Artwork by Madison Brooks (Madison B Graphics). All rights reserved.
Long before the High Seat was forged, before the continent of Karrakyth had a single name to answer to, six beings ruled the world without mercy. Neither gods nor demons, but inevitability given form.
They called themselves the Fates.
Kaeda, the first spark in the void, gathering the fragments of possibility and coaxing them into life.
Thiriel, the razor-edge of freedom, lingering at crossroads and pulling tight the cord between what was and what might yet become.
Vrax, born of longing, wielding desire as an instrument of destruction.
Orenthar the unpredictable, scattering ruin and glory with a careless cast of his dice.
And Liora and Zareth, the inevitable pair. She, the merciless blade, severing the mortal thread at its appointed hour. He, the patient hand, gathering what remained and stitching each fading echo into the vast Archive, where nothing that had ever lived was permitted to be forgotten.
Thus it was. Thus it had always been.
But in the oldest corners of Tir Andrel, where lore is sacred and stories are guarded more fiercely than gold, another tale is told. A tale of a mortal woman and the Fate who loved her.
She was no queen, no sorceress, no hero sung by bards. Just an ink-stained scholar with a laugh bright enough to startle the dark.
It is said that Zareth once set aside his ledger simply to listen to that sound.
He watched her live. He watched her choose. He watched her lose people she loved and grieve them in the graceless way that mortals do. He watched her rise, and fail, and rise again. And somewhere in the watching, something shifted. The patient hand that gathered all endings forgot, for a time, what he was.
As Zareth kept vigil over his mortal, Liora felt his slow, treacherous drift. From duty. From purpose. From her.
She did not rage. She did not grieve. She merely did as a blade was made to do.
She cut.
She severed the mortal’s thread before its rightful hour and hid it where Zareth could never find it: not in the Archive, not in the turning, not in the soft dark where echoes await their second dawn. For the first time since the loom began its weaving, something meant to be remembered was made to vanish.
When Zareth searched for his mortal’s echo and found only silence, he fell into a sleep so deep even centuries could not wake him. Without his hand to gather them, echoes slipped loose. Memories thinned. History frayed at the edges. Some say this is why Karrakyth’s early years are filled with gaps and contradictions. Why songs change from singer to singer. Why certain names feel heavy with significance that no one can quite explain.
It is said that Zareth will wake only when Liora returns what she took. When the hidden thread is brought back into the light and laid, at last, in his waiting hands.
THIRIEL
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AGO
Thiriel had mostly forgotten what a dump the Archives were.
She took the final stretch of stairs in a single, languid leap, somersaulting midair and landing in a loose crouch at the bottom. Her boots kissed the grimy stone without so much as a whisper.
She rose in one fluid motion, all sharp lines and deliberate grace. Ink-dark leathers hugged her frame, stitched with faint glimmers of starlight that caught when she moved. She tossed a cascade of blue hair over her shoulder and wrinkled her nose. The place reeked of dust and memory, both clinging damply to the ribs of the vast chamber ahead.
That was the problem with commemorating the dead. They were so needy about it.
She twirled her staff. The ancient bonewood tasted the air, hunting the scent of treachery and hidden things. One never knew what Liora might lace into the stone to protect her precious Zareth. The staff hissed. Thiriel grinned and stepped across the threshold.
Silence echoed.
“Come out, come out,” she called in a sing-song voice.
She took another step. The floor convulsed. A sound like breaking bone shattered the quiet as something enormous unfolded from the shadows. Vaguely leonine in shape, but wrong in all the ways that mattered. Its hide overlapped in plates of carved granite, its mane a shifting crown of broken stone. Silver sigils pulsed beneath its surface, jagged as fresh-cut wounds.
Thiriel’s smile bloomed bright and savage. “Hello, handsome.”
The beast lunged.
Thiriel was already moving, into the attack rather than away from it, up and over and onto its back. She drove her staff down hard into the narrow fault at the base of its neck. Sigils flared white. The creature collapsed into an obedient heap of rubble.
Thiriel hopped down and brushed grit from her sleeve.
“You’re losing your touch, Li-li.”
She moved deeper into the chamber. The Archives rose around her. They hadn’t been built so much as they had been grown, life by dreary life. Memory served as mortar, thickening the black columns that climbed high into the dark, their tops swallowed by shadow. Hundreds of them. Thousands, even. Silver and violet thread spanned the void, stretching from pillar to pillar in vast geometric constellations.
Thiriel had visited a handful of times, millenia ago, when eternity grew tedious and mortal meddling no longer quite scratched the itch. Liora became so deliciously sharp when anyone lingered near her precious archivist. And Zareth, for all his solemnity, possessed a wicked streak. Thiriel had enjoyed testing his edges almost as much as she loved needling Liora.
And then he’d gone and fallen for a mortal. Worse, he’d unravelled. A thousand year sulk, all because a fragile girl of blood and breath had slipped through his fingers.
How pedestrian.
Thiriel passed beneath the threads, silver and violet gleaming above her like a canopy of captured stars, and let her gaze slice through the dimness. Somewhere in this endless mausoleum of sentiment—
There.
A dias rose from the gloom, ringed by an unbroken circle of pale stone. At its heart, kneeling on one knee like some fallen god, was Zareth. Head bowed. Shoulders broad beneath a fall of dark hair. The build of a warlord, rather than a scholar. He’d always been carved from something weightier than the rest of them.
His hands rested loosely against his thigh, as though he had chosen stillness rather than succumbed to it. Stone crept over his boots and up his calves, as though the Archives were desperately trying to preserve what they had lost.
Thiriel slowed, one brow arching. Well. At least the sulk had aesthetic merit.
From within the fold of her sleeve, Thiriel withdrew a golden thread. A favor repaid with gritted teeth, because Liora's ever-simmering fury was simply too entertaining to resist, and a favour owed was a favour claimed, and Thiriel had always had a long memory for both debts and opportunities.
She lifted one of Zareth’s hands and pressed the thread against his palm.
Nothing.
She sighed. “Honestly, Zar. If you’re going to indulge in tragic romance, the least you could do is play by the rules.”
She wound the thread around his fingers, looping it once, twice. She tugged sharply, just enough to let the echo of the mortal’s life flare.
The Archives trembled.
Light pulsed upward into the vaulted dark, racing the full height of the columns. A hundred other lines flickered in response, as if she’d plucked a chord through the entire constellation.
A fracture spidered across the stone encasing Zareth’s boot.
Thiriel’s grin sharpened.
“Wakey wakey,” she whispered, leaning in close. “Your precious Archive is starting to crumble.” She gave the thread one final, merciless pull. “And you and I have business.”
