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The fox within surged toward the opening, feeding on the darkness. It clawed its way forward, stronger now than it had been during our entire descent. Yet through the haze of my panic, a sudden clarity broke through. This was her intent. She was not merely attempting to turn us back, she was seeking to break my mind, knowing that a girl robbed of hope would surrender to the beast on the stone floor and save her the trouble of waiting until dawn. The hopelessness was her weapon, and she was feeding it to me in that measured, soothing cadence.

I drove my fingernails into my palms, anchoring myself to the pain of skin, not fur. “Auden,” I gritted out through clenched teeth. “Do not listen to her. She is weaving this despair on purpose.”

Auden stepped into the warm glow of the lantern, moving toward the shelves to examine the vessels, and the voice abruptly shifted.

It stopped mid-phrase. The crow’s head snapped toward him, its dark eye locking onto his figure in the lamplight. When the voice returned, its cool detachment had vanished. In its place was something raw, ancient, and grieving, the sound of a voice confronting a ghost long buried.

“You,” the shadow murmured, addressing him alone. “Look at you. After all this time, walking in the light, carrying her burden like a servant.” The voice wavered, losing its composure. “Does she even know what you are? No. Of course she does not. You do not even know yourself.”

A sudden, terrible shift came over Auden.

He froze, but it was not the stillness of confusion. Something shifted beneath his expression, a subtle, desperate reaching. He took a half step toward the perch before he seemed aware of his own movement, his head tilting as if straining to catch a melody heard long ago and almost remembered.

I had seen that expression on him once before, high on the mountain pass when I asked about his childhood and found only a nameless ache behind his eyes. That same quiet anguish flared in him now, drawn toward the crow and the broken voice that called to him. He was pulled toward a memory he possessed no words to name.

“Put it down,” the voice pleaded, fracturing further. “Put her down and come away. You do not belong to her. You never belonged to anyone but—”

The voice cut off sharply, like a hand yanked back from a flame.

A heavy calm closed over the room once more as she regained her grip, but the break had occurred. I had heard the raw emotion in her voice, and so had Auden. He stood swaying slightly, his face drained of colour, caught in the grip of a power he could not comprehend.

The crow remained silent, and the stillness felt far more dangerous than her words. I could feel the ancient presence on the other end of the connection, struggling to reclaim her cold composure. For the first time in centuries, she had lost control of the room. A cornered predator was never more lethal.

I seized the opening. “Auden.” My voice rose, tight with urgency. “We cannot distinguish the jars, and we cannot take them all. If we gather them blindly, we carry out a sack of lethal poisons that have rested side by side for three hundred years. I have seen what two incompatible herbs do when mixed on Rainthorn’s bench. We would be carrying a catalyst for ruin, not a cure.” The room blurred before my eyes. “I do not know which one it is.”

From within the folds of my heavy coat, a dry, small voice interjected, “Oh, do stop. Both of you. Honestly.”

Tsuki pushed his dark head through my collar, his nose twitching furiously, his whiskers fanned wide as his luminous eyes narrowed in deep concentration.

“You forget what I am,” he murmured, his small body tense. “You forget what travels in your satchel. I have smelled that bitter green concoction of yours for days, little silver sister, the bottle the witch gave you before you climbed the mountain. I would know that scent in a field of a million blossoms with my eyes struck blind.”

He glided down my sleeve onto the wooden shelf, pointing like a hunting hound. “It is the same plant. The poison in your bag and the cure on her shelf share the same root. Rainthorn told you as much. Beneath the rot she worked into it, the true flower still speaks.”

His nose twitched again. He darted three jars down, stopping before a stoppered clay pot sealed with dark wax, and extended a single paw toward it. “Here. This one. This is your flower. I would stake my tail on it, and I am particularly fond of my tail.”

My hands trembled as I lifted the clay vessel from the shelf.

The crow shattered.

It was not the cry of a bird, nor the calculated threat of a sorceress. It was a sound of pure, unadulterated fury, the rage of a creature that had commanded every room she entered for three hundred years and had just felt her power slip away. The crow hurled itself from the perch, flying not toward us, but toward the high shelves above the bench. Its beak clamped around a delicate glass vial, ripping it free and crashing it onto the stone floor at our feet.

The glass shattered. A pale, fragrant vapour rose instantly from the shards, smelling faintly sweet.

I opened my mouth to scream a warning, but the mist reached us first, and the world untethered itself.

My mind fractured, refusing to hold simple concepts. One moment I was reaching out for Auden, the jar, and the door, and the next, all three faded from my grasp. I could not hold a sentence, nor retain a single clear thought before it dissolved into a roaring white haze. My own name felt slippery, sliding away into the dark. Beside me, Auden uttered a low, disoriented sound, stumbling blind against the heavy work bench before falling back.

I dragged us toward the entryway. I remember the sensation of cold air, the dim outline of the corridor, the emblem of the bound sun swimming past my vision, and Auden’s hand slipping from mine. Then I was through the threshold, lost in the vast gloom of the palace, separated from him, from the doorway, and from the purpose that had brought me there.

I had no strength left to anchor my form.

Maintaining my human shape had always required an act of fierce concentration, a conscious gripping of my identity against the pull of the beast. The sweet vapour stripped away my thoughts, leaving nothing to hold on to. I felt the woman inside me slip away like water through open fingers. The stone floor rose up to meet me, my hands reshaping into paws, and the ancient house loomed impossibly vast around a small, terrified animal that had nearly forgotten it had ever been a girl.

Tsuki told me later what transpired in those moments, for I possessed no memory to give it form. He had emerged from the chamber airborne, clutching the clay jar to his chest, only to find me already transformed, a silver fox spinning in blind panic upon the polished floor. He forced himself to look into my eyes, needing to know if any part of me remained.

He swore to me afterward that my eyes had not yet turned the flat, solid gold of the true beast. They remained mine, wide with terror, but distinctly human beneath the animal frame. The mist had broken my focus, but the curse had not completed its claim. There was still a girl hidden within the silver fur, and there was still time if someone could reach me.

No one could. When Tsuki tried to approach, I bolted in terror, unable to recognize him, a wild creature fleeing every shadow. I fled low and fast down the dark corridor, disappearing into the depths of the palace before he could act. Auden lay somewhere behind us, collapsed on the flagstones beyond the reach of a creature Tsuki’s size.