The Thornvault Accord - Part 4

Vaelin awoke not in a cell, nor in a Citadel of cold walls and sharper laws, but in a clearing of impossible silence. Glass-thorn trees stretched around him in every direction, tall as cathedral spires, their trunks a translucent violet that shimmered like frozen moonlight. The sky above churned slowly with colors he had no names for—amber-gold bleeding into bruised lilac, split with veins of silver lightning that never cracked but simply hung, as though time had paused mid-scream.

There was no sound, yet he could feel the hush. It pressed against his ears like rising pressure underwater. Every breath tasted of dust and winter roses. He turned in a slow circle, his boots crunching on ash instead of leaves. The ground was scorched in a perfect ring around him, as if he’d been dropped like a fallen star.

“Elira!” he shouted, but his voice came out hoarse, as if the air itself devoured it before it could echo.

No answer. Just the whisper of something deeper pulling at him. A rhythm beneath his ribs. Like a memory refusing to die.

He moved.

The forest did not stay still. Behind him, branches twisted slightly the moment his eyes left them. Shadows lengthened toward him like reaching fingers, but never touched. The path he walked seemed to form with each step, thorned vines unfurling just enough to let him pass, only to reweave in silence once he moved beyond.

Somewhere ahead, he heard it.

A lullaby. Soft. A melody he didn’t know—but somehow it warmed something in his chest, something buried.

He followed the sound.

It led him to a hollow, sunken garden choked in frost-kissed roses. They were colorless, all gray and pale ivory, save for one in the center—a bloom of deep crimson with veins of molten gold. Beneath that rose knelt Elira.

She didn’t look up. Her hands were bare, scraped and dirt-smudged, as she tended the base of the bloom. She was dressed not in the prisoner’s garb from before, but in a long, braided gown of wine-red silk, black accents traced in tiny runes that shimmered faintly with the same molten color as the rose. A circlet of twisted silver and thorns sat crooked atop her head, and her hair was unbound, falling in fire-kissed waves across her shoulders. She looked regal. Worn. Dangerous.

She looked alone.

Vaelin took a step forward. “Elira?”

She froze. The knife in her hand, a curved thing of obsidian glass, trembled.

When she turned, her eyes met his with such force he almost staggered. For a moment—only a moment—the world tilted. He saw flashes: their first real fight, her sleeping beside a ruined hearth, her laughing with a mouth full of stolen berries.

Then her walls slammed up again.

“You’re not him,” she said.

“I am.”

“They’ve tricked me before,” she whispered. “Given me shadows with your face. Lies with your voice.”

“I remember you,” he said. “The Ember Witch of Veln’s Hollow. The girl who carved spells into stormlight. The woman who kissed me like she was daring the stars to try and stop her.”

Elira stood slowly. Her fingers twitched. Her lips parted, disbelieving. “You remember?”

“Not all of it,” Vaelin said, voice rough. “Not clearly. But it’s like… every step I’ve taken since forgetting has been trying to find my way back to you.”

She crossed the frozen roses carefully, boots brushing the brittle petals. When she stood in front of him, the rose at the garden’s center shimmered and floated upward between them. Its petals unfurled slowly, impossibly, into the shape of a perfect spiral.

“The Heartthorn,” Elira murmured. “It’s the last test. The Accord’s cruelest joke.”

“I don’t understand.”

“They gave us a trial of time. Split us into broken timelines. They said if we found each other before the year’s end, the spell would break—but one of us would have to pay the price.”

The rose pulsed between them.

“Elira…”

“If I take it,” she said, voice unsteady, “you forget me. Everything. The Thornvault releases us, and you wake up free. Whole. Clean.”

“And if I do?” he asked, already knowing.

“Then I remember,” she whispered, “but you stay here. Bound. Lost to the world until even your name is forgotten.”

Vaelin said nothing.

The rose hovered. It turned slightly, petals casting light that painted their faces in flickers of red and gold.

He looked at her—not just her face, but the lines around her eyes from sleepless nights, the way her jaw tightened when she fought back tears, the small scar just beneath her collarbone from the arrow he once pulled free with shaking hands. All the signs of the life they’d fought for.

“I made a promise,” he said.

“You made it before the Thornvault,” she said. “You were a different man then.”

“I don’t care.”

“Vaelin, please—don’t you dare—”

He stepped forward and gently closed her fingers around the rose.

Light bloomed.

“No!” she shouted, reaching for him, but the magic surged between them.

Vaelin smiled at her. Not sad. Not afraid. Just… sure.

“I’d rather be lost in here a hundred times than live one day forgetting you,” he said, voice breaking. “If love’s a curse, then let it be mine.”

The Heartthorn flared.

And shattered.

Everything went white.

Elira woke in a rain-soaked glade, sprawled beside the tangled remains of a fae glyph-circle carved into the earth. Thunder rolled overhead. The Thornvault was gone.

She sat up slowly, shaking.

“Vaelin?”

No answer.

He was nowhere. Nothing but mist and trees and mud. She stood, spinning, calling again and again—but only the wind answered.

At her feet, half-buried in the soil, lay a black silk-wrapped sword.

She reached down with shaking fingers. As she lifted it, a faint hum of magic whispered against her skin. A thorn was carved into the hilt, and down the length of the blade, an inscription in old spell-script:

“I chose the curse, so you would not carry it.”

Her knees buckled.

The first sob hit before she could fight it. The second tore loose as she clutched the sword to her chest. For a long time, she knelt there, alone again, with only stormlight and sorrow for company.

Then something moved.

The air shimmered to her left.

A figure emerged, tall and cloaked in shadow. Not Vaelin, but wearing a mockery of his face—an echo. A leftover.

Its mouth split in a jagged smile.

“You broke the cycle,” it rasped. “And now you owe the Vault a truth in return.”

Elira stood.

She wiped her tears away with the back of her hand and unsheathed the thorn-blade with a whisper of steel and magic.

“I’m not leaving him behind.”

The shade tilted its head.

“Then come rewrite the laws of the fae,” it said. “But bleed for every truth you want returned.”

Elira stepped forward into the mist.

“If I have to shatter time itself,” she said, “I’ll make it remember him.”

The forest closed behind her.

And the Thornvault stirred.

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All Parts of the Series

The Thornvault Accord Part 1

The Thornvault Accord Part 2

The Thornvault Accord Part 3

The Thornvault Accord Part 4

The Thornvault Accord Part 5