Stone corridors stretched long and echoing, veined with ivy and candlelight. Courtiers passed with hushed steps, their gazes quick to drop the moment they caught sight of her. Servants stilled. Nobles turned away, some with reverence, some with unease. No one whispered within earshot anymore but they whispered all the same.
Veil Breaker.
The goddess-forged.
Not quite mortal. Not quite divine.
Maris walked among them with her spine straight and her chin lifted, but inside, she was a ruin held together by thread and grit. Alarik paced quietly beside her, one step behind and just off her left shoulder, not guarding, not leading. Simply there.
And somehow, that made it worse.
She couldn’t remember the last time someone had walked beside her without needing something. Without wanting something. Without expecting the impossible.
Alarik hadn’t said much that morning. Just offered her a cup of water and held her cloak open as she stepped into the cold corridor. No questions. No pressure. Only presence.
She hated how grateful she was for it.
“Do you want to go back?” he asked softly, his voice breaking through the silence like a hand brushing her shoulder.
She shook her head. “No. I want to see them. All of them.”
“The nobles?”
She nodded. “And the soldiers. The advisors. The people gathering to fight in my name.”
He didn’t respond. But she felt the tension, how tightly he was holding it in, that burning need to protect her from everything.
Maris turned a corner and paused at the edge of the great hall.
It was filled and overcrowded. Loud with clattering voices and the scent of damp cloaks and steel. Calantheans in deep ocean blues, Nythrans cloaked in silver and black, Virellians etched in storm-gray. Fae, Nightbound and vampire. Eryndorian humans in shades of brown and green. All beneath one vaulted roof.
A gathering no one would have dreamed of a month ago.
And yet… when she entered, they parted.
As if a fallen star had stepped into their midst wearing human skin.
She felt like a walking omen.
Maris moved slowly between them, Alarik keeping pace beside her. She caught flashes of familiar faces: Valea’s red hair twisted back into a warrior’s knot, Zairon mid-conversation near a stack of maps, Serenya standing like a storm sentinel near the war table. The twin generals, Corin and Riven, conversing with their wives. Kael wasn’t here, but she could feel his presence threaded through this hall like ink through parchment. He was always close now. They both were.
And still… she felt alone.
Not because they weren’t at her side, but because none of them carried this burden, none of them were made.
Maris paused near a marble column, breath catching slightly as she looked out across the room.
“I used to think,” she said quietly, “that fate was something you fell into. That it was a rope tied to your ankle, and one day you’d trip and be dragged wherever it led.”
Alarik tilted his head. “And now?”
“Now I think it’s a cage they dress up in poetry and prophecy.” Her voice caught. “They made me for this. Every thread of my life has been tugged and placed by divine hands. I never had a choice.”
She glanced up at him. His expression offered mourning behind his violet eyes.
“I wonder,” she added, “what it would feel like… to choose your own path. No gods. No crowns. Just… a life.”
Alarik’s voice was low. “If I could give that to you, I would.”
