Chapter 68. Before You Were Theirs

The name struck like a forgotten chord.

Amaranth.

Adria had never heard it aloud. And yet something in her bones reacted—not with fear. With shape.

She sat now, knees drawn, palms resting on the moss-woven earth. The fog ringed the grove in a soft perimeter, and though no glyphs glowed, Adria felt watched—but not in the way the Archive watched. This felt… expectant. Like the woods themselves were holding breath.

Yseult poured a dark amber liquid into two stone cups. It smelled bitter, like root and metal and time. She handed one to Adria, who did not drink.

“The Archive will tell you the Orders were always selective,” Yseult said. “That only the gifted were chosen. The pure. The prodigies. But that’s not the whole shape.”

Adria listened in silence.

“They began looking farther,” Yseult continued. “Not for power. For malleability. Children whose resonance didn’t reject memory implants. Whose will could be threaded with outside glyphs. They wer