Night settled over Arkanis like a velvet shroud. Lamps flickered in the palace corridors, their flames bending as Diana moved swiftly through the eastern wing. The echo of her sandals was the only sound until she paused before a side door. A knock—twice, then once. It opened to reveal Claudia, her cousin by marriage, silver needle still tucked into the braid at her shoulder.
"You left the Curia in a storm," Claudia murmured as she stepped aside. "Already, the wives whisper of it."
"Good," Diana said. She placed a folded parchment into Claudia's hand. "Let them whisper louder. And listen—especially to whose husbands dismiss Ashkara as rumor."
Claudia's eyes gleamed, sharp beneath her calm smile. "The circle is eager for something new to gossip about."
Diana left her there and descended deeper into the palace. At the treasury offices, the last clerks were extinguishing lamps. Justinian lingered, hunched over a scroll. He glanced up, startled, then relaxed when he saw her. From beneath his desk, he drew another scroll, its seal broken.
"Ledgers," he whispered. "The grain convoys for Ashkara—diverted south weeks ago. Someone's choking the province on purpose."
Diana's jaw tightened. She took the scroll without a word, sliding it into her sleeve.
Later, in the city, the taverns roared with laughter and sloshing cups. Diana sat in the shadowed back corner of the Syra twins' establishment, a hood drawn low. One of the sisters—Calliane—leaned close, lowering her voice.
"A sailor came in from the Ashen coast. Says he saw a whole village lit red at night—no torches, no firewood, just the houses burning themselves. No screams. No survivors."
Diana closed her eyes for a breath. When she opened them, her gaze was steel. "Keep listening. Every drunkard's tale, every rumor. Send word through Alaric."
By the time she returned to the palace, the streets were quiet save for the lamplighters. A boy with soot-blackened hands darted past her, torch in hand. She caught his arm gently. "Tell your guildmaster," she murmured, pressing a coin into his palm, "that some nights, your fire will carry more than light."
The boy nodded, eyes wide, and vanished into the dark.
Back in her office, Diana unrolled the stolen ledger across her desk. Claudia's parchment lay beside it, Calliane's rumor still fresh in her ears. Each thread was small, but together they began to weave a pattern. The Senate would not see it, but she would.
She bent over the desk, the lamp's flame throwing her shadow long across the wall. Her voice was low, a vow to herself.
"I'll drag the truth out of Ashkara if I have to burn the shadows out with my own hands."
Diana unrolled a broad vellum map across her desk, weighing down the curling edges with an inkpot and a bronze paper knife. The lamplight washed over the Imperium's territories, each province neatly inked in red lines and gilded script. Her eyes drifted southwest—toward the neglected corner of the empire.
Ashkara.
It looked small on the map, a crooked wedge pressed against the sea. But Diana knew its terrain well. Her finger traced the borders, sliding along the gray smear inked as the Ashen Fields, that wasteland barring the province from the empire's heartland. Ashkara sat behind it, a frontier hemmed in by desolation and saltwater.
To the south, the coast was drawn in jagged black, marked littora cineris—the Ashen Coast. Little dots marked villages there, half of which Diana knew no longer existed. They were the first to vanish, swallowed by the sea's coves or raiders slipping through reefs.
And beyond, the wide expanse of the Inner Sea. On the map, it was painted blue. In truth, Diana thought, it was a graveyard of gray swells and black cliffs, its waters carrying Dionian warboats like wolves slipping through tall grass.
She leaned closer, her palm flattening against the province's outline. Isolated, vulnerable, despised by the senate for its poverty—yet it was also the Imperium's southern shield. Lose Ashkara, and raiders had a straight road into the grain valleys of the interior.
Her jaw tightened. The Senate saw numbers, tariffs, and ledgers. But here on the map, Diana saw a wound waiting to be opened wider.
The door creaked. Captain Alaric returned, saluting. "The names you gave me are moving already. By tomorrow night, we'll have the first reports. Quietly."
Diana kept her gaze on the map, her finger still pressing against Ashkara as though she could hold it in place by force of will alone. "Good. Every whisper, every ledger, every survivor. We'll weave the truth from scraps if we must."
