The encounter in the grove left Elara feeling flayed open, raw and exposed. Kaelen's magic was a chilling revelation—a force of absolute negation. How did one fight against nothingness? Her starlight, for all its power to heal and create, felt insubstantial against such a void. It was like trying to fill a bottomless pit with handfuls of sand.
For two days, she kept to her chambers, the four walls of polished obsidian feeling more like a prison than ever. Lyra brought her meals and news of the court in her soft, careful voice. Lord Theron, the red-haired Fae, was agitating for a more aggressive stance against the remaining Liranel loyalists. Lady Seraphine was, as always, at Kaelen's side, her influence a quiet, constant hum in the stronghold's politics.
But it was a piece of information from the third morning that finally pulled Elara from her stupor.
"The Commander and a contingent of his Shadowspeakers left at dawn," Lyra said, placing a tray of tea and honeyed nuts on a small table. "They ride for the Serpent's Spine mountains. There are rumors of… instability in the magic there. He may be gone for a week or more."
Elara's heart gave a traitorous leap. Kaelen was gone. The oppressive weight of his presence, the constant, watchful eye, was temporarily lifted. This was not a reprieve; it was an opportunity.
"Lyra," Elara said, her voice carefully neutral. "The stronghold… it is built around a place of power. Is there anywhere else, besides the Commander's grove, where that power is… concentrated? An archive? A library?"
Lyra paused in her tidying, her moss-green hair shifting over her shoulder. "The Fae do not keep books as humans do, Your Highness. Our history is remembered in song and stone." She hesitated, her peridot eyes flickering towards the door. "But there is the Heartwood Chamber. It is the oldest part of the great tree. It is where the Shadowspeakers go to… listen."
"Listen to what?"
"To the echoes," Lyra said, her voice dropping to a near-whisper. "To the memory of the stone and the shadow. It is not a place for guests."
The warning was clear, but the temptation was irresistible. A place of memory. A place where she might learn the true history of this conflict, of the blight, of the Fae themselves. Knowledge was a different kind of armor, and she was desperately unarmed.
She waited until the deep of night, when the stronghold was at its quietest. Slipping from her chambers in a dark, hooded cloak, she moved like a ghost through the corridors. Following Lyra's vague directions—a left at the thorn arch, down the spiraling root-staircase, through the hall of whispering moss—she found a doorway she had not seen before. It was low and narrow, framed by two ancient, gnarled roots that seemed to pulse with a faint, dark light. There was no door, only a curtain of what looked like woven shadows.
Gathering her courage, Elara pushed through it.
The air inside was thick and old, smelling of stone dust and centuries. The Heartwood Chamber was a small, circular room, its walls the rough, inner bark of the primordial tree. In the center of the room stood a single, waist-high pillar of obsidian, its surface swirling with captured light, like a galaxy frozen in black ice. This was the echo-stone.
Cautiously, she approached it. The room was silent, but she could feel a low thrum of power emanating from the pillar, a deep, resonant frequency that vibrated in her teeth. Remembering Lyra's words—listen—she slowly, hesitantly, reached out and placed her bare palm flat upon the cold, smooth surface.
The effect was instantaneous and violent.
The world dissolved into a maelstrom of sensation. She was not seeing with her eyes, but with her mind, images and emotions flooding into her, raw and unfiltered.
She saw the Fellwood as it once was—a vibrant, sun-dappled forest, alive with color and sound, a place where both Fae and humans sometimes met in wary trade.
Then, a searing, golden light—a human king, her own ancestor, plunging a blade of forged sunlight into the heart of a great, shadowy beast at the center of the wood. The beast was not monstrous; it was majestic, a guardian. Its death cry was a silent wave of anguish that shattered the forest's soul.
The blight began that day. Not as an attack from the Shadowfell, but as a sickness, a grief-stricken rot spreading from the murdered guardian's corpse. The Fae, their connection to the land severed at its heart, watched their home sicken and die. Their magic, once one of balance and mystery, twisted in response, becoming the hungry, negating force she now recognized. They learned to draw power from the decay, to survive the wound her people had inflicted.
The vision shifted.
She saw Kaelen, younger, his face less hardened, kneeling by the corpse of the great shadow-beast, his hands pressed against the blighted earth, his shoulders shaking with a grief so profound it stole her breath. He was not a conqueror then. He was a mourner.
The echo-stone was showing her the truth. The blight was not the Fae's weapon; it was their curse, one her family had unleashed. The war was not a campaign of conquest, but a desperate, furious retaliation for a world murdered.
The torrent of images and emotions was too much. The grief, the rage, the centuries of betrayal—it was a poison flooding her system. She tried to pull her hand away, but it was stuck fast, the stone clinging to her, feeding her its painful history.
She saw her father, King Theron, not as a cold strategist, but as a young prince, listening to his own father speak lies, weaving a tale of Fae aggression to justify their theft of the Fellwood's resources, to hide the original sin of their ancestor.
A wave of nausea and vertigo overwhelmed her. Her starlight, reacting to the foreign, violent magic, flared in panic. A silvery light burst from her palm, a sharp, bright counterpoint to the stone's dark memories.
There was a sound like shattering glass.
The connection broke. Elara was thrown backward, landing hard on the stone floor. Gasping, she looked at the pillar. A hairline crack, glowing with a faint silver light, now ran from the top to the bottom of the obsidian.
Footsteps pounded outside the chamber. The shadow-curtain was ripped aside, and Lady Seraphine stood there, her golden eyes blazing with fury. Behind her were two guards.
"What have you done?" Seraphine's voice was a whip-crack in the silent room. Her gaze fell on the cracked echo-stone, and her face paled with a mixture of horror and triumph. "You… you vile, clumsy creature! You have defiled our most sacred chamber!"
Elara scrambled to her feet, her mind reeling, the truth she had learned warring with the immediate danger. "I didn't mean to… I was just—"
"Silence!" Seraphine snarled. She advanced, her beauty twisted into something vicious. "I knew you would be trouble. I knew your human carelessness would destroy something precious." She gestured to the guards. "Seize her. Confine her to her chambers. Post a guard at her door. The Commander will decide your fate when he returns."
As the guards grabbed her arms, not roughly but with implacable force, Elara did not struggle. She looked from the cracked stone, the evidence of her catastrophic curiosity, to Seraphine's triumphant face.
She had gone seeking knowledge, and she had found a truth that shattered everything she thought she knew. But in doing so, she had given her enemies the perfect weapon to use against her. Kaelen had warned her about the consequences of defiance. He was going to return to find she had broken a sacred part of his world.
The real lesson of the Heartwood Chamber was not in the echoes of the past. It was in the chilling certainty of the reckoning to come.