The horns faded into the fog, leaving only the hiss of ash settling over the ruins. Myrren pressed her sleeve to the wound in her palm, but the mark kept pulsing, black light threading under her skin like ink seeking veins. Corven’s hand closed around her wrist, steady but shaking.
“Hold still,” he murmured. “It is burning through.”

The shard in her other hand had cooled to a dull gray, spider-cracked from within. Each fissure leaked a faint glitter of dust. When she tried to wrap it in cloth, the stone fractured with a sound like ice breaking. Obsidian powder burst between their fingers, dry smoke with a metallic bite.

She gasped. The dust coated her tongue, bitter as cold iron and crushed ink. Her vision doubled: torchlight, moonlight, torchlight again, flickering out of rhythm. Corven’s voice blurred.
“Breathe, Myrren, breathe.”

But she was already somewhere else.

The same village lay before her, whole this time, not burned. Windows glowed with lamplight and children’s laughter carried through mist. Her own hands, smaller and surer measured liquid into a clay jug. The scent rose sweetly: frostmint and ironwood bark, her old masking blend. She knew this recipe. She had written it.

Then the laughter turned to coughing, a girl’s high and thin. A mother’s scream broke through the haze, echoing against the mill walls that should not yet be ruins. Myrren’s fingers spilled the jug. Fluid darkened the ground where the well should be. Her pulse pounded; she felt two heartbeats, one in the vision, one in her body struggling for air.

“No,” she whispered. “That is not…”

The child’s body convulsed in her memory. The smell of frostmint sweetened the rot. She wanted to wake, to tear herself out, but the dust dragged her deeper.

“Breathe.” Corven’s voice again, desperate. She saw him through the shimmer of years, kneeling by the well, shadows gripping his shoulders. For a heartbeat she saw another version of him lying dead in the street where this same poison had bloomed. The two scenes overlapped until sound collapsed into silence. Myrren’s scream made no noise at all.

The world righted itself with a gasp. The lamps of the ruined mill swam back into focus, shadows trembling, dust still in the air. Myrren sprawled against the stone wall, lungs burning as if she had swallowed fire. Corven crouched before her, one hand braced on her shoulder, the other pressing the edge of his cloak against her bleeding palm.

“What did you see?” His voice was low, almost gentle, but darkness coiled beneath it.

She tried to speak, but the words came in shards. “A child. There was a child.”

He flinched, just once. “Describe it.”

“I poisoned them.” The confession tore from her throat before she could stop it. “The well, the resin. It was my formula. Frostmint, ironwood. I killed them.” Her breath hitched; the scent of cold metal and mint still clung to her skin.

Corven’s eyes darkened, gray shot through with shadowlight. “You saw the truth,” he said quietly. “Not a vision.”

“Then tell me it is not real.” Her fingers fisted in his cloak. “Tell me it is another trick, a Veil illusion, anything.”

He did not answer. Only the pulse at his throat betrayed him, quick and uneven. The tether beneath his shirt flickered, a low red glow that matched the rhythm of her heartbeat.

“Myrren,” he said at last, voice rough, “this is not your first sin.” Her eyes widened. He continued, softer, “But it may be your last.”

The words landed heavier than any blow. She wanted to strike him, to shake the fatal calm from his face. “You knew?”

“I suspected.” His thumb tapped once against his palm, the tell he could never hide. “The Veil writes lives in circles. Every cure becomes a poison, every mercy a mistake. You have walked this path before.”

“I cannot have.”

“You have. And the Queen will call it treason if she learns of that mark.”
He glanced toward her hand. The black spiral there was still pulsing faintly beneath the crusted blood. “She already sent men for proof. If anyone sees this, if anyone smells that dust, your trial is decided before it begins.”

Her throat tightened. “Then I erase it.”

Before he could stop her, she scooped what dust remained on the floor, grinding it under her boot heel. A dry crackle sparked through the air, ozone and myrrh, like incense catching flame.

