Scrawled across the aged parchment was a note, the next note he planned to leave in a certain mortal girl’s reading chamber, slipped between the spine of an irrelevant history text.
The one chosen will not always shine. Her light may be hidden in flesh and grief. But when the hour comes, the dreaming shall stir.
Zairon read it, his mouth flattening.
“You’ve been planting notes,” he said flatly.
“I needed to know if she could be stirred,” Alarik replied, finally glancing up. “If her magic would shift. If she even had it.”
“And?”
“Clearly, its having an effect. The spies' reports mention a rising number of incidents involving her — unusual magic.” He smiled without humor. Eyes glowing a deep violet, “Confusion. Doubt. That was enough to set her on the path.”
Zairon crossed his arms. “You could get caught.”
“I haven't ben yet.” He said with a cocky shrug.
Zairon gave a dry laugh. “So you just — use your mirror to waltz into Nythra. Disguised. Into Kael’s court. Just to leave cryptic messages like a cursed suitor with a poetry addiction?”
Alarik’s smile turned cold. “Not a suitor. A scientist. A scholar. A desperate king.”
He turned toward the window.
“After the first prophecy, I knew I’d have to see her for myself. Something about her blood hums. Old magic. Stifled, but breathing.”
Zairon said nothing.
“She reads the tomes,” Alarik went on. “She finds my notes. I shape the spells so Kael’s little lorekeeper doesn’t notice. I even used blood ink from my own veins to bind it to her vision.”
“Does she know?” Zairon asked carefully.
“No. Not yet. She just knows she’s changing. Questioning herself.” Alarik looked over his shoulder. “And now Kael knows something’s not right too. Her slips of magic. His silence even as our forces move toward the border forts, his fear is keeping him frozen.”
He stepped closer to the map, laying a palm on the stretch of borderland between Nythra and Calanthe.
“She is the storm of the dreamer’s heart,” he whispered. “The seer warned me.”
Zairon tensed. “So it’s true.”
“I can’t prove it,” Alarik admitted. “But I feel it. In my blood. In the land itself. The Veil shudders with her presence.”
“And you think she’s the one?” Zairon asked quietly.
“I think,” Alarik said, “she’s either the salvation of us all —or the match that will ignite a war that we won’t survive.”
Zairon’s hand fell to the hilt of his sword. “So what now?”
"I go into her dreams, I'll continue to plant the seeds of doubt, and guide her into what she could become."
Alarik’s eyes burned like glass under lightning.
The king stood in the shadows of his sanctum, a tall and narrow room walled in glass etched with constellations no longer seen. A wind stirred beyond the highest spires of Calanthe, carrying the scent of saltwater.
Alarik’s hands moved slowly over a shallow silver basin. Water shimmered within, laced with powdered dreamroot, ash, and slivers of fae crystal , each piece humming faintly with latent power. A strand of her night black hair floated across the surface, taken from a garment she had worn once while walking Nythra’s library halls.
“If only there was another way,” he said aloud to the empty air.
But the Veil was thinning and the gods’ hands were not yet done mending in their world.
