My satchel carries dried roots, a few spellstones, a dagger with my family sigil, and a small, cracked mirror that oncebelonged to my mother, before she gave it to me. It’s not much, but it’s enough.
Just before dawn, I walk toward the stables. Myris isn’t at the gate, but someone else is.
Lira. The seer.
Her eyes are milky with time, her voice barely audible. “You go west,” she says. “Into the dark.”
I nod. “There’s no light left here.”
She presses something into my hand. A scroll, sealed in wax that shimmers faintly with violet.
“Read it when the moon is high,” she whispers. “And remember: Blood will bind you, or break you.”
I stare at her. “What does that mean?”
But Lira just smiles. “It always means something. Eventually.”
She vanishes into the fog before I can ask more. I tuck the scroll into my cloak and climb onto my horse. I hesitate for a breath, letting the silence settle around me. The city behind me is still asleep, its rooftops veiled in mist, its towers casting long, hunched shadows like watchful ghosts. Somewhere, a mourning bell tolls too early for the hour. I wonder who it’s for this time. A child? A guardian? Another Purna with no strength left to give?
For a moment, I wish I could turn back. Just long enough to say goodbye. But there’s no time for goodbyes anymore.
As I pass through the city gates, the sigils above groan faintly, shedding flakes of stone as I ride beneath.
The road to Velcryn yawns before me, endless and shadowed. And I do not look back.
2
ZEIDAN
The morning begins with blood on the snow.
Every training should look like this. The metal ring echoes around, steel on steel, sharp breaths, the hollow clatter of armor as bodies move in tandem. My warriors circle like shadows, disciplined and silent, their blades carving patterns into the cold air. I move among them without hesitation, parrying, striking, spinning. I am testing them.
I need them sharp. Every movement matters. Every flaw must be cut away.
I break from the last of them, breath fogging in the frostbitten dawn. The clouds above Velcryn churn, heavy with the storm that never comes. Always threatening, never falling. Just like the Council.
My second-in-command, Garrick, tosses me a cloth to wipe the sweat from my neck. “You’re pushing too hard.”
“I can still feel the slowness in my left arm,” I mutter. “That last blow should’ve slowed me more than it did.”
“You’re not a training dummy. You don’t need to prove anything to them.”
I don’t answer. Garrick knows better. Everything here is a test. Every word and every breath.
I was raised with blades and silence. My father trained me to endure first, to feel later, if at all. A prince cannot afford softness in Velcryn. Not when every courtier smiles like a predator and every toast tastes of politics. Even now, I count steps when I walk into rooms. I measure pauses between greetings. I weigh each glance like a dagger, waiting for the one that slips past my guard.
Garrick says I push too hard. What he doesn’t understand is that I can’t stop. The day I let myself breathe is the day they’ll sense it, that flicker of weakness. That slip. And here, weakness is a feast.
I’ve survived this long by being sharper than their plans and colder than their expectations.
Before I can return to the line, the wind shifts. Not the kind that carries scent or sound, but the deeper kind—the one laced with magic. A tremor skims the edge of my senses. Old. Foreign. Awfully familiar.
I turn toward the ridge just beyond the training ring.
Something is coming.
The Matron Councilchambers loom like a throne of stone and bone, built from the remains of the ancient beasts that once ruled this land. The room is as cold as the high spires that pierce the sky above Velcryn.
