She tried to meditate.
Tried to still her mind, to breathe in rhythm with the pulse of the stone.
Tried to repeat the chant every witch was taught upon her naming.
But the words tasted wrong now.
Dry. Empty. Burnt.
She hated when that happened — when the old words she once clung to like rope turned hollow in her mouth. It made her feel traitorous. Or worse — like she was already someone else, and the spell simply hadn't caught up yet.
His voice lingered — not in her ears, but in her blood.
It pulsed behind her sternum like a wound refusing to scab.
Would you want to know?
The question hadn't left her. It didn't echo. It settled — low, quiet, unblinking.
It clung, sharper than any answer.
It demanded an answer she had never agreed to give.
The green glow in the basalt walls seemed weaker.
Or maybe her patience was.
She opened her eyes.
Beside her lay the book — the one she'd recovered from the vision at the shrine beneath the old root-tombs.
Blackened. Bound in red thread.
It smelled like scorched truth.
"An artifact of the covens past."
That's what she'd called it when the inquisitor asked.
She had carried it in silence for days.
Back then, obedience came easier.
She knew what lines not to cross.
She knew how to wear silence like armor.
But now?
Now her fingers hovered over the bindings, and something in her core coiled too tight.
It wasn't fear.
It was recognition.
She had tied them herself — unconsciously, almost instinctively.
Not Threadblind bindings. Witch knots.
Preserving knots. Suppression knots.
Meant to hold what should not speak.
And yet… her fingers had known the patterns too well.
Not learned in any sanctioned hall or under the Empire's gaze — but in a darker place.
By firelight, once.
A trembling night.
A voice — old, cracked, familiar — whispering the spiral-laced words:
"Some things you bury. Others, you bind."
She had been five, maybe six. The Empire hadn't reached that village yet.
Not fully.
Her mother's hands had smelled like lavender ash and saltstone.
That smell always returned when Reneta least expected it — always tied to warmth and danger.
The chant they'd murmured over the knot wasn't a command.
It was a prayer.
She had forgotten the words.
But not the way they felt.
The Threads remember.
That's what her mother had said, brushing her cheek.
Even now, all these years later — her hands still did too.
So now, she undid them.
One by one.
Each knot came away in silence — not a sound, but a sensation.
The Threads tugged like something reluctant to let go.
But her fingers didn't hesitate.
They moved too quickly.
Too confidently.
For someone her age…
For someone supposedly loyal to the Empire…
They moved like a woman raised by firelight and ghost-whispers.
Like someone who was never meant to forget.
The last knot came free.
The book unfolded.
Like a wound.
—
Most of it was ruined.
Pages blackened, glyphs melted into soot.
Ink melted into scars.
But one page remained.
Not protected — preserved.
As if the Threads she'd wrapped had chosen this truth to survive.
Her hand brushed it.
The ink was warm. Familiar. Too familiar.
It was written in the old witchtongue.
Her breath slowed.
It wasn't just comprehension. It was ache.
She hadn't read fluently in that tongue in years — the Empire had seen to that.
But her Threads understood.
They always had.
It was a journal entry.
Signed in an unsteady hand:
—
We warned them. Gods, how we warned them. But they came anyway — with swords in one hand and treaties in the other, burning our sisters beneath both banners. They called it Unity. We called it Silence.
They offered names. Chains. A throne of ash. And they fed the youngest of us to the seals beneath the capital, calling it sacrifice. They wear our bones like charms. Our Threads like trophies.
We were not saints. But we remembered. We remembered too much. And so they buried us.
— Yraea of the Hollow Star, Last of the Rootfire Circle
—
Reneta didn't move.
Didn't breathe.
She read the whole thing. Twice.
Not because she needed to. But because she didn't trust her own memory anymore.
Her chest tightened.
The kind of tightness that preceded grief — but didn't allow it.
The kind that locked your spine upright so no one could see you shake.
We remembered. We remembered too much.
The words etched themselves beneath her skin.
She had spent years chanting oaths she hadn't written.
Wearing colors she hadn't chosen.
Repeating a version of history that always ended the same:
Witches as traitors.
Memory as madness.
Silence as virtue.
She had told herself it was survival.
That playing their part kept her mother's legacy alive.
But what if survival was just the lie you whispered to the part of yourself that still wanted to scream?
This wasn't a tale.
It was testimony.
And she was tired of playing quiet.
She tried to tell herself it was only one page. One voice.
But her Threads curled in disbelief — a recoil she couldn't control.
They knew what she didn't want to admit —
That this wasn't new.
