The moon had hidden that night, veiled behind heavy clouds. The palace under the Hollow Courts—the Underhall—breathed with a cold pulse, echoing the thrum of chained magic. Every corridor felt like a throat waiting to close around her.
Serelith ran.
Not through dream this time—but with blood pounding, breath sharp, bare feet silent on ancient stone.
She didn't yet know what the Codex was.
She didn't yet know what she was.
All she knew was that something deep in her bones screamed to run.
---
She'd stolen no spell, no artifact.
Only a whisper.
A voice that had come to her in the silence before sleep. A woman's voice—older than the stars, gentle as water worn into stone.
> "Your truth sleeps in Vaerethryn. They would see you bound before you ever wake."
The Hollow Queen had tried to hold her in a glamour of obedience. But the spell cracked when Serelith touched the edge of something older—something hers.
And so she fled.
---
She emerged into the twisted wilds that curled just beyond the courts—where the Hollow Queen's hounds would not go. Thorned trees bowed low. Fog crawled like breath across the earth.
And in the darkness, someone waited.
Not a hunter.
A watcher.
Faelan.
He didn't draw his blade. He didn't speak.
He only looked at her, wind catching the dark braid that fell over his shoulder.
"You're late," he finally said, voice low.
She stopped a dozen paces away, wary. "You knew I'd come?"
He tilted his head. "No. I hoped."
She hesitated. "Why help me?"
He looked past her, toward the palace glowing faintly beneath the earth.
"Because once," he said, "I believed in what they promised. In the Queen. In the Courts. But I saw what they did to others like you."
He stepped closer.
"And I won't let them do it again."
--- Back to the present
They traveled by forgotten paths, through tunnels and twilight hollows where the veil between realms ran thin. Faelan moved with the silence of someone who had always lived half in shadow.
Serelith asked few questions.
Faelan offered fewer answers.
But something in their silence began to fill.
A trust that didn't need names. A bond formed not of knowing, but of recognition—like two halves of a secret once split by time.
---
On the third night, they made camp beneath the ruins of an ancient stone watchtower. Faelan watched the stars while Serelith traced her fingers over runes carved into the rock.
"Do you believe in destiny?" she asked him softly.
He looked at her, firelight warming his features. "I used to."
"And now?"
"I believe in choice. Even when the gods try to take it."
She nodded, and said no more.
But that night, for the first time in years, she dreamed of her own will—unchained.
And Faelan watched her sleep, not with hunger, not with fear, but with something that felt almost like hope.