Eryshae

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Mira

The scent of ink and old smoke met her before the door even creaked open. Mira knocked once; sharp, deliberate; then let herself in.

The study was dimmer than usual. No candlelight tonight, only the low-glow of leystone veins running through the walls and under the floor, pulsing with a sickly orange hue. The shadows breathed around the edges of the room, coiling in corners like half-remembered dreams.

Ruwan stood at the center of it, as if summoned by her thoughts alone; shirt undone, sleeves rolled, coat flung haphazardly across the back of a carved chair. He looked thinner. Not in body, but in presence; like something inside him had stretched too far and refused to snap back.

His fingers trembled where they hovered above a map burned into cured vellum. A lattice of ley fractures cut across it, marked with rust-colored ink. Or blood. Mira didn't ask.

She stepped in and shut the door behind her with a soft click. Ruwan did not turn. Only his voice moved, low and hoarse, as though scraped raw from chanting secrets too long.

"Well?" Mira drew in a breath. "It's done," she said, her tone even, clipped. "The Titan's Amber reacted. Sam collapsed. There's no question; he's dead."

Ruwan exhaled. A laugh, or maybe a gasp. She couldn't tell. "But," she added, stepping closer, "there were complications."

That got his attention. He turned then, eyes fever-bright, sunken but alight with the fire of obsession. His hands twitched at his sides like spiders waiting to pounce. "What kind of complications?" he asked as he stepped closer. "I saw them," Mira said quietly. "Both of them."

"Who?" he asked sharply. "The Guardian of Eryshae." Her voice wavered, just slightly, but it was there. "And Deus. In the sky. In the Grove. They were present. Fully. Visibly. The Grove shook. People dropped to their knees. It wasn't a vision; it was real."

For a moment, nothing moved.

Then Ruwan's breath hitched. "You saw him," he said, his voice ragged with awe. "You saw Deus?" Mira stilled. "You did?"

She nodded, jerky and nervous. "I felt him rip through the veil. His shape; his weight. The whole sky groaned."

He stepped closer, eyes locked on her as if trying to read the memory directly from her bones. "Was he angry?"

"No," Mira said. "He felt indifferent, but he declared judgment." Ruwan's eyebrows rose higher. "And the Guardian?" Ruwan asked, almost spitting the word like a curse. "Did she interfere?"

"No," Mira said softly. "She bore witness. She… accepted it. She said the bargain had been upheld." Ruwan tilted his head back and laughed; a breathless, brittle sound, like a man laughing after crawling out of his own grave. "Of course she did," he whispered. "Of course she did. That's how this begins."

He turned back to the table and slammed both hands down onto the edge of the map. "The first war was blood and bark and starlight," he muttered. "But this, this will be truth. At last."

Mira watched him. For the first time, really watched. The wild gleam in his eye. The tremor in his jaw. The way his breath trembled as if caught between a sermon and a seizure. He had gotten what he wanted. And he was falling apart from it.

She did not speak. She only stared, the memory of Sam's face; just before the bark consumed him; burning behind her eyes like an afterimage from a lightning flash. Her hand brushed the empty chain at her collarbone, where the pendant once hung. And for the first time since she'd left the Grove… she wasn't sure if she had succeeded.

Ruwan's hands curled over the map like talons. The parchment crackled beneath his fingers. Then; his head snapped toward her.

"And the Princess?" he asked, voice low and seething. "Where is Vael? Why isn't she in chains at my feet this very moment?" Mira did not flinch. But she straightened slightly, arms folded behind her back with practiced grace. "There was no moment," she replied. "Not a clean one."

"No moment?" he echoed, incredulous. "You had her in the center of chaos. Her champion dead. Her court scattered. The Grove in disarray. What more did you need?"

"More than a sword at her back and a dozen blades in the air," Mira said coolly. "I made a call." Ruwan's nostrils flared. "You made a mistake." Mira's jaw tightened, but she didn't speak. She simply held his gaze, letting his anger wash against the unbroken stone of her face.

"Timing matters," she said at last. "There will be another opportunity. One less obvious. One where her capture doesn't turn her into a martyr in a forest full of ghosts." Ruwan stared at her a moment longer. Then turned away with a guttural scoff, muttering something in an old tongue; half curse, half invocation.

