To Liera, every hallway at the Vernhardt estate now felt like a throat closing in, and every portrait of her ancestors seemed to watch her with judging, hollow eyes.
She moved through the estate not as a daughter of the house, but as an intruder. Following her secret conversations with Verona through the sapphire mirror, Liera had become a ghost in her own home. She spent her nights pouring over the cryptic texts she had pilfered from the library, her fingers tracing the faded ink of the Elemental Stone.
"The Heart of the Land," the texts called it. A source of unearned prosperity that had shielded the Vernhardts from every drought, every economic collapse, and every scandal for three hundred years. But it was no mere rock, it was a prison.
