Light became ash, and ash became air.
When Myrren hit the floor, she wasn’t sure if it was stone or dream; the cold bit her palms but left no imprint. Around her, the palace corridors were gone, replaced by a wavering haze that smelled of violets spiked with resin and something colder, onyx dust, memory-ground. She crawled to where the token should have been, but only black flakes glimmered in the torchlight, gathering themselves into a faint spiral like a heartbeat on the floor. 

Light cracked like glass and went out.

Myrren hit a cold stone on her knees, palms skidding through ash. The corridor had shifted, not the same angle as before, not the same torches. Smoke hung in veils, sweeter than common incense, wrong-sweet, the kind that hummed behind the eyes.

Memory-drug. Not court perfume. A hand in her thoughts.

She clawed for the dropped token. It should have been shattered; she’d watched it break. But only black flakes glittered across the flagstones, arranged. No, not arranged, gathered into the faint curl of a spiral, as if the stone had remembered its shape even in death.

The Seer’s words throbbed in her skull: Every loop is a lie. Every kiss is a poison.

Footsteps echoed, guards, distant but closing. Between their beats she felt a second pull, quieter and more treacherous: the tether. As if Corven were somewhere down the passage, silence reaching for her pulse. She should rise, run toward the shadows she knew. Instead she forced herself upright and turned toward the Spiral Hall doors.

They stood ajar.

Inside, the braziers guttered low, filling the chamber with syrupy haze. In the bowl on the dais, the liquid silver had gone still, skinning over with a thin film patterned like frost ferns. To the left of it, someone had pinned a strip of vellum to the railing with a slender bone needle. The vellum was blank. The needle was not. Its head had been carved into a tiny spiral crowned by nine thorns.

Her breath stuttered. She did not know the sigil, but her body did. A shiver moved through her like recognition. The resin in the air shifted again, less floral now, more mineral, dragging her back through fading moments, a hand on the back of her head guiding the picture she would remember tomorrow.

“Who are you?” Myrren whispered to the empty hall. “What have you done to me?”

The air answered with a soft susurrus, as if a hundred brushes drew along parchment at once. For a heartbeat she saw them not with her eyes but with her sense of scent. The absence of it, the dark figures at old rituals, faces masked in bone and black glass, threads of memory braided and unbraided like hair. The vision flickered. The room emptied again, leaving only her breath and the clink of a chain settling somewhere out of sight.

The guards’ voices sharpened outside: “…by order of the Queen, search the Seer’s wing!”

Myrren stepped to the dais. The bone needle gleamed. When she reached for it, the frost-pattern on the bowl’s surface fractured into a tiny spiral. one, two, three turns, before melting back to silver.

Not divine. Engineered.

The vellum shivered in a draft that did not touch her skin, and words ghosted up as if written from beneath: BE SILENT AND LIVE. SPEAK AND VANISH.

Her mouth dried. A choice dressed as mercy.

Boots thudded in the corridor. A key scraped at the outer lock.

Myrren slid the bone needle into her sleeve, wiped the black dust from her palms, and turned, just as a shadow peeled from the doorway opposite the guards’ approach, silent as smoke.

A woman stood there, bone mask glimmering, eyes like dark glass. She lifted a finger to where lips would be.

“Hush,” a voice breathed from nowhere, silk-soft and smiling. “Little spiral.”

The masked woman’s silhouette wavered like candlelight, one breath she was inches away, the next a shimmer beyond the haze. The smoke between them thickened, silver-laced, and when Myrren drew in air, her mind stuttered.

She smelled home like Ori’s bread, the herbs in her workshop, Thane’s cedar-swept laughter. Then, in the same heartbeat, the scents inverted: bread to dust, lavender to ash, cedar to iron.

She staggered. “You’re not real.”

The woman tilted her head. “Real is what we make you remember.” Her voice was velvet, each word sliding under Myrren’s skin like perfume. “You’ve been in our keeping before, little spiral. You just forget.”

The figure glided closer. Under the bone mask’s lower edge, smoke leaked like breath. The carved spiral and nine thorns glowed faintly, echoing the needle Myrren had hidden in her sleeve.

“Myrren Vale,” the woman murmured, tasting the name. “Daughter of scent and silence. The Queen thinks you a weapon, the Seer thinks you a prophecy, the princes think you a heart to be won. But we… we remember you as the key that slipped her lock.”

The haze swirled tighter. The air shimmered, heat bending her vision. When she blinked, the hall was gone.

She stood in her shop, the alley outside alive with morning calls, Ori humming softly as she kneaded dough at the counter. Relief hit so hard she almost wept.

“Ori?”

Ori turned. Her eyes were empty. Black glass where brown should be.
When she spoke, the voice was the same velvet murmur: “Every loop begins with love, Myrren. That’s how we make you trust it.”

