The smell came first, as it always did.
It was the palace breathing out in the dark. Cold iron and the thin, insistent ghost of last night's candles. Damp marble giving off a warning of the storm still hours away.
Elara—Anya, she had to remember to be Anya now—drew the air in. It was sharp. It felt like a blade finding the space between her ribs.
Two centuries. The crown's weight was more than gold and gems. It was a sediment, layer upon layer of every decision that had built this place and every one that would, in time, lead it to the pyre. She was the architect trapped inside the walls of her own execution.
The mirror showed her a stranger. An angular face. Eyes the colour of a winter storm. Hair black as a moonless night, trapped in a cage of braids and silver pins.
The Founder. The Butcher of Vilgate. The woman who would birth the line that would kill her.
A tremor ran through her hands. She clenched them, feeling the unfamiliar nails, long and sharp, bite into her palms. The pain was real. For now, it was the only thing that was.
"Your Highness?"
Lyra's voice came from behind, soft as poison.
"The ball awaits. The corridors are already whispering."
Elara turned. The dress, a monumental thing of purple velvet and gold brocade, dragged across the floor with a sound like a sigh. Every fold was a declaration. The solar falcon on the sleeves. The bodice was so tight her breath came in small, controlled hits. It was a cage, threaded with gold.
"Has Commander Kaelen Montgrave arrived?"
Her own voice sounded strange to her—a lower, authoritative register she was still growing into. She touched her throat, pretending to adjust the diamond collar there.
"He passed through the east gate minutes ago," Lyra said.
Her eyes held a bright, sharp curiosity.
"He brings the road with him. And the tension from the North. They say the rebellion grows like a weed."
Kaelen.
The name was a funeral bell in her chest. And also the first chord of a forbidden song. In that other life—the future that was her past—he had been her guardian. Her only confidant. The man whose silver eyes saw her, not the magicless princess, but simply Elara. The man who, in the end, could only stand and watch the flames take her.
Now he was here. Young. Whole. Unscarred by the wars she would start. Unburdened by the betrayal she would architect. He had no idea the woman he served was the architect of his house's ruin.
"Excellent," she said.
The smile she stretched across her lips felt like a crack in porcelain. It was the first of thousands.
"Let us receive our hero. We must begin the ball."
The Grand Hall was a spectacle of light and shadow. Crystal chandeliers cast their glitter over a sea of silks, a cacophony of heraldic colours. An intricate waltz played, but beneath the violins, Elara heard the real music: the whisper of silk hiding daggers, the dry clink of goblets sealing silent pacts.
She descended the main staircase. Each step was a solemn drumbeat. The hall bowed. Her heart beat a frantic rhythm against her ribs, but her face was polished ice.
Then she saw him.
He stood by the great oak doors, speaking with the old Duke of Thorne. He stood out. Not for wealth—his uniform was simple, of black wool, the silver epaulettes already dull—but for his posture. A living sword in a hall of ornaments. His dark hair was tied back, revealing a face marked by a premature seriousness. His grey eyes scanned the room with a cold, analytical gaze.
Then they found hers.
The world shrank. The music became a distant buzz, muffled by the blood roaring in her ears.
For a moment, she did not see the commander. She saw the man who brought her bitter tea on cold study nights, whose rough hands had held hers with a tenderness that hurt more than any scorn.
He inclined his head, a strictly formal gesture, but his eyes did not leave her. There was a crack in his gaze, a flash of something like confusion. You look different, his look seemed to say. You look like an echo.
Elara broke the contact first. It demanded all her strength. She turned to receive the mellifluous words of the Southern Baron, her smile a carefully carved artifact.
Every nod, every exchanged pleasantry, was a move on a board only she could see. She had planted the first seed weeks before: a subtle rumour about a silver vein under the Duke of Thorne's lands. In weeks, dispute. In years, a blood feud. In a century, it would give the Crown legal reason to take it all.
She swallowed. Victory tasted of ashes.
The chance came during the fourth waltz. She isolated herself on the balcony overlooking the Winter Gardens, a place of white marble and dormant wisteria. She knew she would be observed. Knew her absence would cause speculation. And she knew he would follow.
