Lain stirred first. The air still smelled faintly of rosewater. Beside her, Sena blinked awake, her hair tousled, a sleepy smile curling at the edge of her mouth.
The knock came again. “Sister Lain?” called a man’s voice.
“Just a moment!” Lain called.
Sena sighed, giggling. “That will be Edric. He starts every morning before dawn.”
Lain felt heat rise to her face. “Does he… know you’re here?”
“Oh, probably,” Sena said, entirely too cheerful for someone who was about to be caught sharing a bed with the guest of Lord Balthir. “He hears everything in this place.”
They dressed quickly, trading quiet glances and suppressed laughter as they fastened belts and brushed wool smooth. Lain reached to tuck a stray lock behind Sena’s ear. Sena, in turn, stole a brief kiss that left both of them flushed.
When Lain bent to gather her bandolier, Sena flicked her tail against Lain’s calf. “For luck,” she whispered.
Another knock. “My Lord is on his way,” Edric announced.
The two straightened at once, Sena’s playful eyes expanding into fearful plates, her ears straight and stiff like a doe hearing danger. Lain was still smoothing her collar when the door opened.
Morgan Balthir stood on the threshold, framed by the morning light. His expression betrayed surprise – then softened into something that might almost have been amusement.
“Good morning,” he said mildly. “I see you’ve both managed to greet the day ahead of schedule.”
Sena bowed her head, mortified. “My Lord, forgive my impropriety, I was only –”
He raised a hand to still her. “Peace, Sena. What you do on your day of rest is of no concern to me.” A faint smile touched his mouth. “Though I must applaud your dedication to our guest's comfort.”
Sena’s blush deepened. “Yes, my Lord.”
Morgan turned his gaze to Lain, his tone warm but unreadable. “Sister, breakfast is being served in the hall when you’re ready. Afterwards, if you’ve the strength, I’d like to show you something – an archive our scholars have kept from the days before the Spire’s rise. I think you’ll find it… illuminating.”
He looked back to Sena. “If you’d like to attend Sister Lain during the journey to the next outpost, speak with Edric. I’ll see that your duties here are covered.”
Sena’s eyes widened. “Truly, my Lord?”
“I reward loyalty where I find it.”
He inclined his head to both women and withdrew, the door closing softly behind him.
For a long moment neither spoke. Then Sena turned to Lain, still blushing but beaming all the same. “He didn’t seem angry.”
“No,” Lain said quietly, heart still pounding. “That almost makes it worse.”
They looked at each other, and laughter slipped between them again, easy and real.
The dining hall smelled of cardamom and fresh bread. Morning light slanted through the tall windows, dust motes drifting like slow snow. Lain entered to find Morgan already seated near a window, a pot of tea steaming before him.
He rose as she approached. “Sister Lain,” he said, gesturing toward the empty chair opposite him. “You slept well, I hope?”
She flushed, taking her seat. “Well enough.”
“I’m glad.” His smile was the sort that looked practiced but not false – playful, sharing her secret with some enjoyment.
A servant arrived with bread, dried fruit, and soft cheese. Lain helped herself to a slice of cardamom cake, its flavor so decadent she paused mid-chew to absorb it, her eyes half-closed in pleasure.
“You’ve color in your cheeks,” Morgan continued. “I was beginning to think the mountains had stolen it from you.”
He poured tea into her cup. The gesture felt strangely intimate, though his expression gave nothing away. She hadn’t marked just how handsome he was until this moment, with the sunlight on his face, his features sharp and clearly defined, all of him angular and lithe. “You’ll forgive me for summoning you so early. I find mornings to be the cleanest time for truth.”
Lain plucked an apricot slice from the bowl. “Truth about what?”
Morgan leaned back, studying her with quiet interest. “The past, mostly. The things your Dagorlind would rather leave buried. But first, tea.”
He ate delicately, the look of a man who’d never been truly hungry. Lain had to slow herself to meet him, the decadence of the food almost as wonderful as the meals she’d had in Vaelun.
A rush of sorrow accompanied that thought – Mallow asking her to choose – and she blinked it away with some discomfort. She would give anything to undue the last two days.
After they were finished, Morgan stood, motioning for her to follow. They passed through a side corridor lined with carved panels – reliefs of wyrms twined with stars, their shapes old and worn smooth by generations of hands. At the corridor’s end stood a door of dark wood bound in iron.
Morgan drew a key from a chain around his neck. “You’ll find this humbler than the Spire’s libraries,” he said, “but perhaps more honest.”