Mira remained still. But the moment hung like a blade over a thread. She should have struck. Taken Vael. Fulfilled every command to the letter. But she hadn't. Because something had happened. Because when Sam fell and the Grove broke and the sky split with gods;

Vael had run.

She had screamed for him.

She had fallen to her knees.

She had held him.

And something in Mira had cracked, too small to name but too sharp to ignore. Not out of sympathy. Not out of softness. But out of guilt.

She had done what was necessary.

She had followed orders.

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But as she watched the bark twist over Sam's ribs, saw the golden glow flicker out behind his eyes, a terrible truth had unfurled in her chest:

She hadn't wanted this. She had killed a man who believed in laughter. In second chances. In them. And now the silence in her was louder than Ruwan's fury. She stepped back once, hands still clasped behind her. "I'll find her," Mira said quietly. "Soon. When it matters most." Ruwan didn't answer. But his silence was permission. And that was enough… for now.

Ruwan moved without a sound; like a shadow shedding skin. He reached beneath the great central table, fingers brushing aside a heavy cloth. When he rose again, he held something wrapped in a velvet shroud the color of dried blood.

Mira watched as he peeled it back. The amber glowed before the final fold was undone; its light a deep, molten gold, pulsing like a heart behind resin. Within its depths, fragments moved: tiny veins of petrified vine, motes of fossilized root, and something darker still; a spiral that was not carved, but grown.

The Titan's Amber. Whole. Complete. Ruwan lifted it in both hands like a priest might cradle the skull of a saint. "If a sliver could do that…" he breathed, voice ragged, reverent, burning, "…then imagine what the full piece of Amber could do."

The study dimmed beneath its glow, as if the world itself bowed to its power. Mira said nothing. Because beneath the awe in his voice was something worse: belief.

Not in a cause.

Not in a nation.

But in the idea that control, complete and divine, was his right. He smiled faintly, eyes transfixed by the spiraling heart within the amber. "We're close," he whispered. "So close, Mira. All it takes is one more fracture. One more root to snap."

He turned toward her; but the light that lit his face was not warmth. It was firelight on ruin. Mira bowed with the precise calm she had perfected over years of hiding her true thoughts; and turned to go.

The winds outside the Temple Grove had died. The smoke no longer choked. The blood had begun to dry. But the stillness was worse than the chaos had been.

Mira stepped into what remained of the sacred clearing. The trees still pulsed faintly with residual power. Ash clung to her boots. Petals that had once rained down like blessings now lay trampled beneath boots and bodies alike.

At the center of it all; beneath the gnarled branches where gods had spoken; lay him. Sam.

Not fully man.

Not fully tree.

His form was twisted, half-oak, half-blood. Vines curled up his arms like veins made of bark. Blossoms still clung to parts of him; sunflowers, now wilted, curling at the edges like prayers unanswered.

Where his heart had once glowed golden… a dark, jagged void remained. Herbalist Myrtle sat cross-legged beside him, sweat glistening at her temples, both hands hovering in intricate motion above his chest. Roots pulsed around him like arteries trying to remember what to carry. The air smelled of crushed moss and copper.

"He is in stasis," Myrtle murmured, not looking up. "But barely. The Guardian's power preserved what it could. The body remains. The spirit… flickers." Mira said nothing. But it was Vael who turned.

Her eyes rimmed red, her ceremonial cloak torn and streaked with blood. She had not moved since Sam collapsed. She had not wept in front of anyone.

But Mira saw it; in the way her shoulders trembled. The way her hands kept clenching and unclenching, as if still trying to hold onto him.

"He shouldn't have died," Vael spat. "Not here. Not like that. He didn't deserve this."

Mira stayed still. The sacred Grove had grown silent. But Vael's breathing was not. It came in shallow, jagged inhales; each one sharper than the last.

Mira stood a few paces behind, silent as shadow. Myrtle crouched on the other side, her face drawn with strain, her hands hovering over Sam's chest in steady motion. The elder herbalist whispered in the old tongue, lips barely moving, weaving threads of breath and leaf and light to hold his soul inside the husk that remained.