Artwork by Marg Ribar. All rights reserved.
ESPER
PRESENT DAY
Knife to her throat, Esper couldn’t have said which she loathed more: the dreams that had driven her back into society, or the pearls that marked everything she had tried to leave behind.
Three years buried in the Royal Libraries of Tir Andrel and she had nearly forgotten the forced perfection of the Blood. Surrounded by books, relics, and ink, no one measured worth by how convincingly you could impersonate the sea. The scholars of Tir Andrel prized discipline, silence, and patience. Substance over ornament.
But Caelwynne had always worshipped the tide, and Esper’s step-family’s court was the only discernable path to the answers she so desperately needed. Standing in their guest chambers at Castle Verricayne, as deft hands fastened pearls at her throat for the Crown’s Night of a Thousand Blossoms Ball, Esper reminded herself that the beads—and everything they represented—were the least of her worries.
She twisted in the full-length mirror, inspecting the damage with clinical detachment. Her half-sister had outdone herself. The gown was an ode to sea-foam and vanity, a cascade of near-sheer teal silk layered in restless waves. Hundreds of tiny pearls glittered across the fabric, catching the candlelight with every breath.
She felt like a mermaid hauled ashore and wrapped in an expensive net.
“Stop squirming,” Sorelle said, jabbing Esper’s scalp with a hairpin.
Esper couldn’t quite mask her sigh as Sorelle fastened a pearl-draped cowl into her long, dark hair. The lattice settled cold against her temples. For a fleeting moment, it felt like a hand at the back of her skull, guiding her toward something inevitable.
Images slipped through her consciousness, impossible to hold, gone the instant she reached for them. Silver thread strung between black columns. A ceiling that climbed into darkness. The twisted metal of a black iron throne.
“There.” Sorelle stepped back to admire her handwork, satisfaction bright in her cerulean eyes.
Esper blinked and met her own near-black gaze in the mirror. Pearls gleamed against her olive skin. Her hands, traitorous things, had been scrubbed free of ink, the faint callus on her pointer finger the only remaining evidence of who she actually was.
“For someone who claims indifference,” Sorelle said, studying Esper’s reflection, “you’re making an awfully dramatic face.”
“I am anatomically incapable of making any other sort.”
“Not true.” Sorelle smoothed the edge of Esper’s skirts. “You make a very convincing expression of superiority.”
Esper smiled despite herself. Sorelle wedged in beside her so they both filled the mirror’s tall, gilded frame. She tilted her chin, assessing them with the solemnity of a general surveying her troops.
“We’re absolutely devastating,” she declared.
And they were. Esper could admit that, if only to herself.
If she resembled sea foam dragged reluctantly to shore, Sorelle was the tide after dark. Her gown was the blue of deep water, silk cascading in long, weighted folds to the floor. Fine chains of pearl-studded silver traced the bodice, glinting like moonlight caught beneath the surface. Her braids, black woven with silver and sapphire, were piled high into an intricate crown that looked effortless and absolutely was not.
“Oh don’t pout,” Sorelle said, flicking her eyes to the gilded ceiling. “Mother would murder us both if I let you attend the Royal Ball dressed like a dockside poet. And I’m hardly introducing you to my friends looking anything less than exquisite.” Sorelle waved a hand, as if this were the only argument that mattered.
Ah yes. The embarrassment of imperfection. Sorelle’s greatest fear, narrowly outranking boredom. And why shouldn’t it be? She was heir to the Dominion of Caelwynne, sea-born and blessed, destined for titles and treaties and a life lived squarely in the light.
Esper, by contrast, was merely the daughter of the man the Lady of Caelwynne had chosen to marry.
“Do you truly hate our colours so?” Sorelle asked in the wake of Esper’s silence.
Hurt lingered beneath her indignation. Esper softened. It was easy to forget that Sorelle was only seventeen.
She cupped her sister’s cheek. “No, pet,” she said, because it was simpler than explaining. “I’ve just never cared to be stared at.”
“You should get used to it,” Sorelle said imperiously. “You are one of the Blood. We are meant to be stared at.”
The Blood. The great houses of Karrakyth clung to lineage above all else. And while Esper had never felt unwelcome or unloved in the Lady of Caelwynne’s household, she had always been … adjacent. The relic of a life that had ended in tragedy.
Esper swallowed the thought before it could take root and turned to the small case that counted as her luggage.
She withdrew a thin leather journal and held it out. “Because I missed your birthday.”
Sorelle’s eyes lit. “Naughty scribe,” she sang, already prying it open and rifling through the pages.
“I hope you still like forbidden tales as much as you used to.”
Outside Tir Andrel, speaking the names of the Fates was taboo. Names carried weight. Names invited attention, and rarely the right kind. But Esper’s mother had never believed in silence, not where stories were concerned. And when Sorelle was born, small and warm and impossibly fragile in Esper’s arms, a spark of light within the abyss of her mother’s death, Esper had offered love the only way she knew how: in stories, in names spoken softly into the dark, in threads passed carefully from one pair of hands to another.
Esper had always been drawn to the structure of it all, the way each story braided into the next, each thread part of some larger design. She loved the pattern, the logic beneath the myth.
Sorelle loved the Fates themselves.
She loved their rivalries, their bargains, their quiet, deliberate cruelties. She loved them as though they were people, not forces—flawed and fascinating and terribly alive. And most of all, she loved Zareth and Liora, and their terrible inevitability.
“You know I do.”
Esper grinned. “You might not be so grateful, once you read it. It tells a different story about your beloveds.”
Sorelle stilled, eyes widening.
“A story,” Esper went on lightly, “of Zareth’s secret lover.”
“No,” Sorelle breathed, clutching the book tighter. Her eyes narrowed. “I thought scholars weren’t allowed to take translations from the libraries.”
Esper lifted a shoulder in a half shrug. “And you doubt how much I adore you.”
Her words were light despite the tension that lingered between her brows. She tried not to dwell on how easily this particular tale had translated, the words falling into place with unsettling precision. As though she’d been meant to find it.
Sorelle grinned and closed the book carefully, laying it on the small table beside the mirror. She seized Esper’s hand and tugged her towards the door.
“Come on,” she said. “We’re missing everything.”
Esper didn’t point out that her sister had wanted to arrive fashionably late, that her own delay in dressing had been meticulously engineered to achieve Sorelle’s desired effect. Instead, she merely followed her sister down the winding staircase, one hand skimming the stone balustrade to steady herself.
