Elyndra rode hard, leaning into the wind as though speed alone could scatter the thoughts that refused to leave her in peace.
The woods beyond the palace road were dark and moving fast on either side of her.
She had tried to rest.
She could not.
She had come back to her chamber after the walk with Zyran and sat on the bed and told herself that rest was necessary, that a tired mind made mistakes, that she needed to be still.
She had laid down and looked at the ceiling as she listens to the palace settle into evening around her.
Viella’s face.
Zyran’s voice.
*Courts do not run on what is right.* cutting through the air like a blade.
Cahir Valerius.
Dressed in burgundy.
Standing beside the queen’s throne like he had always belonged there.
She had called Senna’s replacement, a quiet girl assigned two days ago and told her to keep everyone out.
That she was resting, that she needed space.
Yet even as the horse carried her deeper into the trees, she felt the nagging worry crept in through the back of her mind.
What if Zyran walks in unannounced and finds the room empty?
She exhaled sharply and let the cool night air touch her face.
Then she urged the horse faster.
—
[At Erebus]
Cavendish dark cloud clans had not changed.
She noticed it the moment she stepped through the outer passage and into the courtyard.
The same dark stone, the same toxic dangerous energy, the particular silence that existed only in places built for death.
A shadow near the gate took her horse without a word and led it away.
Elyndra moved carefully through the yard, eyes tracing the familiar angles of the place.
She had grown up inside this silence.
She knew it the way she knew her own breathing.
Nothing had changed.
”Nyxara.”
She turned toward the voice.
Azrael was coming across the courtyard from the eastern building, and behind him were two others.
Alcázar and Adler.
They had always followed him.
Adler on his left, Alcázar on his right.
They were Azrael’s first disciples inside Cavendish dark cloud clans just like Azrael had been her first disciple.
”Lady Nyxara,” The two stopped a few paces away and bowed their heads in the formal greeting.
Azrael did not bow.
He did not bother.
Elyndra did not bother either, she had stopped treating him like other disciples of hers.
”You look terrible,” he said.
”I am terrible.”
Azrael grinned.
”Good.
We’d worry if you weren’t.”
For the first time in days, Elyndra almost laughed.
”How is Azgareth treating you?” he asked.
She looked at him.
She thought about where to begin and found that she didn’t have the formation for it right now, the full account, the ordered explanation, all of it.
She exhaled.
”Worse every day,” she said.
“My life has become a living nightmare in the space of a week.” She sighed, glancing past him.
“I need to see Veythorn.”
Before he could say anything, her gaze had moved to Alcázar, and a smirk tugged at her mouth.
“Still washing the bloody dungeons?”
”You know I never follow a rule I didn’t personally agree with,” he grinned.
She looked at him properly for the first time and felt the genuine warmth of it.
“How many times this month?”
”Four,” Alcázar admitted.
”Four?!?.”
”They’re very boring rules…”
she laughed.
Short and real, the kind that didn’t ask permission.
Alcázar grinned.
Even Azrael’s mouth moved.
She turned to Adler.
He had his hands raised before she could open her mouth.
“Before you say anything,” he said, “do not give me that look. I know what the look means and I would like to say, before the look arrives, that my situation is entirely different from Alcázar’s.”
”Is it?”
”Yes.”
”In what way?”
”I don’t follow the rules either.” he simply said.
More laughter.
She looked at Azrael then, tilting her head.
“This is entirely your fault. Your disciples are impossible.”
Azrael raised a brow, unbothered.
“They are very much like their master.” A pause. This chapter is updated first at g.com.
“And their master got it from his own master,” he said.
”I was not like this…”
”You were exactly like this.
You were worse.”
”I was never…”
Someone cleared their throat.
The sound arrived from behind them and the effect was immediate.
Adler and Alcázar dropped into bows with speed.
Azrael lowered his head.
The courtyard went quiet in a specific way.
Elyndra turned.
Veythorn Cavendish of Erebus stood at the entrance to the main hall with his hands folded behind his back and his eyes on Elyndra with the expression she had learned over years to read as *I have been aware of your presence for longer than you have been aware of mine.*
He was not a large man.
He had never needed to be.
His presence filled space differently, not with size but with the quality of absolute certainty.
He looked at Adler and Alcázar, still bowed, and said nothing to them.
He looked at Elyndra.
”Come,” he said simply.
He turned and walked inside.
She followed.
—
Veythorn’s hall was the same as it had always been.
Dark.
Not dramatically dark.
Carved from black stone and lit by candle lights that had burned low and orange, casting everything in the colour of old blood.
the hall smells of cold air and old iron.
Her footsteps followed his through the corridor.
”What brings you here.” His voice reached her from ahead, unhurried, not quite a question.
She walked behind him and thought about everything that was moving through her, the weight of the past week, the impossibility of this palace she had been sent into, Zyran’s voice saying things she couldn’t argue with, Viella’s hands shaking, Lythia’s clear eyes, all of it building and building until it had no more room.
It was Cahir that came out first.
”Càhir Valerius,” she said.
Veythorn stopped walking.
A beat of silence.
Then he continued, and she followed, and they walked through the door at the end of the corridor and into the inner hall.
He moved to the head of the table.
