By morning the alarm had become an order. Frostmint was burning, and the Queen sent her poisoner to read the smoke. Corven rode at her side, silence between them heavier than ash.

Smoke moved like a living thing across the valley. The Frostmint estate lay broken beneath a sheet of ash, rafters jutting from snow like ribs. The famed terraces were scorched black, frost-melt pooling in hollows where herbs once shimmered silver-green. Every breath stung of mint and sulfur, sweetness curdled by poison.

Myrren swung down before the horse stopped. Heat pulsed through her boots, damp and wrong. Beneath the char she smelled spiraldust, her own theoretical blend made real. Impossible. It required frostroot vapor and ashbird blood, a mixture that should have killed the brewer outright.

“Stay back,” she said. Kneeling, she brushed soot aside. Blue vapor bled from the cracks, rising in slow spirals that caught the wind and vanished. The reaction was alive.

Corven joined her anyway, shadows pulling the air still. “You know it.”

“I wrote about it,” she said. “Years ago. In theory.”

A shout came from the ridge. Villagers, faces gray with soot and terror. One pointed straight at her. “The Veil-marked woman.” Another echoed, “She brings the smoke wherever she goes.”
The words spread faster than flame.

“Ignore them,” Corven said quietly.

“I can’t,” she whispered. “Listen.”

The voices had fallen into rhythm. Bind. Break. Ash. Three words, murmured over and over, their cadence eerily steady, the Seer’s prophecy reborn on strangers’ tongues.

“They’re not praying,” Myrren said. “They’re repeating.”

The tether pulsed beneath her skin as Corven’s hand brushed her shoulder. Heat, then a pull, fierce and intimate. For a heartbeat she could not tell whether it was fear or the tether dragging her toward him.

A nearby roof caved inward, flinging a shower of embers. Corven’s arm locked around her waist, shadows tightening to shield them. His heartbeat thudded through the din, steady and wrong.
When the smoke cleared, she stared at the shifting spirals in the air.
“This isn’t a fire,” she murmured. “It’s a rewriting.”

Myrren crouched closer, ignoring the heat that bit through her gloves. Beneath the upper layer of soot, a thin crust of crystal gleamed, a marriage of frost and flame. She scraped a fragment into a vial. The scent struck her instantly: frostroot vapor and the metallic tang of ashbird blood. Her own handwriting from years ago whispered in her memory: theoretical only; fatal to mix.

Her stomach turned. “Someone used my notes,” she said. “Every measurement is exact.”

Corven knelt beside her, the shadowlight from his palms dimming the glare. “Kael?”

“He never saw this formula. I buried it in my private journals.” She closed the vial, but the residue inside seemed to breathe, expanding against the glass. “And yet here it is, perfected.”

Wind swept through the ruins, stirring the smell of scorched mint into the air. Amid the debris, a scrap of parchment fluttered against a charred beam. Corven caught it before it vanished into smoke. The handwriting was neat, coldly precise.

Spiraldust / Cohort-Test 4 / Memory-Retention variance: 62 percent.
Witnessed under oath of Frostmint.

Kael’s script. Myrren’s fingers trembled as she read. “He was here,” she said. “Or someone following his methods.”

She rose too fast. The tether lurched, tugging her balance. Corven steadied her with a hand at her spine, protective and unyielding. “He told you the crown rewrites its subjects,” he murmured. “Perhaps this is how it begins, burning away the drafts.”

“My drafts,” she said bitterly. “I theorized spiraldust as a mnemonic vapor, not a weapon. It was meant to restore memory, not erase it.”

A cluster of villagers had ventured closer, their faces half-veiled with damp cloth. One man held a bent staff etched with the Frostmint crest. “You brought this,” he accused. “Your poisons sing our names from the ash.”

Myrren turned toward him. “That chant, do you know what it means?”

He blinked, confused. “It means what it always has. Bind. Break. Ash.”

“They’re not your words,” she said softly. “They were taught to you through the smoke.”

The elder spat into the snow. “Witchcraft and excuses.” His gaze slid to Corven. “And him, shadow-bound. A matching curse.”

Before Corven could move, Myrren stepped forward. “I know the scent of the Veil,” she said. “This dust is theirs, but it bears my formula. Someone wants you to see me as their maker.”

The elder’s expression hardened. “We see what stands before us.” He raised his staff toward her. “Veil-marked.”

The word struck like a verdict. Around them, the crowd began to echo it, Veil-marked, Veil-marked, until it became rhythm, not speech.

Myrren’s vision blurred. The tether thrummed hot beneath her skin, resisting the chorus. The onyx token at her throat pulsed once, twice, syncing with her heartbeat. A flash seared her mind: the moment the fire began, figures in cloaks pouring dust from glass flasks, blue smoke rising, villagers turning toward the flames with glassy eyes.

She gasped. “I can see how it started. The token’s anchoring me.”

Corven caught her shoulders. “What do you see?”

“Not an accident. Ritual.” She met his gaze, breath trembling. “They meant for this place to remember me.”

His jaw tightened. “Then the spiral isn’t spreading. It is following.”

