.
It’s unsettling, but I tell myself it makes sense. Three months of surveillance would require many crystals. Many angles. He was thorough—of course he was thorough. He’s seven hundred years old. He doesn’t do anything by half measures.
Then I reach the back of the room, where the oldest crystals are kept.
These are different. Cloudier. The images inside are harder to see, like they’ve degraded over time—or like they were made with older magic, less refined techniques. I pick one up, turning it toward the light, curious what Ironhold looked like before I was born, maybe. What my village was like when his surveillance began.
The image slowly resolves.
My parents’ forge. But not the way I remember it—brighter, newer, with flowers in the window boxes that my mother alwaystended. The flowers she stopped planting after I turned twelve because she didn’t have time anymore, because the village’s demands kept growing.
And in the image: me. Young. Very young.
Sixteen, maybe.
The year they died.
My hands start to shake.
I set the crystal down carefully—too carefully, like it might shatter, like I might shatter—and pick up another. This one shows the road outside Ironhold. The one where bandits attacked my parents’ cart. The attack I wasn’t there to stop because I was sick in bed with a fever that came out of nowhere.
A fever that kept me home. That kept me alive while they died.
The crystal shows the road, shows the bend where it happened. Shows the cart. Shows—
I pick up another crystal. And another. And another.
My hands are trembling so badly I almost drop them. The images blur as I cycle through—not from the magic degrading, but from the tears building in my eyes.
Fifteen. A crystal showing me at fifteen, gangly and awkward, training with my father’s old sword.
Fourteen. Standing at my mother’s elbow while she cooked, my face round with baby fat I don’t remember having.
Thirteen. Twelve. Eleven.
