🕯️ Ashes of the Crown
Chapter 6 – The Bone Archives (Seris's POV)
The silence was deeper now.
Not like the hush of fear or the quiet between storms—this was older. Sacred. Like the crypt itself had stopped breathing.
Seris moved with care, each step echoing off the curved walls. Her hand brushed the stone—cold, wet, ancient. Faded carvings ran beneath her fingertips: runes she didn't know how to read, but somehow understood.
Kael walked ahead, slower now, one hand pressed to his wound. His blade was still out, still slick. She could feel the heat radiating from his skin—fevered. Fading.
He was breaking.
"Sit," she said softly. "You need rest."
"We don't have time."
"You can't lead me to freedom if you're dead." Her voice cracked. "Sit."
He did.
Seris kneeled beside him, untying what was left of her undersleeve. She tore it, pressed it to his shoulder.
"Not deep," she muttered, lying.
Kael didn't call her out on it.
"I've never seen you fight like that," she whispered.
He didn't answer.
She looked at him. "What was that power?"
Still silence.
So she said it: "Shadowstep."
His eyes flicked to hers—sharp, alert, angry.
"I saw it in the Archives," she said. "In the old records. A forbidden art, lost after the massacre at Rael's Hollow."
"You read too much."
"You hide too much."
Kael gritted his jaw. "It kills the body, burns the nerves. Every time you use it, you bleed days off your life. And you want me to teach you?"
"No," Seris whispered. "I want you to live."
They sat in quiet again.
Then Seris felt it—a faint pull. Like her blood remembered something her mind did not. The runes on the walls lit softly as she walked, glowing with a pale gold flicker. Her steps drew them like fire across dry parchment.
At the end of the hallway was a stone door sealed with a circular sigil.
She touched it.
The stone whispered.
"Blood of the Crown… Flamebound…"
The sigil flared, and the door opened—not by magic, but by memory.
Behind it were shelves made of bone, stacked with scrolls wrapped in dragonhide, jars filled with starlit ash, and tomes that pulsed faintly—alive.
Kael stared.
"I thought this place was destroyed," he murmured.
Seris stepped into the Bone Archives like one returning home.
Somewhere inside, her blood whispered:
> You are not the last flame, Seris.
You are the spark that burns the old world down.
🔥End of chapter