Page 28

Humans and orcs, painted shoulder to shoulder across a wall that’s survived a thousand years of nobody looking at it — not fighting, not one race elevated above the other, but working. Building. A human hand and an orc hand raised in the same motion over the same half-finished wall. A shared table, shared bread, no throne in sight anywhere across the entire mural’s length. Farther along, a panel shows an elf and a dwarf bent over the same set of plans, arguing by the look of their gestures, but arguing like colleagues instead of rivals.

A little farther still, a half-fae figure stands at the center of a crowd drawn from every race in the mural, hands raised, and I don’t need a caption to understand I’m looking at the closest thing this Covenant ever had to a leader — someone the whole room trusted enough to listen to, not because a crown said they had to, but because the room had chosen them.

“This isn’t propaganda.” Something close to reverence moves under the words, the same reverence I save for proof that overturns everything I thought I knew. “Propaganda oversells unity that never existed. This is just two people who built a wall side by side because building it mattered more than which of them got credit for it.”

“Every history I was ever taught called that impossible.”

“Every history you were taught was written by people who needed it to stay impossible.” I trail my fingers along the painted wall without touching the actual stone, careful the way I’m careful with anything a thousand years old and irreplaceable.

He lets the question sit a while before he answers it. When I glance back, he’s studying a panel further down the wall — a Blackfang crest, unmistakable even worn thin by time, painted small in one corner beside a figure I can’t identify. Not a king. Not a general. Just a Warden, standing watch over nothing in particular, the way his whole family line has stood watch for a thousand years since.

The passage opens into a crypt.

Circular, vast, dozens of sarcophagi arranged in careful rings around a dais at the chamber’s center — and on that dais, a throne. Empty. Not broken, not looted, simply and deliberately empty, like whoever built this room knew exactly how dangerous it would be to let one person’s name sit permanently carved into the seat of power.

I move through the outer ring first, reading what names I can make out through a thousand years of dust. No titles carved beside any of them, no dates, nothing to suggest a hierarchy of who mattered more than whom. Just names, resting equal, the same quiet dignity I found on the wall in the Hall of Oaths before soldiers tried to grind it into powder.

“There’s no king buried here.” I move through the rings slowly, reading names I don’t recognize on sarcophagi that predate anything I’ve found elsewhere in this city. “There’s no king anywhere in this city, is there. The Covenant wasn’t a monarchy. It was guided. A Keeper, chosen jointly, answering to every race instead of ruling over any of them.”

“A Moonkeeper.”

“A Moonkeeper.” I turn to find him watching the empty throne with an expression I haven’t seen from him before—recognition tangled with dread. “Vorren. What.”

He’s quiet long enough that I think he won’t answer.

“My father used to say the Blackfang line was waiting for someone.” He says it like a confession, low, reluctant, the words of a man handing over a truth he’s kept locked away for decades. “Not guarding anything. Waiting for it. I remember him saying it once, the winter before he died, and I remember thinking it was the closest thing to fear I’d ever heard in his voice. I dismissed it my whole life as superstition — the kind of thing old men say to make an unglamorous posting feel like destiny instead of duty.” His eyes don’t leave the throne. “Standing here, I’m not certain anymore that he was wrong. I’m not certain he wasn’t the only Blackfang who ever came close to understanding what we actually were.”

I remember the rest of that winter too, though I’ve never once said it out loud to anyone. Three days after he said it, he took me up to the ridgeline in weather no sane man hunts in, and we sat in the snow for six hours doing nothing at all — not drilling, not talking, just watching the pass below for something we never once named. I thought it was a punishment at the time, some obscure lesson about patience I hadn’t earned yet. I understand now he wasn’t teaching me anything. He was afraid, and he didn’t want to be alone with it, and I was the only person in the world he trusted enough to sit with him in it. I never got the chance to tell him I understood that. I’m telling this throne instead, which is a poor substitute, but it’s the only audience currently available to make the confession to.

“You never told me that.”

“I never told anyone that. It didn’t feel like mine to say out loud until right now.” He finally looks at me instead of the throne, and whatever’s sitting behind his eyes is too large for the small space of this crypt to hold comfortably. “I think he knew, Lyessa. Not any real detail of it. Just that something was coming, and that my life was going to be spent standing closer to it than any Blackfang before me.”

“Do you resent him for not telling you more?”

“I did, for a long time. I don’t anymore.” He reaches for my hand, laces his fingers through mine like he needs the contact to finish the thought properly. “I think he told me exactly as much as he understood himself, and spent the rest of his life hoping the burden would land on someone better prepared for it than I turned out to be. I used to think that made him a coward. Standing here, I think it made him honest. No man carries something this size alone, and he knew it before I did.”

I squeeze his hand, and don’t trust myself to say anything that wouldn’t sound smaller than what he’s just handed me. I cross to the dais instead, drawn by something I can’t fully name, and rest my palm against the throne’s arm the way I’ve watched Vorren rest his against stone that’s answered him twice already. The stone’s cold under my palm at first, ordinary, and for one breath I brace for nothing to happen at all.

The throne answers too.

Not the flood of silver that met his blood at the gates. Something quieter, warmer, moonlight seeming to gather and pool directly beneath my palm even though there’s no visible source for it anywhere in this buried chamber. There’s no question in it, no test to pass. Just warmth settling into my hand like a name finally spoken the right way after a lifetime of hearing it said wrong.

“Lyessa.” Vorren’s voice, careful, close, already moving toward me like his body’s decided something his mouth hasn’t caught up to yet. “Your hand.”

Light traces up my wrist, gentle and impossibly warm, and for one suspended moment I understand, with a clarity no amount of scholarship could have prepared me for, that this city has been waiting for both of us — him by blood, and me by every choice I’ve made since the night a parchment first changed everything I thought I knew.

There’s no time to finish deciding what that means.

The floor beneath the dais groans, cracks spidering out fast from beneath both our boots, and gives way entirely. There’s no time to think, only time to grab a fistful of his coat and drag him down with me instead of trying to outrun it, and we go over together as the dais and the throne and a thousand years of buried history all drop out from under us at once.

The dark that swallows us has no bottom I can see coming. I hear Vorren shout my name, and then there’s only falling, stone and dust and the distant, impossible sound of something vast stirring awake somewhere far below, roused by two people it’s apparently been waiting a very long time to finally let fall this far into whatever it’s been guarding.

FIFTEEN

LYESSA

We land soft.