The shadows behind the parlor were my cover. I needed to move unseen. If I timed it wrong and the Erdonal soldiers saw me, or if the seer had sensed me, all would break loose. The mission. My chance. I couldn't afford a single mistake. I mapped out the path in my mind: slip through the back, keep to shadows and stay silent.
The alley narrowed, crowded with shapes of the people. One man stood at the red-painted door, the sign above it swaying in the wind —Herbs and Potions, his gaze dragging over me. I dodged it quickly, forcing myself to stride faster. Almost there.
I slipped toward the back door of the parlor, when the back door yawned wide and unlocked with old hinges groaning and the wooden floor shrieking loudly. Shit. I went rigid, body locked. The silence was so excruciating, I prayed no one heard it. My heart was beating fast, until muffled voices drifted from the inside. Erdonal soldiers. The crowd outside made me invisible, so I sealed the door softly, as silence swallowed the click, but my pulse still roared like I'd given myself away.
I could still hear them, faintly, as the sound drifted through the wall. But not close enough to hear the full conversation. I found myself in the storeroom. Rows of glass jars with bright green things lined up on the wooden shelves that clung to all the walls. Packed with mountains of grain, lentils spilling from torn sacks and a heap of earthy potatoes, it had everything a decent storeroom needed. The concrete floor half-buried under hay and dust with tinted small white droppings of chickens or ducks.
I scanned the room. Desperately yet quietly, to my best ability, I started rifling through the sacks and boxes, prowling like a hound for the sound. I tapped and listened for hollows for any kind of echo, for a single note that would tell me where the voices came from.
Something rasped.
I froze. Is it…
The blunt and bare rectangular doorway drawn on the wall shone bright, yet still was barely a visible shadow. I'd found the source. In between, there was a slit in its seam, a little mouth in the wood, and through it the soldiers' words slid straight into my ears. I hunched against the sacks, fully lowering myself onto the hay and pressing down my ear to the seam. The old lady's rasp was unmistakable – seer. The crew sat inside, they were in there, I could hear their voices speaking over each other.
"The rune," Aeyen said firmly. "Does it mean anything?"
There was silence.
"We found it in Falbeah, Tri-Kingdom border." He paused, swallowing hard.
I could hear the Captain ripping the rune sign from Aeyen's hand. "Everyone was dead when we arrived and these were everywhere, so do you know what they mean or not?" The captain was getting frustrated.
"We're wasting our time." I could hear the bearded man whispering.
"And the air there was…peculiar, beyond humid and…dark." Another woman from the crew added.
They waited for the answers as desperately as me. What killed them? How could the entire village vanish like that? Unknowingly this was part of my mission, possibly the part I Roe needed to know about.
Quiet wrapped the room like a shroud, thinning the time. I was barely breathing myself, pressing hard and flat against the sacks, sharpening my hearing to catch seer's words.
"These don't belong to us." The seer breathed out in a brittle whisper.
"I don't believe you," Heavy boots creaked nearer, the Captain advanced. "These are from the old language," I couldn't tell how close the Captain stood to the seer, I could only feel the edge of the tension of the room. "Your people's language."
"It's a dead tongue. Maybe if a single library still existed, I could have helped you." The seer paused.
"But does it belong to you?" The bearded soldier barked.
"See? I told you it's witches doing! And none of you believed me." Aeyen shot out.
"Shut up Aeyen!" A hand of the bearded soldier struck the boy's head, punching the air with hollow report.
"Nothing in this world belongs to us. Only to the Gods." Seer voiced the answer with a patient hush.
"Bullshit!" The bearded man again snapped. "Everything here belongs to Erdonal. All the Luminite belongs to Erdonal, as much as the whole Hollow Mountain Range. To each its own. Talka has its libraries while Husemid has its deserts. And every scrap here belongs to His Majesty King Aslan. You belong to King Aslan," His fingers drummed the wood, getting more annoyed. "So, why don't you tell us what it means? Wild guess? It's your doing, isn't it?"
"Why don't you bring this to your King." The seer asked plainly.
"YOU WITCH!" I only heard the intake of the bearded man who was about to lash out with fist or palm, seer or stone, I couldn't tell.
"Calm down, Taaner." The Captain growled back. "We're not here to accuse anyone of anything, we're here to learn if these runes mean anything." I could hear her stepping back, trying to undo the heat.
"We're wasting our time, the sunrise is in an hour and we need to get back to the port." The fourth member of the crew complained.
"She's useless." Taaner muttered through clenched teeth."Let's go!" I could feel the room shaking, as the boots scraped the floorboards. The hinge of the door squeaked as someone pushed the door open.
"I can't translate the rune, but I can tell you who you are looking for."
The soldiers stilled mid-motion.
Silence.
