Chapter 2
Part 4
The shrine was a wound in the earth—open, unhealed, pulsing faintly in the night air.
Velrona stood alone in its center, wrapped in Erlin's borrowed flesh, though every muscle, every breath, felt more like armor now than life. Her voice had faded into the dark a long moment ago, but the silence that followed did not feel empty.
It felt responsive.
The stars overhead were cold and uncaring, but the earth below… it remembered her.
In fragments.
In bruises.
System Notification: Emotional resonance threshold reached. Memory thread unstable. Anchoring fragment.
She didn't brace.
The memory hit like teeth.
She was not standing in the shrine anymore.
She was back—inside herself, as she once had been.
Not in this half-dead world, but before. At the height of the Obsidian Veil's power. A meeting hall. Cold stone lit by blue flame. Seven daughters kneeling before her, each swearing loyalty in the tongue of old bone.
Ythara. Kassien. Siloh. Liris. The others she had tried to forget.
All of them watching her with devotion.
No.
With fear.
And in her hand—inked in blood—was the parchment she never sent.
A death-writ.
Marked for herself.
The memory broke.
Velrona gasped—her first involuntary breath since reawakening. Erlin's body stumbled back a step.
What was that? Erlin whispered in her mind. You—
"Don't," she said aloud, voice hoarse. "Don't speak that name again."
Which name?
"Mine."
She leaned against one of the shrine's fractured pillars.
The parchment was real. It wasn't a vision. She'd written it. She'd signed it. She'd sealed it with her own glyphs.
And yet… it had never been delivered.
But someone found it.
Someone used it.
She had called for her own death.
Why?
By dawn, she had returned to Lirn's hidden room beneath the old watchtower.
He was already waiting, kneeling before a blank scroll. Not praying—writing. When she entered, he stood without fear.
"I need the list," she said. "The full version."
Lirn handed her a bundle, tied in obsidian thread. She untied it, laid the vellum across the table.
Seven names.
Each etched in precise columns. Each marked with a symbol from their current sect. And beneath each, a phrase: Last known act, Territory, Public Rhetoric, Deviation from the True Veil.
Velrona read the names like tasting poison, one drop at a time.
1. Kassien Volt – The Bone Accord
Last seen: North, at the Iron Meridian.
Ruling through militarized bone-forging and spirit-bound generals.
Speaks of her as "the ideal we could never reach."
Refers to her death as "tactical martyrdom."
Velrona remembered him young, arrogant, brilliant. She'd shaped his mind to crush chaos with logic, never knowing that one day he'd rationalize her destruction.
2. Siloh Threnne – Ossuary Court
Last seen: Southern Empire ruins, converted into a walking mausoleum.
Paints murals with soul-ink. Turns grief into performance.
Calls her "The First Brushstroke."
Holds funerals for moments, not people.
Siloh had always felt too much, created too beautifully. She'd wept when Velrona gave her a name—and now, she gave names to shadows.
3. Ythara – Choir of Sanctified Flame
Last seen: Eastern borderlands, now a fire-rite theocracy.
Cremates enemies alive. Uses hymns as spirit keys.
Calls Velrona "Saint of the Final Ember."
Claims Velrona died willingly to seal a curse.
Velrona's fingers twitched.
Ythara had been her voice, once. Her public shadow. Every word she'd ever spoken now burned in effigy.
4. Liris of the Hollow Womb – Status Unknown
Last seen: Deep tunnels of Motherdeep. Disappeared three years ago.
Believed to be birthing revenants from partial souls.
Her cult collapsed into silence after a failed mass ritual.
No one speaks her name now.
Liris had been the most unstable. The most beloved.
Velrona folded the parchment gently.
She didn't want to read more.
"You shouldn't go to them alone," Lirn said.
"I have to."
"They will not welcome you."
"I don't need welcome," she said. "I need truth."
That evening, she took Erlin's body for a walk down the hill, through the farms, past the burned shrine.
The road forked near the riverbed, where the older stones still held faint signs of her rites. A child was there—digging in the mud. A girl. Eight, maybe. Barefoot.
She looked up.
Stared.
And smiled.
"You're sad," the girl said.
Velrona paused. "Am I?"
The girl nodded. "Sad people wear their shoulders higher."
"And what do happy people do?"
"They carry stories."
Velrona crouched. "And what's yours?"
"My mother says you died to save us."
Velrona blinked.
"And what do you think?"
The girl shrugged. "I think you're not dead."
Velrona smiled.
"No," she said. "Not anymore."