Chapter 3. Ash and Memory

Dawn had not yet broken, but the fortress was already stirring. Shadows moved like echoes down the long corridors, silent and swift. The scent of smoke hung in the air, faint but unmistakable, curling up through cracks in the stone and seeping beneath the iron-banded door of my chamber. I pressed my palm to the wall, feeling its coldness as though it might tell me something the rest of the world refused to reveal.

Brin was dead.

I didn’t know how I knew it, not exactly. No one had told me. No messenger had arrived. But the moment I saw the smoke rising beyond the eastern courtyard, I felt it, as surely as if her blood had been spilled into my own mouth.

My fingers brushed the brand at my collarbone. It itched along the bone—not painful, but alive. Responsive. A warning.

I paced the tower room in silence, every footstep a small act of defiance. I had been locked away for two nights now, given no news, no updates, not even a servant to sneer at me in passing. Isolation was a tool meant to hollow me.

It didn’t.

I remembered Kael’s eyes, the way they had softened when he whispered my name, as though he’d been carrying its weight too long alone. I remembered the ritual circle, the Seer’s touch against my temple, the way truth had poured into me like fire into a cracked vessel. I was Thessia. I had been hidden. Stolen. Marked. And now the world was shifting to accommodate my return.

The sun had not yet crested the horizon when a knock broke the silence. Three sharp raps, precise and even.

I turned to the door, expecting another priest, perhaps another test. But when the lock clicked and the door creaked open, no one stood on the threshold.

Only air.

Then I felt it. A presence behind me.

Spinning, I came face to face with a girl no older than sixteen. She wore the pale gray robes of the Seer acolytes, her head shaved save for a narrow braid that fell down her back. Her skin was so pale it seemed translucent, and her eyes—her eyes were wrong.

Too old.

“How did you get in?” I asked, though the answer was already forming like ice in my chest.

She didn’t speak at first. Instead, she extended her hand, revealing a small medallion glinting in the morning gloom. It bore a sigil I had never seen before in waking life—a crescent moon pierced by a thorned arrow.

But my blood knew it.

“The Vesper Court,” I whispered. Oathbreakers with a religion of hunger.

Her lips curled, not into a smile, but something colder. “Brin died to keep you from being found. She failed.”

I took a step back. The mark tightened, a slow coil of pressure beneath my skin.

“What do you want?”

“You.” She tilted her head. “All of you. The pieces you’ve hidden, the names you’ve forgotten, the power you’ve left untapped.”

“I am not yours.”

“Aren’t you?” Her voice was a whisper and a weapon. “You keep saying that. But you still don’t know what you gave up to become what you are.”

I steadied myself. Focused. Felt the magic stirring behind my ribs like a heartbeat.

“Leave,” I said.

“You can banish me, Thessia,” she said, turning toward the door. “But soon you will beg me to return.”

The moment she crossed the threshold, her image wavered, then vanished like smoke in a gale.

I didn’t breathe for a long time.

They came for me later that morning, two guards flanking a priestess with cold, colorless eyes. No words were exchanged. A fresh pair of sentries rounded the corner for rotation. The younger one—helm a touch too big, nerves louder than his boots—saluted. “Ma’am, standing orders say she’s to be walked for air and returned to the tower.”

The silver-eyed guard cut him off without looking at me. “New orders. Isolation in the northern wing until the Seers are finished. For safety.”

The officer passing with them—braids bound in iron rings—slid him a sideways look sharp enough to cut parchment. She said nothing. Neither did I.

We passed through a narrow gate carved with runes older than the Shadowfang crest. The air beyond it was colder, heavy with the weight of ancient things.

The chamber at the end of the hall was vast, circular, and hollow. Its floor was inscribed with glyphs that shimmered faintly as we entered. The scent of dust and time hung like perfume in the air. At the chamber’s center sat a woman wrapped in so many layers of fabric she seemed carved from cloth.

Her voice cracked the silence.

“You saw her.”

I nodded.

“She is not real. Not anymore.”

“Then what is she?”

“A scar. A memory left behind by something that never should have lived.”

“She said I’d chosen once.”

The old woman lifted her head. Her eyes were gold, bright and sharp. “You chose love. Over legacy. And the world has been bleeding for it ever since.”

I knelt, because I didn’t trust my legs to hold me. “I want the truth. All of it.”

“You already carry the truth,” she said. “You just haven’t yet remembered how to wield it.”

Her gaze flicked between me and Kael, as if weighing us like coin in her palm. “When the Moon calls the debt, you will have to choose,” she murmured. “And you cannot keep both.”

They did not return me to the tower.

Instead, I was brought to the northern wing—abandoned since the Wolf Rebellion, sealed off with old blood magic and pain. The corridors smelled of stone and regret, but the room I was given was clean. Bare. Unlocked.

They no longer feared what I might run from.

Only what I might run toward.

That night, I dreamed again.

I stood at the edge of a frozen forest. Each step cracked the ice beneath my feet. Ahead, Kael waited.

He turned slowly. His face was tired. Older.

“You remember more each night,” he said.

“I don’t know what to do with it.”

“Then don’t do anything. Let it do something to you.”

Before I could answer, the forest shook. From the trees stepped a woman wearing my face, but her eyes were empty. No soul. No fury.

Just hunger.

“Choose,” Kael said, voice suddenly sharp.

I looked between them.

“Choose what?”

“Your crown.”

The ice cracked beneath me. The world split. I fell.

And awoke.

The window was open.

A raven sat on the ledge, wings tucked neatly at its sides. Its feathers shimmered with an oily sheen, its eyes bright silver. Tied to its leg was a scrap of parchment.

I moved slowly, untying the strip. The raven did not move. As I opened the message, it cawed once, sharp and sudden, then took flight.

The paper bore a single word.

Veilgrove.

I sat on the edge of the bed, breath held in my chest.

The Moon Court was calling—and this time, I wanted to hear it.