The staircase gave way to a long corridor, the transition almost abrupt. Stone to softness, shadow to light. White carpet stretched ahead, muffling their steps, towering trees rising along their right. Lantern light pooled soft and amber between the branches. Sorelle’s midnight-blue train trailed behind her, shimmering as guests parted to let her pass.
At the corridor’s end, an archway of cherry blossoms waited, pale petals drifting lazily through the air and beckoning them into the gardens.
Esper lifted her chin and stepped through.
The honeyed scent of night-blooming jasmine settled deep into her lungs. Marble floors gleamed beneath her slippers, polished to a mirrored sheen that caught the moonlight through the vaulted glass ceiling above. Mossy veins threaded stubbornly between the tiles, as if the earth refused to be subdued.
Hundreds of glittering bodies drifted across the terrace. Too many eyes. Too many teeth disguised as smiles. Esper’s chest tightened and she reminded herself why she had come. The half-memories that haunted her dreams. The déjà vu that clung to her waking hours. The black iron throne that rose, unbidden and insistent, in the back of her mind whenever her guard slipped.
She had thought it madness, at first. Her mind stretched too thin under the weight of her studies, conjuring mysteries where none existed. And then she’d found the sketches, hidden in the margins of a journal so ancient even she had struggled to translate it. An iron throne, rendered in careful lines and labelled in a sharp, deliberate hand: the High Seat of the Kings.
Tonight, she meant to find it.
Violins wove a lilting tune that felt far too upbeat for the tightness of Esper’s ribs. Laughter rose and fell against the clipped hedgerows. Silk whispered. Crystal chimed.
Esper mapped the gardens instinctively. Entrances and exits, the blind corners, the servant stairwells twisting between terraces. A shiver raked her spine. The air grew taut. She felt suddenly, acutely exposed. As though something—someone—had noticed her.
Across the terrace, a figure stepped onto the raised platform hemmed by cherry blossom trees. A cloak of black velvet fell from his shoulders, swallowing the light. There was something deliberate in the way he held himself. Too still, too composed, as though waiting for the world to arrange itself around his presence.
His dark gaze swept the crowd and found hers.
For one disorienting heartbeat, Esper forgot how to breathe.
His features were all clean lines and unyielding angles, impossibly symmetrical, as though he had been carved from an idea rather than born of flesh. It was the echo of a face she had seen in dreams, hovering just beyond reach, as though she had known him once and simply… didn’t anymore.
Sorelle reached back without looking and caught her hand, fingers warm and grounding as she tugged Esper into the current of bodies. The moment fractured. Silk and laughter and music closed in, sweeping her along.
“Well don’t we all clean up well,” Sorelle said as they approached a cluster of the Blood.
Esper drew in a slow breath and let it out again, steadying herself. She lingered half a step behind, shaking off the uneasy feeling of being not only watched, but seen.
Lord Thalen Caelithar of Erelthane turned at the sound of Sorelle’s voice, his attention sharpening as it landed on them. He was tall and broad, with the unmistakable bearing of someone raised not merely to command, but to be obeyed. Firelight from a nearby brazier caught his hair, burnished gold threaded with shadow.
Beside him stood Henrik Beaumont of Valkarra, smile fixed in place like it had been lacquered on. His jewel-studded doublet glittered with ostentatious excess, each stone winking in the lanternlight. His eyes were as cold as the metal sewn into his cuffs. If Thalen had been born to lead, Henrik had been born to wreck havoc.
And then there was Ylvara Ellmyre of Myrrovarre, draped in a gown crafted from a thousand glittering blossoms. Petals trailed from her wrists and tangled through the dark fall of her hair. The effect was a flower at the precise moment of bloom: luminous, deliberate, and misleadingly soft. Myrrovarre did not raise fragile things.
The urge to retreat prickled along Esper’s spine, pulling her towards the safety of the edges of the room. The pearls at her throat clicked softly with each breath, a traitorous reminder of where she stood. She lifted her chin.
If she wanted to find the throne, she would have to play her part. And that meant finding the Prince, the one person who might be willing to help her.
“Thalen, Henrik, Ylvara—you remember my sister, Esper.”
Sorelle's tone was light, but an edge ran beneath her words. A reminder. A positioning. Esper had nearly forgotten the particular ferocity of her sister's loyalty, the way she wielded grace like a second blade.
Thalen Caelithar inclined his head in a proper bow. “I hear your translations of ancient Kyth rival even the Master Scholars of Tir Andrel.”
Esper stilled, caught off guard. Of the five of them, he alone held an official lord’s title, inherited far too young after his father’s death. That he not only remembered her, but had paid attention to how she spent her time, was worth noting.
“Rival is generous, my lord,” she replied, smooth and composed. “I merely translate what’s there, nothing more.” She could have left it at that. Almost did. But she felt the weight of their attention, the quiet, polished judgment that clung to people who believed themselves the arbiters of truth. “I try not to put words in the mouths of the dead.”
Accuracy mattered. Too many scholars bent old texts to suit their purposes, sanding down meaning until it aligned with what was expected. Until it suited the Crown, and the Blood.
Henrik’s smile sharpened. “So the rumors are true then,” he said. “You’ve fled Caelwynne and your wicked step-family for a dusty library.”
“She hardly fled, Henny,” Sorelle said with a pointed edge. “It’s where her mother was from. Of course she wants to spend time there. Stop creating scandal where there isn’t any.”
Henrik gave a soft snort and took a leisurely drink. His gaze drifted back to Esper, lingering just long enough to be deliberate. A potential problem, but one she could handle. She would make certain neither she nor Sorelle found themselves alone with the heir of Valkarra.
He turned his attention to Thalen. “Your cousin should be of an age to attend now, unless I’m mistaken, Caelithar. Still hiding her away?”
“Vaeleria is twelve,” Thalen said evenly.
“I hear she’s a rare beauty,” Sorelle said slyly. “No wonder Thalen keeps her from your lecherous hands.”
Henrik lifted his middle finger in a lazy salute.
Esper let the moment stretch just long enough to be polite before stepping into the opening before it could close.
“Where is the prince?”
Henrik snorted, tipping his glass. “Buried in a book, most likely.”
As if that were somehow an insult. The idiot probably couldn’t even read.
“Kaysa said he planned to disappear after the opening rites,” Ylvara said, her voice cool and measured. “You know he hates these things.”
Esper’s short nails pressed into her palms.
She and the prince had been close, once. As children, they’d hidden beneath banquet tables, trading whispers and contraband books and avoiding the chaotic spectacle of court. She had been counting on that friendship tonight. Counting on him to help her find the answers she’d come for.
