Silence followed her scream.
Alera's voice had barely died in the throne chamber when the shadows bent. The Bone Heir slumped forward in his seat, sword still lodged in his chest, his expression locked in a half-smile of disbelief. Blood ran in streams thick, black, slow like oil.
Then the ground began to tremble.
Not from footsteps.
From something deeper.
Older.
Saphine was the first to move.
She yanked Alera to her feet, voice sharp. "We need to go. Now."
Alera's hand was slick with blood. Her knees buckled, but Saphine didn't let her fall. The Choir Hall behind them rumbled as ancient sigils lit up along the bone pillars. Warning sigils.
"Where are the others?" Alera gasped.
"Kieran's gone. Kael's still" Saphine stopped, jaw tightening. "He bought us time."
Alera froze. "What do you mean?"
"He stayed behind when the chamber doors began to seal. He knew one of us had to hold the gate open."
"No" Alera twisted, trying to turn back. "We can't leave him"
"We must." Saphine's grip was iron now. "He gave you a future. Don't insult his death."
They ran.
The Bone Court was collapsing.
Not like stone and dust
Like a memory being forgotten.
Hallways flickered in and out of existence. Doors that once led to chambers now opened to bottomless voids. The faces of former queens on the walls began to scream mouths distorting, eyes bleeding, bone weeping dust.
The castle didn't want them to leave.
It wanted to consume.
"I don't remember this corridor," Alera panted.
"That's the point," Saphine snapped. "It wasn't here before. The palace is reshaping."
"Into what?"
"Something worse."
They turned left.
Then right.
Then
A dead end.
A wall of flesh breathing, wet, covered in veins that pulsed with glowing ink. Bones jutted from it like jagged teeth.
And carved into the wall, freshly bleeding
Alera's name.
Her full name.
Alera Ilithra Solara.
The wall spoke.
No mouth. Just vibration.
He is not gone.
He is inside you now.
Alera pressed her back to the far wall.
"No," she whispered. "I killed him."
You killed his body.
Not his echo.
The wall cracked open.
A tunnel formed.
Long, dark, sloping downward.
Saphine grabbed her hand again. "That's our way out."
"It feels like a trap."
"Everything here's a trap. But it's the only one that leads away."
They entered.
And the tunnel breathed.
The walls pulsed.
Each footstep echoed like a drumbeat inside a lung. The air thickened with salt and old blood.
Far behind them, a scream shattered the stillness.
Then another.
Then… silence.
Not the quiet of absence.
The quiet of extinction.
They ran harder.
Saphine began murmuring old prayers half-forgotten oaths from her youth as a temple novice.
Alera felt her child shift within her womb. Not in fear.
In recognition.
She paused.
"What is this place?" she asked the air.
The child whispered through her blood:
"This was the first throne."
She stumbled.
Saphine caught her.
"What is it?"
"It's not a tunnel."
"Then what?"
"A vein."
They were inside the throne itself.
It wasn't just a seat.
It was a living creature.
And now that its master had fallen, it was collapsing into madness.
At the end of the vein-tunnel, they emerged into a forgotten crypt round, silent, its ceiling covered in stars etched with ash. There, at the center, a single pedestal sat.
Upon it: a knife of black glass and red gold.
Alera felt drawn to it.
"It's made of sovereign bone," Saphine said. "One of the last blades from before the Sundering."
"Why is it here?"
"Because the throne left it for you."
Alera reached for it.
The moment her fingers brushed the hilt, time twisted.
Visions surged.
A screaming child.
A throne weeping.
A woman, her own face laughing as the world burned.
Then
Silence.
She yanked her hand back.
But the knife clung to her palm.
Like it had been waiting for her all along.
Then came the sound they feared most:
Bootsteps.
Dozens.
Then hundreds.
Marching.
Saphine drew her blades.
"Sentinels?"
"No," Alera whispered. "Bone guards."
"How are they alive?"
"They're not. They're what's left of the Court, fighting back."
Figures entered the crypt bone-armored, eyes hollow, moving in broken unison.
They didn't attack.
They knelt.
Alera froze.
"What—?"
Then one of them spoke:
"We serve the Queen of the Forgotten."
The blade in her hand shimmered.
The throne had died.
But something older had awoken.
And it now recognized her.
Saphine's eyes widened. "What did you do?"
"I took his place," Alera whispered.
"No."
"I became what he feared."
A roar shook the crypt.
The Bone Palace above them… was gone.
It collapsed in on itself, sucking light and memory into a single collapsing point.
Alera dropped to her knees.
But she didn't cry.
She whispered an oath.
"I will never wear a crown that devours me."
The Bone Guards stood.
A portal opened behind the crypt wall formed from ash and grief.
Saphine stared. "That leads outside."
Alera turned.
"Then we go."
They stepped through.
And for the first time in days
They saw the sky.
The real one.
Black. Broken. Infinite.
Endless wind tugged at her hair.
Ash drifted from the remnants of what had been the Bone Court.
Alera turned toward the void behind them, whispering:
"You tried to make me your queen."
"But now I'm yours."