The first thing she felt was warmth.
Not the warmth of sunlight, but of fire a slow, living heat crawling up her arms. When Elara opened her eyes, she wasn't in the forest. The ceiling above her was carved oak, blackened with candle smoke. Flames danced in iron sconces, throwing amber light across stone walls lined with velvet drapes.
She blinked. Her breath hitched.
The air smelled of incense and something sharper iron, salt, blood.
Her hands lay folded on her lap. They were not her own. Paler, thinner, marked by faint lines of ink that formed a circle at the wrist. The ring on her finger was heavy, gold, set with a red stone that seemed to pulse faintly in rhythm with her heartbeat.
"Elayne," a voice murmured.
Elara froze.
The voice came from a man standing across the chamber tall, broad-shouldered, wrapped in a fur-lined cloak. His face was half in shadow, but his eyes glowed faintly with the same red as the stone on her hand.
"Are you ready?" he asked.
Elara tried to speak, but the words that came weren't hers. "If there is a chance to bring him back, I'll pay it."
The man stepped forward, and in that instant she realized she wasn't watching she was inside. Living the memory.
He knelt before her, taking her hand. "Then let it be done."
He guided her toward the center of the room, where a circle of symbols had been drawn in ash and blood. At its heart lay a body motionless, shrouded in linen.
Elara's no, Elayne's chest constricted.
She knew that body.
Her brother.
His name rose from her lips like a breath she had been holding for centuries. "Corven."
The man in the cloak nodded solemnly. "You said you would do anything. Remember that when the blood answers."
He handed her a small blade black, thin, etched with runes that shimmered like embers.
Elayne knelt beside the body. Her reflection flickered in the dark pool of blood gathered beneath it, the surface trembling as if alive.
"Speak his name," the man said.
Elayne did. Once, twice, again each repetition heavier, the syllables bending in ways the human tongue should not. The air thickened. Candles dimmed.
The symbols around the circle began to glow.
Elara could feel it a deep vibration crawling through Elayne's body, her pulse syncing to something vast beneath the earth.
"Now," the man whispered.
Elayne pressed the blade to her palm and drew it across the skin. Blood welled up, bright and hot. She let it fall onto her brother's chest.
Nothing happened.
She looked up, desperate. "Why isn't he..."
The man raised his hand sharply. "Wait."
The air bent.
The blood on the body began to move veins of red spreading outward like cracks in glass, merging with the lines on the floor. The entire circle ignited in crimson light.
Then came the sound.
A heartbeat.
Slow. Deep. Too loud.
Elara could feel it in her bones one pulse for every beat of her own heart, until they were no longer separate.
The man smiled faintly. "The door is open."
But Elayne's joy faltered. The body on the floor twitched, the linen stirring not like life returning, but like something else waking.
The candles flared. The air stank of sulfur.
Her brother's hand rose from the shroud trembling, skeletal. The sound that came from his throat wasn't human.
"Corven?"
He turned toward her. His eyes were black, not from shadow but from within.
"Elayne," the man said quietly, "you must finish it. Bind it."
But Elayne couldn't move. Her brother's body convulsed, the light of the circle searing brighter until it painted the walls with crimson.
The man stepped forward, reaching for her but too late. The body sat up, the linen tearing. Blood poured from its mouth, soaking the runes.
Elayne screamed, falling backward.
The air split open.
From the wound in the world came something vast and unseen a rush of cold wind, the scent of decay, and a voice that spoke from everywhere.
You would unbind death with blood?
Elayne's mind went white.
The man tried to pull her away, shouting words in a tongue that burned her ears. But the voice drowned him out.
Blood remembers. Blood binds.
The symbols on the floor turned black. Elayne's wound seared, glowing red. The blood that had fallen from her palm crawled back into the cut, etching shapes beneath her skin.
She screamed again, but it wasn't her voice anymore. It was layered hers, and another's.
The man staggered back, eyes wide. "No… no, you've called it to yourself!"
Elayne fell forward, catching herself on her hands. The blood in the circle rose up, spiraling around her arms like smoke. Her brother's body collapsed, lifeless once more.
Then, silence.
Only the echo of the voice remained, whispering through the candlelight:
The blood remembers.
Elara's vision blurred. The room melted around her. The firelight became mist, the stone walls twisting into darkness.
But before it vanished entirely, she saw one last thing.
The man older now, alone standing before the sealed door of the manor, his hand pressed to a sigil burned into the wood. His eyes hollow. His voice broken.
"Forgive me, Elayne. It should have been me."
The scene dissolved.
Elara gasped, her body convulsing as though surfacing from deep water. She was back in the present the cold earth beneath her, the forest whispering softly.
Her palm burned. She lifted it, trembling. The faint outline of the same symbol glowed beneath her skin.
Her reflection appeared again in the puddle beside her.
"You saw," it said quietly.
Elara's throat was dry. "She was me."
"She was the beginning," the reflection replied. "And now, you are the end."
The forest shifted, the red light deepening, the air trembling with the slow beat of something ancient.
From far away, a raven called long, low, and final.
Elara looked down at her hand once more, feeling her pulse align with something vast and living beneath the ground.
"The blood remembers," she whispered.
And somewhere in the distance, something answered.