“I don’t understand,” I rasped, fighting the throb building at the back of my skull.
“I’ll arrange what I can.” He halted us outside the empty Hall, scanning the corridor like every shadow might betray him. “But your—” his eyes cut both ways again, “friendswill have to do the rest.”
The ache stopped. Mywhat?
My face stayed smooth, unreadable, as I lowered my hand. But inside, everything screamed.
He knew. About the Order. About me?
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I lied, flat and effortless.
He gave the barest nod, a look measured, strong with what he wouldn’t say. “Very well. Watch for my letter.” Then he turned, hurrying down the corridor.
The light above the council door wavered once, twice, and died. And I could have sworn the golden-haired queen in the portrait below shifted her face from me.
Not in scorn, but down, sorrowful, as the last glow guttered out. As though she mourned what was coming.
The archives in the Csolenia palace ranked high among my sanctuaries.
First was the Roux Forest. Second, the dream where the woman’s hum threaded through my sleep. And third, this: the sacred vault layered in memory and myth.
Unlike the palace’s ivory bones and beige austerity, the archives breathed diversity. Cherry-oak floors gleamed beneath my boots, shelves of polished crystal and dark wood soared twenty feet high, lining the chamber in perfect symmetry, all rising toward a mirrored ceiling, where their reflections stretched on forever.
Three majestic floors wound above one another, each rimmed with balconies that encircled a single, spiraling staircase of deep turquoise.
At the very top, the dome arched wide, its surface alive with color and motion—suns, constellations, radiant glyphs, all drifting and swirling in quiet harmony, casting a celestial glow over everything below. The stained glassabove spilled animated colors across the spines, as if each story, once frozen in time, was suddenly alive again.
It was more than a library. It was a haven. A place where memory and magic knelt side by side, breathing through every spine. Not because the tomes themselves seemed to hum, beckoning me closer. Not even because the pages carried the scent of the realms, like nostalgia pressed into paper.
But because of the freedom it offered.
I sat there, temples throbbing beneath my fingertips, willing the ache to fade. Elva and I had come to the archives after the closed-door meeting, a small rebellion of our own, Elva chasing solace, me chasing answers.
She had always loved the fairy-tale shelves, the ones with princes and towers and girls waiting to be saved. But lately, I feared the stories had started to sound too familiar.
Hours had bled away and we’d abandoned the folklores of gallant rescues, now knee-deep in brittle scrolls about the Bale and its hunger.
In the margins of every text, I searched for something else, a footnote, a cure, a loophole for the curse that marked me. Though there was nothing but dust and half-truths.
“How many more are there?” I groaned, letting my head fall against the velvet chair. The fabric was soft enough to smother a scream.
Elva set a tome in her lap with a soundless thud. “I don’t understand,” she murmured, voice too gentle for what we were seeking. “Not one scribe thought this was worth recording?”
We’d devoured every record that even whispered of the six Gods or curses. At first the scraps we found had hinted with promise. Now they were nothing but faded ink and dead ends.
A millennia ago, a curse had been loosed upon one soul. That was all it said. No name. No place. No fate. No end. As if history didn’t want fate to remember.
And as the silence of the great library stretched, I felt myself begin to fray from the quiet, rising terror that I would never know.
The sickly-sweet perfume of roses drowned the lower floor, clawing down my throat. Cloying. Choking. I shoved the stench out through my nose and slammed the tome shut.
“Verena—” Elva’s whisper cracked like glass. “Those are ancient texts; you must handle them delicately.”
She snatched it from me, smoothing her palms over the leather spine, then stacking it with the others, every motion precious. She placed them on the crystal table as if they were relics of bone, then reached for another.
This one was painted in gold, and she held it against her chest like it, hopefully, held all our answers.
I ignored her. Ignored the looming weight coiling up my throat. The doom that felt too close, too certain.
