The Ember and the Crown - Part 2

Rain slashed against the lacquered eaves of the Roseward Gate as the trio passed beneath its snarling gryphon sigils, the storm offering no kindness for returning exiles or outlawed mages. Drevril’s capital, Arlavorn, breathed with veiled menace. Market stalls remained shuttered, their canvas draped like corpses. Crimson banners snapped on parapets above, but beneath them, the scent of burning ink and alchemical ash stained the wind. Something sacred had been disturbed.

Tovik adjusted the jester’s satchel at his side, the bells on his sleeve carefully stitched with runes of soundless cheer. “There’s a chill in the air, friends,” he muttered, voice a breath above a whisper. “Like someone’s been digging up bones that don’t want to be unearthed.”

“Because they have,” Elira said, her voice sharp, though her gaze lingered on the blackened sigils scorched into the flagstones near the palace square, inkless, yet still pulsing faintly. “Memoryburn residue. Someone’s been rewriting truth itself.”

Vaelin stood still beside them, head tilted slightly, as if listening to something the others couldn’t hear. His Mourning Sight flared to life without warning, shadows deepening across his irises. For a heartbeat, the world shimmered. Where the citadel stood now, he saw another, burned, crumbled, filled with ash, where laughter once reigned.

He didn’t tell them. He never did.

Within Laurel Hall, laughter echoed falsely through grand archways.

The jester had returned.

Tovik bowed low as he swept into the feast, his garments, laced in wine-red and storm-blue velvet, glimmering subtly with illusory gold thread. The hall was a cacophony of manipulated cheer, courtiers toasting with stale wine and counterfeit smiles. The “Queen” sat beneath the Thornlight Chandelier, her visage flawless, almost too flawless.

Elira watched from behind a panel of enchanted lattice near the minstrel gallery, her sigil lens rendering the glamoured Queen as she truly was: not a reflection of bloodline but a woven skin of illusion stitched with bloodwritten binding.

The imposter was using her sigils, perverted, corrupted versions of glyphs she had once locked in the vaults of the Crimson Library. She felt bile rise. If they had her work, they had someone from the Library. Someone she once trusted.

Vaelin stood guard in the shadows above the rafters, his hands laced with oath-thread. The Remnant’s echo whispered to him, guiding his steps, steadying his pulse. From above, he could see the sigils carved into the banquet table itself, like runes etched into a sacrificial altar.

This was no courtly feast.

This was a ritual.

As Tovik juggled knives that shimmered like silvered truths, he let his laughter fall into rhythm with the court’s charade. But his mind, sharp as ever, mapped the positions of the guards, the whisperknights, and the woman seated near the Queen’s right hand.

Tall. Scar-slicked. Eyes like flint and poison.

Lady Anvara Vess. Spymaster of the Needle Guild.

And the one who’d framed him.

Memories came unbidden: her breath against his ear as she taught him to lie without speaking, her dagger kissing his throat the day she burned his name from the royal ledgers.

She smiled now, watching him, and raised her goblet in mock salute.

He gave her a jester’s grin. A blade hidden in a joke.

Elira slipped into the lower vaults of the palace through a forgotten passage carved when the Laurel Hall was still a cathedral. Glyphs of flame and remembrance bloomed beneath her fingertips, reacting to her phoenixblood as she descended.

She came upon the Hall of Sealed Histories, now defiled. Vats of inkless sigils burned faintly on raised plinths. Mages, bound by iron thread and magical silence, etched more bloodwritten decrees under guard.

In the center stood a single table, upon which was chained a familiar book. One of her earliest grimoires. A book she thought was lost when the Crimson Library was sacked.

Someone had betrayed her order. And this was proof.

From behind her, a voice echoed through the vault.

“Elira Voss. Witch of Ash and Arc. Do you still burn when your truth is spoken?”

She turned slowly, and standing beneath the ancestral flame was an old friend, Archivist Rennar, his eyes hollow, his wrists etched with memory-burn glyphs.

He had survived.

Barely.

Above, the ritual was nearing its peak. Vaelin could feel the threads of blood oath magic twisting across the hall, forming a net of compulsion. Nobles were being bound to new decrees with every toast, every nod. The impostor Queen didn’t need fear or force, just words, and a web of binding oath-magic long thought lost.

His fingers bled shadow as he called upon Remnant Echo.

The hall dimmed.

Whispers swelled.

Shadows took shape beside the nobles, ghosts of those they’d betrayed, cheated, or killed. For a moment, the illusion shattered. Panic rose. Cups dropped. One noble vomited as he screamed the name of a dead son he thought buried far away.

Tovik took the moment to vanish, knives whirling in silent threat.

From the rafters, Vaelin dropped like falling grief, landing beside the false Queen as the chandelier above flickered.

But the Queen only smiled.

And whispered, “Vaelin Dareth. You swore an oath once, did you not? Would you break it now?”

He froze.

Because he had. Years ago. To a dying monarch whose secrets he had never questioned.

And blood oaths, once broken, always remember.

Beneath the Laurel Hall, Elira stood trembling beside Rennar, whose breath came in ragged gasps.

“They chained me here,” he murmured. “Because I remembered too much. Because I told them what the Phoenix Seal means.”

She gripped his hand, tears burning her throat. “You told them?”

“No. I told her,” he said, and turned his gaze upward. “The Queen.”

Elira’s pulse slowed.

“The real one?”

“She’s alive. But fading. They’ve bound her beneath the Spire in glass and gold flame.”

A sigil flared into being in her mind, one she’d once only seen in memory fragments, an ancestral seal of firebound royalty, the same etched into her dreams.

It wasn’t just blood that bound her to the Queen.

It was legacy.

In the fractured moment of silence above, Vaelin forced himself to move, even as the Remnant within him screamed warnings. The Queen's glamour melted slightly, revealing lines of script carved into her skin, living blood oaths written over stolen flesh.

She wasn’t the Queen.

She was a vessel.

Vaelin lunged.

The throne cracked.

The imposter vanished in a gust of fire and ink, leaving behind only the scent of scorched parchment.

As nobles screamed and chaos erupted, Tovik caught Vaelin by the shoulder and dragged him toward the exit.

“She knows us,” Vaelin said, dazed.

“She knows everything,” Tovik whispered. “And we just told her more.”

Behind them, the throne lay empty.

And above, shadowy script rewrote itself into the marble of the ceiling, a single phrase etched into the memory of the realm:

“Oaths unkept shall chain the soul.”

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All Parts of the Series

The Ember and the Crown Part 1

The Ember and the Crown Part 2

The Ember and the Crown Part 3

The Ember and the Crown Part 4

The Ember and the Crown Part 5