They didn't touch her. Not once.
Even as the guards escorted Elara through the towering arches and whispering halls of the palace, they kept their distance not out of respect, but something quieter and colder.
Fear.
Reverence.
Uncertainty wrapped in silence.
Elara said nothing. She didn't need to.
The glow of the sacred stone still pulsed faintly behind her eyes, like a second heartbeat no one could hear but her. Every footstep echoed across the marble like a drumbeat calling her into a life she hadn't chosen.
Just hours ago, she'd been washing linens in a sunlit courtyard, hands soaked in lye. The scent of baked roots, rain-drenched stone, and morning chatter still clung to her skin but now it felt distant, like a dream she'd already begun forgetting.
Inside, she was calm.
Not proud.
Not afraid.
Just still.
They led her into the Empress's receiving hall a vaulted chamber awash in moonlight filtered through stained glass. The air was thick with lavender and old incense, a blend of peace and judgment. At its center stood the woman whose face adorned every coin in the realm: tall, poised, robed in starlight silk.
The Empress.
Her crown was thin as a whisper yet gleamed with quiet command.
"Elara of Bramblecourt," the Empress said. Her voice was low, smooth curious, not cold.
No trumpets.
No heralds.
Just a name spoken like a question wrapped in prophecy.
Their eyes locked. The court watched, silent, hungry.
The Empress studied her, gaze sharp as glass, as if reading a truth that had not yet been written.
Elara didn't bow. Didn't shrink.
She simply looked back.
The air between them thickened.
Then, at last, the Empress gave the smallest nod. Barely a tilt. But the room shifted with it.
"You changed the course of the Empire today," she murmured.
A single sentence. No praise. No threat. Just fact.
Elara opened her mouth to speak—but there were no words strong enough to hold the storm forming inside her.
Instead, something else settled in her chest.
A weight.
The kind that came with stories waiting to be written in blood and fire.
She wasn't the servant's daughter anymore.
She was something else now.
The Chosen.
And as the stained-glass moonlight shimmered across the chamber walls, the palace whispered all around her—of secrets cloaked in silk, of power passed hand to hand, of shadows that didn't always follow light.