The silence after Kaelen's departure in the council room lasted until nightfall, and then it turned into something worse. It was as if the very air of the palace had solidified into ice. Elara did not dine. She refused the meal. She sat in the study chair, looking at her own hands in the tremulous candlelight, feeling the fissure inside her widen.
On one side, the iron determination, cold and calculating, that held Anya Veridian upright. On the other, a slow and silent crumbling, the dust being shaken from Elara's foundations.
It was in this state of fragility, with her defenses low and her mind exhausted from war and wrong decisions, that the memory struck her. It was not a thought. It was an invasion.
A smell first. Not temple incense or mine dust, but the sweet, rotten scent of wild lilies mixed with old iron. The sound of ragged, irregular breathing coming from somewhere to her right. The weight of armor sodden with something warm and sticky across her legs. Not her legs. Longer, more muscular, trembling with strain.
She was kneeling in mud. A fine, cold rain was falling, mixing with the sweat on her face. Before her, leaning against her, a young man with the same angular jaw, the same storm-grey eyes, now clouded with pain. Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth, a bright red thread against the pallor of death.
"Anya…"
His voice was a breath, full of a liquid that shouldn't be there. His hand, still in a torn mail glove, grasped her forearm with desperate strength.
"Don't speak, Loras. Don't. The surgeon is coming. Hold on."
The voice that came from Elara's throat was deeper, hoarse from command-shouts, cracked by something that sounded like panic.
"The field…" he whispered, and a violent tremor ran through his body. "Held?"
"Held. Thanks to you. Thanks to your flank."
The words were automatic, tactical, but her eyes—Anya's eyes—were locked on her brother's face, watching the light leave them degree by degree.
"Good."
A faint smile touched Loras's pale lips.
"Then… worth it. Tell… tell mother…"
The sentence was lost in a wet sigh. The grip on her arm slackened. The hand fell into the mud with a soft, final sound.
"Loras?"
Anya's voice was just a breath now.
"Loras!"
She shook him, lightly, then with force. His head lolled, limp, eyes half-open, empty, reflecting the leaden sky above. A scream formed in her throat, a roar of denial and agony so deep it seemed to tear the world in two.
But it did not come out. It was trapped, strangled, turning into a muffled groan that burned inside like acid. The Empress could not scream. The Founder could not come apart. There was an army watching.
Then, the sensation changed. The sharp pain, the rending loss, began to compress. To sink. It did not disappear. It was pushed into a deep, dark, cold place inside her chest, and over it was poured liquid cement—rage. A pure, colorless, absolute rage.
The rage turned its back on the brother's body. The rage gave dry orders for it to be collected. The rage planned, in that exact instant, the retaliation that would raze the rival clan to the last stone, the last child. The pain was set in a cast. The Founder rose from the mud, and what walked back to the lines was only frozen fury and the will to crush.
The memory dissolved as abruptly as it had come.
Elara came back to herself with a gasp, gripping the edge of the table. Her hands—her own hands, small and sharp-nailed—were shaking violently. Her face was wet. She brought her fingers to her cheeks and found them soaked with tears that were not hers, and at the same time, were.
Nausea rose, uncontrollable. She leaned to the side, but nothing came. Only an icy void and an agonizing understanding.
She hated Anya. Had hated the tyrant, the butcher, the woman whose line would murder her. But now, she had felt the price. She had lived the exact moment Anya Veridian's humanity was sacrificed on the altar of the throne. Her pain had been real. The loss, unbearable. And she, Anya, had chosen to turn that pain into the engine of the empire. She had become monstrous so as not to shatter.
A horrible, unwanted empathy sprouted in Elara's chest. It was like looking at her own reflection in a warped mirror. Two women, two times, both destroyed to create something greater. Both using pain as fuel. The difference was that Elara knew the end of Anya's story. And Anya had never known she would be the ancestor of her own executioner.
The impulse was physical, urgent. She had to go there. Now.
Without calling Lyra, without guards, wrapped only in a dark cloak over her simple day dress, she slipped stealthily from her chambers. She knew the way. Anya's knowledge, like a ghost map, overlaid her consciousness. She descended secondary stairs, crossed silent inner courtyards under a cloudy night sky. The night air was damp, promising more rain.
The Chapel of the Founders was a small, austere building in the palace's rear gardens, far from the grandeur of the Sun Temple. There lay the tombs of the first Veridians. The oak door creaked lightly when she pushed it open.
Inside, the air was dry and cold, smelling of stone and extinguished candles. Moonlight, filtering through a narrow stained-glass window, painted the floor in dark colors. And there, in a simple marble niche, was the effigy of Loras Veridian. Young, serious, with a sword across his chest.