She finally looked up, her eyes burning in the lamplight. "Ashkara is where it begins. And if the Senate will not defend it, then we will."
****
Diana leaned over the map again after Alaric left, tracing the jagged outline of the Inner Sea with her fingertip. Mare Thalassion's dominion pressed hard against Ashkara's coast, their fleets a constant shadow. On paper, they were the obvious culprits—feeding the Dionians, choking trade, using famine as a weapon.
It fit. Almost too well.
Her lips pressed thin as her hand hovered over the Ashen Coast. The accounts of burning villages, of silence swallowing households whole—those were not the Mare's way. Thalassion fought with ships and steel, not with omens and vanishing shadows.
A whisper curled through her, as it sometimes did when her lineage stirred—threads of fate tugging at the edges of her thoughts. They told her this was no simple maritime plot. A weight lay deeper, knotted in the soil of Ashkara itself. She could feel it, though the shape eluded her, as though the loom of destiny had left one thread hidden from her sight.
"Mare Thalassion…" she murmured to the empty room. "Perhaps. But there's more. Something I cannot yet see."
Her gaze drifted back to the Inner Sea on the vellum map. To the senators, it was nothing more than a blue smear of ink, a border between provinces. But as Diana studied it, the lines shifted in her mind's eye—the sea became a vast iris, dark and unblinking, its jagged reefs like cracks in a pupil. An eye. Watching. Waiting.
The sensation came again, sharp as a hand tightening on her shoulder. That subtle tremor in the threads of fate she had inherited—an intuition that whispered when speeches and scrolls lied. It told her what no report could: her preparations here, the gathering of names, the ledgers smuggled from the treasury, the whispers from taverns and wives' circles—all of it was enough. Enough to begin, not enough to end. The truth would not crawl to her desk in Arkanis; she would have to go to it herself.
She straightened, palms flat on the table. Her eyes lingered on Ashkara's jagged outline, hemmed in by the ashen scar and the sea's hungry maw. A province abandoned by the senate, mocked by her peers, yet heavy with silence. Diana exhaled, a long measured breath, and whispered into the quiet room:
"It's time."
The next morning, the palace bustled as if nothing in the world were amiss. Diana dressed as she always did—crimson sash, gold-trimmed robe—masking her resolve behind the practiced calm of duty. She moved through the corridors, nodding to scribes, listening to the clink of armor as Praetorians shifted at their posts. From the outside, she was only another noblewoman going about her daily obligations.
In the Curia Solis, the senators had reconvened. Diana sat silently in her usual seat as their voices filled the chamber once more. The same arguments: tariffs, grain shortages, accusations of mismanagement. Their words overlapped like vultures squabbling over a carcass.
She let her gaze sweep the chamber, her face composed, her thoughts elsewhere. It struck her again how small these men were compared to the hunger in the streets, the raids on the borders, the silence in Ashkara.
Her father's absence gnawed at her more than their bickering. The Emperor's throne at the head of the Curia remained empty, draped in banners, while beyond these walls he drowned himself in banquets and music. Revelry in a time of famine. Laughter while the Dionians struck. His people gnawed on scraps while their sovereign reveled in the Palace of the Sun, chasing pleasure until dawn.
Diana's hand curled tightly in her lap. The weight of rule had fallen, not on the Emperor, but on her shoulders—and if she faltered, no one else would stand.
The meeting adjourned with the scrape of benches and the rustle of parchment. Senators gathered their scrolls and drifted into clusters, still muttering over tariffs and levies, their voices fading into the marble echoes of the Curia Solis.
Diana rose, her robe falling about her like a crimson tide. She intended to slip out quietly, already thinking of the preparations waiting for her—packhorses readied in the palace stables, Alaric's men sworn to silence, coded messages that would send word ahead along the Ashen roads.
But before she reached the bronze doors, a shadow blocked her path.
Senator Varo.
His bulk loomed close, his perfumed breath sour with wine. Rings glittered on his fat fingers as he adjusted his toga with exaggerated care. Around them, the chamber emptied, leaving their voices to mingle in the hushed air.
