2.4 KiB
The moment her fingers closed fully around the hilt, the world seemed to exhale.
Dust lifted from the crypt floor, dancing upward like threads of memory unwinding. The torchlight dimmed—but not into darkness. Instead, the shadows became deeper, thicker, pregnant with movement. The runes on the blade flared—a cold, searing white that wasn’t light but revelation, slicing through the chamber like truth unwelcome.
The corpse of the Nameless Queen shuddered.
Ashmire groaned in its bonds.
Chains of iron and bone quivered and snapped, not all at once, but one by one—each breaking with a scream. Not metal, not magic—will. The old seals cracked as if the stone wept to release them. The corpse gave no final breath, no last twitch. It simply yielded, as if the blade no longer required permission.
With a sound like bone grinding against thunder, Telaryn drew Ashmire from the ruined breast of her ancestor.
The crypt went silent.
Then the world convulsed.
Ashmire pulsed in her hands—too large, too heavy, yet weightless. Like holding a heartbeat made of steel. Her arm spasmed, not in pain, but in recognition. Veins lit beneath her skin—first red, then silver, then black. Her eyes rolled, and for a moment, Alisha’s scream was distant, muffled, wrong, as though heard underwater.
The throne cracked behind her, falling into ash.
And the corpse—the Nameless Queen—collapsed into herself and was gone. Not vanished. Not dust. Drawn in.
Telaryn’s knees hit the floor. Ashmire remained upright in her grip, humming now with whispers layered over whispers, a thousand voices singing a name none of them could remember but all of them obeyed.
The air became liquid.
Walls bent. Murals slithered like painted things waking up. The crypt tilted sideways—then upward—then inside-out, though Telaryn did not fall. She drifted. Light became ash became wind became thought.
The Queen’s voice came then—not in words, but in memory.
You are already broken.
I offer you shape.
You are already burned.
I offer you fire.
You are already mine.
I was always you.
Alisha was calling her name. Reaching. Crying. But Telaryn didn’t hear her anymore.
Because she was standing beneath a black sun, on a throne of bone and blood, with an army of ash rising from a thousand fallen kingdoms—and her name was not her own.
And the blade in her hand laughed with her voice.