A cold that had nothing to do with the morning air had sunk its teeth into my bones, pulling me from sleep. I sat up, my breath misting before me. In the cavernous hearth, the fire had withered to a clutch of dying embers, their weak pulse a faint protest against the encroaching dark. From the kitchen, a sound—the faint, rhythmic scrape of a boot on stone.

A groan escaped my lips as I stretched my arms overhead, my body answering with a constellation of pops and cracks from a night spent on the unforgiving floor. Cassius’s sleeping roll was empty, the indentation a silent confirmation of where he’d gone.

When I entered the kitchen, the silence was a physical presence, heavy and thick as winter fog. Cassius and Seraphiel stood like statues on either side of the rough-hewn table.

Cassius met my gaze, his own weary. “Morning,” he said, the word raw with exhaustion.

“And to you,” I returned, nodding to the other figure. “Seraphiel.”

“Yes… morning,” she murmured, her attention a universe away. Her movements were a study in precision, a strange, silent ritual. Her hands glided across the tabletop, placing two cups. With a single, pale finger, she traced the rim of one before hovering the teapot above it, her lips moving in a silent count. She poured, the steaming liquid a dark ribbon in the gloom. She repeated the exact sequence with the second cup. “Sit,” she commanded, her voice flat, devoid of warmth. “Drink before it’s gone.”

I sank onto a stool, my chilled hands wrapping gratefully around the cup’s surprising heat. The first sip was a shock of warmth that spread through my chest, a welcome tide against the cold.

Seraphiel took the stool across from me, her face half-hidden as she leaned her head into her hand. The silence stretched, populated only by our soft sips and the quiet clink of porcelain on wood, each sound an intrusion. I set my cup down, the noise seeming to crack the heavy air.

It was Cassius who finally broke the spoke, his voice a gentle probe into the darkness. “Are you ready to share your story, Seraphiel?”

A short, bitter laugh, like the snap of a dry twig, escaped her. A deep breath shuddered in her chest and was released as a long, weary sigh that seemed to carry the weight of years. “I suppose,” she said, her face lifting to us, a pale mask in the dim light. “But first, a condition. You will set aside every story you have been told, every judgment you have formed. You will grant me an open mind.”

Cassius and I murmured our assent.

“There are two sides to every story,” she continued, her blind gaze drifting toward Cassius. “A truth your father was never willing to hear.” The words were aimed like darts, dipped in ancient poison. She looked away. “I cannot recall how many years it’s been… but it began when I was a student, buried in the silent, dust-choked archives of Aelindoria. My passion was for the proscribed arts. Curses.”

I nodded slowly. Cassius had said elves were free to study such things, a dangerous academic freedom, so long as the knowledge was never put to practice.

Her voice softened, a distant echo from another life. “One day, another elf sat across from me, his own texts just as forbidden as mine. Necromancy. Our shared obsession became a language only we spoke. We debated forgotten theories, we shared our discoveries. That intellectual fire blossomed into friendship, and then into love. We were married within the year.”

I couldn’t help the smile that touched my lips. “That sounds like a beautiful beginning.”

A ghost of that old joy haunted her lips before vanishing. “It was,” she said, her voice hardening, her jaw clenching. “But my husband…” She paused, as if the name itself was a venom she dared not speak. “He began to lose himself. The study became an obsession. The light in his eyes, once so bright with curiosity, began to curdle into something furtive and shadowed. The scent of grave-dirt and strange reagents clung to his robes.”

She shifted, her hands trembling in her lap. “His temper fractured. He abandoned his friends.” She turned her head toward Cassius, a hollow gesture. “Your father… he was the closest of them.

“Soon, he began slipping from Aelindoria in the dead of night. I followed him once, a shard of ice in my heart. I found him in a hidden clearing, weaving a curse with threads of shadow and bone.” Her voice dropped to a terrified whisper. “He was so consumed, he never sensed me. I fled, my own heart a frantic drum against my ribs. Who could I tell? Who do you turn to when the darkness you fear sleeps beside you? My nights became sleepless vigils while he descended, mumbling to himself, becoming a hollowed-out shell of the elf I had married.