The image of the black iron throne surfaced, sharp and unbidden. Her head nearly jerked with the force of it. She willed herself still, mindful of the ever-watching eyes of the Blood.
When she steadied herself, she realized she had missed part of the conversation. Henrik was laughing at something Sorelle had said.
“Care to place a wager?” he drawled.
“You Valkarrans and your bargains,” Ylvara muttered. “Always assuming something must be won.”
The music faltered.
Cool air threaded through the gardens, pulling at the loose strands of Esper's hair. Conversation stilled. Across the terrace, the crowd parted instinctively. It felt as though the entire garden had drawn a breath and forgotten to release it.
Five figures stepped from the shadows.
“The Fae,” Sorelle breathed.
They moved through the parted crowd in layers of sheer fabric and trailing gossamer, their garments shifting with each step, dark one moment before catching the light in a sudden, fractured shimmer.
But it was the smallest of them who held Esper’s gaze.
Luminous blue hair spilled down her back in untamed waves, catching the lantern light like a flowing river. Her steps were light, but energy flickered beneath her skin, sharp and impatient, as though she were perpetually on the verge of doing something she had not yet decided on.
Esper tore her gaze away, pulse uneven. She felt as though an invisible thread had been drawn taut across the gardens. Something had been set in motion.
Whatever game was beginning, it wasn’t hers. She had a throne to find.
“So,” she said lightly, glancing around the loose circle, “are we going to find the prince, or is that too much effort for the evening?”
Henrik’s attention slid back to Esper, speculative and edged. “Are you proposing a game, little scholar?”
She shrugged. “Simply trying to pass the time.”
His rings tapped against his glass, grin sharp. “Are we not as entertaining as your dusty books? Very well.” He straightened, rolling his shoulders. “We meet back here in an hour. First to drag Caspian’s elusive self back wins the glory of being the best.”
“And the losers?” Sorelle asked.
Henrik’s smile widened. “The losers offer a secret. Something … inconvenient.”
Esper’s gaze narrowed. A secret in the hands of Henrik Beaumont was about as advisable as wandering the castle unattended.
Thalen rolled his eyes. “Count me out. And you’d better be careful the King doesn’t find any of you where you shouldn’t be.”
“You’ve grown dull in your old age, Caelithar.”
“Will you be alright on your own?” Sorelle asked, her fingers tightening around Esper’s. “We could team up.”
“No teams,” Henrik said. “We each must stand on our own merit, after all.”
Esper turned her hand in Sorelle’s, giving it a brief, reassuring squeeze. “I’ll be fine.”
Sorelle hesitated, searching her face for a moment longer than necessary. Finally, she grinned. “See you in an hour.”
Esper nodded and let her go.
She lingered where she was as the group broke apart, watching them disappear into the shifting currents of the crowd, silk and laughter swallowing them whole. The music swelled, the night stretching wide and glittering ahead. Hours yet to play out. With no one to account for her, she could move as she pleased. Search where she liked. And if she found nothing—well. Someone would find the prince eventually. She’d get her answers one way or another.
Keeping her father and the Lady of Caelwyne at the edge of her vision, she drifted along the terrace’s outer wall. She slipped behind a marble column, letting shadow claim her.
She turned and slipped through a narrow servant’s arch half-hidden by climbing ivy.
The noise dulled. Marble gave way to slate beneath her slippers. She let herself exhale fully. At least here, there were no prying eyes.
Castle Verricayne was vast. She had studied the layout in Tir Andrel until the lines swam behind her eyes: hidden staircases, sealed galleries, servant arteries threading between the grand halls.
In theory, she knew the path to the library. Not the public one, but a second, older library labeled simply as West Archive. Exactly the type of place that might hold answers to questions she wasn’t even sure how to articulate.
She took a left at the first fork. The servant corridor sloped gently downward and emptied into a hallway. Some long-dead architect had thoughtfully etched wing markers into the stone near the archways. WEST was carved in a blocky, archaic script beneath a fading crest.
Esper moved deeper into the west wing, leaving behind the hum of the gardens for corridors that felt increasingly unused. A shuttered gallery slipped past on her left, its doors sealed tight. Then another. And another. Each one locked.
The hallway began to narrow, the ceilings pressing lower, the light thinning to a series of shallow sconces set too close to the floor. Their glow pooled weakly against the stone, leaving the upper reaches in shadow. She reached a threshold and hesitated, running her fingers over the words etched into the stone.
The Hall of Whispers.
“Caelwynne’s done the world a disservice, tucking you away in dusty old libraries.”
Esper whirled. Henrik lounged against the opposite wall, one shoulder braced against the stone, his gaze gleaming as it trailed down her neckline.
Her pulse stumbled.
Thought we weren’t supposed to form teams,” she said, forcing the words to emerge steady, cool, uninterested. As though her mind wasn’t already mapping distances.
Henrik shrugged. “I practically grew up in this castle. I know all the best hiding spots.” His lips curved, confident in the way of men rarely denied anything. “I wager we can have some fun and I can still find the prince within the hour.”
He pushed off the wall and stepped towards her. Esper drew a slow breath in through her nose and held it, the way she did before translating a difficult passage. Calm first, action later. She willed the fear from her face and, in its place, borrowed Sorelle’s most effortless weapon. Flirtation.
“You grew up here?” she asked softly as he closed the distance. She set her palm lightly against his chest. “So you know all the hidden rooms.”
He leaned closer, breath sweet with liquor, and brushed a finger along her cheek. “Indeed, little scholar. Was there one in particular you had in mind?”
Her heart was racing fast enough to bruise, but she let her fingers drift down the front of his gem-studded doublet, pausing just above his belt.
“I read about a secret room,” she murmured. “A hidden chamber with a black iron throne.” She lifted her eyes to his and shaped her mouth into something she hoped resembled mischief.
Henrik’s chuckle was low and pleased. He caught her chin between his fingers and tilted her face to his. “I think your books are lying to you,” he said. “There’s only one throne room, and even I’m not foolish enough to risk my titles defiling it.” His thumb brushed her lower lip. “But there are many other rooms.”
Revulsion choked her and she scrambled for composure.
“Continue touching her,” said a passionless voice behind Henrik, “and your name will be erased from the Archives of the world. After I take my time dismembering you.”
Henrik went still. Slowly, he released her chin and turned. The mysterious man from the terrace stood several paces away, lamplight catching on the dark fall of his clothing and the bright edge of the dagger he flipped idly between his fingers.
Henrik stepped in front of her, bristling. “Blades are forbidden in the castle, friend,” he said. “Walk away, and I won’t report you.”