"My lady Arkanis," he said, his tone smooth as oil, "you've been… industrious of late." His eyes narrowed slightly, weighing her, like a merchant assessing coin for impurities. "Whispers in taverns, clerks in the treasury poking at ledgers that are not theirs to share, soldiers moving without orders. Bold, some might say. Reckless, others might whisper."
Diana held his gaze, her face calm though her pulse quickened. "If you wish to accuse me of something, Senator, do so openly. The Curia is not built for whispers."
Varo chuckled, a sound too soft for mirth. He leaned closer, his words for her ear alone. "Accusations are for fools. No, no—consider this… a caution. There are eyes on you. The palace is not blind, no matter what your father prefers to drink away." His lips curled into a knowing smile. "A pity, really, if loyalty were mistaken for ambition. That sort of mistake can be… fatal."
For a moment, Diana thought of striking him across the face, the way she had slammed her fist against her desk the night before. Instead, she inclined her head with cold grace. "Then let them watch," she said evenly. "And let them learn what loyalty looks like."
Varo's smile faltered for the briefest heartbeat. Then he swept past her, muttering something to his aides, his laughter trailing in his wake.
Diana did not look back. She pushed through the bronze doors, the sunlight washing over her as if to scour the senator's words away. But the threat lingered like smoke in her lungs.
She drew a steadying breath. Varo was right about one thing—eyes were on her. Which meant her departure had to be swifter, quieter, and more deliberate than she had planned.
By nightfall, Alaric would have the horses ready. Her hand-picked guard would ride under the guise of an escort to the western provinces. And she, Diana Arkanis, would finally turn her face southwest—toward Ashkara, the Ashen Coast, and the shadows that waited there.
****
Night draped itself over Arkanis like a dark mantle. The palace, usually alive with torches and music from her father's endless revels, had fallen into a quieter rhythm. The laughter and lyre-song spilled only from the upper halls, far from the eastern stables where Diana stood.
Her cloak was plain, the crimson sash of her station hidden beneath rough wool. Alaric waited beside her horse, his armor darkened, his men already mounted. Each had sworn silence, their faces hooded, their spears bound to keep them from clattering.
"The western gate is cleared," Alaric said in a low voice. "Our papers mark us as an escort bound for the river garrisons. No one will question it."
Diana nodded. Her gaze drifted up toward the glowing palace windows, where music played while the city beyond the walls endured hunger. She tightened her cloak around her shoulders. Let them drink, let them dance. When their illusions burn, I'll be the one holding a sword in the ashes.
She swung into the saddle. The horses moved at a measured pace, hooves muffled by cloth wrappings. They slipped through moonlit streets where beggars huddled in doorways and lamplighters lowered their torches in salute. At the western gate, the guards gave only a cursory glance at Alaric's seal. Within moments, the company passed beneath the portcullis, and Arkanis fell away behind them. Diana exhaled slowly. Ahead stretched the road southwest, toward Ashkara. Toward answers.
Far from the capital's marble and gold, the Ashen Coast crouched beneath the moon, gray cliffs rising from a restless sea. The wind carried the taste of salt and ash, whipping across fishing huts that leaned drunkenly against the rocks.
Tonight, no lanterns burned in the windows. No nets hung drying on their poles. Silence pressed down heavier than the tide.
A village sprawled along one inlet, its thatch roofs dusted gray, its alleys empty. The only sound was the sea breaking against reefs. Then—light. A flicker at the far end of the village. One house. Then another. Flames leapt, not orange but red, burning without smoke. The fire spread from hut to hut with unnatural speed, yet not a single scream rose.
Figures moved in the glow—shadows long and thin, sliding along walls without bodies to cast them. They gathered at the heart of the village, circling, until the last roof collapsed in cinders. The silence remained unbroken, save for the hiss of the sea.
The wind shifted, carrying the smell of char toward the open water. A fishing boat drifted just offshore, its single occupant clutching the rail with white-knuckled terror. He did not scream, did not row—only stared as the phantom fire devoured his home.
And then, as suddenly as it began, the lights winked out. Only embers remained.
The man fell to his knees in the boat, rocking with the waves, whispering prayers that no god had answered in a long time.