The Guild Tower – Below the Stone Council Chamber
The Council gathered in silence beneath the bones of the city.
The chamber was a circle of stone thrones, older than any of the men and women who now occupied them. The floor, carved with glyphs long outlawed by their own laws, thrummed faintly as if remembering something it wasn't supposed to. In the center, a brazier burned with violet flame, scentless but consuming.
High Arbiter Voss leaned forward, eyes sunken deeper than even the candlelight dared to illuminate. "The Ashkeeper has gone beyond its binding."
A murmur, low and fragmented, stirred like rats beneath robes.
"The third glyph awakened without our sanction," said Magistrate Elden, the youngest on the council. "And the black reeds along the Hollow River are dying. We are no longer dealing with metaphor."
"There is no metaphor in blood," Voss whispered. "Only memory."
Lady Caldria—the one who never wore shoes, who claimed it let her hear the city better—stood. "We sealed the vaults for a reason. Whatever they're triggering, it's older than Lenora. Older than us. And it's bleeding through."
"Lenora Veyne," someone spat her name. "She is the thread."
"She is the needle," corrected Voss. "But it was Cassian who sewed the first cut."
A silence fell as something unseen shifted in the glyph-carved stone beneath their feet. The Council had built this chamber to withstand prophecy, heresy, and worse. But now the stone wept. Hairline fractures, no wider than a breath, formed beneath the elder seat. And from one of them… a petal. Red. Soft as breath.
A spider lily.
Blackbriar's Edge – Hours Later
The forest was not quiet.
There were no birds—only the creak of frozen leaves and the hum of insects that had no business surviving in winter. The trees stood like witnesses too afraid to speak.
Dorian stopped walking.
Lenora noticed the change in his posture before he said a word. "What is it?"
He turned. "Do you hear that?"
She listened. For a moment, nothing—then a whisper. No, a chime. Very faint. As if something metal was swinging in the ruins ahead.
"The bells," Lenora whispered. "Same as the chapel."
They stood before a rusted gate, tangled in briar and bone-vine. It groaned as Dorian pushed it open. Beyond, the remnants of Blackbriar awaited: a manor sunken into the earth like a corpse. Twisted statues loomed—some broken, others worse for still standing. Moss clung to them like regret.
As they walked through the threshold, Lenora's glyphs burned under her sleeves. But she didn't speak of it.
Instead, she looked at Dorian and said quietly, "The Council is watching us."
Dorian didn't laugh for once. "Let them. We're already ghosts to them."
Inside the Vault – Subterranean Passage beneath Blackbriar
The vault door should have been sealed by six wards.
Only two flickered.
Lenora reached toward the bloodied lock. The glyph on her palm—one she hadn't drawn—pulsed faintly.
"I shouldn't be able to open this," she whispered.
"Then don't," Dorian said, stepping forward.
But it was too late. The vault recognized her. It sighed open—not like stone, but like flesh yielding to memory.
Inside was a small chamber, circular and low-ceilinged. Glyphs crawled across the stone like ivy. Some were recent. Others breathed.
In the center: a single stone cradle.
Inside it, wrapped in mourning silk and bound in ritual thorns, lay a mask.
Dorian stepped forward. "That's not yours."
"No," Lenora said. "It's hers."
She didn't have to say who.
Because something in the room exhaled. A soft sound, like cloth being drawn from bone. The air thickened with the scent of lilies.
And in the far corner, behind the veil of shadows, a figure began to form.
Blackbriar Vault – Beneath the Earth
The figure in the shadows sharpened by degrees—first a whisper of shape, then the pale suggestion of movement. There was no sound of feet on stone, no rustle of breath or cloth. Only the slow, deliberate coalescence of something that had been waiting far too long.
A veil.
A mouthless mask.
A white robe threaded with what looked like spider silk and ash.
"The Mourner," Dorian said, though his voice was barely breath.
Lenora didn't step back.
She stepped forward.
Her gloves were already off.
"Why are you here?" she whispered, her voice low and steady, even as the glyph on her palm burned against her skin.
The Mourner's head tilted—not in response, but like a puppet remembering it once had a soul. Her hands, pale as frost and adorned with old rings and faded sigils, lifted slowly.
She pointed to the cradle.
To the mask.
To Lenora.
And then she spoke. Not aloud. Not in a way sound could carry.
"The binding failed. You remember now."
The voice slipped into Lenora's mind like water into cracked porcelain. It wasn't unfamiliar. In fact, it felt like something she'd once heard in the womb.
"I don't remember everything," Lenora said, her voice hoarse. "Only pieces. Cassian. The circle. The snow—"
"The rite was severed. The heart split."
"The boy lived."
Lenora staggered. "He's alive?"
The Mourner did not answer in words.
She lifted one trembling hand and touched the air.
Behind her, the vault wall shimmered. Not light. Not fire. Just… a window into something other.
Dorian moved, fast—his arm in front of Lenora's without thinking. "What the hell is that?"
It was a vision.
A memory.
A present, happening elsewhere.
A boy, grown now. Beautiful in the way rot is beautiful—too still, too perfect, skin pale as chalk, eyes burning with glyphlight.
Cassian.
Standing in a chamber lined with spider lilies. Before him knelt two figures in mourning white, drawing fresh symbols in ash and bone.
"He lives," the Mourner said again. "And he remembers what you forgot."
The window vanished.
Silence returned. Too heavy. Too thick.
And then the Mourner stepped forward—closer than she'd ever come before.
She reached out a gloved hand and pressed it lightly to Lenora's shoulder.
"He is waiting. And he is not alone."
Later, just outside the vault
The cold was worse now. Dorian lit a cigarette with hands that trembled, then offered it silently. Lenora shook her head.
"You're shaking," he said.
"So are you," she answered.
He laughed once. Bitter. "It's not every day your dead ex-boyfriend turns out to be a cult leader."
Lenora looked at him, crimson eyes heavy with memory. "He wasn't my lover."
"No?" Dorian exhaled. "Then why does it feel like he still has part of you?"
Her silence was answer enough.