Page 21 of The Last Rose of Ashwood

Seren dismounted and for several moments, she stood there.

Ashwood’s symbol had been hacked from the stone above the door after the revolution. Someone had done it angrily. The gouges remained. The absence of the crest felt almost louder than the crest would have been. Seren remembered men doing that across the north. They spent time tearing down imperial symbols, smashing statues, burning, and taking joy in the destruction of things that had once made them kneel.

She had taken joy in it, too, at the time. It had felt like justice. Now she looked at the scarred stone and wondered how often justice and vengeance wore the same face until years passed and someone finally noticed the difference.

“Not helpful.” She let the words drop under her breath like a complaint filed directly with the universe.

The building smelled of mold, old paper, and animal nests. Shelves leaned drunkenly against walls and rain had ruined most of the exposed records, turning ledgers into swollen blocks of pulp. Several cabinets had been broken open long ago. Others remained locked, though rust had weakened their hinges enough that Seren forced them with the flat of her knife.

The archive held maps, tax records, land grants, birth registers, and imperial road maintenance reports. All of it was evidence of the ordinary machinery of a government now long gone. She searched quickly at first, then more carefully once the first layer of frustration burned out. Records had a language of their own, the useful things were rarely titled helpfully. No one labeled a dangerous secret ‘Dangerous Secret Concerning Vanishing Villages.’ Instead, they buried it beneath layers of surveys, property disputes, old boundary revisions, and religious site inventories, the truth hidden in plain sight among the mundane.

By the time she found the first relevant map, damp had soaked through her gloves, and her patience had worn thin. The map showed the northern province as it was before the Coalition redrew it. Eastmere had another name then, written in faded script near a riverbend. Around it lay three other settlements, including two of the villages now confirmed vanished. Thin lines of green ink connected them in a pattern that looked at first like roads.

Then Seren realized they ran beneath roads. Rootways. Pathways rumored to run unseen beneath the land itself, tangled and ancient. She’d heard the term whispered in old stories, but never imagined they were real. The word appeared in the margin, half-faded. Her pulse slowed as she spread the map across the least broken table and weighed the curling corners with stones. The ink formed a branching pattern across the region, converging beneath several old temples and shrines. One mark repeated beside each convergence: a circle of roots around a vertical line.

The same symbol from the fragment.

Seren withdrew the stone from her pack and placed it next to the map, scrutinizing both with a careful eye. The resemblance was striking, similar in form, though not a perfect match. She leaned back, considering the possibilities. The subtle differences might be intentional; a clue or a warning embedded in the details. Beyond the fractured roof, the wind stirred the trees, whispering through the archive as if urging her to look deeper.

The Ashwood Dominion had not simply built over the north. It had mapped something beneath it. The Council had inherited ruins, roads, provinces, laws, and problems it did not understand. Seren looked at the map, tracing the faded lines with her finger. She compared it to the fragment in her hand, then glanced up at the gouged-out crest above the doorway, finally seeing how they all connected. A bitter taste filled her mouth as dread settled in, she realized, with a cold certainty, what had happened here and why it mattered. The pieces fit together now, revealing a truth she wished she hadn't found.

She gathered what records she could salvage, stacking them by relevance. Several documents were illegible. Others were written in languages she could not read. One, however, contained enough familiar Old Common for her to understand the title.

On the Northern Locks and Their Custodians.

The word unsettled her enough that she almost missed the sound behind her. A floorboard creaked. Seren drew her sword and turned in one smooth motion. The room was empty. Rain tapped through the broken roof and a second sound came from below. A slow scrape under the floor, like something dragging itself through earth. Seren backed toward the table, muscles tense, every sense straining for warning. Her eyes flicked across the gloom, searching for movement, for explanation—anything to anchor her spiraling nerves. Frigid air prickled her skin as the roots pressed into the room, thin pale strands questing through the cracks between stones near the far wall. They crept forward with an almost deliberate curiosity, their tips quivering as if tasting the air for purpose, and the scent of damp earth grew thick and intrusive. A faint, sour musk rose as they slid past broken mortar, the sound a whisper of growth and hunger.

One root, trembling, touched the leg of the table and stopped. Seren’s breath caught. She grabbed the records, shoving them into her pack as the floor gave a low, ominous groan beneath her boots. The roots spread farther, not attacking, not exactly. Their crawl toward the map was purposeful, a silent, unsettling negotiation, making Seren wonder if they recognized the lines inked on the page, or if the map itself was what called them here.

The document had been folded into the false bottom of a courier case, sealed beneath wax that bore no official mark. That alone made Seren dislike it; her suspicion sharpened into unease. She wondered what secrets warranted such secrecy, and whether she genuinely wanted to know. Anything hidden so carefully was bound to carry danger, or worse, responsibility she wasn’t ready to face. The absence of a seal gnawed at her; it meant someone powerful wanted this lost, or wanted only the right hands to find it.

Men who believed themselves righteous loved seals. Seals made cowardice look formal. Seals turned lies into policy and murder into procedure. To send a document without one meant either fear, treason, or the sort of bureaucratic intelligence that survived by never leaving fingerprints behind. Seren had known enough councilors to know all three conditions often shared a table.

Seren unfolded the paper. Most of it had been ruined deliberately. Someone had taken a knife to the parchment with exquisite care, slicing away names, dates, locations, whole lines of text until the document resembled lace made by a paranoid hand. What remained was worse than a complete report might have been because it invited the mind to build bridges across absence.

Preservation Office Internal Memorandum

Restricted Classification: Rootway Event / Ashwood Contingency

Distribution: Councilor-Level Access Only

Seren wondered how many other vital facts had been locked behind such restrictions, leaving ordinary people to face the consequences in ignorance. She read on, determined to uncover whatever fragments remained despite the layers of intentional ambiguity and bureaucratic caution.

In the event of seal reactivation, all northern incidents are to be contained under provincial emergency doctrine until hereditary markers can be confirmed.

Hereditary markers, she thought, was an odd statement. The words sat on the page like a corpse laid cleanly on white linen. Seren read them twice, then forced herself onward.

Do not involve military command until disappearance pattern reaches third threshold. Premature action risks awakening public memory of Ashwood custodial function.

The next line had been mostly cut away, but several words remained.

—Rose must be located before—

Below that, another fragment.

—Sword designation remains theoretical unless paired exposure occurs—

She turned the parchment toward the lamp, angling it until the thin light soaked through the places where ink had nearly vanished. There were more scraps, scattered like bones.