The lock turned with a soft click. Inside, the air was cooler, thick with the scent of parchment and ink. Shelves lined the walls from floor to ceiling, filled with scrolls, maps, and thin-bound ledgers. A long table dominated its center, the surface scattered with measuring instruments, fragments of ceramic bells, and an ancient horn carved with Kelthi runes.
Lain stopped short. “What is this?”
“The Archive,” Morgan said. “One of several. I try not to keep all the knowledge I’ve recovered in one place. Much of it was rescued from the ruins of your people’s temples. Before the Brighthand could bury them, my men found what was salvageable. Some of the pieces we’re still learning to read.”
He moved to the table, his hand brushing over a cracked tile that shimmered faintly under the light. “These are not weapons, though the Dagorlind would call them so. They’re records of the truth.”
“How did you come by all this?”
“The same way I come by everything worth keeping,” he said, tone softening. “By listening. And by saving what the powerful discard.”
He turned toward her, eyes catching the lamplight. “You understand better than most what it means to be used by those who claim divinity. The Spire would cage every voice that doesn’t serve its will. You were their jewel. I would see you made sovereign instead.”
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His words struck something raw in her, equal parts yearning and suspicion. “Why?”
“Because I’ve seen what happens when power fears what it cannot control. They fear you, Sister. They fear your Heat, your song, your lineage. Everything that makes you who you are. I would rather see that power turned toward freedom.”
He let the silence settle, heavy and deliberate. “Sena will be a comfort to you on the road. She’s loyal, and loyal people are rare. I trust you’ll be kind to her.”
“I will,” Lain said quietly.
“I know.” His voice dipped. “You were meant to bring life where others bring ruin. Even your tenderness is a kind of strength.”
Her pulse thrummed in her throat. The words were perfectly pitched, devotion masked as admiration.
Morgan stepped closer, just near enough for her to feel the weight of him without touching. “You’re welcome to stay here in the Archive for as long as you wish.” He handed her the heavy key. “I’ve pulled down some histories that may be of interest, but please examine anything you are drawn to. Tomorrow we begin the journey south. There are places I want you to see. A shrine of my people that still holds great power.”
He turned to the door, pausing at the threshold. “The world remembers its saints, Lain. Even if they forget themselves.” He pivoted and left her, his footsteps echoing down the hall until they faded from her hearing.
Lain stood very still, ears turning to catch the faint creak of beams and the soft shifting of the wind outside the shutters. The Archive smelled of dust and oil and the faint sweetness of dried flowers. It was almost the scent of Elder Tanel’s office, where temptation and suppression went hand in hand.
She ran a finger along the edge of one shelf, tracing the rough grain of the wood. The texts were arranged without an order she could recognize: fragments of stone inscribed with runes beside stacks of Dagorlind Vellum, old songs written in ink that had long since gone brown.
She was not drawn to books. Books had always been useless to her, tales of histories that mattered little when her future was so clearly defined, her life so obviously foreshortened. She’d lived every day preparing for the moment of her death. There had been nothing else.
But one book on the table caught her eye regardless: a ledger bound in blue hide, its spine etched with the symbol of the Spire, a serpent curled around a bell.
She hesitated, then opened it.
The first pages were brittle, written in the fine, slanted script of an archivist’s hand. Chronicle of Ivath. Beneath was a diagram of the Spire as it once had been: a fortress surrounded by water, its foundations sunk deep into an immense circular basin. She’d seen this image before, a Sister tutor explaining that the city had been risen from the lake by the power of that generation’s Bellborn commanding the Underserpent.
The Underserpent is to remain in suspension beneath the water’s surface, the script read. Movement restricted by current and temperature. Sleep preserved by the song of the Bellborn.
Lain’s stomach turned. It went on to describe the twenty-year cycle, where the Underserpent’s pulse – the Deep Tuning – reaches its peak. This was called the Serpent Cycle. And here, something familiar:
Every score of years the Underserpent stirs in its depths, remembering the world. Should its breath go untempered, the seas would heave, the mountains quake, the firmament tear. In its desperation to be loose upon the earth. Therefore must the Bellborn rise, as she has since the First Dawn, to soothe the creation of the deep with her holy song.
Through her voice is born stillness; through her sacrifice, silence. For the wyrm knows the sound of its keeper’s blood, and in that sound it sleeps again.
Thus is peace maintained until the next twenty year tide, when the song must be renewed, lest the world remember its hunger.
Beneath the drawing of the basin was a second diagram of the wyrm itself, enormous, coiled in sleep. The water above it was marked containment pool. Chains, labeled divine tethers, looped around its body and anchored to the structure above.
