(Page 9) Chapter 1 – The Celestial Thread | Six Nights Before

The council chamber had been built to steady hearts: high windows, long banners, a hearth guarded by saints cut in cedar. On the night it fell, the banners hung limp, the hearth burned low, and the saints threw long, uneasy shadows. The Sunring outside should have gleamed a clear circlet. Instead it guttered on the clouds like a lamp starved of oil.

“The omens are not omens,” said Scholar Aram, voice raw. “They are measurements. The Spire’s current is interrupted. The Thread is fraying.”

“Speak plain,” Elira had said—then, openly, a queen. “What fails, fails where?”

Aram’s hands shook as he spread his maps: inked lines of star courses, marks of old pilgrim roads, marginalia in a script that seemed to unspool as it was read. “Here,” he said, tapping the Spire’s sigil. “And here.” He indicated three lesser towers, now ruins, that once fed light to the greater. “If the Ring dims to nothing before the circle is renewed, the under-realm will press through all the weak seams at once. Shades first. Then worse. The Thread binds, Your Grace. If it snaps—”

“If it snaps,” rumbled Captain Maera, “we stand. We have stood before.”

Elira had loved the captain’s steadiness more than any oath. She turned to her. “And if standing means dying all the same?”

“Then we make of dying a wall.” Maera bowed, smiled like a sunrise seen after a storm. “And we clear you a road.”

From the far door, a messenger stumbled in—blood at his ear, soot on his cheek. “They are within the outer ward,” he gasped. “Not men. Not any thing I know. The bell struck with no hand on it. I heard—” His voice cracked. “I heard a horn from beneath the stones.”

The chamber shuddered. Dust sifted from the groin of the vault. Somewhere, deep as a cavern, a chain dragged.

Elira looked to Aram. “How long?”

“Days? Hours? I cannot tell. The Ring flickers like a candle in a draft.”

“Then we do not wait,” Elira said. “We go to the Spire.”

“You cannot go alone,” Maera said. “And you cannot go with an army; you will draw every eye. Two, then. Three at most. And not lords. Not heralded.”

“My queen,” Aram said, “forgive me—but there is more. The Thread is not only a thing bound to stone. It is—”

“People,” murmured someone at the door.

Kieran stood there—young and too still, his mother’s cloak thrown over his shoulders, ash in his hair he had not noticed. Behind him, Myla, ink smudged on her fingers, clutching a journal to her chest like a reliquary.

Elira’s breath caught. “Kieran.”

“Captain Maera sent me,” he said, voice flat with shock that had not yet found a place to live. “She said: if the queen runs, you run with her. If she kneels, you kneel. If she needs a blade, be one.”

Elira swallowed hard. “And Myla?”

Aram answered, eyes bright with grief and a scholar’s terrible wonder. “Her mother broke the runes open. She found the pattern the Thread makes when it chooses. It wrote itself around Myla’s name before the ink dried.”

“I don’t understand any of that,” Myla said, jaw set. “But I can read what others won’t, and I remember what I read. If you need me, I’m coming.”

Outside, the bell struck again on no rope. The Sunring’s light flickered and dimmed, flickered and dimmed.

Elira looked at the three of them and saw not pawns, but pieces of providence. She turned to Maera. “How far can your wall hold?”

Maera grinned, wolf-bright. “Far enough to give you a day. Farther, if they dislike fire.”

“They won’t,” the messenger whispered. “They don’t seem to mind anything.”

“Then we make them mind,” Maera said. “Go.”

Elira shed her circlet. It was light, and yet it had weighed her down all her life. She pressed it into Aram’s hands. “Hide this. If I fail, crown no one with it; bury it with me.”

“My queen—”

“Not here,” she said, soft and fierce at once. “Crowns paint targets.”

She pulled up a plain hood, buckled the old sword to her hip, and gave the last order of a reign that hadn’t had time to begin. “We leave by the postern. Three riders. No banners. No fanfare. We travel light, and we travel with prayer.”