She didn't sleep.
Not because of the ash. Not even because of fear.
Because she couldn't stop asking herself what had gone wrong.
She lay on the cold stone, staring at the darkened ceiling of the ruin, waiting for exhaustion to take her. But sleep didn't come. Her body was still braced like she was on watch. Her mind kept circling the same question: why had they sent her here?
Her fingers itched from whatever clung to them—residue from the vision. Not Threadlight. Not magic. Just ash, as fine as dust and as quiet as guilt.
She had followed orders. Fought loyally. Held the line when others broke. There were scars on her arms and memory she didn't speak of to prove it.
And still, they sent her here.
Alone. No escort. No answers.
Not to the front. Not even to report.
To this place.
Whatever it was.
She sat up, her joints aching from the cold. The fire was long dead. Her torch was nothing but a blackened stick. She clenched and unclenched her hands, staring at her palm.
The ash was still there.
She tried rubbing it away.
It didn't come off.
Frustrated, she stood and crossed back to the pedestal. The book she once held now lay on the floor. It was not large but now it just felt… heavier. As if her presence had changed it.
She didn't reach for it again.
She didn't want another vision. If that's what it even was. Maybe it had all been nerves. Loneliness. An old myth clawing its way into her head because she had nothing else to hold on to.
Instead, she stared at the ash and said aloud, "What do you want from me?"
Her voice echoed back. Hollow. Pointless.
This wasn't an altar. It wasn't a sacred place. It wasn't a test.
It was abandonment.
The Empire had abandoned her.
Or—had they? She hesitated. She wanted to believe there was a plan. That this was some deeper lesson in loyalty. That this isolation had meaning.
But a voice in her gut whispered what she didn't want to hear: they didn't trust her anymore.
And maybe—maybe they were right.
She didn't know when it had started. The quiet doubts. The things she stopped saying out loud. The moments she watched fellow officers issue orders she didn't fully believe in, and stayed silent.
The stories she remembered from childhood, before her first binding oath, before the training that cut softness out of her voice.
She pressed a hand to her collarbone, half-expecting to feel the old Imperial brand beneath her uniform. But it wasn't there. It had faded. Like her certainty.
She had believed the Empire gave her purpose.
Now she wasn't sure if that purpose had been real, or just something she'd borrowed to feel like she belonged.
The ash on her hand wasn't a mark of power. It wasn't a sign.
It was a question.
And it was one she couldn't answer.
She turned away from the book.
Not in fear. Not in awe.
She was just tired.
Tired of being sent places with no explanation. Tired of silence masquerading as purpose. Tired of wondering whether obedience was the same thing as belief.
Her footsteps echoed faintly as she moved back to the stone alcove where she'd tried to sleep. She sat this time instead of lying down, arms wrapped around her knees, her cloak drawn tightly across her shoulders. The quiet here wasn't comforting—it was accusing.
It gave her no orders to follow. No objectives to fulfill. No map.
She hated it.
⸻
There had been a time when she'd been certain.
She remembered being twelve, standing in her training robes with the Thread-mark still fresh on her wrist, trying not to flinch as the instructor forced them to practice Thread suppression drills again and again until their magic bent like clockwork.
She remembered being praised for control. For restraint. For obedience.
"You are not a wild spell," the Inquisitor had said. "You are a weapon—finely shaped."
Back then, she had believed it. Wanted it.
And yet…
A memory slipped in. Unwanted. A rare day when she'd fallen asleep in the library, one of the older tomes still open beside her. Not a state-sanctioned manual, but a translated piece of forgotten pre-Empire folklore. She didn't remember the story anymore. Just the image—etched in red ink—of a woman standing barefoot in a circle of thorns, light blooming from her skin like fire.
It had frightened her. But she'd traced the lines of the drawing anyway.
She'd asked an archivist about the symbol once.
The woman had gone quiet.
"You shouldn't be reading those," she said. "The Empire gives us all we need."
After that, the book was gone.
So was the archivist.
Reneta had told herself it meant nothing.
She had told herself that story was a relic. A danger.
But tonight, sitting beneath stone soaked with silence, she realized something.
That image had stayed with her longer than most of the doctrines she memorized. It had stayed, not as proof—but as a question.
And she had never dared ask it aloud.
⸻
Her hand twitched.
She looked at the ash again.
Not glowing. Not whispering. Just there.
Real. Physical. Cold.
And somehow still tied to her.
She didn't understand it.
Didn't need to.
For now, it was enough to know it hadn't harmed her.
Not like the drills. Not like the punishments for stepping out of line.
The ash didn't punish.
It lingered.
And for the first time in years, she didn't feel like she was reciting a lesson written by someone else.
She felt… present.
Still unsure.
But more herself than she had in months.
⸻
She rose again. This time not to pace. Not to flee.
She walked the chamber, touching the wall carvings with her fingers—not searching for signs, not hoping for visions. Just… feeling them. Wondering what hands carved them. Who they were for.
She let herself wonder who had been here before her.
Not as myths.
As people.
Perhaps soldiers who had failed.
Perhaps children of those burned by Empire fire.
Perhaps no one at all.
Maybe the Empire had chosen this place precisely because no one would remember it.
Because no one would believe what was buried here mattered.
But it did.
She didn't need the why yet.
She only knew what she felt.
⸻
Eventually, she knelt again—not before the pedestal, but beside it.
Her back against the stone. Her arms resting on her knees.
She exhaled slowly, and the tension in her spine eased.
No answers came.
But the silence didn't press against her anymore.
It didn't feel like a cage.
It just… waited.
Let her exist.
And in that quiet, she whispered—not to the Empire, not to a god, not even to the witches she wasn't sure she believed in:
"I don't know what's true anymore."
The words fell like small stones.
She didn't take them back.
Didn't try to follow them with reasons or apologies.
Just let them be.
⸻
She stayed like that a long time.
And when sleep finally came—uneven, cold, shallow—it was not peace.
But it was hers.
And that, for now, was enough.