The air out there was cold enough to bite. The music arrived muffled, a ghost of the revelry. She rested her hands on the icy balustrade. The cold seeped through the silk.
"Your Highness should fear the frost."
His voice came from behind her, inevitable and deep.
She did not turn.
"A commander who faces the Northern winds worries about a balcony's frost? That seems unlikely. Poetic, perhaps."
He stopped beside her, maintaining the exact distance of an arm's length. She felt his heat as if standing next to a furnace. She could smell leather and ashes, juniper soap, and beneath it, the metallic scent of distant snow.
"I worry for the wellbeing of the crown that holds the realm together," he replied.
There was an unfamiliar edge in his voice, a roughness.
"Especially when that crown seems… distant. As if floating above us all. Never quite touching the ground."
He noticed. The thought cut through her. By all the gods, he noticed.
She finally looked at him. The moonlight greyed his features, deepening the shadows under his eyes. He was exhausted, she realised with a sudden stab of guilt. The rebellion was eating his peace. And she would turn that spark into a wildfire.
"The weight of the crown," she said, allowing a thread of genuine weariness into the words, "is a peculiar loneliness. Sometimes I feel I am building something so vast that not even I, centuries ahead, will control the shadows it casts."
He watched her in silence, his eyes reading her face.
"All construction needs foundations."
He paused, almost imperceptibly.
"Foundations demand sacrifice."
Sacrifice.
The word was a physical blow. The image exploded behind her eyes: the platform, the runes glowing with profane light, the impassive face of the Queen-Mother, the cold blue flames rising, consuming flesh and future…
She took a tiny step back, her fingers tightening on the marble.
"Some sacrifices," she whispered, looking at the stars—an alien arrangement in this era's sky, "don't strengthen. They only carve pieces of you away. Leave only a hollow. Or a determination so cold it fuses to the bone."
A thick silence hung between them, filled only by the sound of their breathing. His heat was a dangerous, magnetic pull.
"I…"
Kaelen's voice wavered, betraying a tremor. He was wrestling with something.
"I thought I understood the cost of duty. But lately, my dreams are full of ruins."
Elara froze.
"Ruins?"
"Fragments. A circular room with books that don't exist. A sad melody in a mode I've never heard."
He turned his face to her, and she saw not the commander, but the man: bewildered, vulnerable.
"And a face. Always the same face, hidden by smoke. By the distorted gleam of… fire."
Elara's heart stopped. The air left her lungs.
He remembered. Not with his mind, but with his soul. The bond that had tied them in the future was leaking into the present.
She should discourage him. Laugh it off. Keep the ice in her gaze. That was the plan. The safe move.
Instead, her hand moved by pure impulse. Her gloved fingers hovered in the air, inches from his bare hand with its pale scar. She could feel the heat radiating from it.
"Perhaps," she said, and her voice had gone rough, "some ghosts aren't from the past. They're from the future. Warnings of paths not yet taken. Echoes of choices still to be made."
Their eyes met again. This time, there was no protocol, no empire between them. Just two castaways. One who knew the deluge was coming. The other feeling the tide shift under his feet.
The sound of quick, hard footsteps tore the moment apart.
Lyra appeared in the balcony entrance, slightly breathless.
"Your Highness. Forgive me. The Chief Emissary of the Primal Sun has arrived. He demands an immediate audience."
Her eyes shone with a feverish light.
"He claims to have an urgent vision. A new prophecy. Involving you."
A new kind of cold, sharp and deadly, went down Elara's spine. It froze the brief moment of humanity she had breathed on the balcony.
The Church. The Ancestral Cult. The very guardians of the dogma she, as Anya, would help to build.
They were not supposed to act yet. Their visions should not be this clear. The timeline was already groaning under the weight of her presence.
She nodded, feeling the mantle of Anya settle on her shoulders like armour.
"Take him to the Private Chamber. I will be there shortly."
Passing Kaelen, her skirts brushed the stone. She could not avoid a pause, a fraction of a second where the world seemed to still. Without turning, she let the words come out in a whisper that was both warning and confession.
