Eliza nodded once. The signal passed like a breath:Now. Quickly.
With her back to the door, Brenna slid a folded scrap of parchment from her sleeve and palmed it onto the table beneath the soup bowl. Her fingers were ice-cold when they brushed Eliza’s. She kept her voice at the pitch of servants’ chatter. “The broth is better today. Less salt.”
“Thank you,” Eliza said, and set her spoon aside untouched.
When the guard’s step receded, Eliza drew the parchment free. Half its edge was gone, charred where flame had chewed it. The rest bore tight, hurried script in a careful hand—the ink blotted in places where the quill had pressed too hard.
She read the first line and felt the blood drain from her face.
Subject’s containment unstable. Recommend immediate termination to preserve structural integrity of wards.
Termination. Not study. Not repair. Eliza’s pulse flickered, a small, shocked thing inside her throat.
She read on, lips thinning.Increase frequency of cut-and-observe to monitor response latency. Dissection of shadow essence planned per Protocol IX. Transfer of residual energy to containment stones to stabilise tower array.
They did not mean to save him. They meant to harvest what he was and break the rest for parts.
Her fingers tightened on the edges until the half-burned corner crackled and flaked. She turned the scrap over. Blood had marked this page—the faint brown print of a thumb across the back. She did not let herself wonder whose.
“How?” she asked, though she already knew. “Where did you get this?”
Brenna swallowed. She stood very straight, as if bracing against a blow. “The lower steward keeps a fire in the small hall by the records room. A mage came through with a stack of notes. He fed most to the flames when he saw me—said they were spoiled. This one stuck to another page. After he left I… I took it out with the tongs.”
Eliza pressed the parchment flat with one hand. With the other, she reached for Brenna’s wrist and felt the thready rush of blood beneath the skin. “You did well,” she said, and forced her voice steady. “You did very well.”
Brenna’s gaze darted toward the door. “There’s more. The guards say the torches below won’t stay lit. The stone sweats. The runes are dimming.” Her breath hitched. “They say the thing in the cell hums when the mages cut him. Like it… like it answers.”
Eliza closed her eyes. When she opened them, the room was the same—winter roses, beeswax, the neat run of embroidery on the coverlet—and nothing was the same at all.
Later, when the light had thinned to a pale rind on the horizon, Thalorin came.
The door swung wide without warning; the guards’ boots rapped once and then stilled. Thalorin entered alone, a slim figure in dove-grey, carrying a small bouquet of hothouse flowers cupped in one hand as if she were visiting an invalid. She smiled—soft, correct, her eyes alight with a careful concern.
“My poor, ailing friend,” she said, and the endearment had the polish of a blade’s edge. “I was told you had not eaten. I thought perhaps…” She set the flowers in a porcelain dish by the window and adjusted a stem with two fingers. The candle flame beside it slanted toward her touch, bending in a way fire did not bend. The ward hum—distant and constant since Eliza’s imprisonment—rose by a hairsbreadth, a pitch felt more than heard.
“I have eaten,” Eliza said, though she hadn’t. She remained seated. She would not stand for this woman.
Thalorin’s attention flitted to the bowl, to the bread broken into neat halves. “Some days are heavier than others,” she said, and turned back with a pitying tilt to her head. “You mustn’t worry yourself with affairs below. The contagion will be dealt with soon. You should rest. I won’t have them troubling you with ugly talk.”
Contagion. The word slid into the room like cold air under a door. Eliza smoothed her hands atop her skirts so Thalorin would not see them curl.
“The city believes you are ill,” Thalorin went on, her voice hushed to a caress. “Your cousin has taken on such burdens in your stead. You must be grateful for his devotion.”
Eliza looked at the flowers rather than at Thalorin’s mouth. Pale petals. No scent. “Devotion,” she said.
A smile ghosted over Thalorin’s lips, gone as quickly. “Rest,” she repeated. “Be well.” As she turned, the candle flames bowed again as if to a queen. The key clinked; the door sighed shut behind her.
Silence seeped back into the seams of the room. The bouquet stood on its dish, perfect and dead.
Eliza reached immediately for the scorched scrap. Her hands had steadied in Thalorin’s presence out of sheer will; now they shook. She spread the parchment under the failing light and read again.
Dissection of shadow essence.
Transfer of residual energy to containment stones.
Every line was a blade. They meant to take him apart and use what bled from the cuts to strengthen the tower that masked their ignorance. They would call it science. They would call it protection. They would grind him into talismans and call that peace.
The candle stuttered. Wax ran like tears down its side.
