He heard their approach then—the whisper of fabric across the sand, the muted chime of talismans catching the wind. Two Acolytes moved through the dark like wraiths, their pale hands visible only when the torchlight touched them. Even the sea seemed to hush around their passage. They stopped beside him without greeting, hoods turned toward the horizon as if they, too, were watching the tide. When one finally spoke, the voice was wrong – too calm, too precise, as though a dozen echoes were trapped beneath the words.
“The Queen asks after her General,” it said. “She grows impatient with her silence.”
Benni’s jaw tightened. He kept his eyes on the water, letting his breath steady before he answered.
“The General is occupied,” he said evenly. “She’ll send word when there’s need of it.”
The second Acolyte tilted its head, the faint motion oddly birdlike. “The Queen’s patience is not eternal,” it murmured, but the tone was not a threat – instead it was something colder, hollowed out by devotion.
The torchlight caught the edge of its collar, revealing the faint raised lines of sigils carved into flesh. The sight turned his stomach. He had always thought Ara’s contempt for them was born of fear or superstition, but standing there beside their mutilated reverence, he understood. It wasn’t what they were that sickened her. It was what they had willingly surrendered – the last fragments of their own will – in the hope of sharing a power that would never be theirs.
“Captain!” The call carried across the camp – Daen’s voice, louder than Benni had ever heard it, cutting through the surf and the muttering Acolytes alike. Benni turned from the shore, already moving toward him, grateful for any reason to leave the creatures behind.
Daen stood near the main firepit, a young courier at his side, theboy’s cloak heavy with mud and sea spray. His chest heaved as though he’d run the whole distance from the northern watch without stopping.
“Message came from the cliffs,” Daen said as Benni approached.
The boy straightened, fumbling a salute. “Sir, the watch reports strange lights near Tirn’vahl. A storm without clouds – fire above the sea, seen only for a breath before it vanished.”
His voice trembled with a mix of exhaustion and excitement, the kind that came from carrying something that might finally matter. Benni took the scrap of parchment offered, the ink smeared and rain-blurred but legible enough. It wasn’t much – half a dozen lines and a signature – but it was more than he’d had in weeks. He read it twice before handing it back, the words ringing in his mind like the first spark struck in darkness.
Benni looked up from the parchment, the flicker of the fire catching on the hard line of his jaw. “Tirn’vahl,” he said quietly, tasting the word as if it might reveal more than the ink could. The name meant nothing to him beyond geography – a wind-battered ruin on the northern coast, where storms chewed through the cliffs and salt ate everything it touched. He’d heard it was more a ghost than a fortress, the stones crumbling under their own weariness, the air thick with the scent of the sea reclaiming what man had built. It was the kind of place no one went by choice.
Daen met his gaze, already understanding the direction of Benni’s thoughts. The courier’s words still hung between them, like smoke – fire above the cliffs, light where there should have been none. Astrid arrived moments later, drawn by the stir of voices, her hair loose and glinting copper in the torchlight, catching the look between them.
“What is it?” she asked, quickly realising it was something that would take them both from camp before dawn. “If you’re thinking what I think you are,” she said, “we’ll need horses.”
Benni hesitated. Duty warred against instinct, the invisible chainsof rank tightening with every heartbeat. The camp could not run itself, not with the Queen’s Acolytes drifting through like carrion birds, not with the lieutenants restless and whispering. If he left, the truth would follow him like a scent on the wind—impossible to outrun, impossible to disguise.
“I can’t go,” he said at last, forcing the words out as though they cost him blood. “If she’s out there, the two of you will move faster. Take the northern route. Avoid the main road.”
Astrid nodded once, brisk and certain. Daen lingered, his jaw working as if to shape words he couldn’t quite bring himself to say. Then, without a sound, he stepped forward and pulled Benni into his arms. It wasn’t the quick, bracing clasp of comrades, but something heavier, held a heartbeat too long, as though both men understood that this moment – this shared warmth in a world gone cold – might have to carry them through whatever came next.
“We’ll find her,” Daen said then, plainly.