"Commander Montgrave… keep your dreams close. In a world built on convenient truths, they may be the only real things we have left. And the most dangerous."
She left then, feeling the weight of his gaze on her back like a brand.
Long after the ball's lights had died, Elara remained in the cold privacy of her chambers. The room felt heavy. She pulled the gloves off slowly and let them drop onto the ink-stained oak table.
A single tallow candle flickered in a silver holder, throwing long, trembling shadows on the bare stone walls.
On the table was the scroll.
The emissary had handed it to her with bony hands, his face a mask of contained fervour. The seal of the Primal Sun, a disc with sharp rays, was broken in black wax.
The words, handwritten in a tense, angular script, burned before her eyes:
Thus speaks the Sun through the Veil of the Moon:
Beware, O Founder, whose hands shape the dawn.
The Serpent of Time bites its own tail, and the venom is memory.
A rootless soul flowers in foreign soil, watered by the tears of ages.
She builds with the hands of the Destroyer and sows with the heart of the Beloved.
Her shadow stretches longer than her life, and her echo speaks louder than her throne.
What you build will fall. What you name will be a curse. What you love… will be your fire.
They knew.
Not everything.Not her name or origin. But they felt the rupture. They felt the anomaly.
Ironic, she thought with a humour so dark it was despair. They are using against me the very weapon I intend to forge.
Deliberately, Elara held the scroll to the candle's trembling flame. She watched the fire lick the edges, consume the black words, turn the sacred vision into twisted ash. The acidic smell of burnt paper filled the room.
Then, a sound from the corridor.
A single set of footsteps, heavy but contained, stopping on the other side of her massive oak door. No knock. No voice. Just a thick, living silence filling the space between the wood and the darkness.
Elara stood motionless, her hands hovering over the ashes, her eyes fixed on the thin strip of pale light under the door.
Kaelen.
Had he heard something? Seen the emissary's face?
Outside, Kaelen remained still. His right hand hovered near the hilt of his longsword, but did not grasp it. His heart beat against his ribs like a confused drum in the dark.
The emissary's fanatic words still echoed. Serpent of Time. Rootless Soul. But it was not the words that had brought him here.
As he had waited in the corridor adjacent to the audience chamber, a small crack in the monumental woodwork—a long-forgotten flaw—had entered his line of sight.
And through it, he had seen.
Not her directly, but her reflection in the huge silver mirror on the opposite wall. For one devastating instant, the image was not of Empress Anya Veridiana.
The ice mask had crumbled. Reflected in the silver was a woman whose face he had never seen on his sovereign, yet was viscerally familiar. Eyes wide not with fury, but with a deep, helpless terror. A mouth slightly agape in a silent gasp of utter anguish.
It was the look of someone completely alone, torn from everything they knew.
The air left his lungs as if he'd been struck.
The reflection vanished as quickly as it had appeared, replaced by the rigid posture of the woman who commanded empires. But the sight was seared into his mind.
Now, before her door, his hand moved away from the sword.
The palace slept, or pretended to. The only sounds were the blood in his temples and the echo of a monstrous question taking shape in the silence of his soul:
Who, by all the gods, was really inside his queen's head?
Inside the chamber, Elara heard the footsteps retreat.
They were not hurried or angry, but slow and heavy, like a man who had just seen the world split apart and now had to learn to walk on the shards.
She leaned back in the high-backed chair, feeling the weight of the centuries, future and past, crushing her.
The first move was made. The first seed, planted. The first crack, opened.
And somewhere deep in her chest, where Elara, the sacrificed princess, still trembled and breathed, a small flame of something that was not vengeance or strategy began to burn.
It was just pain. Pure, raw, human.
The pain of having been so close to him and knowing every step toward him was a step toward his own ruin.
She looked at her empty hands in the dying candlelight and whispered to the shadows, to the sleeping empire, and to the future she was doomed to build.
"And so it begins."
Outside, in the now empty corridor, a single unburnt fragment of parchment, blown under a rug by the draft from a slightly open window, held half a prophetic line:
…will be your fire.