Page 11 of The Last Rose of Ashwood

Hold the grief that should not weep.

Second door, thorn door, red with blame,

Bind the wound that learned a name.

Third door, ash door, crowned in bone,

Keep the dead from walking home.

Fourth door, mirror door, silver-bright,

Hide the truth from its own sight.

Fifth door, tide door, black and wide,

Drown the voice that calls inside.

Sixth door, marrow door, pale and thin,

Lock the hunger under skin.

Seventh door, heart door, last to fall,

Break the rose, and break them all.

At the time, she had thought it was an ugly hymn. Children were meant to be given pretty songs. They were meant to sing songs about birds, moonlight, mothers returning at dusk with warm hands and honey cakes. Children’s stories were not meant to be filled with grief and teeth. She had said as much, because at nine she had not yet learned that honesty was a blade best kept sheathed until useful. Her father had looked down at her with that expression she came to understand only after the war had hollowed her out enough to make wisdom of pain. Pain was not anger and it was not disappointment.

“Pretty songs are for children who inherit peace,” he had told her. “You will inherit the things peace was built to hide.”

Aelira had hated him for that, briefly and with the clean ferocity only a child could manage. Later, she hated him for other things; for silence, for cruelty, for every order he gave in the name of preservation, and for every truth he fed her only after it was too late to spit it back out.

Still, she had remembered the rhyme.

She remembered it now as rain threaded silver lines across the tower window and the letter trembled between her fingers despite the stillness she forced upon her hand. The old archives had contained histories not meant for public record. Deep names that were never spoken above ground and warnings translated from languages so ancient that even elven scholars argued over whether they had ever been spoken by mouths at all.

Her family had not merely ruled—they had guarded. Ashwood had not been innocent. and Aelira would not dishonor the dead by pretending otherwise.

Her family had ruled humans for centuries with one hand extended in protection and the other closed around their throats. They had called themselves guardians first, monarchs second, as if order became gentler when dressed in older language. They had built roads through starving provinces, yes, and raised granaries after droughts, and held back the old things beneath the earth while human villages slept through generations without ever knowing what moved below their fields.

But mercy, in Ashwood hands, had always arrived with conditions. When magic bloomed too early in human children, when a boy made stones tremble in his sleep or a girl whispered to buried things without understanding what answered, Ashwood took them from their families and called it protection. The official letters were beautiful; heavy parchment with green wax. Phrases about safety, training, duty, and the honor of service. No letter ever described the mother screaming at the gate, the father who offered his own hands if only the child could stay, the small shoes left by hearths because someone had believed there would be time to pack properly.

Ashwood silenced rebellions with dirt and stone. It buried uprisings beneath language polished smooth enough to pass for law. It wrapped brutality in ceremony until even those committing it could pretend they were preserving order rather than crushing grief before it learned how to organize. Courts praised restraint because the executions were elegant. Generals praised necessity because the dead could no longer argue. Priests blessed the empire because survival had a way of making cowards sound devout.

Aelira knew that better than anyone. She had been one of Ashwood’s sharpest instruments, honed on duty, obedience, and the terrible education of being told too young that cruelty could be holy if enough lives depended on it. She had signed orders with a steady hand. She had watched villages kneel and told herself kneeling was better than burning. She had believed, because belief was easier than looking too closely at the cost of being right.

Still, the empire had known what slept beneath the continent. That knowledge did not absolve Ashwood. It did not wash blood from marble, return stolen children to their beds, or make tyranny noble because a worse darkness waited below. It only meant that the old empire had understood the shape of the prison. It had known the locks, the seals, the names that should never be spoken above ground. Ashwood had been cruel, arrogant, and often unforgivable. It had also been afraid. The Coalition was not. Or worse, it was afraid and still believed fear gave it the right to touch what it did not understand.

A knock struck the tower door.

The sound did not belong. It struck the door below, then climbed the stairwell in slow, uneven echoes, each one thinner than the last and somehow farther away than it should have been. Stone should have swallowed sound cleanly. Instead, the knock lingered, tapping from wall to wall like something small and patient moving inside the bones of the tower.

For one suspended breath, Aelira did not move.

The sound was so ordinary that it became impossible. No one knocked here. No one found the tower by accident, and those who knew enough to look for it knew better than to announce themselves with bare knuckles and hope. The mountain kept its distance from the world below, folded in fog, stone, and old wards that did not welcome curiosity. Travelers lost the path. Hunters turned back before they understood why. Couriers, if they were wise, delivered their messages elsewhere and allowed ghosts the courtesy of remaining undisturbed.

Another knock came, firmer this time, and Aelira’s hand went still around the edge of the letter she had been reading. An older instinct beneath fear: calculation sharpening before emotion could make itself useful. Someone had found her door. Someone had either passed through the protections around the tower or had been allowed by them, and Aelira did not know which possibility displeased her more.

She lifted her gaze toward the stairwell. The tower seemed to listen with her. The fire gave a soft crack behind her, too domestic for the sudden violence gathering in her chest. Dead women did not receive visitors, which meant whoever waited below had either come looking for a ghost, or worse, had come knowing exactly what still breathed inside the tower.