The stranger’s gaze flicked past Henrik and settled on Esper. Something in her chest tightened with the unmistakable sensation of a long-sealed door shifting open. Up close, his features were even more perfect. Every line exact, deliberate, as though nothing about his face had been left to chance. Certainty, she realized, rather than beauty.
The dagger turned once more between his fingers, catching the light like a falling star.
“I would reconsider,” he said. “You seem the type attached to particular limbs.” His voice was a swatch of dark velvet skimming across Esper’s skin. Calm. Bored in a way that suggested violence was not an escalation, but merely an administrative task.
Esper exhaled slowly, steadying the riot in her ribs. Henrik was drunk and arrogant and predictable, and while he had her at a disadvantage, her chances of escaping him were inconvenient, not impossible. This man, however, held himself like someone accustomed to finishing what he began.
Softly, slowly, she took a step backward towards the shadowed entrance of the Hall of Whispers. Another. The pearls on her dress clacked. Henrik’s head twitched towards the sound. The stranger moved. One breath the dagger was idle, the next its edge rested beneath Henrik’s chin.
Without waiting to see what would happen next, Esper turned and fled.
Artwork by Marg Ribar. All rights reserved.
THIRIEL
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AGO
Thiriel tapped her foot impatiently as stone cracked, releasing Zareth with all the urgency of a continental drift.
“Any day now,” she muttered.
The fissures widened at a glacial pace. Crystal-veined tendrils of rock that had crept up his calves retreated inch by inch.
Thiriel leaned back on her heels, fingers tightening around her staff as she waited.
And waited.
Finally, just as she was contemplating smiting the entire place, Zareth exhaled.
Thiriel’s mouth curved. “Welcome back.”
Zareth lifted his head, dark hair falling back just enough to reveal those bottomless eyes, a faint shot of silver glinting in their depths. When he spoke, the rasp of long silence dragged the air, though the words themselves landed clean and exact.
“You are either very bored,” he said, “or something has gone catastrophically wrong.”
Thiriel tilted her head. “Must it be catastrophic? Perhaps I simply missed our banter.”
His gaze dropped to the softly glowing thread still coiled around his fingers. He rose, unfolding to his full height, and the Archives seemed to recalibrate around him. He was broader than she remembered. Or perhaps she had simply forgotten what it felt like to stand before something that refused to yield.
A flicker of anticipation licked through her.
He stepped down from the dais.
“Why,” he asked, “am I awake?”
Thiriel clasped her hands behind her back and began to circle him. His eyes tracked her every move.
“I require a favor,” she said.
His mouth curved, caught somewhere between amusement and disdain.
She stopped just short of him, closer than perhaps advisable. “I need time in the Fae realm. Without notice. Or interference.”
Zareth studied her for a long, assessing moment. “And why,” he asked, voice low and exact, “would a creature of spectacle require concealment?”
She sighed. “Must we do this dance? Pieces are moving. I need a place of observation, before every courtier with a pulse and a vendetta starts posturing.”
“You enjoy posturing.”
“When it profits me.”
His gaze sharpened. “Who are you hunting?”
There it was, the warlord’s instinct. Truly, he was wasted in this dusty hole.
“So many questions, and not even an ounce of gratitude for returning your darling girl intact and untangled.” Thiriel fluttered her lashes. “You’re welcome.”
Zareth didn’t move. “What you elect to do unbidden does not purchase my gratitude. Or my cooperation.”
She clicked her tongue. “You used to be more fun.”
“And you,” he said, “are still as reckless as you are irritating.”
His fingers twitched. Black stone surged up from the floor. A tight ring of obsidian bars snapped into place around her.
Thiriel grinned. “I did miss you.” She tested the cage, fingers curling around cool stone. Too narrow to slip through. Too high to vault. As efficient and effective as ever. “What do you want, Zareth, dearest?”
“I want her back.”
No hesitation. No emotion. A simple fact.
She’d expected it. Still, the audacity sent a bright, chaotic thrill through her. She had, of course, already laid the groundwork. Already bargained with Kaeda to breathe the girl back into being.
But Zaerth did not need to know that.
“Reincarnation,” she said coolly, “is not a bauble to be plucked from a shelf.”
His gaze didn’t waver. “I am not a piece on your board, Thiriel.”
Thiriel sighed, as though deeply inconvenienced. “The girl will walk the world again,” she conceded. “I can veil her choices from Liora, for a time. But if you mean to have her here, in this mausoleum of yours, she must come willingly. That is the contract.”
He inclined his head once. “She will.”
Thiriel arched a brow. “And if she doesn’t?”
“Then you will assist in guiding that willingness.”
Thiriel folded her arms, waiting.
“In exchange, I will fold your imprint beneath the hum of Fae-kind,” he said. “Dull your edges. Mask the distortion you create merely by existing.”
“I create distortion?”
“You are distortion.”
Thiriel flashed him a bright, delighted smile and dipped an exaggerated curtsy. “Charmer.”
The sound Zareth made bordered on a growl.
“If her path is to be hidden, it will be hidden from you as well. No watching. No interfering.” Thiriel leaned into the narrow gap between the bars. “No hovering in the margins like a sentimental ghost.”
“I have waited a thousand years, already,” he warned.
“Then you can manage twenty-one years more,” she said breezily. “Merely a blink, really.”
She tapped her nail once against the obsidian.
His jaw tightened, and for a moment, Thiriel wondered if she’d pushed too far.
Zareth lifted his hand. The cage collapsed in on itself without a sound, dissolving into a fine, dark powder that vanished before it reached the floor.
Thiriel stepped through where it had been, brushing invisible dust from her sleeve.
“Well,” she said, already turning away, “this has been productive. Do give my regards to Liora.” She glanced over her shoulder with a sharp smile. “I’ll call when it’s time.”
ESPER
PRESENT DAY
Esper ran.
The Hall of Whispers swallowed her whole.
Her slippers slapped marble, pearls clacking like a thousand tiny accusations against her ribs. The sound ricocheted off stone, mocking her. She gathered her skirts in both fists and ran harder.
Her lungs burned. The corridor forked ahead. She turned right.
The hall earned its name as she moved deeper. Air shifted. Sound distorted. Her own breathing seemed to lag half a heartbeat behind her body.
“Pull yourself together,” she muttered.
Running from drunken nobles was one thing, losing herself to fear was quite another. She slowed, pressing one hand against the wall to steady the spin of her thoughts.
Her palm tingled. Pressure tightened in her chest, tugging at her.
Left.
She frowned. There was no left. Only a blank wall. The tug came again, sharper this time.
Left.