"And who are we looking for?" The Captain murmured.
"You're looking for once an orphan, crowned a King. Once a traitor wielding magic now he commands the arcane, the lost wanderer who shall find his throne." The seer articulated in a hoarse voice slowly. My eyes flew open, every hair on my arms prickling.
"Where do we find this orphan?" Captain asked flatly.
"You'll find it sooner than you think. It's crawling from the shadows already." The seer answered raspy, almost smiling. The smirk on the seer's face was larger than the wall dividing us.
Through the tiniest gap in the wall, I couldn't see the seer's face. Only the fragile outline of her body cloaked in layers of black, the fabric rippling like smoke as if it were alive. From beneath the wide sleeves, a pale, skeletal hand emerged with the tired skin stretching thin over brittle bones. She was still, yet I could feel the power bled from her calmness; nothing loud or theatrical but something ancient and beyond patient.
"And the runes?" One of the soldiers blurred.
The seer's head tilted slightly beneath the hood, the motion almost birdlike. For a heartbeat, no one dared breathe.
"One question," She barked, her voice no longer low, but cutting. "Now, pay up and be gone."
The crew stilled, exchanging warning glances before Captain crouched, dropping a handful of tarnished coins that scattered across the dirt floor with a hollow jingle. She muttered something low, too quiet for me to catch. Then they turned their boots that echoed against the hollow silence. Suddenly, the door creaked open, letting in a draft that smelled of smoke and cold breeze, and they were gone.
The door still swayed slightly on its hinges with only the faintest tremor rippled through her cloak, like wind brushing over old parchment. The air was so still I could hear the sound of my own breathing. When the door finally slammed shut, her voice returned this time more quiet, rasping, deliberate.
"And yet… one stays."
My heart dropped. The tiny wooden door separating two spaces flung itself open, scattering dust and ash across the floor. The gust tore through the storage room, whipping my cloak aside, tearing the hood from my head and stripping away any illusion of hiding. Candles guttered, their flames stretching toward the seer before snapping out one by one. No corners left to melt into, no shadows deep enough to swallow me. Just me, and her gaze cutting through my bare skin.
"Fate," she murmured, "has a peculiar sense of timing."
I didn't flinch. Didn't move. She only lifted her head slightly, the hood shifting enough for me to glimpse the hollowed line of a cheekbone.
I hadn't met many seers. Yet she looked like the one I met once. She was pale as frost, etched with veins that pulsed faintly like threads of silver. I remember Roe and I leaving the Summer Palace under the cloak of darkness. He said nothing the entire way and I didn't dare to ask. I remembered the trek through the rain, the smell of rot and incense clinging to her tent. I only caught a glimpse of her face. That night, when Roe emerged from the tent, the color had drained from his face, hands shaking. By the next full moon, I left the palace too.
My throat tightened. Every instinct screamed to run, but my feet refused to move, anchored by something far heavier than fear – curiosity.
"My…" The word cracked out of me, barely more than a whisper. "My name is Lyra Fairton." I wanted to say more, to explain, to ask but my tongue felt leaden.
"Didn't your mother teach you, you do not lie to seers." A faint sound came from beneath her hood. The temperature dropped again, biting through my clothes until my skin burned cold. My stomach twisted.
She leaned forward, the staff scraping against the floor. Sparks of faint blue light of her eyes shimmered. The air around her shifted, stirring the ashes in slow, deliberate spirals, as I could feel the floorboards creaking beneath me.
"I'm not lying, my name is Lyra Fairton and I came here for answers. And I have gold to pay for it." My breath hitched.
"Then you came here for the wrong reasons," The seer didn't move. She stood as if made of the same stone that held up the mountains, her cloak rippling in the draft though she herself remained perfectly still. "I do not answer questions from liars." she whispered.
Ironically, that's what I used to think was all they did. Answer pretty lies for desperate people, like me. Seers were deceivers, not known for their honesty. Far descendants of the witches, with their bloodlines said to have thinned with time, leaving behind only fragments of true magic. My mother used to say their greatest gift wasn't foresight at all, but storytelling, especially tales about life before the Great Witch Rebellion, when the old gods still walked among men.
The wind screamed against the walls again, clawing at the open door like it wanted back inside.
"You're chasing ghosts," She said, voice cracking like firewood. "And looking for the answers about things that were buried long before you were born."
I froze. I hadn't told her anything yet. I hadn't told anyone. Not even Daniel. The hood lifted just enough for me to see more of the sliver of her face, thin lips cracked with age, and eyes that gleamed like shards of obsidian reflecting firelight. She tilted her head, and though the hood shadowed her face, I could feel the weight of her stare on me.
"You must travel to Erdonal."
My lips parted, then closed instinctively fast and tight, as if that could prevent her from seeing straight through me.