The silence cracked. Vael spoke. Low. Measured. Cold. "I don't know who did this." She turned slowly, eyes rimmed in red but blazing with fury. She looked at Myrtle. Then at Mira. She held both in her gaze. "But I swear to the Guardian and the Grove itself; whoever did this to him…"

Her voice wavered; just once. "…will pay." Mira's breath caught in her throat. Vael turned fully now, standing tall, shadows slicing down her cheeks like warpaint. Her ceremonial cloak fluttered in the breeze; ragged, bloodied, still half-glowing from the echoes of the ritual. "They won't die clean. They won't die quick." She stepped forward, her voice rising.

"They will feel everything he felt. A thousandfold. Every moment of agony. Every heartbeat that failed him. I will etch it into their bones before I burn them."

Her fists clenched. Mira could feel the heat radiating off her; not from magic, but from rage sharpened to a blade. And for the briefest second, Mira saw what made Vael terrifying:

Not her power. Not her title. But her grief. Grief that had not broken her. Grief that was about to become something else.

Vael turned away, kneeling again beside Sam's body. She brushed a hand over the bark on his chest; so gently it nearly undid Mira. She didn't see the flicker of guilt cross Mira's face. Didn't see the way her fingers trembled. Didn't hear the scream Mira held inside. Because Vael didn't know.

Not yet. But when she found out, Mira knew. She would not get the chance to explain. Mira didn't speak. She stood rooted, her body still, but her insides… weren't.

The fire of Vael's vow still lingered in the air, burning like incense left too long over open flame. The smell of blood, bark, and burnt silk clung to the Grove like memory. And in the quiet that followed her promise, Mira felt something inside her begin to slip. Just slightly. Just enough. Her fingers curled at her sides.

You didn't stab him.

You didn't twist the blade.

But the amber had. The amber you placed. She had told herself it was obedience. Duty. That she was embedded, nothing more. A thread woven through the tapestry of rebellion. But when Vael spoke those words; a thousandfold; Mira knew.

The reckoning wouldn't stop at whoever forged the blade. It would find whoever handed it over. Her gaze drifted to Sam's broken form. The vines curled around his limbs like grieving hands. His face was still; too still; and yet even now, even in stasis, she could feel something in the air near him. Like the embers of a storm that refused to go out.

She remembered his laugh. Gods, that laugh. She remembered the way he'd handed her a bite of cake with frosting on his fingers. She remembered not hating it. Mira's jaw clenched.

This is not weakness. This is strategy.

This is not guilt. It's proximity.

She told herself that. But her mouth was dry. Her chest tight. She looked at Vael again; kneeling beside him like a queen mourning her fallen general; and something in Mira's stomach twisted so sharply she nearly doubled.

You could tell her, a voice whispered. Right now. You could fall to your knees. Spill everything. The orders. The pendant. The lies.

And then what? Then she kills you. And maybe that's what you want. Mira looked down at her hands. Perfect. Still. The hands of a professional. But her thoughts were not still. They scraped and clawed inside her like birds behind glass. You didn't stab him, she told herself again.

But her mind betrayed her, dragging her back; back to the day Ruwan gave a different girl a different shard of Titan's Amber. Back to the training hall bathed in firelight and fear, when one of her sisters in the assassin's ranks had bowed her head and accepted the amber like a blessing.

It hadn't been a blessing. It had been a curse. Mira had watched her friend's veins turn black. Watched her scream as her body convulsed, her skin breaking open to reveal bark, vines, bone. Watched her attack the instructors. Watched her scream until her voice stopped working; and the thing she had become no longer remembered her name. Ruwan had called it a "success." The amber did what it was supposed to. Just like it had with Sam.

Mira closed her eyes. And in the darkness behind her eyelids, all she could see were sunflowers.nBlooming from bark. Eyes of fire. And the expression on Sam's face when he reached for Vael; reached for life; as if she were the last tether left.

Mira's hands finally moved. Slowly, she touched the pendant at her throat, the one Ruwan gave her. She pressed it until it hurt. And in the silence of the sacred Grove, Mira stood behind Vael and Myrtle, swallowed whole by the promise she had helped unleash; And the guilt that was finally learning how to grow roots.