She remained standing.
He turned to face her.
And then he laughed.
It was a short sound.
Not warm, not cold.
He shook his head once, and something moved in his expression that she had seen perhaps almost in the years she had known him.
”I saw him,” she said.
“Cahir. He is the royal chamberlain. Standing in the palace as though he has always belonged there.”
”I know,” he said.
She looked at him skeptically.
Veythorn’s voice was quiet and without warmth.
“I have known for years,” he said, “I searched half the known world for that traitor. Daekhar. Every kingdom with a shadow worth searching.” He paused.
“I spent years looking for him. Daekhar first, then the border territories, then every mid-level court appointment I could trace. He was in Azgareth the entire time. Sitting in the queen’s courtyard. Being trusted.” He folded his hands on the table.
Elyndra said nothing as she listens to him.
”The position of Royal Chamberlain to Queen Desdemona,” he continued, “is not incidental.
It is a reward.
It was given to him, and he accepted it, and the thing he did to earn it…” He paused.
“Was your mother.”
The hall was very quiet.
”He killed her, I know.” Elyndra said.
The words came out flat.
Not a question.
Not even a statement.
”Yes,” Veythorn said.
”But why?” Her voice did not rise.
It dropped.
“Why did he want her dead?”
”That,” he said, “I do not know.
I have never known.
The order came from somewhere, the motive was never something I could reach.” He held her gaze.
“It is what I could not find. The why.”
She looked at him.
”You knew,” she said.
“You found him years ago. You knew where he was and…” She stopped.
Started again, more carefully.
“You kept it from me.”
”I kept it from you,” he agreed.
”Why.”
He was quiet for a moment. Enjoying the story? Read on at g.com.
Then his voice changed.
”Because,” he said, “it was not yet time for you to know.” A pause.
” And you were not ready.”
”That was not yours to decide,” she said.
He looked at her with the expression she knew from years of this, not dismissive.
Not angry.
”I had no answer to give you,” he said after a moment.
“I found him. I knew what he had done. I did not know why.” He paused.
“Your father is not a complicated man. But his reasons were his own and I could not confirm them from the outside.” He looked at her.
“So I waited.”
”For years?
That long?” she said.
The room was very quiet.
He nodded once.
“You needed to be the one to find the rest of it.” He looked at her steadily.
“Not me. You.” He paused.
“That is why you are in Azgareth, Nyxara. Not to be selected. Not to win a crown.” His voice had returned to its usual now, careful, clear.
“You are there because the answers are there. Because your father is there. Because whatever that had been the reason of your mother’s death by your father is somewhere inside those walls, and the only person who can find it…”
”Is me,” she said.
He nodded once.
She thought about the dungeon.
The four days.
The whip marks still fading under her robes.
”You could have told me,” she said.
“From the beginning. That he was there.”
”Would you have gone willingly?”
The question sat between them.
She didn’t answer.
”You have to move quickly,” he said.
“And you have to move carefully. And you cannot afford…” He paused.
Something in his expression shifted.
“You cannot afford to be distracted.”
She heard what he meant beneath what he said.
She held his gaze and said nothing.
”Do you understand me?” he asked.
She was quiet for a moment.
”Yes,” she said.
She stood in the dark of Veythorn’s hall and, for the first time in longer than she cared to admit, she felt genuinely lost.
—
She returned to Azgareth as she had left, unseen, unannounced, slipping through the dark like a shadow.
She had brought everything she could carry from Erebus.
Her mother’s letters, bound in the original cord, the paper soft with age and handling, the handwriting she had memorised so thoroughly she could have reproduced it herself.
The records she had piled up years, copied and recopied in her own shorthand.
The notes she had built slowly, carefully, with patience she had believed would eventually be enough.
She spread them across the bed.
Across the floor beside the bed.
Then across the desk.
She moved between them with a candle, reading and rereading, following everything from one page to the next.
Her mother’s words, the dates, the names that appeared and disappeared, the careful language.
She looked for Daekhar.
She looked for Cahir.
She looked for the specific reason, the why that Veythorn had never reached, the motive that would make the look of everything else make sense.
The candles burned lower.
She turned another page.
Then another.
The room was scattered with paper.
Everywhere she looked, her mother’s handwriting looked back at her, familiar and unreachable, giving her everything except the thing she needed.
After a long time she stopped.
She stood in the centre of the room and looked at what surrounded her, the pages on the floor, on the bed, on the desk, overlapping and disordered, her chamber floor was covered in papers.
She searched every page.
She found nothing.
The candles burned lower.
She sat down on the floor at last, her back against the bed, knees drawn to her chest hugging her legs.
She had made a promise once.
She remembered it clearly, that she would avenge her mother’s death.
That she would not let it go unanswered.
She also remembered, with the particular honesty that came only in exhausted, quiet moments, that she had tried to let it go.
That she had buried the girl who made that promise and become Nyxara instead, had tried to become someone new, someone without the weight of it.
But the past had followed her.
It had followed her all the way to Azgareth, It had followed her all the way to the throne room and placed her father ten feet away from her in burgundy robes and waited, patient and fixed, for her to look.
She pressed her forehead against her knees.
She closed her eyes.
The memories came anyway.