Her fingers traced stone until they caught on a seam. She pressed. The wall gave. Esper stilled, staring into the narrow passage beyond.
“Well,” she murmured. “That’s … convenient."
She slipped inside. The hidden door grated shut behind her. Steeling herself, she crept forward until the passage gave way to a cavernous chamber.
Esper crossed the threshold and stopped short.
The throne room rose in tiered shadow, walls of dark marble climbing toward a ceiling so high she wasn’t sure it existed.
No chandeliers. No silk banners.
At the far end, upon a circular dias, sat a throne of black iron. It looked exactly as it had in her dreams. Not the ornamental seat displayed to ambassadors and poets, but the true High Seat of the Kings.
Someone was sitting on it.
Artwork by Marg Ribar. All rights reserved.
Esper stopped breathing.
Dark velvet spilled from his shoulders, drinking in the light until he seemed more shadow than man. What little glow the lanterns offered illuminated him in fragments. The strong line of his jaw. The column of his throat. One elbow rested lazily against the throne’s arm. In his other hand, a knife turned slowly between his fingers. Something dark edged the steel, so faint she wondered if she was imagining it.
The man from the terrace. The man from the Hall of Whispers. Her mind flashed to Henrik, to the blade at his throat.
Surely not.
Esper drew in a breath, forcing it steady, forcing herself back into her body.
“Is he alive?” she asked, stepping further into the room.
Her voice echoed faintly against the polished stone.
The knife stilled. “Would you be upset were he not?”
Esper’s fingers curled at her sides. “He is the Valkarran heir.”
The man tilted his head, as if considering her claim.
“A mortal title,” he said, the blade turning once more between his fingers, “of very little weight.”
The arrogance of it scraped along her ribs. Esper held herself still, forcing the reaction down. Anger would cost her clarity, and clarity was the only thing that would get her answers.
You are a scholar, she reminded herself. Observe. Do not assume.
“Why are you following me?” she asked.
“As I arrived first, I believe it is you who are following me.”
She gritted her teeth. “Do you plan on evading all of my questions?”
His silence coiled around her, gathering in the space between them, pressing against the edges of her composure. She gave it nothing. Silence, at least, was a familiar companion. She could stand in it without flinching.
Finally, the knife stilled and disappeared into the darkness that surrounded him.
“The lecher will wake with a headache and nothing more,” he said. “Unlike my counterparts, I abstain from meddling in the affairs of mortals.”
Mortals.
The word landed harder this time. A tremor of unease slipped down her spine.
“Who are you?”
He regarded her, something unreadable in his expression. “Do you truly not know?”
The question didn’t sound rhetorical. Something familiar plucked at her, that same door shifting, straining against hinges long rusted shut.
“I don’t ask needless questions,” she said, sharper than she intended. Nor did she enjoy being toyed with. With effort, she kept the thought to herself.
“You’ve been dreaming.” He rose, utterly unhurried. Behind him, the shadows deepened. “Memories that do not belong to you. Faces you cannot place.”
He stepped down from the dias, the echo of iron beneath his boots lingering in the air, as if the world itself were reluctant to let the sound go.
Esper swallowed. He was enormous. Not only tall and broad, but vast. As though his presence extended beyond the shape of him, pressing outward, filling the room.
“What do you know of it?” she whispered.
He stopped several paces away, close enough that she could see the starlight glinting in the depths of his eyes.
He regarded her for a long moment. “You were not as aesthetically pleasing, before.”
It sounded like an accusation. His stare was severe enough to feel physical. Before what? Sorelle’s relentless grooming?
“It was one of the reasons she hated you so.”
Esper blinked.
“Far less beautiful than she was, and still I loved you. Liora could not abide that.”
Liora. As in the Fate Liora, because no one was stupid enough to name their child after the force of death. Realization unfolded slowly, inexorably, each piece locking into place with quiet, dreadful precision. The dreams. The fragments. The pull. And beneath it all, the story she had so carefully translated for Sorelle. A mortal woman. The Fate who loved her. It had ended, as tales involving the Fates did, in blood and ruin.
A laugh slipped from her before she could stop it, sharp and breathless. The absurdity of everything pressed hard against her ribs.
He stepped closer, his hand hovering in the space between them. “That laugh …”
Esper held her ground despite the frantic hammering of her heart. “Tell me who you are.”
Even as she spoke the words, she knew.
“I am Zareth,” he said simply.
Zareth. Keeper of the Archives. Gatherer of Echos.
“Your name, though long erased from this world, was Malia,” he said softly.
The syllables struck deep, settling somewhere beneath her ribs. Esper fought against the instinct to recoil. Think. She needed to think. A Fate who mistook her for someone she wasn’t was a complication she might not survive.
“When you laughed, the entire Archive responded.” His expression shifted into something edging dangerously close to grief.
The torches flickered.
“I have come,” he said, “to reclaim what is mine.”
Esper’s mouth went dry. “I’m sorry for your loss,” she managed, forcing the words past the tightness in her throat. “But you are mistaken. I am not her.”
He stepped closer.
The space between them collapsed. Esper felt as though he had swallowed all the air in the room. He lifted his hand, stopping just short of her cheek. Close enough that she could feel the suggestion of it, as though he didn’t trust himself to make contact.
“You were banished from this world for a thousand years, and then hidden from me for twenty-one more. I will not lose you again. You belong with me.”
Her stomach bottomed at his claim. She grasped for calm even as her restraint snapped.
“I am not a misplaced object, to be claimed by a stranger’s hand,” she said fiercely. “I belong to no one but myself.”
Slow applause echoed through the chamber, bright and mocking in the darkness. A figure stepped from the shadows—the blue-haired Fae from the terrace, luminous and sharp-eyed and endlessly amused.
“Oh she does have spirit.”
“You are neither wanted nor needed here, Thiriel,” Zareth said, something dangerous edging his voice.
Thiriel. The Fate of Crossroads. Chaos incarnate. For one fleeting, disorienting moment, Esper wondered if she’d struck her head in her flight from Henrik. If this was just another dream. Another fevered story her mind had spun to make sense of things.
“And miss the grand finale of all my hard work?” Thiriel tutted. “Hardly.”
Esper’s gaze moved between them.
She had spent her life studying the Fates, listening to their stories, translating the texts that held their long history of indiscretions. If she had to take a chance, she’d take it with Zareth. Thiriel was a wild card, as likely to crown a mortal as she was to unmake them.
Esper reached out, her hand settling against Zareth’s arm. “What do you want from me?”
