For several long breaths, nothing moved. Not the banners above the towers, not the wind along the cliffs, not even the restless storm that usually prowled these skies. The silence felt… attentive.
A soft rasp of talons against the stone cut through the quiet and brought me back from my thoughts.
I didn’t turn right away.
I already knew.
The raven perched on the outer parapet where the wind should have torn it away. Black feathers slicked tight against its body, water beading harmlessly along its wings. I could have sworn it was the same one that delivered the summons, except for its eyes.
They weren’t dark. Instead, a silver light burned softly within them, not reflective, not borrowed from the storm clouds overhead. It came from deeper than that. From inside the bird itself. From somewhere old.
A cold weight settled in my gut then.
The raven tilted its head, studying me with unsettling intelligence. I felt it, the faint thread of pressure behind my temples, the same sensation I had felt in the Hall when Caelira raised her hand and took control of the room.
Not a command, but a recognition.
Slowly, almost deliberately, the raven turned its head away from me and looked towards Caeliras chambers.
My breath left me in a thin, quiet exhale.
“So, it’s her,” I murmured.
The raven didn’t answer, it didn’t need to. From beneath its wing, it drew something free with its beak and let it fall onto the stone between us.
Not a ribbon, or a scroll, just a single thread.
Black and silver twisted together so tightly they looked like one color until the light caught them just right—shadow andlightning braided into something impossibly precise. The sight of it struck something deep in me, sudden and undeniable.
I knew that weave.
Renoir Feyr had shown me once, years ago, in a forbidden book sealed beneath three wards and a vow of silence. He had told me it was a myth, a relic of fabrication. A symbol the world had buried because it didn’t know how to survive the truth behind it.
The thread of the First Court.
My hands went cold.
The raven stepped back from the offering and bowed its head, not to me, but toward her chambers, toward her. The raven lifted its wings, and its cry split the sky, sharp and piercing as lightning through a cloud. Wind surged in its wake as it launched from the parapet, black feathers flashing once before it vanished into the stormlight.
A quiet uncertainty settled beneath my ribs, the kind that comes when something shifts in the world and you can’t yet see the shape of it. This was only the beginning—I felt it with a certainty that sat heavy in my chest.
I stood there a long moment before moving. The storm had gone quiet again, settling back into its restless rhythm as though nothing unusual had happened. Yet the place where the raven had stood still felt… marked, as if the air itself hadn’t quite let go of what had passed through it. Even now the sound of its cry seemed to linger, faint and hollow, somewhere beyond the trees.
The thread was still laying where it had fallen.
The braid too precise for coincidence, two powers fused in a configuration that should not have existed outside forbidden diagrams. I crouched and lifted it between two fingers. It was warm, not with heat, but with presence.
My jaw tightened.
For a heartbeat, all I could see was Caelira in the Hall, her spine straight, fury contained but burning, her voice cutting clean through a room full of men who believed power gave them the right to decide her fate. I had promised her I wouldn’t cage the truth behind silence again.
But this wasn’t just truth, it was a door.
One I didn’t know how to open without pushing her straight into a fire.
I closed my fist slowly around the thread, feeling the subtle hum of it against my skin. The storm above answered with a faint, uncertain shift of pressure, not loud, not violent, just attention.
A shudder ran down my spine.
