Chapter 31. Under The Knife of Blood

Blood, the Conclave likes to say, tells the truth because it doesn’t know how to lie. They say it like they’ve never seen a person bleed on purpose, like they’ve never watched someone open their own skin just to force a story into the room.

The Hall of Vessels waited above the Spiral, a long chamber carved with low reliefs of wolves walking in solemn procession, their heads bowed as if hunger itself were a rite. Each wolf carried a shallow bowl in its teeth, tails curled low, paws etched so fine the claws caught light and threw it back.

Basins lined the center—obsidian deep enough to swallow torchlight, pale moonstone with veins like frozen lightning, onyx that shimmered faintly as if frost had claimed it in secret. Each vessel caught a different cut of light from the skylit ceiling, so the room glowed in shifting tones—black ice, milk glass, stormwater.

“Witness,” the Clerk announced. “Ashfall.”

A murmur lifted, careful as a cut.

The old woman from the