The air inside the chamber thickened, humming with power and ash. Candles bowed in their sconces as if some vast creature had drawn breath beneath the earth. The runes around Linda brightened—first crimson, and then a searing white that cut across the masks of the Silent Court.
The obsidian-masked matron began to chant. "By the wound of the first dawn, by the silence of the stars…"
The others answered in a hundred overlapping tongues. Shadows lengthened, twisting like serpents.
Linda repeated each word, voice trembling. Her blood dripped onto the sigil, sizzling where it touched. The floor itself seemed to pulse in rhythm with her heart.
Then—footsteps.
Faint at first, but growing louder. Steel boots striking stone. Orders barked in the hollow corridors above. The sound did not echo naturally; it clanged, multiplied, distorted, as though the Veil itself carried it down to them.
The masked figures stilled.
"They come," hissed one.
"Too soon," another whispered. "She's barely begun—"
"Finish it," the matron snapped. "If the spell is broken now, she will die screaming."
Linda swallowed hard and began the next verse. Her magic surged up her arms, branding her veins with light. The pain was exquisite, intimate. She could feel Philip somewhere beyond the dark, reaching back.
But the stone stairway above erupted with light.
Guards poured down, torches in hand, swords drawn. Their captain's voice rang out, sharp with fear. "By decree of the Crown, surrender yourselves! The Court is finished!"
The Silent Court did not move. One by one they turned their masked faces upward—an ocean of blank expressions reflecting the torch-flames.
Then the first torch went out.
A shriek tore through the stairwell, followed by the crash of armor tumbling down the steps. Shadows moved where no bodies stood. The guards fired crossbows blindly into the dark. Bolts whined through the air, clattering against the circle that held Linda.
One bolt nicked the rim of the sigil. The rune sparked, flickered—then roared.
"Hold her steady!" the matron cried. "The Veil is opening!"
The coals in the pit erupted into a column of blue fire. Linda screamed as invisible hands tore at her hair, her skin, her soul. Images flooded her vision: a field of white flame, a crown lying broken, Philip's face half-consumed by light.
"Philip!" she gasped.
Above her, two guards burst through the curtain of smoke, blades raised. One saw her glowing eyes and faltered. The other didn't.
His sword arced down—
—but the obsidian-masked woman moved faster, sweeping her sleeve. The blade hit an unseen wall and shattered like glass.
"Finish it, girl!" she shouted. "Speak his name!"
Linda's voice cracked, raw with power. "Philip Astride—return!"
The chamber exploded in brilliance.
The world became a scream of wind and stone. Every torch blew out at once, plunging the undercity into darkness. The guards fell, their armor ringing like bells. The Silent Court threw up their arms to shield their faces as the circle blazed hotter and hotter.
Something vast pressed against the thin fabric of reality—a shape without shape, a will without name.
And from somewhere inside that blinding storm came a whisper, soft as breath but cold as the grave:
"You called, little fire."
Linda's heart seized. "Who—who are you?"
The voice laughed—a sound that seemed to come from every direction at once. "Not the one you sought. But I heard you first."
A shadow took form within the light—tall, slender, and wrong.
The matron stumbled backward. "Close it! Close the circle!"
But it was too late.
The circle cracked, splitting open like shattered glass. Air rushed out of the room, dragging with it the screams of men and women alike. Linda felt herself lift off the ground, her blood streaming upward in thin red threads.
For an instant she saw through the breach: a place of endless mirrors, a river of souls twisting toward a distant throne. And standing at that throne—Philip, reaching for her—before the shadow dragged him away.
The world snapped shut.
When the light cleared, the Silent Court's fire pit was nothing but ash. Half their number lay motionless, masks melted to their faces. The others crawled toward the ruins of the circle, whispering prayers that had been forbidden for a century.
Linda lay on the cold stone, smoke curling from her palms. The sigil still glowed faintly, but a second mark now pulsed beneath it—black and spiraled, like a brand burned from the inside out.
The matron crawled to her side, her voice hoarse. "What did you bring through?"
Linda stared at the sigil. It pulsed once, twice.
Then, from the shadows behind them, something answered with a heartbeat that was not Philip's.
When the roar died, there was no sound left at all.
The undercity lay still, smothered in frost. What had been flame now glimmered as white ash. Every candle had frozen mid-drip; the wax hung in icicles that caught the moonlight leaking through the cracks above.
Linda stirred. Her body felt weightless, emptied. When she tried to breathe, the air cut like glass. She sat up slowly, flakes of ash sliding from her cloak. The circle around her was gone—burned so deep into the stone that it looked carved by time itself.
Of the Silent Court, only three remained upright. Their masks had cracked; beneath them, pale eyes blinked with terror. One whispered a prayer that froze in the air as frost-dust.
"The Veil…" the matron croaked. Her obsidian mask had shattered, revealing a lined face streaked with blood. "It's open still. Can't you feel it?"
Linda tried to speak, but no words came. Her throat was raw, her magic hollow. She looked down at her hand. The red sigil of the bond still glowed faintly—but beside it, darker lines had spread, curling up her wrist like veins of ink beneath the skin.
The matron reached for her, hand trembling. "Child… what answered you was not the prince."
"I know," Linda whispered. Her voice echoed too loudly, as though the chamber itself repeated her words a second after she spoke.
One of the surviving masked figures dragged himself toward the tunnel, muttering, "We must seal the way… before it finds form."
Linda's gaze drifted to the pit. Where the coals had burned now lay a sheet of ice, smooth and gleaming. Beneath it something moved—slow, deliberate. A ripple crossed the frozen surface, and a sound rose that was not a sound at all, but a memory of breath.
The matron staggered forward, raising her broken knife. "Go. Flee before it—"
The ripple stopped.
For a heartbeat, all was still. Then the frost cracked outward from the pit like lightning. A gust of frozen air swept the room, snuffing what little light remained. The matron's body stiffened; frost bloomed across her skin, sealing her words forever in a veil of ice.
Linda stumbled back, horror freezing her more completely than the cold.
Then she heard it.
A whisper—soft, intimate, impossibly close.
"Did you mean to call me, little fire?"
She spun around. No one stood behind her.
Her pulse thundered. She pressed her bleeding hand to her chest. "Who are you?"
The whisper came again, this time from inside her ear, inside her mind.
"You gave your name in blood. That makes it mine."
Her vision blurred. The frost along the floor traced shapes that looked almost like footprints leading away into the dark.
"Where he fell, I waited," the voice murmured. "Now, through you, I walk again."
The last candle broke with a sound like shattering glass.
When the soldiers finally found the ruins hours later, the undercity was empty. Only a single trail of frost led upward through the tunnels, fading into the streets above.
And far away, beneath the first light of dawn, Linda Shawn opened her eyes to a sky she no longer recognized.
Somewhere deep within her, the stranger laughed.
She walked barefoot through the frost. Each footprint she left melted a little, steaming faintly — as if fire still lived inside her, burning against the cold now carrying her name.
And in the frost-bound quiet, silence remembered her.