Without anchor, the beast would burrow and nest, another line read. Its stirring would awaken the faults beneath Ivath. Connected thus to the Underveins, the Serpent would find its brethren and restore power to those who seek to harm us.
What were Underveins? Lain had never heard the term before, but it seemed to be some sort of pathway, or channel, that connected the wyrms to one another.
They were keeping the Underserpent suspended in a pool above the earth. To keep it from finding its place underground, where it belonged. To keep it from speaking to its kin.
She shuddered at the horror of it.
She turned the page. There were notes here in a different hand, added later, blunt and utilitarian.
Kelthi settlement dismantled. Starbloom yields diminishing. Survivors relocated to Ivath interior.
Ivath once belonged to the Kelthi.
She could almost see it: the wide valley filled with Starbloom, the wyrm sleeping deep beneath their roots. The Dagorlind had dug it up somehow, bound it, caged it in water so it could not nest in its own earth.
It wasn’t the wyrm’s awakening that caused earthquakes. It was its captivity.
She shut the book too hard, dust rising from the pages. The sound echoed in the stillness, startling her.
Slowly, she ran her thumb along the worn spine, tracing the outline of the chained wyrm. The image burned behind her eyes.
If the Underserpent was meant to sleep in the soil, to hear the voices of its brothers, then every quake she had been taught to fear, every tremor they had told her to sing into the next valley, had been the song of something unbearably alone.
Her breath came unevenly. She pressed her palm to the table, grounding herself against the trembling in her chest.
The world remembers its saints, Morgan had said.
But saints could be liars, too, couldn’t they?
Her gaze drifted to the fragments of bells scattered across the table, each bearing Kelthi symbols that shimmered faintly in the light.
She thought of the wyrm below the Spire, breathing through chains, its voice buried beneath stone and water. Thought of the way the grove had opened to her when she sang, the answering hum of something ancient and kind.
A realization unfolded within her, slow and certain as dawn.
The world didn’t need its gods woken. It needed them healed.
Lain closed the ledger carefully, as if the act itself might disturb the wyrm’s restless dreams.
Her gaze drifted to a shelf near the corner, where books sat forgotten. She ran her fingertips along a spine, half-afraid the binding might turn to dust beneath her touch. So many voices, all silenced and stored.
She knew why the others were here – the broken, the exiled, those the Dagorlind had betrayed or abused. But Morgan? She didn’t know what drove him. What did a man like that – a Veinwright – want with the Underserpent?
Her thoughts circled back to the morning in the woods, the bloodwyrms rising, then bowing to him.
Mallow’s voice haunted her memory: They were made by Veinwrights. And Morgan had quieted them with a word.
She was drawn by a shelf of thick ledgers sealed with red wax. One bore a title carved into its spine in archaic script: On the Art and Extinction of the Veinwrights.
She broke the wax and opened it.
The first illustration was anatomical, a human form rendered in dark ink with lines tracing from the heart outward into the limbs. Along those lines were tiny notations: sanguinal pathways, black filament, avian striae. A second page showed an arm covered in faint feathers, iridescent and thin as oil. Beneath, the text read:
The mark of the Veinwright, those who could write will upon the living blood.
Through their craft were born the Bloodwyrms and the bound hosts that served them – the Veinwritten. Their power was unholy, mastery forbidden.
Lain’s stomach turned. She remembered the way Morgan’s eyes had looked in the forest, silver and depthless, how her Tuning had felt nothing from him at all, as though his song had been hollowed out.
Veinwrights were the makers of monsters. And now one of them wanted to free the Underserpent.
She flipped to another page, featuring a diagram of a man with feathered wings extended. She gasped at the angelic beauty of the figure. How could anything so beautiful be terrible?
The next page had a series of treed diagrams – family names etched on each branch, marriages, children. One by one, the branches narrowed; someone had drawn an X through most of them.
Extinction.
She snapped the book shut.
She stayed there for a long time, staring at the table, until the shadows shifted and the air cooled again. When at last she rose, she took one of the broken bell fragments with her – a small thing, no bigger than her palm, etched with a sun mark of the Edran line. She didn’t know if it was coincidence or fate, but she slipped it into a bandolier pocket all the same. For a moment she considered if she was stealing; but then, Morgan wasn’t a Kelthi. It didn’t belong to him.
Then she turned toward the light spilling from the corridor, the faint sound of footsteps somewhere beyond.
Morgan had bound Mallow. Tonight, before deciding what to do next, she would find out why.