I stare at it, my pulse echoing in my ears. The parchment crackles faintly as I turn the page.
A second branch. This one drawn fromSelric Thalriento a different name:
Valarie Normandy Thalrien.
Below it:
Orren Thalrien.
My chest tightens. A name I never knew. A brother.Mybrother.
Next to Valarie’s name is a birthdate, and a death date—twenty-seven years ago. But for Orren, there is only the date of his birth, five years before mine.
No death. Just a blank space. Waiting…
The room tilts off center for a breathless moment as I try to make sense of what that blank space could mean.
Metal clinks faintly as I adjust the velvet. Something is hidden beneath the parchment.
I lift it carefully—and gasp.
A crest. Silver-blue, old as tide and salt. A mermaid engraved in profile, soft and smooth from generations of touch. Concentric ripples fan outward from her figure.
I stare. I remember it, vividly. Hidden in my father’s drawer, long ago.
The moment my fingers brush it, warmth pools in my chest, like stepping into a deep, still lake. Water stirs inside me—not conjured, not summoned, but remembered.Ancient. Familiar.
I know, instinctively, that this crest carries more than just lineage. It holdsmemory. Power. And it calls to my blood like a song buried under centuries.
From the shadows, Gavrail murmurs, “Find anything?”
I grab the ledger and the crest, replacing the file carefully, tucking the blue velvet back. My fingers are trembling. The truth I found is too quiet to scream, but too loud to ignore.
Whatever Thorne wants with me… it didn’t begin at Whittaker.
It began long before I even knew Whittaker existed.
We slip back into the hallway, shadows curling like smoke around our shoulders—Gavrail’s work. We vanish together into the building’s hush.
I glance at him as we rush through the hallway and down the stairs in silence. His mouth is grim, his shoulders tense.
Once we’re outside, cloaked by the cool night air, I take my first real breath.
He looks at me and the items I hold. “I looked at his planner.” His lips are pressed tight, barely controlled anger beneath the calm mask he always wears. Shadows twitch across the groundlike they want answers, and they want them written in blood. “The day your father died,” Gavrail says slowly, eyes never leaving mine, “his planner was blank. No meetings. No classes. Just two initials—S.T.—and an address.” He pauses. “Your address.”
S.T.
Selric Thalrien.
* * *
Gavrail’s roomin the Ivy House is sparse but not sterile—each detail intentional. A burnished metal lamp casts amber light over books on fusion theory and mythic inheritance, all lying in organized stacks.
One wall is covered in maps of magickal territories marked with cryptic symbols and small, handwritten notes—strategic, surgically precise. Another is draped with dark velvet banners from Vikhrostrum, their sigils not just proud but ominous, reminders of oaths kept and blood spilled.
A single plant sits in the window, leaves green and waxy, a gift from Amelia he hasn’t had the heart to kill. The space smells faintly of cedarwood and ink. And him.
The Thalrien crest lies between us on a folded linen square, half glinting in a narrow shaft of moonlight. Its edges have been softened by age, but the mermaid etched in profile is unmistakable. Gavrail keeps glancing at it out of the corner of his eye, a muscle ticking in his jaw.