"How do you—?"
"Your mother is no longer with us." The seer said neither as question nor surprise. I didn't answer, she perhaps guessed it. Every instinct screamed that anything I said might be turned against me.
Finally, I managed. "She's not. But that's now what I came here for." My voice steadied, even as my pulse betrayed me. "There's… something I have," I said at last, carefully choosing each syllable. "Something I need to know how to use."
The seer shifted closer, the hood tilted again. A slow, rasping breath escaped her. "You're the daughter of your mother, what there's to know. One does not learn how to bond." She whispered "The magic bonds you. It comes to you, when you're ready."
I swallowed hard, my throat tightening. "Then how am I supposed to control it?"
"You're not. It cannot be taught, only nurtured. Through the people you meet, the scars you carry, the moments that make you bleed or happy. It finds you when you are most alive."
Her words rooted themselves in me.
I took a cautious step forward, the floor creaking beneath my weight. "But what if I hurt someone? What if I don't want it? What if I don't know how to control it? I have no idea what I shall do." The seer turned her face slightly toward the dying fire. As if she knew the shape of my doubt, the rhythm of my mother's warnings, even the sound of the thoughts I hadn't yet dared to think. As if the sound of Daniel's voice warning me that I won't find what I am looking for echoed in my ears.
"We're given the bond, either to destroy or protect. When one is born, one is given that power. You do not choose. The cruelest fate is not knowing which one you are." She said, the faintest hint of a smile ghosting across her voice.
I felt the air tighten in my chest.
My breath trembled.
"I came for answers," I whispered, desperate. "For a way to stop it, before it gets worse. Before something happens."
"Magic bond is inside every one of us, yet only the chosen ones feel it. There's no stopping it."
"What does that even mean?" I demanded, voice breaking. The seer lowered her head. The light faded from her staff until only the darkness remained.
"Yours will echo louder than any one of ours, your mother should've told you that." She turned slightly. "But I'll give you a gift," She looked down, her outline blurring in the half-light. "A gift once given to me by an old witch, a long time ago,"Her cloaked silhouette almost lingered above the floor when she turned fully to me. "A prophecy – the traitor's child, born on the night of the storm with a silent curse, will sit on foreign throne, and once it will set its gaze, it will set it ablaze."
"And what does it mean?" I asked.
The seer did not flinch for a second. The hood dipped slightly, as if my question amused her more than it offended.
"You'll know it when you see it, daughter of Eleonor." The faintest trace of a smirk ghosting across the shadows of the seer's mouth.
I knew this was a useless idea. Frustration rose in me, hot and bitter. "But—"
The rest vanished in a burst of wind that ripped through the room, scattering ash and papers alike. It hit me full force, knocking me backward into a heap of grain sacks. When I blinked the dust from my eyes, she was gone.
Not a sound, not a trace, just a faint, humid metallic taste in the air and the soft hum still vibrating in my bones. The place she stood now was nothing but swirling dust and a single thread of silver light dissolving into the air.
My heart hammered. Not only from the desperate need to believe she'd been real, but from the sudden realization that Lady Fairton would murder me once she saw the state of my dress, now covered in half the tavern's dust.
I pushed myself to my feet just as the first thin rays of sunlight slipped through the cracked window, scattering gold across the dust that still hung in the air. Outside, through the narrow window the horizon bled with faint pinks and molten orange, the colors of a world slowly waking. Proof that I'd been gone far longer than I thought.
I needed to leave before Lady Fairton would notice my absence. I could explain it easily. I'd been at the tavern all night, drinking, nothing worth mentioning, not that she'd ask. The dust? From someone stumbling into me. Perfectly ordinary. Perfectly harmless. Clean lie.
I brushed the dust off my dress the best I could, though it clung stubbornly to the fabric. My frozen fingers still only made the mess worse. The dust spread in uneven streaks across my dress. In the warped mirror by the door, a tired face stared back—smudged cheeks, tangled hair, eyes that looked older than they had yesterday. I didn't look my best.
The door groaned shut behind me, sealing in the last of the night. The seer. The Erdonal soldiers. Sam and Olghir, that now looked hollow in half light, streets empty, windows shuttered. Silence and stillness.
Not a soul outside. No footsteps. No voices. No mystery man cloaked in darkness.
Lady Fairton would never know about this detour.
But the words wouldn't leave me: the prophecy, the runes on the village walls, the nightmares that felt too vivid, too raw they might as well be memories. Were they threads of the same web? Was Erdonal involved?
The mission had begun. I had to find the cause of the attacks on the villages and help Roe win the war. With the sun climbing fast, only hours remained before I had to cross the Great Gate. A cold fire burned in me: topple Aslan, seize the bond, and lift Rasfalia from its knees.