Just buried.
She closed her eyes, but the words followed.
Burning in the space behind her thoughts.
They fed the youngest of us to the seals beneath the capital.
She didn't know what that meant.
But she felt the shape of it, deep in her gut.
A hollow she hadn't noticed until it ached to be filled.
Something in the ink had recognized her.
A pulse. A memory.
Not from the page — through it.
Not knowledge.
Resonance.
Her fingers turned the page—
And the Threads snapped.
Too late.
The heat flared.
Her cuffs pulsed red — a warning of restraint.
But the flame was already rising.
"No—!"
She crushed the book beneath her cloak, smothered it with shaking hands, cursed it through gritted teeth — but it was dry. Too dry.
The flame took what it wanted.
Her Threads flared instinctively, snapping into a binding weave — a seal meant to preserve sacred text.
But the flame ate it.
Not hungrily.
Deliberately.
As if it had waited.
She poured a memory-thread across the page — raw and violet.
Even that refused to catch.
The book didn't want saving.
It wanted release.
She smelled her own blood where the flames licked her wrists.
Felt the iron taste of fear on her tongue.
The edges of the page curled like skin.
Her skin.
She'd fought beasts twice her size. Threadburned soldiers with no eyes and relics made to unmake.
But this?
This felt worse.
Because she wasn't losing a fight.
She was watching a piece of herself go up in smoke.
And in the final second — as the glyphs were swallowed whole — she heard something.
Not screaming.
Wailing.
Like voices wept into ink centuries ago had finally found breath again…
And were burning not in pain — but in testament.
—
When the smoke cleared…
Ash.
Only ash.
The page was gone.
The threads she'd tied were gone.
And yet something remained.
Not paper.
Not power.
A truth too sharp to name.
—
She sat back.
Chest tight.
Palms blackened.
She didn't cry.
She didn't scream.
She just stared at her hands — red and shaking — and wondered what else they were capable of losing.
And then, softly — laughter.
Not close. Not far.
Not sound.
It hummed in the stone.
In the air.
In the Threads themselves.
"So curious," the voice came again. "So quick to burn."
She stood fast, blade in hand — the sword-whip, coiled and unreadable.
The hilt sang faintly, like it remembered a scream too well.
Her aura flickered.
Not flame. Not Thread.
Memory.
"Show yourself," she snapped.
The voice didn't oblige.
"Don't pout, child," it said. "You read what you needed. The rest would've only made you scream."
Her jaw locked.
The insult didn't sting. The familiarity did.
"You knew it would burn."
"Of course. The truth always does."
A pause followed.
Not silence — just… waiting.
Then the voice shifted.
Amused. Indulgent. Almost kind.
"There's another place. Not far…"
And as it spoke, Reneta didn't lower her blade.
But she listened.
Because something inside her had already decided to go.
Even burned, some Threads refuse to die.
"Go there," the voice murmured. "If you want more than fragments and fire."
Then the walls stilled.
No more tremble.
No more voice.
Only the quiet breath of something deeper.
Something waiting.
—
In the center of the temple floor, a crack split the stone.
Clean. Jagged. New.
It hadn't been there before.
She crouched beside it, fingers brushing the edge.
Warm. Like breath caught mid-gasp.
Not a break. A warning. A whisper. A path.
The stone trembled faintly beneath her skin.
Like a heart restarting.
Like a covenant reforming — not with the Empire, but with something older.
And in that moment — in that quiet fracture of certainty — she chose.
Not to obey.
Not to rebel.
Just to move.
—
The whipblade vanished into its sheath.
The last of the ash she gathered between her fingers.
Not to save.
To feel.
To remember that even flame could carry memory — if it burned the right things.
The tooth-charm at her neck was gone.
Burned.
Consumed with the book.
In its place, she tied a thread — blackened, half-burnt, pulled from the wreck.
She knotted it in blood.
One loop. Seven turns.
A silent vow.
Not spoken.
Bound.
And then she left the temple.
—
Above ground, the wind howled.
The sky had not changed.
But the air felt different — parted, perhaps. Not like a blessing. Not yet.
But not a curse either.
The crows followed her now.
Three, then five, then a dozen.
They watched from the black-barked trees, their eyes gleaming not with hunger — but witness.
The path ahead did not feel like exile.
It felt like reckoning.
A calling older than truth.
A sin older than silence.
A voice that had waited far too long to be named.
And Reneta no longer walked as one seeking permission.
She walked like a girl who had touched memory with her bare hands.
And had survived.