3.5 KiB
Halven descended the narrow stair behind the old cairn at the edge of the town, his breath fogging in the cold, his lantern flickering with each step. He needed stillness. Not the stillness of a guarded breath in court or the edge of battle, but the kind that only came when no one was watching. The kind hidden beneath stone and silence. He moved slowly, not because of age—though age had come for him in its quiet way—but because haste had no place among the dead.
The air down here smelled of old ink, damp stone, and resignation. Walls bowed slightly, as if bearing the weight of memory. There had been no order to the archive for years—perhaps decades. Scrolls were scattered across warped desks, shelves leaned as if sighing beneath time’s weight, and somewhere in the deeper dark, snowmelt dripped in a steady rhythm, like a heartbeat left behind.
He had always found comfort in places like this. Forgotten spaces. Not sacred, exactly, but respectful. Spaces that remembered, even when the world above chose to forget.
Halven lit two more lanterns and set them on rusted wall-hooks. Warm light spread across the cluttered chamber—revealing a collapsed shelving rack where a tapestry of the old faith had half-melded into the floor, a nest of bundled scrolls tied with faded silk, and something else.
A blood-stained ledger, cracked open along its binding.
He hesitated before reaching for it. His fingers were ink-stained still from years at court. He had once held the ledgers of a kingdom—read balance sheets from port towns, and written royal decrees that bore the signature of Telaryn’s father. But those were numbers. Declarations. This was history carved in ash and ink.
He sat, knees groaning, and unfurled the ledger across a fractured desk. Beneath layers of soot and parchment-mildew, the genealogy emerged: lines of descent inked in sweeping curves, names nested within names. But midway through the tree, the script faltered. One branch had been burned away deliberately—and where a name should have been, there was only a sigil:
A black crown with no base. A sword inverted, wrapped in thorn.
Halven swallowed.
He’d seen that sigil before—half-buried in dust, carved into the wall behind the First Throne as they’d fled the Hall of Kings. He hadn’t spoken of it then. He wasn’t sure anyone but him had noticed. But here it was again—not gone. Buried.
He flipped a few brittle pages further. His breath caught.
A legend. Fragmented. Ancient Tul, inked in faded red.
She who lit the fire beneath the mountain,
Held court where the ash did fall like rain.
Her blade took no light, and no warmth did she give—
But the spirits kneeled in silence,
And the dead remembered her name.
Below it, someone had scratched an annotation in a younger hand—Temple script, perhaps a few centuries old:
Her name is no longer spoken. But her bloodline remains.
Halven exhaled slowly, as though afraid to disturb the dust further. A chill ran down his back.
He glanced toward the stairwell. He was still alone.
But some part of him, the part that had lived long in the shadows of court, in whispers and riddles and politics dressed as loyalty, understood what he had just uncovered.
Telaryn was not just heir to a fallen kingdom. She was heir to something older. A throne never abdicated. A name never spoken. A fire never extinguished.
He pressed a hand gently to the page, feeling the brittle parchment crinkle beneath his palm.
“The bards won’t sing this”, he said quietly. “But it will matter. Ancients help us all—it will matter.”