“Then she started talking to them. Voices no one else could hear. Answering questions no one had asked. Smiling at empty corners. Like something was speaking to her.”
A pause. A breath that doesn’t quite settle.
“And then . . . she started writing.”
He exhales. And this time, his voicedoesfalter.
“My father would wake in the night to find her on the floor—murmuring in tongues, covering the walls in numbers, letters, shapes none of us could make sense of. Their whole chamber—every inch of stone—was covered by the time she died.”
A long pause.
“She didn’t die suddenly,” he adds, voice barely more than a whisper. “She disappeared. Piece by piece, long before her actual death.”
A chill slides down my spine. Not at the madness—but at the image of waking in the night to find someone you love scribbling on the walls in a language you can’t read. Of watching them slip further away while you can do nothing but pretend it isn’t happening.
Thane straightens slightly. Like he’s trying to lift the weight—but it clings to him still. It’s not just memory. It’s the family legacy.
“We tried to contain the secret as much as possible,” he says. “She never left the Warlord’s wing. Only a handful of staff were assigned to care for her, and every one of them swore to discretion. Blood oaths, in some cases.”
His thumb rubs slowly over his palm—again and again, like a nervous tic.
“Because if word got out . . . it wouldn’t have just ended my father’s reign. It would have fractured the realm. The Fire Clan couldn’t afford a scandal tied to shadow magics—especially not with the Shadeheart’s forces finding cracks in the wards and attacking the borderlands.”
His eyes flick briefly to Valen, then back to me. And for a breath, the room holds still. As if even the bond between us dares not speak.
“So we buried the truth. And when she died—when she finally . . . broke—we let the world believe it was illness.”
He says nothing for a moment.
Then, softer: “It wasn’t a lie. Not entirely.”
Thane’s voice drops even lower, rough with something that sounds like grief wrapped in shame.
“About six months into the madness, she started wielding the Shadow Element.”
He doesn’t look at me this time. His gaze drifts past us, fixed on something far away—something only he can see.
“I don’t know if she meant to. If it was a choice. It just . . . started happening.”
A breath. Measured. Barely held together.
“That’s when it got worse. When more of her slipped away. The woman who raised me—the one who sang lullabies when I couldn’t sleep, who taught me how to listen before I spoke—was gone. And something darker began to take her place.”
His fingers twitch. Then lace back together, tighter this time.
“Shadows would curl from her fingers like black smoke. Sometimes they came when she was awake. Sometimes . . . when she was sleeping. I remember watching them drift across the floor like they had minds of their own. Watching them rise up the walls while she whispered to things no one else could see.”
A beat. Longer, heavier.
“I was eighteen.”
The age pulls at a thread in my memory. Familiar but out of reach.
Eighteen.
It clicks into place. The age. The timing.Kastiel.
Thane’s older brother. The one who died in battle. The one herarely speaks of. Thane was eighteen and hesaw it happen.