Benni gripped his shoulder hard in answer, then stepped back, watching as they mounted and turned toward the dark horizon. The sea wind swallowed the sound of their departure, leaving only the hiss of the surf and the faint crackle of the fire behind him.
Chapter Twenty-Five: Mathias
Mathias had seen grief before – how it hollowed men out or hardened them like old iron – but he had never seen it take root as it did in her. The General had not left the inner chamber in three days. Not to stand in the light beaming through the half-fallen roof, not to taste the air at the cliffs at the back of the old temple. She remained where Maeve had left her, folded into the shadowed curve of the altar, her body still as the dead save for the slow, guarded rhythm of her breath. She had eaten little, slept less, and, though he doubted she knew it, still held the dagger – sometimes with the loose fingers of a dreamer, sometimes with the desperation of someone trying not to drown.
He kept to the edges of the chamber, a silent figure in the periphery, not absent but never imposing. She had not looked at him since that first morning, and he hadn’t tried to summon her gaze. Instead, he watched the way her shoulders curled inward, as if bracing for a blow that never came, and the way her jaw stayed clenched even in sleep, the muscles twitching as if chasing some thought she refused to letloose. The fire’s light caught in her hair when she shifted, glinting on strands of gold, and for a moment, he almost reached out – just to move one from her cheek. But his hand stilled before it reached her. There was a tightness to her poise that made the air feel brittle, as though the wrong touch might set something unravelling. So he held the moment gently and let it pass.
By the second night, that composure began to wear thin. The first sign came in the way she pushed the cup aside when Maeve brought it – too sharp for courtesy, too slow for rage. It clattered to the floor, unbroken, and Ara didn’t flinch, only stared at it for a long moment, jaw set, breath quick in her chest. Later, she began pacing – not steadily, but in restless bursts, as if her limbs didn’t know what to do with the tension inside them. A hand dragged through her hair again and again, tugging until strands clung to her fingers. She snapped at the laces of her coat when they tangled, muttering once under her breath – low and venomous – though whether it was a curse or a plea, Mathias couldn’t tell. He just watched as she turned in tighter and tighter circles, like something cornered too long, and knew the storm was gathering – not a single drop had fallen, but the air had shifted.
He hadn’t meant to wait this long. In the first hours after Maeve had spoken, he’d told himself it was mercy to leave the General be—to give her space, to let the words settle before they demanded proper shape. But days had passed, and what he saw now wasn’t catharsis but containment. She was holding herself too tightly, pacing cracks into the floor, carrying the weight of both the life she lived and the one stolen from her. And constantly, she looked braced for impact—shoulders tense, hands clenched, eyes too sharp for someone who hadn’t slept. He had watched soldiers grit their teeth through wounds, sailors walk into drowning like it was a debt long owed and mothers bury their children without a sound – but none of it had prepared him for the way she carried what had been done to her. Not with defianceor even anger—only grim, unyielding persistence.
It stirred something uneasy in him. Whatever strength she still had would turn to splinters if kept here too long. And so he rose, slow from the cold floor, crossed the room with steady steps, and set his hand on the bolt of the door. It stuck for a moment – warped from years of sea air and weather – but then shifted with a groan as he dragged it back.
She turned at the sound, sharp as a lash. Her eyes went to the door, then to him, and for a moment neither moved. Her gaze dropped to his hand on the bolt, then to the open doorway, where the wind slipped through—cool and damp with the coming rain.
“Is that it, then?” Her voice was hoarse but even. “A few days of pacing circles, and now you throw the door open like it’s meant to mean something.” She didn’t rise, didn’t look away. Just stayed where she was, seated at the foot of the altar like a woman waiting for a verdict she no longer feared. Mathias held her gaze.
“It doesn’t,” he said. “Not unless you walk through it.”
“And where would I go?” There was a rumbling of thunder in her words now. “Where can the bastard daughter of a dead mage and an executed priest go wherewho she iswouldn’t follow her?”
Mathias cocked his head, his eyes infuriatingly gentle as a small smile started to pull at the corner of his lips. “To the Last Sea, perhaps? To taste the free air and to let the waves wash away whatever is left of the Heir Apparent and the ward of the Sorcerer Queen? Or the dust from an old temple, at least?”
