[POV: Amelia von Quinsley]
Amelia had never been alone. Not really.
Even in silence. Even in hiding. Even in the farmost wing of the dusk-bound palace garden where the air grew thick with forgotten pollen and the walls wept black vines—she'd never been alone.
Because her mother's presence lived in absence. In scent. In memory. In the way no one ever looked her in the eye without flinching.
She sat now in the sanctuary Saelin built, deep under the eastern cliff-tombs, where no name had been recorded since the founding of the upper cities. Her knees were drawn to her chest, sleeves bunched around her hands.
She hadn't spoken in hours.
The glyph seal at the entrance wall still shimmered, though dimly. It bore a curl of black that no reader could decrypt. They had tried. Many had tried. And many of them stopped speaking after that.
Not out of harm.
But because the glyph didn't allow lies near it.
And most who touched it realized they had nothing left to say.
---
Amelia exhaled.
Her voice, when it came, was soft and rasping.
> "I know you left it for him. Not me."
No one answered. But the seal flickered.
> "But I was here too, mother. I was here while they beat him. While they forgot me. While father named me 'tolerable' in front of the court."
Her hand hovered over the edge of the glyph.
> "And I remember everything you told me not to forget."
A breath. A tremble.
> "So I'm going to open it."
She pressed her palm to the surface.
The glyph flared.
For the first time in a decade, the seal shifted.
---
[POV: Lady Saelin – Memory Construct Fragment]
The moment her daughter touched the glyph, Saelin's memory pattern awoke.
Not a ghost. Not a soul.
Just the arrangement of emotion and concept that she had encoded into the stone, preserved in the syntactic marrow of old Law.
The glyph spoke.
Not aloud. Not mentally.
Conceptually.
It bled the idea of mother into Amelia's skin.
And from within the sealed vault beyond, a voice echoed in full clarity for the first time:
> "Amelia. If you're here, it means your brother has made the first choice."
> "It also means I have failed."
---
Amelia stepped back.
> "What... is this?"
The seal shifted. Its center opened—not like a door, but like a sentence curling into space.
Beyond it lay a chamber of black stone, polished to a mirror's shine.
And on its floor: a single ring, painted not in ink, but in dried blood.
Inside that ring were three items:
A burned scriptwatcher badge
A needle of Quinsley silver, still wrapped in crimson ribbon
And a blank page of archive parchment, untouched
---
[POV: Amelia]
> "You knew it would happen. You knew."
She stepped into the chamber.
The badge was her mother's. The needle was from her robes. The page...
She didn't know.
> "What do you want me to write on it?"
A pulse came from the wall.
The glyph answered with a sentence:
> The name only your brother deserves to say.
Amelia's lips parted.
But she did not speak.
Not yet.
She touched the page.
And across the kingdom, in places where ink should not move, a tremor began.
The Queen's personal mirror shattered.
The Watchers' archive index glitched.
In the Border Tier, a forgotten warding bell rang a note that had not been permitted for twenty years.
And far below, where Ezekiel stood at the lip of unformed reality, he blinked.
> Something just remembered me.