The days that followed blurred.
Serelith trained.
Faelan taught her the ancient forms of spellcasting—the gestures woven through language older than even the gods. He taught her how to draw power from silence, from stillness, from the threads of the Codex whispering behind her thoughts.
But every night, she returned to the Memory Pool.
And every night, the Codex showed her more.
A gate made of moonlight. A child crying in a storm. A blade wrapped in ivy and flame. A woman who looked like her, almost, bound in chains of glass.
She was starting to remember things she had never lived.
But Faelan—he did not dream.
He watched instead.
From the cliffs above the temple, he stood beneath the fading stars, a solitary shadow in the wind. In the east, the Hollow Court stirred. In the north, the gods whispered of a reaping.
And in the west, the Autumn Court had begun to move.
---
Long before Serelith, Faelan had been called Heir to the Autumn Throne.
He had been born beneath falling leaves and twilight storms, in a palace carved from the redwood heart of the Thornsong Forest. His father, the Autumn King, ruled with fire-touched reason and quiet cruelty. There were rules in that court—rules that broke boys and hardened men.
Faelan had broken them all.
He had defied the rites. Refused the sacred binding to the Hollow Queen. Questioned the bargains sealed in blood with the gods. When he'd refused to take the mantle of Binder of Seasons—the sacred role passed from father to son—the court had branded him a traitor.
And yet they had not killed him.
Not openly.
They feared what he might become if he ever fully embraced his mother's line—the Night-Blooded, those who once stood beside the Veil itself.
So he had run.
Hidden in plain sight. Waited. Watched.
And when he found Serelith in the mortal realm, marked by the Codex, fragile and furious and his, he'd known:
The world was ready to burn again.
---
Back in the temple, Serelith stood before the runed wall of the inner sanctum, the Codex's voice rising in her thoughts.
> "You are made of broken stars and unraveling time.
What you carry is not power—it is memory.
The world forgets.
You will remember it all."
She turned to Faelan as he entered.
"You knew I was marked," she said. "From the start."
"I suspected," he admitted. "But it wasn't until I saw the way the Hollow Queen looked at you... that I knew."
"Why help me?" Her voice was quiet. "You lost everything because of this."
Faelan hesitated.
Then stepped close, reaching out—not to touch her, but to let his fingers hover near her cheek, like the ghost of a memory.
"Because once," he said, "before the Codex was sealed, before the Courts bowed to shadows... there was a woman who bore its mark. She nearly changed everything. The Hollow Queen destroyed her."
His voice faltered.
"She was my mother."
Serelith's breath caught.
"I won't let that happen to you," he said. "I will not lose another."
And for the first time, Serelith saw not just the warrior in Faelan.
She saw the exile. The broken heir. The boy who had chosen hope over crown.
---
But far beneath the Hollow Court, the Queen stirred.
She had seen the defiance.
She had seen the bond forming between them.
And she would not allow it to bloom.
Not again.
Not when the veil itself was beginning to tear.