By dusk, the rain had thickened to a silver veil over the palace, muting torchlight and voices alike. Myrren did not return to her chambers. Holt’s warning still rang in her ears, tangled with Thane’s gaze that had followed her long after she turned away. She walked instead toward the lower halls, where warmth and scrutiny could not reach her down stairways that smelled of old paper and oil, past doors barred to most but never locked to curiosity. The archives breathed damp and dust, a thousand forgotten records humming like beehives in sleep. Somewhere in their depths, she told herself, lay a truth untouched by devotion or shadow. But when the air shifted, sharp with ink and frostmint, she knew she wasn’t the first to come searching.

The archives lay beneath the oldest wing of the palace, carved from stone that had forgotten sunlight. Candles guttered in iron sconces, their smoke tracing the damp air. Myrren’s steps echoed softly, too loud for a place built to hold whispers. She could taste iron and mildew, the ghost of ink left to dry centuries ago. The scent was wrong, it shifted with every breath, as if someone had been here moments before, stirring dust that hadn’t settled in years.

She moved between shelves taller than any man, lined with scrolls sealed in wax the color of dried blood. The torch she carried hissed, dripping fat onto her wrist. Somewhere deeper, a door creaked, then closed too softly to be wind.

Her pulse stuttered.

A voice drifted from the dark. “You shouldn’t be here, Mistress Vale.”

Kael Droveth stepped from behind a shelf, thin and pale as parchment, his scholar’s robes smudged with ink. His eyes gleamed with a collector’s hunger. “The archives keep better secrets than men,” he said mildly. “But they do not take kindly to thieves.”

“I’m not here to steal,” she replied.

“No?” His gaze dropped to the spiral token at her throat. “Then you are here to remember.”

The way he said it, remember made her skin prickle.

Kael moved closer, the scent of old vellum and clove oil clinging to him. “You left your notes behind after the trial. I’ve been reading them.”

Her breath caught. “Those were private.”

He smiled faintly. “Genius rarely stays private. Your formulas are… extraordinary. Some even beyond what’s been recorded in the crown’s alchemical codex. And yet”—he tilted his head—“half the poisons you describe don’t exist.”

“They will,” Myrren said before she could stop herself.

Kael’s eyes sharpened. “Ah. So you’ve dreamt about them too.”

She froze. “What did you say?”

He gestured toward a side chamber where a single lantern burned. “If you wish to understand the spiral, Mistress Vale, you’ll find your answers among the names.”

“What names?”

“Yours. And hers.”

He left her standing in the narrow aisle, his words echoing like dripping water. Against her better sense, she followed. The chamber was smaller than she expected, stone walls lined with glass cases, each holding notebooks wrapped in brittle leather. On one desk lay a single open journal, its pages soaked from an old spill of ink. Her name was scrawled across the first line.

Not Myrren Vale.

Just Myrren.

And below it, another: Cordelia.

The ink shimmered faintly, as if still wet.

She hesitated before touching the page. The ink smelled faintly of frostmint and iron gall, her own mixture, though she had never written with it here. The handwriting tilted like hers too, but the strokes were older, steadier, as if she’d already learned what she had yet to become.

The first line beneath the names read:

On the seventh day, I will find the cure that kills faster than the poison it mends.

Her fingers trembled. Beneath it, formulas filled the margins, ratios she’d never tested, antidotes she hadn’t conceived. Each ingredient felt familiar in her mind’s scent-map, as if memory had raced ahead of her own craft.

She turned another page.

He will burn for me once, then betray me once more. The shadow will bind me. The crown will hang me. But the scent of foxglove will bring him back.

Her pulse thudded in her throat. She’d used foxglove only once, in a failed experiment that nearly cost a servant his life. The note had been buried years ago.

“Who wrote this?” she whispered.

Kael leaned against the doorway, watching her as though she were part of the archive itself. “Perhaps you did. Perhaps Cordelia. Or perhaps neither. The spiral doesn’t care whose hand moves the ink.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Then explain the dates.” He gestured toward the corner of the page. In neat notation, the entries were marked with years that hadn’t yet come, two winters beyond the current reign.

She felt dizzy. “This is some illusion. Another of the Queen’s trials.”

Kael’s smile did not reach his eyes. “The Queen forbids access to this vault. Even her own records stop at the famine ledgers. But this…” He stepped closer, lowering his voice. “This is a prophecy written as a memory. You are the continuation of her hand.”

Her stomach twisted. “Cordelia’s?”

“Cordelia was one name the spiral wore. Yours is another.”

He brushed a speck of dust from the journal’s cover, fingers lingering too long. “When the High Whisperer began his experiments, he used scent as the binding medium. The right aroma, the right toxin, it laces memory through time. Perhaps you were chosen because your gift makes you… permeable.”

She recoiled, the air suddenly thick with the scent of clove and damp parchment. “You’re saying I’m repeating her life.”

Kael’s expression softened, almost kind. “Repeating is such a bleak word. Refining, perhaps.”

Lightning flickered through the narrow window. For an instant, his reflection shimmered on the glass, standing behind her though he had not moved.

Her hand brushed another page, and the words rose faintly like heat against her skin:

When the prince’s fire falters, light the ashes. When the shadow calls, follow him. Both are death; both are love.

She slammed the journal shut.

The pulse at her wrist throbbed once, sharp and electric like a tether tightening.

Somewhere above, the bells tolled the hour.

When she looked up again, Kael was gone. Only his lantern remained, its flame guttering beside the closed book. The scent of him lingered, ink, clove, and something darker, almost sweet, like the beginning of rot.

The silence after Kael’s departure was unbearable. Every sound in the archives pressed inward, the drip of rain through cracked stone, the rasp of her own breath, the whisper of parchment shifting where none had been touched. The air itself seemed alive, drawn toward the journal like a lung filling before a scream.

Myrren should have fled. Instead, she opened it again.

Ink bled along the pages, crawling like veins beneath the skin of the parchment. The words rearranged themselves as if written by an unseen hand: Follow the scent.

The torch at her side hissed and went out.

In the sudden dark, her other senses sharpened. Frostmint and foxglove, ash and ink. A trail. She followed it between rows of shelves, her fingers brushing bindings slick with condensation. Somewhere ahead, a door whispered open. The scent grew stronger, pulling her as the tether sometimes did when Corven was near, an ache in her wrist, a pulse that wasn’t wholly her own.

The corridor narrowed, the air colder. She reached a final alcove, circular and low-roofed, its walls carved with spirals overlapping like tide marks. A single table waited at the center, draped with a shroud of dust.

Upon it lay another book. Smaller, bound in black leather.

She brushed the dust away. The cover bore no title, only a faint spiral impressed in the hide, glimmering like onyx in the candle stub’s light. She opened it, and froze.

The first page was blank. The second too. But on the third, fresh ink gleamed, still wet, letters forming as she watched. Her own hand lifted without command, fingers trembling, and began to move. The quill that hadn’t been there a moment ago was suddenly between her fingers, dipping itself into ink that smelled of foxglove and blood.

She wrote:

He burns. The shadow waits. I cannot tell which one I am meant to love.

Her breath broke. The quill slipped from her grasp and rolled to the floor, but the ink kept flowing, lines unfurling faster than she could read.

The scent of fire will fade.
The tether will tighten.
When you reach the spiral’s end

Lightning flared through a crack in the ceiling, lighting the words as they finished themselves in her script:

you will belong to the shadows.

The air shuddered. The lantern flame died.

Behind her, a familiar scent, cypress, cold steel, the hush before a storm rose like breath against her neck.

A whisper followed, low and shivering through the dark.

“You already do.”