“Then came the final night.” Her hands clenched so tightly her knuckles shone white. “He was clumsy, loud. I knew he was leaving. I followed again. But this time, something was waiting. As I reached the edge of the clearing, a searing agony erupted at the base of my skull, and the world dissolved into nothing.”

Her voice broke, becoming thin and unsteady. “When I awoke, the world was gone. Only a thick, suffocating blackness. My questing hands found… fabric. A chest that did not rise. A face that was stone-cold. Panic seized me. I screamed, not even knowing whose name to scream. When the patrols found me, I was kneeling in a necromantic circle beside my husband’s corpse. They said I’d killed him in a ritual gone wrong. That I was trying to bring him back.”

She finally looked up, her blind gaze seeming to pierce right through Cassius. “I tried to explain! I screamed the truth at your father—he knew his friend, he had seen the darkness taking root! But it was easier to believe the simple lie. It was easier to see a grieving wife turned monster than to admit his dearest friend had fallen so far.”

The first tears escaped, twin trails of liquid silver down her cheeks. “So he exiled me.”

“My father would never…” Cassius began, his brow furrowed in a knot of disbelief. “He is a just elf. There must have been evidence, a reason—”

Seraphiel’s voice turned to ice. “Oh, he had a reason. To protect the unblemished legacy of his fallen friend. For that, he condemned me. For that, he turned a deaf ear to the truth.”

Doubt warred with empathy inside me. The story was almost too perfect, a flawlessly constructed tragedy. But the grief… the grief was no performance. The tremor in her hands, the raw pain that radiated from her like heat from a forge—that was real. Looking at the broken elf before me, a wave of empathy washed over my skepticism.

“I believe you,” I said, the words out before I could reason them away.

Her head snapped toward me. “You do?” It was barely a whisper. A shuddering sob broke from her, then another, until she was weeping freely—a storm of grief unleashed after years of drought. “I’ve waited… so long…”

Cassius and I sat in heavy silence, giving the storm its space. When her sobs finally quieted to shaky breaths, he spoke, his tone measured, careful. “If what you say is true, Seraphiel, then your name must be cleared. Aelindoria will welcome you home.”

She shook her head, a flicker of old bitterness marring her features. “Home? That Aelindoria is a ghost to me now. This solitude is my home. I am too old and too tired to want anything else… except for one thing.” Her blind gaze found me. “Help me, and I will help you. Your curse, Cassius… I know how to break it. But the price is high, and the path is not for the faint of heart.”

A cold knot formed in my stomach. I leaned forward, my voice barely a whisper. “What do you need?”

She gestured vaguely towards a cluttered corner of the room. “There is a mountain men call Silverpeak. On my bookshelf, you will find the maps. An herb grows on its slopes and nowhere else on this earth. It is called Moonless Bloom. I require it.”

Cassius shifted. “If this herb is so vital, why us? Surely others have come to you for aid.”

A wry, humorless smile touched her lips. “The desperate and the greedy find their way here, not the trustworthy. And certainly not the kind.” I thought of the cutthroat faces in Coral Bluffs, and I understood completely.

I met her blind gaze with a firm nod. “We’ll bring it to you.”

“Good,” she said simply. “In a large tome titled ‘Ancient Herbs,’ you will find a drawing of the bloom. Study it. Do not bring me the wrong plant. Now, take what you need from my stores. Be safe.”

We rose and moved to the bookshelf, pulling down a rolled-up map and a heavy, dust-covered book. All the while, I felt her presence behind us, a silent, watchful judge. As our hands touched the door latch, her voice, now stripped of all vulnerability, sliced through the silence.

“One more thing.”

We turned. Her head was tilted, her focus entirely on Cassius.

“Thalia, you may go. Cassius stays. I require a private word.”