Myrren stumbled back, striking a shelf. Bottles shattered. Lavender oil drenched her skirt. The scent thickened, sharp enough to cut, to burn. She clawed toward the door..

but the world split again.

The corridor returned, dim and wrong. The masked woman still watched, head cocked like a bird. “Don’t fight it. Fighting breaks the mind faster than memory ever could.”

Myrren’s heart was hammered. “What are you?”

The woman lifted one gloved hand, tracing a spiral in the smoke. “We are the veil between what you think you’ve lived and what you will remember living. We are mercy, if you obey.”

Boots pounded beyond the outer door. Guards. Too close.

Myrren lunged for the dais, but her vision doubled. The walls folded inward, then a blast of cold struck through the heat, breaking the illusion like a shattered mirror.

The woman vanished.

And in her place stood Corven.

Shadow clung to him like armor, breath visible in the sudden chill. He reached her in two strides, gripping her shoulders. “Don’t breathe the air.” His voice cut through the haze like steel. “They lace it with memory dust. Every inhale rewrites you.”

She tried to speak but could only rasp, “There was.. someone..”

“I know.” His hand cupped her jaw, forcing her to meet his eyes. “That was not someone. That was them.”

“The Silent Veil,” she whispered. The name felt wrong and familiar at once.

He nodded once, grim. “And now they know you see them.”

The door behind them rattled, guards shouting orders, the Queen’s insignia flashing in the crack of light.

“Corven..”

He drew her close, shadows curling around them both like a cloak. The air dimmed, the scent of steel drowning the sweetness of the drug. Her vision blurred.

“You’re safe now,” he murmured, though his tone was hollow. “For a moment.”

The haze trembled, pressing against the darkness he cast, a living thing trying to seep through. She felt it, whispers along her skin, fragments of other lives: laughter, firelight, a child’s cry, threads of stolen memory searching for somewhere to root.

Corven’s grip tightened. His breath brushed her ear, cold and steady. “They’ve already touched you.”

The words struck like a pulse of frost, spreading through her veins faster than any poison.

And then everything went still.

A sound cut through the silence: a bell struck three times, the palace’s midnight warning. Behind it came the slam of doors, the metallic rhythm of armored feet, the stench of oil and steel. Guards were almost upon them.

“Move,” Corven hissed.

Before she could answer, his shadows unfurled, cold silk wrapping her waist, her arms, her throat. The world blinked. One heartbeat they stood in the Seer’s hall, the next they were falling through darkness that had depth and weight, a plunge through water that wasn’t water.

Her lungs burned. She gasped, and the air bit like frost.

When her boots hit ground again, they were no longer in the Seer’s wing. Stone columns loomed around them, cracked and half-forgotten, some hidden vault beneath the palace. Light seeped down from fissures overhead, thin as veins of silver.

“What..” she started, but her voice wavered. The words slid away from her tongue, lost to echo. “What did you do?”

“Moved us.” Corven’s jaw tightened. “A step through the shadow, before they sealed the ward.”

She pressed a hand to her chest; her heart was a hammer gone wild. The darkness felt alive, breathing with them. “You said not to breathe the air.”

“I meant that air.” His tone softened. “This one is mine.”

For a moment, she believed him. The cold eased. The silence felt protective, almost gentle. Then, pain. A searing pulse at her wrist.

She yanked back her sleeve. A spiral of dark veins bloomed beneath her skin, faint but pulsing with onyx light.

Myrren froze. “What is that?”

Corven’s breath caught, his composure cracking. “Their signature. The Veil never leaves empty-handed.”

The mark spread another turn, each line a tiny shimmer of black fire. She tried to scrub it away, but it burned hotter beneath her touch. “Get it off!”

He seized her wrist, his palm searing cold. Shadow light flared between them, devouring the glow, but not enough. The spiral remained, half-hidden, faintly alive.

“It’s not poison,” he said hoarsely. “It’s a memory. They’ve branded you inside your own mind.”

Her throat constricted. “Then tell me how to undo it.”

His silence was answer enough.

Overhead, the bell tolled again, fourth strike. Guards shouting in distant corridors.

“They’ll come here next,” she whispered. “You can’t fight them and this.”

“I don’t intend to fight.” His gaze held hers, sharp with something between fury and grief. “I intend to erase the trail they left.”

He drew her closer, too close, one breath between them. The shadows around him tightened, sealing the vault in near-dark. She could smell his magic now: cypress, rain on cold iron, the scent she could never forget even in dreams.

“Corven..”

His hand rose to her cheek, trembling just once. “Forgive me.”

Before she could ask for what, his shadows surged. The world snapped in half, light devoured by blackness. Her body felt weightless, her thoughts dissolving like ink in water.

And just as everything went silent, his voice found her, barely more than a breath against her ear, words that cut deeper than any wound:

“They’ve already touched you.”

The darkness answered with a pulse, her heartbeat, or the Veil’s. She couldn’t tell which.