The drums were silent, but the city remembered. In blood and steel, sorrow and storm, destiny stirred beneath the ash.
A faint echo of thunder, distant yet near, a world in mourning would not permit forgetting.
Ash clung to the world. It lay heavy on eaves and forgotten glyphs, settling in the eyes of shattered saints and banners limp with rot. Aetherholt no longer gleamed; the city sprawled, corpse-like, beneath an unbroken shroud of cloud. Once, the streets of Velmora had rung with the steps of proud men — their echoes drowned now in gray muck and the unceasing drizzle that bled color from memory.
The air itself lingered in twilight: damp, metallic, saturated by the dying breath of rain. The wind's passage, rare and uncertain, tugged the scent of old battles — iron, smolder, and the faintest tincture of something unspoken.
Within the keep, a darkness gathered, not absolute but remembering. There remained yet warmth in the great hall's hearth, each ember battling its exhaustion, illuminating silhouettes stretched monstrous upon battered walls. The stones themselves seemed to recoil, as if history seeped into their core and soured there.
Aric studied the war table, shoulders hunched with iron fatigue. His fingertips pressed into the warped map, stained and runnelled by months of sweat, rain, and the remorseful ink marking forgotten towns. The taste of sleeplessness dulled his tongue. His armor, lost of luster, hung like penance from his limbs. He bled, in small ways — his nails earth-dark, his skin a tapestry of bruises and callus and all the things victory never promised.
Footsteps. Hushed, sure. He did not lift his gaze.
"You heard," he uttered.
"I did."
Seraphina paused on the threshold — a queen more by oath than circumstance, her dignity stitched with resolve and fatigue. She pressed a splayed hand to her covered belly. The gesture was not tender. Seven months, and the weight grew heavier each night. Her skin had grown pale; her eyes were hard, reflecting not fire, but the pressure of survival.
"Eldor's lost," Aric muttered. "They bent the knee."
"To the Riven Lords." No surprise clouded her voice, only the habit of grief.
She moved beside him; her presence was neither triumph nor defeat — simply inevitable. Her gaze, tracing the wounded map, was the gaze of someone who searched for a future they no longer trusted.
"Can this be stopped?" Aric's voice was a grave.
"No. We endure, or we vanish."
Thunder mumbled across the roof beams. The rain thickened, pattering against colored glass where banners once caught sunlight. The night sharpened, as if waiting for them to act.
That night they returned to a place forsaken— the Old Cathedral. Its gates shrieked protest, an agony etched in every ancient hinge. A stench of rot and time pressed from the hall, nausea and memory mingled. Downward, stone steps disappeared into gloom that thickened with descent. The air became viscous, clutching at clothes, at skin; cold and yet frighteningly alive, as if something endured beneath the stone.
The altar slumbered. It was not holy. Stone, fractured, veined in pale argent light that coiled and pulsed — like veins beneath dead flesh. Seraphina unfurled a cloth, hand-stitched by ancestors unknown to history. Her voice, when she spoke, was memory given form.
Aric drew his blade. The slice was deliberate: blood blossomed from his palm and spattered the altar. The sound of it was a hiss— almost a question. The veins within the stone brightened, and a blue flame rose, thin and hungry, tasting the air but not consuming it.
Will you?
His answer was a whisper pulled from marrow: "Yes."
The flame leapt. It coiled about his wrist, then drove like a dagger into his ribcage — hot, beautiful, annihilating. For a moment, pain wrenched a shudder from his bones. When he stood, his eyes burned brighter, their old color leeched away by something odder, older.
Afterward, the tide of war turned. Riven banners burned in mud. Velmoran lines no longer faltered. Fortune grew superstitious: blades slid aside, arrows bent, the mists themselves crawled to shroud their advance. The stories began — of a king who could not be scorched by fire, whom the gods themselves blinked at in the darkness and recoiled.
