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“Do you know what you just threw into that fire?” she asked.
“I do not.”
“It was the pelt of a rare creature from the northern reaches,” she explained, her tone sharp. “A beast that carries its own innate magic. It is one of the few forms that possesses a natural resistance to containment. I cannot say whether the binding will fully hold her, or what manner of form she will take now. You may have created an unpredictable force, or ensured the failure of the binding entirely.”
Drystan met her gaze, offering no defence. He clung only to the hope that his sudden intervention had spared Liora a far worse fate.
Morrigwen watched him, her initial anger giving way to a cold, mocking curiosity.
“An Aurelian who acts out of sentiment,” she noted, her voice dry. “The first in three centuries. You sought to give her grace, even in her downfall. You wished her to retain dignity. If she survives the binding, her form will certainly carry the grace of the wild creature you chose.”
Drystan remained still, unable to answer.
“Your sentiment has interfered with a process meant to protect your line,” she continued, her eyes narrowing slightly. “I believed you possessed the resolve of your great-grandfather, capable of cold necessity when required. Yet you hesitate. We shall see if this compromise breaks the stability of your rule.”
The fire in the brazier began to die down, the magic completing its cycle. Far to the east, in her quiet cottage, Liora’s form was shifting, bound to the new shape forced upon her by the ritual.
He could neither pause the magic nor undo his choice.
“What will become of her?” he asked quietly, the command leaving his voice.
“There is no way to predict the outcome,” Morrigwen replied, turning away from the altar to look into the dimming embers. “You may have set the terms of your own undoing.”
The warning hung heavy in the silent room.
Drystan stood by the black stone as the flames flickered and died. The unnatural green light vanished, leaving only the faint, steady glow of the ancient floor. The brazier held only dark ash, the bones, feathers, and pelt fully consumed.
“The working is finished,” Morrigwen said softly. “The magic has taken its course. The power of her bloodline is contained for the moment, and your realm remains secure tonight. Whether that containment holds for the duration of your rule remains to be seen.”
She stepped toward the heavy iron door, which swung open at her approach.
“I shall not return unless you call for me,” she added, pausing at the threshold. “Though I suspect when we meet again, it will be because you seek to undo what was done here tonight.”
She passed through the doorway, and the iron door sealed silently behind her.
Drystan stood alone in the quiet chamber. A profound exhaustion settled over him, heavier than any armour he had worn into battle. The ashes in the brazier were cold, the ritual complete.
Slowly, he turned from the altar and walked to the iron door, pressing his palm against the sigil to release the lock.
He climbed the long, ascending corridor through the foundations, passing from the grey stone back into the white marble of the palace above. The halls remained quiet, the third hour yielding to the fourth while the court slept, unaware of the shift that had taken place beneath their feet.
Entering his private quarters, he closed the door behind him and walked to the cold hearth, sinking into the chair.
Far across the realm, in a small cottage at the edge of the eastern fields, the transformation was complete. He did not know what form she now carried, only that her life had been irrevocably altered by his hand.
Drystan sat in the quiet room, staring into the dark hearth as a steady tremor returned to his hands, and offered no resistance to the cold.
Chapter 7
I woke to fabric.
The dark pressed down on me from every side. I had gone to sleep beneath the cover the way I had gone to sleep a thousand times before, and now the cover was a country, a vast weight of canvas lying directly against my ribs, heavier than cotton had any right to be. It crushed the breath out of me. I reached up to push it off and the reach came out wrong, the limb too short, folding at a joint that bent where no joint of mine had ever bent, and the cover did not move. I reached again. The same. Whatever I was pushing with would not do what I asked of it.
I shoved against the fabric with everything I had. My body answered, but not the way a body answers. My legs drove in pairs I had not commanded, hindlimbs and forelimbs working on opposite diagonals, a strange new coordination that my mind had never learned and that my body somehow already knew.
The cover lifted in a small triangle above my face. A thin shaft of morning light reached me. I pushed toward it.
It was the same cloth I had washed with my mother’s hands across the years of its service. But it surrounded me on all sides now, vast where it should have draped, and the more I struggled the more it closed around me, a soft suffocating tent with no edge I could find.
