Chapter 15. The Queen’s Mercy

The Hall still trembled with the echo of her name.

Seraya stood at the center of the fractured stone floor, her mother’s blade still buried deep in the mountain’s heart. The dagger hummed faintly, as though the stone itself remembered what it had been forced to forget. Silver light pulsed from the mark on her chest in slow, deliberate waves, steady as a living heartbeat. Each pulse traveled outward, into the walls, into the roots, into the ancient bones of the Hall of Thorns. It felt as though the mountain itself had finally exhaled after centuries of holding its breath.

Silence filled the chamber, heavy and watchful.

The Elders remained kneeling—not in reverence, but because they could not rise. Thick roots coiled around their limbs, rough and unyielding, binding them to the stone and to the consequences they had spent lifetimes believing would never reach them.