A gust of wind tore through the ruins, scattering the ash into curling lines that formed a single new spiral between them. It glowed for one heartbeat, then vanished into smoke.

The word Veil-marked carried through the valley like a spell. Once spoken, it could not be unsaid.

Villagers dropped to their knees, not in worship but in fear, crossing themselves with ash-stained fingers. Children hid behind half-burned fences. The chant dulled to a murmur that scraped against the wind, a thousand whispered accusations too soft to name yet too sharp to ignore.

Corven stepped forward, his cloak stirring the soot into eddies. “Back,” he ordered quietly. Shadows stirred at his feet, coiling like serpents ready to strike.

The elder’s staff trembled but did not lower. “We will not have your silence curse what remains.”

“Your silence is already cursed,” Myrren said before she could stop herself. Her voice cracked with cold and exhaustion. “You have breathed the spiral itself.”

The villagers hissed as one.

“Myrren,” Corven murmured, his hand catching her wrist. The tether surged at the contact, heat and pulse and memory converging until she almost forgot which heartbeat was hers.

“Let me speak,” she whispered. “If I do not name the poison, it wins.”

But the tether did not loosen. It pulled tighter, as though aware of the danger in her defiance. The world tilted. She could feel Corven’s restraint wrapping around her like a chain. His shadows tried to quiet her, to protect her, but the effect was suffocating.

“Corven,” she gasped. “You are..”

He dropped his hand instantly, horror flickering across his composure. The sudden absence of pressure left her swaying.

The elder saw it, the invisible link, the intimate collapse. “You see?” he shouted to the crowd. “Bound in shadow. The Veil owns them both.”

A cry went up, echoing through the ruined hills. Burn the taint. Burn it clean.

Then Corven’s arm was around her again, pulling her against him as the nearest roof collapsed in sparks. His cloak wrapped her like a second skin, shadows dampening the air so they could breathe.

“You will be buried if you stay,” he said against her hair. His tone was iron.

“If we leave,” she choked, “they will say guilt made us run.”

“They already have.”

Her pulse raced. “We cannot fight every lie.”

“No,” he said, eyes dark as the smoke around them. “But we can find whoever keeps writing them.”

Behind them, the villagers’ chant broke into chaos, half begging for mercy, half vowing judgment. The tether throbbed painfully, pulling them toward the heart of the blaze where the spiral had first burned itself into the ground.

Myrren turned one last time toward the chanting crowd. Ash swirled in mirrored patterns, each spiral forming her sigil for a heartbeat before vanishing. It was proof and curse etched in the very air.

She tasted iron on her tongue, realization blooming cold and final. “They will not stop,” she whispered. “Not until every version of me is ash.”

Corven met her gaze. For the first time, no fatalism, no restraint, only a quiet vow. “Then we will burn the script itself.”

He tightened his hold, and the tether flared so bright she saw its outline, silver-black bands looping between their wrists, fading only when the smoke swallowed them whole.

They stepped into the heart of the ruins as the crowd scattered, voices breaking against the roar of fire and wind. Above them, the ash spirals lifted into the sky like ink seeking a new page.

Myrren knelt where the last spiral smoldered. The soil beneath was slick, not with rain but with congealed resin. She pressed two fingers into it; warmth flared against her skin, then memory.

For a heartbeat she saw the scene not as ruin but as creation: cloaked figures moving in precise arcs, glass flasks releasing mint-white vapor, Kael’s handwriting gleaming on brass tags. Her own younger hands among them, steady and sure. Then the vision shattered into ash.

Corven’s shadow fell beside her. “What did you see?”

“The start,” she whispered. “They were not burning the hills. They were writing them.”

Wind cut across the slope, scattering soot like ink dust. The crowd had fled; only silence and the distant toll of unseen bells remained.

Corven crouched opposite her, eyes reflecting what little firelight still breathed in the ruins. “The villagers will carry their stories to court. By dawn, the Queen will have her proof.”

“That I caused this?”

He did not answer.

The tether hummed between them, faint, alive and merciless. Myrren looked down and saw their shadows overlap, two silhouettes joined at the wrists. She felt it then: not heat, but recognition, as if the spiral itself had shaped the bond.

“If the dust remembers us,” she said quietly, “then every breath they take writes us again.”

Corven’s gaze darkened. “Then we must find the first ink. The one that started your name.”

She turned the vial of residue in her hand. The spiraldust pulsed faintly, echoing her heartbeat. “You mean Kael.”

“I mean whoever taught him your hand before you had one.” His voice was almost tender. “You saw it, didn’t you? The earlier version of you. The one who failed.”

Her throat closed. “If she fails, I will too.”

“No.” He rose, extending a hand streaked with ash. “You will finish what she began.”

Myrren hesitated, then placed her fingers in his. The tether burned bright, searing, but held.

Corven’s eyes caught the fading spiral behind her, its curve incomplete. “We are not investigating a crime, Myrren,” he said softly. “We are retracing your footprints.”

The last ember flickered out. In the dark, her pulse kept writing.