He didn’t startle. Indeed, she didn’t think he could be anything but absolutely composed. But his gaze dropped to where she touched him, lingering a fraction too long before lifting to meet hers.
“Zar,” Thiriel drawled. “Care to confess your devotion?”
And there it was again, that terrible sense of standing at the edge of something vast and unknowable. Of being seen too clearly. Of being one misstep from falling into the abyss.
“You brought light into a world that held nothing but tedium,” he said, his tone harsh despite the words. “I’ve come to take you home.”
Thiriel pressed a hand to her chest. “Who knew you were such a romantic?” she asked. “Not Liora, certainly.”
Esper didn’t dare look away. Up close, Zareth’s eyes were layer upon layer of liquid darkness, flecks of silver shifting far below the surface.
“Where is home?” she asked.
“The Archives.”
Esper swayed, a wave of lightheadedness catching her off guard. Her grip tightened on Zareth’s arm as she fought to steady herself.
The Archives.
No text had ever truly described them. Only half-formed accounts of a place that existed in the quiet between worlds, where the memory was gathered and kept. A place of darkness. Of permanence. A place where lives were preserved, rather than lived.
“No,” she whispered, shaking her head. “Please. I cannot.”
Zareth gripped the back of her neck, fingers tangling in her hair hard enough to dislodge Sorelle’s carefully placed pins.
“Remember me,” he said, almost gently. “Remember what we were.”
Something familiar stirred at the edges of her mind, but refused to take shape. Instead, other memories rose to meet her. Sorelle’s reflection in the mirror, chin lifted in haughty satisfaction. The low murmur of the Master Scholar as he reviewed her script. The dry, familiar scent of old parchment. Sunlight, warm against her skin.
A quiet life, but a life all the same. Her life.
“I don’t remember you,” she said again. “I don’t remember anything.”
Silence stretched, thin and precarious. Esper held his gaze, though every instinct urged her to look away. She was acutely aware of how easily he could simply snap her neck.
A sharp clap fractured the moment. Thiriel.
Zareth loosened his grip, pulling his hand from her hair. His sudden absence left Esper off-balance, and she caught herself a half-step back as he moved away.
“I believe we’ve had enough chit chat for one night,” Thiriel said brightly. “Here is how this proceeds.”
She moved as she spoke, drifting in a slow circle. The hem of her gown whispered against marble as she repositioned herself, forcing Esper to turn until the throne loomed directly behind.
“The High Seat requires a sacrifice.” Thiriel tilted her head. “You may not remember darling Zareth, but you do remember the throne.”
Esper’s gaze betrayed her as it slid towards the towering monstrosity of black iron. The air around it seemed to thrum, as though Thiriel’s presence had stirred something long dormant beneath the metal.
“It’s why you are here, is it not?” Thiriel continued lightly. “For answers. To end that tiresome not knowing. To understand why it has been calling you.”
Esper dragged her attention back. “Why has it been calling me?” she asked, her mind spinning as information clicked into place. “The High Seat has stood since Riven Verricayne struck his bargain and united the Continent. It has never before required a sacrifice. Why now?”
Thiriel’s grin widened until it was all teeth. “Times are changing. Old promises coming due. History correcting itself, et cetera, et cetera.” She flicked her fingers carelessly. “Nothing to trouble your pretty head over.”
That, at least, earned a reaction.
“Thiriel.” Zareth didn’t raise his voice, but the warning was clear. “Do not think to play your games here.”
“Only ones in your favour, darling. Conveniently, entry into the Archives demands the shedding of mortal life.” Thiriel’s attention settled fully on Esper. “Zareth regains what he lost. I acquire what I need. And you, girl, get to be something more than a silly little mortal.”
“And if I prefer the life of a silly little mortal?” Esper asked.
Thiriel’s lip curled. “Then I’d say Zareth has chosen poorly.”
“This is not a thing to be taken,” Zareth said. His attention remained fixed on Esper, unyielding in its intensity. “It must be chosen. You must come willingly.”
Esper’s pulse hammered, but her mind sharpened around the words, turning them over. With the Fates, there were always constraints. Limits. Rules.
She lifted her chin. “So you can’t force me.”
Thiriel laughed, sharp as breaking glass. “Oh, I wouldn’t say that.”
She crooked her finger. Blue light gathered, thin and pale and unnatural. A figure stumbled from its centre. Esper’s world narrowed to a single, terrible point.
“Sorelle,” she whispered.
Her sister’s wrists were bound in a ribbon of shimmering light. The intricate crown atop her head had come undone, dark braids spilling loose as though she’d fought. Hard. Her breath came fast and uneven, but her eyes—
Her eyes were clear. Furious. Determined.
“Esper,” Sorelle gasped. “Run. They’re—”
Thiriel snapped her fingers.
The sound of Sorelle’s voice cut off. She folded in on herself with a strangled breath, fingers clawing at her throat.
“Sorelle!” Esper lunged.
She barely made it two steps. Invisible hands stopped her mid-stride. The air hardened, locking her body in place as though she’d been caught in stone.
“She’s fine,” Thiriel said, her tone bored. “I simply grow weary of her whining.”
Sorelle sucked a ragged breath, eyes blazing as she dragged herself stubbornly forward.
Esper strained against the air that held her in place. Her gaze flicked to Zareth, pleading.
“Please,” she whispered.
His mouth tightened, but he inclined his head.
The invisible hold shattered.
Esper stumbled forward, catching Sorelle by the shoulders and pulling her upright.
“She has no part in this,” Esper said.
Thiriel’s smile didn’t waver. “Oh, but she does. The High Seat will have its sacrifice. Should you decline—” she dipped her head towards Sorelle—“your sister will suffice.”
Sorelle made a sound, raw and furious and terrified all at once. Something in Esper went very still.
She released Sorelle with one hand and reached up, tearing the loosened pearl lattice from her hair. The pins gave easily. Beads scattered across the stone.
Esper shook out her hair, clearing the pounding from her temples. Her thoughts settled, aligning with sudden clarity, a blade finding its balance.
She turned on Zareth, her expression hard.
“You claim to—” she forced herself not to choke on the words— “love me. And yet you would let her threaten the one person I hold most dear in the entire world?”
Thiriel’s delight sharpened. “I do so love when they get angry.”
Esper ignored her. Zareth was watching her with that same terrible stillness, something held taut beneath it.
“Was a sacrifice to the throne part of your bargain?” she asked softly. “Do you even know what it will set in motion? Or are you as much a pawn in her games as I am?”
“The games my brethren choose to play with mortals do not concern me,” Zareth said. But his gaze flicked, brief and sharp, toward Thiriel. Esper did not miss the reproach in it.
