The sky bled purple at the edges of dusk, deepening to a hard, unforgiving blue.
Reneta rode beneath it alone. No guards. No farewell rites. No trail behind her but the hush of plains and the slow rhythm of hoofbeats. Her cloak was still damp at the collar from the basin where she'd scrubbed the blood away. She hadn't gotten it all. The smell clung to her sleeves. Her scalp. Her skin.
So did the boy's eyes.
He hadn't closed them when he died.
She hadn't looked back.
She wouldn't.
The wind dragged across the land in long ribbons of silence. Silvergrass bowed in waves, whispering secrets only the dead could understand. The dirt road curled beneath her mount's hooves like a thread half-unraveled.
The war was behind her.
But it clung like bone ash. Like breath caught in iron lungs.
The war left its fingerprints in everything. The way she rode. The way her shoulders never fully uncoiled. The way her silence had edges now—sharp, deliberate. Even the horse seemed to sense it, trotting with less confidence, ears flicking backward as if afraid to step where blood might have soaked the roots.
She adjusted the reins. Her gloves creaked, leather damp from sweat and dried blood. Her fingers ached—half-numb from gripping the coiled spine of her sword-whip, a relic weapon of charred silver and memory-bound steel. It flexed at her hip even now, humming faintly as if it too resisted the silence.
⸻
As she rode she remembered.
The rebels had moved like ghosts—faster than command expected. Smarter, too. They'd carried forbidden relics and the old faith, stitched into their skin with ash and ink. She remembered one in particular: a man with the crescent flame burned into his throat, smiling as he bled out beneath her boots.
"You think they need you," he whispered. "But the war won't miss you. Not when you remember who you are."
She hadn't flinched.
She hadn't replied.
She felt her breath catch now, hours later, as the last light dropped below the horizon.
⸻
The stars came out one by one.
Seven of them, too bright to belong.
Not constellations. Not mapped. They formed no known pattern, yet their symmetry felt wrong in a way that truth often did—subtle and slow. Like a memory nearly recalled.
They hovered in a curved arc—strange, unblinking, arranged in a shape that tugged at something older than maps. It wasn't their presence that unsettled her. It was how still they felt. As if watching.
She looked away.
Then looked again.
⸻
Earlier that morning, she'd stood in the war tent, still armored, blood drying on her sleeve. The generals hadn't looked at her. Only the veiled woman at the center—Khalida Amaya, the High Chancellor.
Chains of gold webbed her face like judgment.
"Commander Brar," Ida said, calm as oil poured over flame. "You will depart before dusk."
"I've just returned."
"And served admirably. Which is why we entrust you with this."
Her voice was soft, but it held the bite of a blade reversed in the hand.
Reneta's jaw locked. "The Witch Division was promised recall. Hollowreach is bleeding. We've lost command over the third—"
"The pilgrimage is not punishment," Ida interrupted. "It is remembrance. Legacy calls. Few are chosen to walk the ancestral paths."
The moment stretched.
"And fewer still are trusted not to stray."
Not a compliment.
A leash.
And Ida held it lightly, like someone used to controlling monsters. Reneta had felt it even then—the way the Chancellor's gaze didn't land on her so much as measure her distance from ruin.
⸻
She didn't think about that conversation now—not directly. But it gnawed at the back of her thoughts like rot beneath clean bandages.
The Empire called her exile an honor. A sacred duty. A reminder that her bloodline—once her shame—was now a tool.
Even the sacred could be shaped into chains.
⸻
The plains narrowed into a blackened wood. Charred trunks leaned sideways, hollow and split. She slowed her mount. Dismounted.
The air pulsed strangely here. Thicker. Hungrier.
Ash clung to her boots. The ground squelched where roots had burned hollow.
She didn't fear these places. Not exactly. But she walked with her hand on her weapon's hilt, fingers coiled against the whip's wrapped chain handle. Her sword-whip didn't hum. It waited.
Somewhere in the trees, thunder rolled.
No storm followed.
⸻
She came upon a ruined marker—a stone half-sunk into the soil. Spiral lines carved deep, then worn shallow by time and forgetting. She knelt. Wiped away the ash.
Witchglyphs.
Ancient. Unregistered. Not written in any imperial ledger.
A pulse threaded through her wrist as her fingers brushed the symbol. The Soul Thread pulled taut. Not violently—just enough to remind her it hadn't forgotten.
She rose quickly, cloak shifting. Her horse snorted behind her.
There was a tug. Not physical. Not quite magical either.
Just… memory-shaped.
She followed it.
⸻
A narrow path split off, mostly swallowed by roots. She moved through it.
It opened into a clearing. At its center sat a forgotten shrine—ivy-choked, half-collapsed. The sigils on its base were too eroded to read, save for one image: a cloaked woman, fire cupped in her hands, reaching toward a blank space.
It had once been cared for. That was clear—stone polished smooth by generations of reverent touch, now cracked by rain and time. The vines didn't strangle it. They held it. As if trying to keep the memory from dissolving.
A thin line of ash curved around the base, unbroken. Ritual. Protective. Forgotten. Her skin prickled.
No priest had been here in decades. But something had lingered.
Reneta stepped closer.
The Threads curled near her skin.
This wasn't heat. It was warmth. Familiar. Intimate. A hearth inside a broken world.
She laid a hand on the stone.
And for just one moment—one breath of time caught between heartbeats—she heard a hum.
Not a sound, not truly.
A song.
A lullaby. Not from her childhood, but from her bloodline. One passed without words. One buried in Thread and ash and grief. Something remembered by bone, not mind.
She jerked her hand back.
The warmth vanished.
Her face stayed still.
But her soul rattled.
The Empire says I was born to serve.
But what if that's not why I was born?
⸻
She turned to go—and saw him.
A figure, just beyond the clearing.
He didn't move. Didn't speak. Just watched.
She didn't draw her blade.
Didn't need to.
But her stance shifted. Subtle.
He stood barefoot, pale-skinned, wrapped in shadow. The light bent oddly around him. His outline wavered like heat off coals. His face was unreadable. His hands hung loose.
Then he lifted one—not in greeting. Not in threat.
Just acknowledgment.
Reneta held his gaze. A beat. Two.
Then turned her back.
And walked on.
She didn't hear footsteps behind her. But that meant little. Some things didn't need steps to follow. Some names didn't need to be spoken to be recognized.
The wind picked up as she left the glade—cooler now, almost curious.
The sword-whip at her hip coiled once, like something waking from sleep.
And above her, the stars hadn't moved at all.
Not once.
As if they weren't drifting with the sky.
As if they were waiting.