And the silence that answers feels deliberate.
She sends the words, but they float at the boundary of his mind—denied entry.
Fuck.
“Teddy and Seren, find Lara and the witches. Rally them. We need their alliance,” Kael announces, forcing his voice into neutrality. Like finding the witches isn’t world-altering.
But Elyssara sees his strain in the way the veins bulge in his neck.He’s fighting something. And losing ground. But now is hardly the time to push him.
Seren nods, shoulders pulled back proudly.She won.
And the thought makes Elyssara beam—Seren is finding her power. While Elyssara feels like it’s slipping through her grasp.
“Ah!” Elandor calls from behind his desk, a tuft of wiry gray hair poking up over the edge of the desk. “Here it is!”
He unravels a large roll of parchment, frayed and snagged at the edges. He stretches it over the table that splits the room in half, gesturing to pin the corners with candle holders and ink pots.
The last time Elyssara stood in this room, her mother had walked back into her life like a ghost wearing flesh. Hope had bloomed so violently inside her she’d nearly drowned in it. Now, all that remains is the echo of her absence. The memory of her warm blood spilling across Elyssara’s bare hands.
“There we are,” Elandor huffs, smoothing his hands over the parchment in pride.
A map.
A map of Caeloria.
Elyssara’s never seen one.
And this map? It’s a study in cruelty and excess.
Caeloria sprawls across the parchment in scorched ochres and iron-stained reds, its borders jagged and unforgiving. Vast deserts dominate the continent—salt flats cracked like broken bone, dunes and seas marked with warnings instead of names, and blackened badlands where ink thins as if the cartographer feared to linger too long. Trade routes are etched in resin-ink,thin and deliberate, cutting through the wastelands like veins feeding a single heart. That heart? A place called Azhareth. There, fortresses rise impossibly from the desert like defiance itself, their walls marked thicker than any city elsewhere in the realms—one gate in and out. Azhareth gleams, drawn larger than scale allows. Its domes and towers are inked in careful symmetry, surrounded by walls, arsenals, and supply vaults. This is not a land built for living. It is a land engineered to endure, to dominate, and to bleed its enemies dry before they ever reach its gates.
“Our Shades have been working on securing this map for a decade,” Elandor explains. “Almost impossible to breach the walls of the city proper.” His eyes land on Kael’s. “We thought you may need it.”
He pauses for a moment, dragging his gaze from Kael, to Elyssara, to Kael, back to Elyssara. “For the Memory Orbs.”
The Memory Orbs.
Elyssara has known the time to take back the Orbs would come. Only, looking at the map of Caeloria—the unforgiving terrain, one gate in and out of the capital, and the vaults beneath Azhareth Castle where the Orbs apparently are… well, it all seems impossible.
“We’re going,” Kael announces without commotion. His eyes cut to Elyssara. “Both of us.”
She knows he would follow her to the end of the realms. But his declaration startles her. Lately, he’s barely touched her, barely looked at her, barely slept at her side. She’s woken alone almost every morning, no warmth left in the sheets where he’d laid. Like he’s already started leaving her… just slowly enough that no one else would notice.
Kael doesn’t falter. “I killed Maireth’s son—she’ll be coming for me. I want to get toherfirst.”
Elyssara’s heart shatters in an instant.
It felt like devotion. Togetherness. Love.
But this? It’s strategy. And strategy does not love her back.
She shoves down her hurt, unwilling to let him see it. Because if she lets it surface now, she won’t be able to do what comes next.
“I get the Orbs. You take out Maireth. Understood,” she confirms, her tone stripped and icy.
His dark expression falters. A fracture of tenderness splitting through the cracks. He huffs an exhale. “My love?—”
“It is done!” Elyssara cuts him off, and no one dares to breathe.