Nights returned to the barracks. Men, once gaunt with hunger, found spartan feasts waiting: split loaves, cold stew, the occasional roast fowl. Each meal tasted of borrowed time, yet within the brief flicker of candlelight laughter tried to crawl back from exile. It came uneasy to their lips, long unfamiliar, yet growing with every retaken field. Old songs — half-remembered, half-invented — rose in tremulous chorus through the battered streets, their notes threading the darkness between broken walls and mended hearts.
But bargains always beckoned a reckoning.
In the king's shadow, whispers gathered substance. They told of pale wanderers seen at the city's periphery on nights when the wind shifted from the east; spectral figures pacing, pausing, ash swirling at their heels, as if cataloguing the city's wounds. Certain old priests, faces puckered by the years, kept litanies by their bedsides and pressed trembling lips to foreign icons as they prayed. Children tossed in sleep, muttering of veiled faces and fields steeped in silent blue fire.
Seraphina's pregnancy gnawed at her. The child within grew restless, violent in small spaces. Midwives muttered and quailed behind doors. Sleep became exile; her body was no longer her own. Still, she spoke of nothing to anyone — save the voices that found her with eyes closed: beloved, and terribly changed.
It was not only voices; some nights, dreams. She would wake before dawn's pallid touch, heart stuttering, nails digging red crescents into palm. The world between sleep and waking was thick with shadow — the feeling of cold stones pressed to the soles of her feet, of unseen eyes watching every step, of some ancient, inexorable thing waiting just beyond the candle's reach. Once, she awoke clutching her shawl convinced it was a winding sheet; her breath ghosted in the midnight air, and the infant inside her shifted as if aware.
One night, she wandered the rain-slick stones, toes stinging, moonless sky above, clouds like iron.
"What are you?" she asked the dark.
There was no reply. Yet some secret heat flowered beneath her heart. Not comfort. Only certainty. The child born of her would carry more than any monarch's name. The silence stretched, vast enough that she fancied the world itself had ceased breathing. Somewhere behind glass, a lamp guttered low; she turned back only when the numbness reached her knees and the scent of camphor from the nursery called her home.
The city began to change. Old districts, long abandoned, found new life as the desperate and the disinherited flooded in. Merchants crept from exile, peddling wares beneath canopies glistening with rain. The battered temples, stripped by war, began to fill with those seeking answers — yet the gods gave none. Instead, a feverish hope — a hunger to witness the impossible — rose. On the day after the first frost, a child was said to have walked unscathed through an inferno on Market Lane. In Alley Dews, crooked men broke their curses with water touched by the king's blood. And yet always a price. Always a cost.
Then, the Veil Eclipse.
No moon, no stars, the world sunk into a hush so profound that time itself curled in the cradle of waiting. Inside the royal apartments, the walls pulsated with the agony of labor. Seraphina's cries cut through the hush; then the midwives converged, figures wreathed in white, faces drawn taut as bowstrings. It was a birthing mapped by old omens: a silver crow perched at the cathedral gable; iron striking from the belfry with every contraction.
Twin sons came into the world on the wings of thunder — the first streaked red and wet, wailing life into every crack of stone, the second arriving with unblinking calm, the silence between their breaths so unnatural it forced gasps from every person present. The youngest regarded his brother and mother both with eyes too old for any infant, pupils rimmed in pale blue. For an instant, traceries of runes flickered along his back, as if the pattern of history itself had branded the flesh.
"My sons," Seraphina rasped, "born of mortal blood, marked by the faith I do not understand."
Lightning carved the heavens. The storm raged over Aetherholt and all the city cowered. Deep in the cathedral crypts — the altar beat once as if waking from a century's sleep. Above, every flame guttered and shied from the dark, while the second child — Kael blinking, met the gloom as if it was kin.
Word spread. Prophets and madmen muttered of the Endwoven, the Coming Hour, the Masked Child. Yet prophecy, unspoken, nested now in every shadow, every dawn-stained window. It had already begun and the world held its breath.