Page 8 of The Last Rose of Ashwood

“Expected by whom?”

He had the sense not to answer questions that held dangerous answers. Seren looked back at the carved sentence. The Council had known enough to delay, enough to send vague summons, enough to care about markings before bodies. Somewhere, in some locked room, men in clean coats had read reports and chosen what not to tell her. Seren felt anger settle inside her with cold precision. For that, she was glad. Anger was useful when fear threatened to become shapeless.

“Tear it down.” Her voice carried and echoed against the hollow stone.

Roran’s head turned quickly in her direction. “General—”

“The floor,” she clarified, raising a hand to stop him. “The lower foundation and every sealed chamber beneath it. Carefully, if possible. Quickly regardless.” Seren ordered.

The engineer looked horrified. “General, this temple is centuries old.”

Several soldiers exchanged uneasy glances. Seren watched them until the glances stopped. In another life, she might have hesitated before ordering destruction in the center of a vanished village. She might have spoken of preservation, experts, permission from the Council. Hesitation felt like a luxury purchased by people not standing in an empty temple over words that should not exist.

Seren turned toward Roran. “Send riders to every nearby settlement. Quietly. No panic. No rumors. Anyone reporting dreams, roots, strange lights, missing people, or old symbols sends word directly to me."

Roran nodded once. The command settled him, so she continued, “Find out who knew about this before I did.”

Seren looked down at the carvings spreading beneath her boots like veins beneath skin. For one terrible moment, she imagined something vast sleeping far below the village, waiting beneath the accumulated weight of stone, history, and every lie men told themselves to sleep peacefully. Waiting implied something had been aware enough to choose the moment it woke. Seren hated the thought immediately.

Outside, rain continued falling over the empty village. Lanterns burned in every window, bread cooled on tables, fires warmed rooms no one returned to, and somewhere a child’s ugly doll stared at nothing with painted glass eyes. Seren stood in the center of the temple, surrounded by symbols no living scholar in the Coalition could read, and understood with a clarity that settled like ice beneath her ribs that this mystery was larger than one missing village—larger than three.

The floor struck once more beneath her feet, a slow, deliberate pulse, like a heart remembering it had been buried.

Chapter Two: Aelira Ashwood

The tower woke before she did.

Aelira heard it in the slow settling of stone, in the thin breath of wind moving through corridors built for voices that had long since gone silent, and in the quiet complaint of ancient walls remembering weight they had not carried in years. The structure had first been raised for border lords who mistook height for permanence and stone for authority, a common error among men with more money than imagination.

Later, it had housed imperial envoys, provincial stewards, and the occasional disgraced noble relative sent north to contemplate humility from a distance far enough to make repentance inconvenient. Now, it housed only her. Her, and the memory of what power had sounded like when it was still alive. The mountain no longer spoke. That was the first thing Aelira noticed every morning, before cold gathered along her skin, before darkness resolved into the shape of the room, before her hand reached for the obsidian rose beside her bed, before thought sharpened into identity and identity returned with all its old, exquisitely persistent burdens.

Each dawn began with the same absence: a silence seated deep beneath the world, where once there had been a voice older than empire, older than crowns, older than every arrogant little border line ever drawn across living earth. In childhood, the land had never been quiet. It had breathed beneath her feet, patient and immense, aware of her in the way a forest knew rain before it fell. Now the stone beneath the tower offered her nothing but cold. How rude of the world, she thought, to keep existing without recognizing her. It had not spoken in words, despite what human songs later made of her people. It had not whispered secrets in elegant phrases or bent itself to royal command like a servant eager for approval. The old bond had been deeper than that. It had been pressure beneath the ribs when rain gathered miles away, a shiver through the fingertips when roots found water, and the slow awareness of stone warming under spring sun. The feeling of belonging not to a crown, nor to a palace, but to the living body of the world itself.

The first Elven royals, the old stories claimed, had been born beneath the roots of the Worldroot Tree. Human scholars dismissed such stories as poetry. Aelira had once pitied them for that, for the smallness of minds that mistook mystery for ornament simply because they lacked the sense to feel it breathing beneath their feet. Now she woke each morning in a tower carved into the side of a nameless mountain and felt nothing from the earth below except cold.

That was the true punishment—not exile. Though exile had its little cruelties. Some losses had been humiliating at first, certainly, and occasionally inconvenient in ways no fallen princess should have been forced to endure, but they had proven survivable. To be surrounded by life and no longer know whether the living world recognized her was worse. It was not loneliness. Loneliness was simpler. This was estrangement from something that had once known the shape of her soul.

