The code was seven words.
Unremarkable.
Until whispered.
Until spoken into the right ear.
Until carried by breath into the veins of spies who'd long forgotten they were once loyal to a different moon.
Zela had warned her.
"Even shadows have names they wish to forget."
Now, those names remembered.
At dawn, Elara walked through the Whispered Market—a stretch of old shops and spice sellers where the elite bought secrets alongside saffron. Zela shadowed her, hood up.
It took less than an hour.
Three palace informants collapsed in the square.
Blood trickled from their ears.
Their eyes glazed white.
And in each of their palms, scorched into the skin, was the crescent symbol of the old pact.
Arodan's mark.
The market screamed.
Guards arrived.
Myra's enforcers surrounded the bodies.
But no one accused Elara.
They couldn't.
Because she hadn't touched them.
She'd simply remembered what others had forgotten.
"The wind does not announce its coming—but it levels the trees all the same."
That evening, Myra sent a message.
Not a scroll.
Not a raven.
A head.
Wrapped in silk. Set gently on Elara's table in the Sunken Library.
It belonged to Ramos, her mute alchemist.
His mouth had been sewn shut with gold thread.
A note pinned to his collar:
"Let's see who runs out of silence first." —M
Zela gasped, tears stinging her face. Ebele turned away, cursing low and hard.
But Elara only stood, her face unmoved.
"This is the price of climbing," she said.
Ebele snarled, "Then let's pull her down."
"No," Elara whispered.
"She wants a storm. We'll give her a drought."
That night, Elara lit the ceremonial candles herself.
She placed Ramos' vial of nightbloom powder—his final invention—into the crypt vault. She knelt, whispered the crypt code once, and pressed her hand to the sigil.
The vault glowed faintly.
The Court of Shadows would remember him.
Not as a victim.
But as a sacrifice.
Elsewhere in the palace, Caelum received word from one of his inner circle:
"Elara has begun invoking Arodan's name in closed ritual."
He dismissed the court with a wave, jaw clenched.
He found her in the starlit tower.
Alone.
Barefoot. Holding a blade not for war, but for ceremony.
"Another secret?" he asked.
"No," she said. "A memory."
Caelum's voice lowered. "You're no longer just playing the court, Elara. You're becoming its compass."
"And if the compass points into darkness?"
"Then the kingdom will follow anyway. Because they fear Myra more than they trust me."
She turned.
"What about you? Do you fear me now?"
Caelum didn't answer.
Because the truth was, yes.
"The river that forgets it was once a stream soon drowns its own banks."
Later, in the Sunken Library, the last survivor of her original Court of Shadows approached her.
N'kobi.
"You said we'd be family," he said. "But you're building a kingdom. Which one matters more to you now?"
Elara blinked.
And for the first time in days, looked tired.
"Can I choose both?"
He shook his head. "Not if the throne bleeds everyone else dry."
And then he handed her a note.
A coded letter.
From inside her court.
A betrayal.
Someone had leaked the crypt code to Myra's priest-scribes.
Elara's pulse slowed.
Her jaw tensed.
"N'kobi…"
"Wasn't me," he said.
"But it was someone you trusted."
"The insect that sits inside the fruit is harder to kill than the one on the skin."
Elara sat down.
And smiled.
Not because it was over.
Because it had finally begun.