Page 11 of The Shattered Rite
His voice came so softly, it could have been mistaken for wind through leaves.
“You don’t ask questions,” he said.
Eliryn blinked. “Would you answer them?”
A long pause.
“No,” he admitted, but without cruelty.
She almost smiled. Almost. But that felt like too much, tonight. “Then we understand each other.”
He didn’t reply with words, but the smallest shift in his expression suggested amusement. He moved away like a shadow drawn back toward the trees.
Later, when two of the guards murmured among themselves, Eliryn sat alone. She kept her ears open. Not just to what they said, but to what they didn't. No names. Not even once.
The woods whispered behind her. Something cracked softly underfoot.
She hated how her voice cracked. Hated that she asked at all. “Someone there?”
Silence.Of course there's no answer. That would make things easy.
He was there again. The third rider. Watching. Always watching.
When a venomous crawler darted toward her, she flinched at the sudden thud of a stone. She never saw it die—she only heard the crack of bone, smelled the metallic tang of something broken. Her stomach flipped. She hated that, too.
That night, she dreamed—of wind and voice and presence too large for shape. She woke gasping, the pendant branding heat into her sternum. She tore it out from under her armor, clutching it in her fists until her knuckles turned white. A perfect ring of melted frost had formed around her bedroll.
The others said nothing. But their eyes lingered too long.
By the next afternoon, the towers of the capital broke across the horizon. The road beneath them seemed to pulse, as if something ancient stirred far beneath its stone spine.
They passed a black-liveried wagon going the other way.
“Royal physician’s crest,” the scarred rider muttered.
“Strange time to run,” said the cruel one.
“Strange time for everything. First the call. Next the culling.”
Eliryn stayed silent. But the words coiled somewhere low in her stomach, heavy as stone.
By nightfall, the city swallowed them in stone and shadow.
And somewhere far below it all, something old stirred.
Waiting.
And whispering her name.
Eliryn clenched her jaw and told herself it was the wind.
Chapter 4: The Citadel
"Trust no throne whose walls were built by silence."—Sayings of the Wandering Flame
The gates of Vireth opened with a sound like a sigh—old wood groaning against iron, heavy with the weight of forgotten oaths. No herald greeted them, no fanfare. Only the measured clatter of hooves on worn stone, and the silent watch of sentries tucked into shadowed battlements above.
Eliryn sat straighter in the saddle as they passed beneath the arch. The cold hadn’t lessened, though the sun now hung high and weak behind gauzy clouds. She blinked hard, trying to focus. Light and shadow flickered oddly across her vision—no longer distinct shapes, only drifting impressions. Smears of color. Echoes of what should be. The road below pulsed like wet ink; the sky above was a smear of ash-white.
