ELARA POV
"A delivery came for you."
The new maid … not Mira, someone else, a quiet woman with grey eyes who hadn't told me her name yet … set a small wooden box on the table by the window and stepped back like she wanted to be as far from it as possible without actually leaving the room.
I looked at the box. "From who."
"The Council, ma'am. It arrived with a letter."
She held out a folded envelope. I took it. Broke the seal … the Council's mark, the same grey wax from the Chamber … and unfolded it.
My eyes moved across the page slow. I wasn't in a rush. Something about receiving a gift from the people who put me here made me want to read every single word twice before I touched anything they sent.
The writing was neat and formal and said a lot of words that added up to basically nothing. Congratulations on the successful ritual. The Council wishes to support the health of both vessel and heir during this critical period. Please accept this tonic, formulated specifically for Void pregnancies. To be taken once daily with water.
I read it twice.
Then I looked at the box.
"Did Silas see this come in?" I asked.
"I don't know, ma'am."
"Okay." I set the letter down. "Thank you."
She left fast. They all left fast now.
I pulled the box toward me and lifted the lid. Inside, packed in dark cloth, was a small glass bottle. The liquid inside was pale … almost clear but with a faint shimmer to it, like light hitting water at a certain angle. It didn't look dangerous. It looked like something you'd buy from a medicine shelf somewhere. Clean and simple and completely fine.
The Council sent it. So obviously it wasn't fine.
But I turned it over in my hands anyway. Read the small label on the bottom … just the name. Void-nurture tonic. Nothing else.
I pulled the stopper out and smelled it.
Herbs. Something faintly sweet underneath. Nothing that set off any alarm bells in my nose. The moving veins on my arm didn't react. The thing sitting quiet inside me … the presence I'd been feeling since the ritual, warm and enormous and very much awake … didn't stir.
Maybe it actually was what it said it was. Maybe the Council, for once, was just…
The temperature in the room dropped.
Fast. Like someone had opened a window directly into winter. My breath came out in a short visible puff and I pulled the bottle closer to my chest instinctively and looked up.
She was standing by the fireplace.
A woman. Or the shape of one. She was there and not quite there at the same time … solid enough to see clearly, transparent enough that the wall behind her showed through her shoulder. She was tall. Dark hair. High cheekbones. And she was looking at me with an expression that was somewhere between urgent and desperate.
She looked like Silas. That was the first thing. The same jaw, the same eyes, the same quality of holding very still when something important was happening.
I didn't scream. I don't know why. Maybe I was just too tired of being scared. Maybe after moving shadows and black veins and a ritual bowl that glowed, a ghost by the fireplace felt like a Tuesday. I just sat there with the open bottle in my hand and stared at her.
She was watching me back. Waiting. Like she needed me to understand something before she could do anything else.
She lifted one hand. Pointed at the bottle.
"That?" I said. Felt ridiculous talking to a ghost. Did it anyway.
She nodded. Hard. Then she made a motion with her hand … throwing something, getting rid of something … urgent and clear.
"You want me to throw it away."
Another nod. She was moving closer now. Drifting, more than walking, the way ghosts apparently moved. Her face was more visible up close. The urgency in it was real. Whatever she was, wherever she was, she meant it.
I looked at the bottle in my hand.
I looked at her.
She reached out … or tried to. Her hand passed through my wrist and I felt it, a cold that was way deeper than the room's temperature, cold that went all the way down through skin and bone … and then the bottle flew.
Not out of my hand. She hit it. Her hand went solid for one second, just one, and she slapped the bottle hard enough that it spun out of my grip and hit the floor.
It shattered.
The liquid spread across the floorboards and I pulled my feet back automatically, out of the way, and then I just watched. Because the floor was eating it. The liquid hit the wood and the wood turned dark immediately … not wet-dark, wrong-dark … and then it started breaking down. Dissolving. The boards went soft and then started to disintegrate, slow and terrible, the liquid spreading outward and taking the floor with it.
A hole formed. Not big. But real. Where solid wood had been thirty seconds ago there was now just … nothing. Edges still eating away slowly, the dissolution spreading outward before it finally slowed and stopped.
I was on my feet without remembering standing up.
"What was that," I said. To the ghost. To the room. To anyone.
She was fading. I could see it … the transparency getting worse, the shape of her getting less solid. She had maybe seconds. She pointed at the hole in the floor. Then she pointed at her own stomach. Then at me.
"It was meant for me," I said. "It would have done that to me."
She nodded once. Already barely there.
"Who are you," I asked. I needed to know before she was gone. "Are you…"
The door hit the wall.
Silas stood in the doorway. His eyes went from me to the ghost … and he saw her, I could tell by the way his whole face changed … and then to the hole in the floor, the still-smoking edges of dissolved wood, the broken glass and the spreading dark stain.
The ghost was gone. Just … gone. Between one second and the next.
Silas crossed the room in about four steps. He grabbed my arms and looked at me, eyes moving over my face, my hands, checking. "Are you hurt."
"No. I didn't drink it."
"You almost…" He stopped. Let go of me. Looked at the floor. At the hole. At the edges where the wood had just stopped existing. His jaw was so tight I could see the muscle in it from where I stood.
"Silas." I kept my voice steady. "Your mother was just in this room. She knocked it out of my hand."
He didn't answer. He crouched down by the hole and looked at it close. His hand hovered over the edge but didn't touch.
"Void-Stunter," he said. Quiet. More to himself than me.
"What is that."
"Old Council formula." He stood back up. His voice was flat in the way that meant something was happening behind it that he wasn't showing. "It kills the mother's body slowly. Internal only. From the outside it looks like a Void pregnancy complication." He paused. "The baby survives. The mother doesn't."
I heard the words. Understood them. Felt them land somewhere in my chest and sit there heavy.
"They want me dead before the second trimester," I said.
He turned to look at me.
"That's what your mother was trying to tell me. She pointed at the bottle, then her stomach, then at me." I held his eyes. "The Council doesn't want me alive past a certain point. They just want the baby."
Something moved across his face. Not surprise. He wasn't surprised. He was angry … a kind of anger that was quiet and enormous and had clearly been building for a long time. His eyes went dark at the edges in a way I'd started to recognize. The Void pressing close to the surface.
"The letter said it was a health tonic," I said. "Formulated specifically for Void pregnancies. They signed it. They stamped it. They sent it with their seal on the envelope and their mark in grey wax and they just…" I stopped. My hands were shaking a little. I pressed them flat against my sides. "They tried to kill me with paperwork. That's honestly impressive in the worst possible way."
"Elara."
"I'm fine. I'm processing. Give me a second."
He gave me a second.
"Okay," I said. "What do we do."
Silas looked at the hole in the floor for a moment. Then he looked at the door. Then back at me. Something had settled in his face that I hadn't seen before. Not calm … more like a decision that had already been made and he was just now saying it out loud.
"Nothing," I said slowly. "That's not a nothing face."
"The Council made their position clear." He said it even. "So I'm making mine."
"Which is."
He looked at me straight. Eyes fully dark now. Void-dark. The smoke behind the grey rolling steady.
"Nobody touches what is mine." His voice didn't rise. Didn't need to. "Not even the Gods."