“Myrren, do not.”

The powder flared, a breath of black smoke rising between them. For an instant she saw masks through it, faces of stone and bone kneeling around a well, voices whispering, Bind what breaks.

The flare died, leaving the room cold again.

Corven caught her by the shoulders. “What did you do?”

But she was already staring at the ashes, eyes wide with something between terror and revelation.

The ashes moved. They did not scatter; they coiled slowly, deliberately, as if a breath beneath the floorboards was drawing them into pattern. A spiral again, smaller, perfect. Myrren’s pulse matched its turn.

Light fractured around her, torch-flame bending into rings. The ruined mill vanished.

She stood inside another circle, stone walls veined with onyx, air thick with incense. Masked figures knelt around a well that glimmered like obsidian water. Their voices overlapped in a hush that vibrated through her bones.

Bind what breaks.

She knew that cadence. A ritual formula, half alchemy, half prayer. Her younger voice answered from within the circle, clear and certain: Ash to memory, blood to truth, scent to silence.

A woman stepped forward, face hidden by a silver mask etched with the spiral crown. “Cordelia,” the woman said, and though the name was not hers, it rang inside her ribs like recognition. “Your gift will keep the spiral turning.”

Myrren tried to deny it, but the words burned into her tongue. “I never meant…”

“Intention is dust,” the masked woman whispered. “Only the binding remains.”

The well flared with black light. Every reflection in its surface was her own, a hundreds of Myrrens, each marked by a different wound: rope, flame, blade, crown. One raised her hand and pressed a blood-spiraled palm against the glass. The barrier rippled, pulling her in.

She fell through herself.

When she hit the floor, the mill was back, cold cracked stone, Corven’s shout echoing. Smoke clung to her lashes, but the whisper still thrummed behind her heartbeat. Bind what breaks. Crown what bleeds.

Dawn found them by inches, thin gray light seeping through the cracks in the walls. Myrren stirred against the cold floor, the scent of scorched myrrh still hanging in her lungs. Her body felt flayed from within, every heartbeat dragging through ash.

“Stay still,” Corven said. His voice was hoarse, stripped bare of command. She blinked up at him. His shadows trembled faintly, drawn thin as smoke around his hands. Her blood streaked his sleeves, his collar, the edge of his jaw.

“What happened?” The words were barely sound.

“You stopped breathing.” He glanced toward the ashes on the floor, no spiral now, only a black ring where it had burned itself out. “I tried to pry your hands open. The shard…” He broke off.

She followed his gaze. Her palms were raw, crosshatched with cuts so fine they shimmered in the weak light. Each one bled in slow pulses, lines curving inward until the blood gathered in a spiral at her lifelines. The shard was gone.

“I do not understand.”

“You do not need to.” He turned away too quickly, shadows curling up his neck like smoke. “We have to move before the patrol circles back.”

She pushed herself upright, dizziness tilting the world. “Did you take it, Corven?”

His silence was answer enough. The tether between them thrummed once, hard. His thumb tapped against his palm, then stilled. When he faced her, fear lived in his expression, but not of the soldiers.

“If I could have taken it,” he said softly, “I would have.”

Something inside her cracked at the sound. She reached for him before she meant to. His fingers caught hers, careful of the wounds, heat trembling through the contact. For a heartbeat she thought the blood might still itself under his touch. It did not.

Outside, horns echoed again, distant shouts tightening the net around them.

“Myrren…”

She froze. The whisper was not his. It came from everywhere and nowhere, breathed through the floorboards, the ashes, the pulse in her hands.

One shall wear the crown of ash.

Her gaze dropped. Blood coiled across her palms in a perfect spiral, glowing faintly red before darkening to black, a crown’s outline rising where her lifelines met.

She looked up, but Corven was staring at her the way a man stares at an omen.

And somewhere beyond the ridge, the flare of gold came again, Thane’s fire, closing in.