She approached, feeling the echo of that stolen pain vibrate in her bones. She wanted to say something. To Anya? To the ghost of the brother? To herself? The words did not come.
It was then that she saw it.
On the floor, before the tomb, was a small bouquet of wildflowers. Daisies, some bluish herbs, a bit of sage. Simple flowers, the kind that grew in the fields outside the city walls. They were not the opulent arrangement of an official ritual. They were fresh. Recently picked.
Elara's heart stopped for an instant.
Who? Who, besides her—or the residual consciousness of Anya she carried—would remember Loras Veridian, the Founder's fallen brother, on an ordinary night like this? The official cult venerated Anya, not her forgotten brother.
She knelt, touching one of the daisy's white petals. It was soft, damp with night dew. A memory, not her own, surfaced: Loras, at twelve, picking daisies to tuck into his little sister's belt before a riding tournament.
Kaelen.
The answer came before the thought fully formed. Kaelen, with his meticulous loyalty. Kaelen, who studied the Montgrave records, who investigated the loose threads of history. Kaelen, who was looking for a shadow in everything. He had discovered Loras. And, for some reason she dared not decipher, had brought flowers.
The emotion that flooded her was too complex. Gratitude? Dread? A deep sadness for this kindness directed at a ghost, in a gesture the real Anya, locked in her fury, might never have allowed herself?
She stayed there for an indefinite time, the wildflowers before her being the most fragile and concrete proof that their lives—past, present, future—were irrevocably entwined.
When she finally rose, her legs numb, and left the chapel, the outside world seemed denser. The threat of rain materialized into a fine drizzle that dampened her face, mingling with the remnants of her tears.
She took the path back through the winter garden, a gravel trail between trimmed shrubs. Her mind was a whirlwind, processing the memory, the flowers, the painful empathy.
It was then that she saw the silhouette.
She stopped. Under the arbor of dormant wisteria, sheltered from the fine rain, a man was standing. Not a guard. The posture, the way his shoulders filled the shadow—she knew.
Kaelen.
He was not in uniform. He wore a simple dark tunic, and in his hands, he held a dark, rectangular object. A book.
He saw her. He did not seem surprised. It was as if he had been waiting for her.
The drizzle made a soft sound on the leaves around them. Elara could not move. The distance between them was only about ten steps, but it felt like an abyss.
He raised the book slightly. The faint light from a distant lantern glinted on the worn leather binding.
"Your Highness," he said.
His voice was calm, but charged with a new solemnity, like a man bearing a verdict.
Elara forced herself to take a step forward. Then another. The gravel under her feet seemed incredibly loud.
"Commander Montgrave. Night gardens seem to be a common point for us."
He ignored the remark. His eyes, grey as the damp night, were fixed on her, studying every micro-expression, every tremor she could not control.
"I went to the archives again," he began, slowly. "Not for military strategy. For… personal curiosity. After our conversation. After the tomb."
Elara felt the ground give a little under her feet. He admitted it.
"There are obscure records. Diaries of old servants, unofficial battle accounts. Things that don't make it into the glorious chronicles."
He paused, turning the book in his hands.
"And I found this. Kept with the personal papers of a chaplain who served the Veridian house in the early years."
He extended the book to her. It was not an offering. It was a challenge.
With hands that trembled slightly, she took it. The leather was cold and damp. She opened it to a page marked by a leather strip.
The handwriting was cramped, slanted, of someone who wrote quickly. It was not an official diary. It was a personal record. And on the marked page, a passage:
"The Lady today is not herself. Or perhaps she is more herself than ever. After the tragedy in Loras's gorge, something broke. She locks herself in the north wing for hours. The servants hear… nothing. No weeping. No scream. A tomb-like silence. But today, bringing her supper, I saw her standing at the window. Staring at nothing. And on her lips, without sound, she repeated a word, a single word, like a spell or a curse: 'Elara.' I have never heard such a name. I discreetly asked the genealogists. It is not in any known lineage. Who, then, would this Elara be, whom she invokes in her moment of deepest solitude?"
The blood seemed to freeze in Elara's veins. The air left her lungs. She looked at Kaelen, and saw in him not triumph, but a deep confusion and a pain that mirrored her own.
He pointed at the name in the book, his voice a hoarse whisper lost in the sound of the rain.
"I found this. It is about you… or about someone who was you, long before you were who you are now."
He swallowed dryly, his courage faltering for a fraction of a second.
"And I need to know… Who is Elara?"