The castle walls whispered.
Seraphina pressed her palm against the cold stone of the vault, feeling the vibration beneath her fingertips—a pulse like a slow-beating heart. The golden feather's dust still clung to her skin, its metallic scent mixing with the iron tang of blood and the lingering stench of the Sleeper's passing.
Lysandra groaned on the floor, her ice-blue eyes fluttering open. Kaelan's hands, slick with her blood, trembled as he helped her sit up against the rubble-strewn wall. The wound at her side had stopped bleeding, but the flesh around it had taken on a strange, silvery sheen, like moonlight on still water.
"It's inside me," Lysandra whispered, her fingers hovering over the injury. Her breath fogged in the suddenly chilled air. "I can feel it."
Kaelan's jaw tightened. He reached for his missing sword out of reflex, his empty hand closing around air. The scar on his face stood out livid against his pallor, the old wound pulsing with a faint golden light that hadn't been there before.
Seraphina moved to kneel beside them, her own body protesting every movement. The circlet was gone—dissolved into feathers, into dust, into memory—but its absence left a strange hollow between her temples, as though part of her mind had been carved away.
The castle shuddered around them, a deep, groaning vibration that sent fresh cracks spiderwebbing across the vault ceiling. Dust rained down, catching in Lysandra's golden hair like morbid snow.
"We need to move," Kaelan said, his voice rough. He slid an arm around Lysandra's waist, hauling her upright with a grunt of effort. "These walls won't hold much longer."
Lysandra's breath hitched as her feet touched the ground. "The western wing," she gasped. "The library. There are records there—"
"Of what?" Seraphina demanded, catching her sister's other arm.
Lysandra's smile was all teeth. "What your ghost mother did to bind the Sleeper the first time."
The library was a ruin of toppled shelves and scattered parchment.
The red star's final pulse had shattered every window, leaving glass shards glittering like cursed diamonds across the bloodstained carpets. The air smelled of smoke and spilt ink, of old knowledge and older secrets laid bare.
Lysandra collapsed into a chair by the hearth, her silver-tinged wound gleaming in the firelight. Kaelan prowled the perimeter, his missing sword clearly preying on his mind, his fingers twitching at his sides as if imagining the hilt within his grip.
Seraphina moved to the oldest section—the forbidden alcove where the first queen's grimoires had been chained to their stands for centuries. The largest tome lay open on a lectern, its pages filled with spidery script that danced before her eyes.
Then the words resolved.
"The price is blood," she read aloud, her voice echoing in the hollow silence. "Not of the sacrifice, but of the sacrificer. Not death, but memory. To bind the darkness, the light must forget itself."
Kaelan went very still. "What does that mean?"
A drop of blood fell onto the page. Seraphina touched her brow—the spot where the circlet had fused with her skin. Her fingers came away red.
Lysandra laughed, the sound edged with hysteria. "It means Mother didn't just die that night." She pressed a hand to her silvered wound, her eyes glowing unnaturally bright. "She let the castle eat her, Piece by piece. Memory by memory."
The hearth fire flared suddenly blue, casting long shadows across the walls. And in those shadows—
Figures. Dozens of them. All women. All queens.
All forgotten.
The hearth fire's sudden blue flare painted the library in ghostly hues, casting long, wavering shadows that seemed to twist and coil like living things. Seraphina's breath caught in her throat as the shadows deepened, taking shape—tall, regal figures with hollow eyes and flowing hair, their forms woven from smoke and memory. They stood shoulder to spectral shoulder, a silent chorus of queens past, their mouths moving in soundless unison. The air grew thick with the scent of burnt rosemary and funeral lilies, so overpowering that Seraphina's eyes watered.
Lysandra gasped, her fingers digging into the arms of her chair as her wound pulsed silver. The light spread through her veins like liquid moonlight, tracing intricate patterns beneath her skin that matched the ancient runes carved into the vault walls. "They're not just shadows," she whispered, her voice echoing strangely, as if multiple voices spoke through her. "They're anchors. Pieces of every queen who ever bound the Sleeper, torn from history and sealed in the stones."
Kaelan staggered back, his boot crushing a shattered inkpot beneath his heel. The missing sword's absence seemed to pain him more than any wound, his empty hand flexing at his side as golden light flickered along his scar—a mark Seraphina now realized was no battle wound, but something far older. The castle's trembling intensified, books leaping from splintered shelves as the very foundations groaned in protest.
Seraphina reached for the open grimoire, her bloody fingertips smearing the page as she turned it with trembling hands. The ink shimmered, rearranging itself before her eyes into a single, stark sentence that burned itself into her vision:
"The last queen must choose: to remember is to destroy."
The ghostly figures stepped forward in unison, their translucent hands outstretched. The temperature plummeted, frost crackling across the broken windowpanes as their silent chorus filled Seraphina's mind with visions—
A sword forged from a dying star's light, plunged into the heart of the first darkness.
A crown of thorns woven from a queen's sacrifice, its bite deeper than any blade.
*And beneath it all, the terrible, whispering truth: the Sleeper was never the enemy. It was the prisoner.
The fire snuffed out.
In the sudden darkness, Lysandra's silvered wound blazed like a beacon—and from its light, a single word took shape in the air, hovering between them like a promise and a curse:
Remember.
The word Remember hung suspended in the air, its letters shimmering with silver fire that cast jagged shadows across the ruined library. Seraphina reached out instinctively, her fingers passing through the glowing word—and the moment she touched it, the world dissolved into memory.
She was no longer standing in the broken library, but in a vast, starless cavern beneath the castle. The air here was thick with the scent of damp earth and something metallic—like blood on ancient stone. Before her loomed the bone-throne from her visions, its surface carved with runes that pulsed faintly in the gloom.
And upon that throne sat the first queen.
Valeria the Forgotten.
Her face was both young and impossibly ancient, her dark hair streaked with silver, her eyes twin pools of liquid gold. She wore no crown, but a circlet of living flame danced above her brow, its light revealing the truth of the cavern—the walls were not stone, but flesh, veined and pulsing, the castle's foundations built upon something alive and dreaming.
"You see now," Valeria whispered, her voice layered with echoes of all the queens who had come after. "The Sleeper was never our enemy. It was the first of us—the queen who came before queens, who gave her body to become the land, her blood to water the fields, her bones to build these very walls."
The vision rippled. Seraphina gasped as new knowledge flooded her—
The binding had never been to contain the darkness.
It had been to make the world forget the sacrifice.
To make the people believe their safety came from crowns and swords rather than the slow, eternal devouring of royal flesh.
The first queen's golden eyes met hers. "The cycle must end, daughter. Remember us—truly remember—and the feast will cease."
The vision shattered.
Seraphina collapsed to her knees in the library, the word Remember now burned into her palm. Across the room, Lysandra convulsed, silver light pouring from her wound as the ghost queens' whispers filled the air—
"The blood remembers."
"The stones hunger."
"The last queen must choose."
Kaelan roared in pain as his scar split open, golden light erupting from the wound—and in that light, Seraphina finally understood.
The scar wasn't a wound at all.
It was a seal.
And it was breaking.