The cottage below the tower sat alone on the mountainside, though 'cottage' was a generous word for the attached stone structure she used for storage, stabling, and the performance of a simpler life. No road led here and no traveler stumbled upon the place by accident. The nearest village lay nearly two days away by horseback, hidden beyond valleys folded into forests thick enough to discourage the curious. That had been intentional. People imagined exile as chains, damp cells, iron doors, men with keys. The reality was often much quieter. Her hand moved without thought to the bedside table and closed around the obsidian rose pendant. It fit her palm perfectly, as if grief had carved it for her hand alone. Black glass petals curled into one another with exquisite precision, each thorn sharp enough to draw blood from the careless. It had belonged to her mother. The Empress Consort had worn it pinned at her throat on the morning the palace fell, a small black flower against silver silk, elegant as mourning before mourning had yet become necessary.

Aelira had taken it from her mother’s body before the fires consumed everything else.

The memory arrived, as it always did, without asking permission, and for one cruel breath the tower disappeared.

Smoke clawed through the palace corridors in thick, black ribbons, swallowing the carved ceilings and turning the gold-veined marble beneath her knees slick with ash, water, and blood. Heat pressed against her skin so fiercely that every breath tasted burned. Somewhere beyond the shattered doors, people were screaming, but the sound reached her as if from far away, muffled beneath the terrible intimacy of what lay before her.

Her mother rested where she had fallen near the broken window, silver silk spread around her like moonlight ruined by war. Her face had turned slightly toward the rain, serene in a way death had not earned, while blood darkened the bodice of her gown and gathered in the delicate hollow of her throat. The obsidian rose remained fastened there, absurdly intact amid the wreckage, its black petals untouched by flame, its silver thorns gleaming as though the world had not ended around it.

Aelira remembered reaching for it with hands that did not feel like her own. She remembered the clasp resisting. She remembered hating it for that.

In the tower, her fingers tightened around the pendant until one thorn bit into her palm. The present returned by degrees: cold stone, dim morning, the narrow bed, the silence of the mountain beneath her. Pain belonged to the present. Pain was honest enough to be useful. Aelira released the pendant and rose from the bed.

Outside the tower, below the window, the obsidian roses were blooming. She had planted them herself during her first year in the tower, using cuttings smuggled from the imperial gardens before the Coalition burned the rest. Black flowers with silver thorns, each one stubborn and poisonous and beautiful in a way that seemed almost rude against the mountain’s wild greenery. They grew in neat rows beneath her window now, defiant petty things. A garden fit for an empress in a tower fit for a prisoner. The irony had not lost its charm. Her wardrobe was much smaller than it had once been. Smaller, certainly, than any daughter of Ashwood would have considered tolerable in another life, when dressing had been less a matter of preference than politics. At court, silk had spoken before she did. Color announced allegiance. Embroidery carried old family victories. A jeweled clasp could remind a rival house of a debt unpaid for three generations, and the cut of a sleeve could insult an ambassador more efficiently than any spoken word. Aelira had been raised to understand that beauty was never merely beauty when worn by a princess. It was language.

What remained of that life now hung in a narrow wardrobe inside a mountain tower, guarded by moth sachets, old cedar, and a woman officially dead to the world. Still, every garment was exquisite. She had chosen them during the final hours beneath the palace, which was perhaps the detail that embarrassed her most. War had reached the gates. Smoke had begun crawling beneath doors. Men were dying in corridors where musicians had played three nights earlier, and somewhere below, the empire was splitting open beneath the weight of its own sins.

Aelira had saved gowns. Not only gowns, of course. She had also taken documents, gold, weapons, ciphers, maps, names of loyalists, names of traitors, and the old routes beneath the mountain. She had slid the royal signet onto her finger with hands still sticky from blood, then stolen a blade from a dead man who had no further use for it. Practical things, she thought. Necessary things, she told herself.

Still, she had saved the gowns. Specifically, a black court gown embroidered with silver thorns because some young, terrified part of her had not yet understood that a life could burn so completely no dress would have anywhere left to belong. She saw it more clearly now—A girl standing in the dying heart of an empire, trying to preserve herself through fabric because everything larger had already become impossible to save. It was not vanity, not entirely. Not foolishness, though there had been some of that too. It had been grief acting quickly, choosing remnants before the fire could decide what she was allowed to keep.