“Is that not how I was lost to you?” she pressed. “Fates playing games with mortals? Dare you gamble my soul a second time?”
Something shifted in Zareth’s depthless eyes, the faintest recalibration. Sorelle gripped her hand, hard enough to bruise.
“You said this was a choice,” Esper whispered. “So let me choose. Let my sister go.”
For a moment, she thought something in him wavered. But then Thiriel laughed, bright and cutting, and slipped into the space between them.
“Smart, for a mortal,” Thiriel said. “A pity you’re already promised. I think we might have had fun.”
She drifted toward Zareth and poked him lightly in the arm. His hand closed around her wrist faster than Esper could track.
“Your games grow tiresome,” he warned.
Thiriel merely winked at him. With a growl, he released her.
“I’m afraid you’re overestimating your leverage,” Thiriel went on, unconcerned. “Zareth will take you home.” A glance, sharp with amusement. “And I don’t imagine you intend to go willingly. Not without proper motivation.”
Esper closed her eyes. Just for a moment. Long enough to gather herself.
Sorelle dragged in a breath, glaring at Thiriel and gesturing furiously to her throat. With a theatrical sigh, Thiriel snapped her fingers once more.
“Don't you dare,” Sorelle said, her voice low and furious. “Don’t even consider—”
“I’m thinking.”
“You’re doing that thing,” Sorelle shot back, “where you’ve already decided and you’re just working out how to say it so I can’t argue—”
“Sorelle.”
“No.” She stepped in front of Esper, placing her body between her sister and the Fates. A ridiculous gesture that hit Esper harder than anything else.
“I’m not about to sacrifice your life,” Esper hissed.
“Oh, but yours is negotiable?”
Esper’s jaw tightened. “I’m not certain we have the luxury of alternatives,” she muttered. “Something bigger is at play here.”
Sorelle’s fingers dug into her arm as she looked to Thiriel. “I want to make a deal.”
“No,” Thiriel said pleasantly.
“I thought that was your entire reputation,” Sorelle snapped. “Tempting mortals into terrible decisions?”
“Be that as it may,” Thiriel said, looking genuinely disappointed, “this particular course is not open to revision.”
Sorelle swore.
Esper caught her sister’s face between her hands and forced her to look at her. “I will be ok.”
The lie landed steadier than she felt.
“I won’t lose you again.” And there it was. Sorelle’s voice, stripped of all its armour, no imperious lilt, no weaponized grace.
Again. The word sat heavy on Esper’s heart.
“Do you trust me?” she asked, so softly it was barely a whisper.
Sorelle hesitated. Nodded slowly.
“Then don’t interfere. No matter what.”
Esper met Zareth’s measured gaze and played her final card. “If you wish me to come willingly, if you wish me to not fight you every step of the way, if you wish for me to give you a chance, then we bargain.”
Thiriel opened her mouth. Zareth held up his hand. Silence fell, immediate and absolute.
“What bargain do you wish to make?”
She stepped towards him. “Entering the Archives requires the shedding of my mortal life,” she said. “Take it with your own hands and I will come willingly. I want nothing to do with the High Seat of the Kings and her chaotic plans.”
“Darling girl,” Thiriel said. “If you deny the Seat, I will simply sacrifice your sister once you are dead.”
“I don’t think you will,” Esper said. “I think it’s me the throne requires. Not a substitute.”
For the first time, Thiriel’s expression faltered.
She moved, but Zareth shook his head.
“That is far enough.”
Thiriel stilled, flicking her hair back with careless grace. “If I lose my sacrifice, so too will you lose your mortal. I made this reunion possible. I can undo it.”
Zareth did not answer immediately. His gaze lingered on Thiriel, as if weighing her threat. Finally, he gave the barest dip of his head.
But Esper had never expected Thiriel to release her so easily.
“Ask for something else,” he said. “Anything.”
“Very well,” Esper said. “You walk between worlds. Grant me the same. Six months there. Six months here.”
He regarded her steadily. “One. One month a year, you shall be permitted to return.”
“Six,” Esper said. “And I will do everything in my power to remember.”
He studied her for a long moment before conceding with a nod.
Sorelle inhaled sharply, ready to argue, but Esper tightened her grip. “Swear to me,” she said, “that she's to be returned to the Ball untouched. She has no part in your games, not today, not ever.”
Zareth’s gaze shifted to Thiriel. “I swear it,” he said. “For both of us.”
Thiriel shrugged, looking vastly amused.
Esper cupped her sister’s cheek. “I’ll see you in six months, pet. We’ve been apart longer, and endured.”
Sorelle surged forward, wrapping her arms around her, holding tight, as if she could anchor her there by force of will alone. Esper held her just as fiercely. For a moment, just a moment, she let herself stay.
And then she looked up over Sorelle’s shoulder to catch Thiriel’s gaze and nodded.
Thiriel clicked her tongue. Sorelle crumpled. Esper caught her before she struck marble, lowering her carefully. She pressed her fingers to Sorelle’s throat, letting out a breath as she felt her pulse beating steadily.
She rose. “What must I do?”
“You need only touch the throne,” Thiriel said.
Zareth held out his hand. Esper stared at his long fingers, the quiet certainty in the gesture. She stepped past him, mounting the dias alone. The throne loomed. Up close, the black iron was a twisting mass of barbed thorns.
In her dreams, she had sat upon it. In her dreams, the sky had burned with silver and violet light.
She hesitated. Sorelle lay motionless behind her, looking small and fragile against the vastness of the chamber. Pressing her lips together, she laid her palm upon the iron throne. Barbed hooks tore at her skin, a rivulet of scarlet snaking between the thorns.
For half a heartbeat, nothing happened.
Memory struck like a blade, too many, too fast, for her to understand. Strong hands seized her shoulders as she ignited from the inside out. Her knees buckled, but she did not fall. The blackness that surged to claim her was filled with names and stories, past and present braided together.
Somewhere beyond the storm, she felt him. Zareth. Steady. Immovable. Waiting.
“Malia,” he whispered.
But Malia, whoever she had been, was nothing more than ash and echo. Esper might have surrendered her mortal life, but she refused to surrender herself. She refused to surrender the mother who had died for her. The sister who had loved her fiercely enough to bargain with the Fates. The life she had built, piece by piece, with stubborn, unrelenting will.
She would not be reduced to a relic in his Archive.
Distantly, she felt her body dissolving. As the last of the light fractured and fell away, Esper made herself a promise. Whatever waited beyond this threshold of death, whatever power tried to claim her, the Fates would learn that she was not theirs to keep.