Chapter 1 — The Last Light of the Seventh Son
The Citadel's bells did not simply toll that morning; they gave up their voices. Thirteen strokes — long, knifing rings that cut the city into before and after — and the crowd stilled as if a seam had been sewn through their throats.
Erevan Veyra was led up the salt-slick steps with his hands bound behind him, a silk noose dragging across his shoulders like an accusation. He walked with the dignity of a man who had practiced lying to the world for years. The rope's kiss at his wrists felt like a familiar thing; betrayal had always been tied to his skin.
They called him names: heretic, shadow-touched, the Emperor's mistake. Children spat. Noblewomen clutched charms to their breasts as if the motion alone could hold off ruin. Even the wind seemed to lean away from him.
Above the execution platform the Mirror of Crowns hung in its gilt frame, its glass black as a wound. It was a relic carved from meteorite, said to reflect the soul rather than the face — to show what men had stolen and what had been stolen from them. For generations the Mirror kept the palace honest. For generations, the palace learned how to hide.
Erevan's gaze found it and held. He thought of the small things: his mother's callused palm, the ledger where the First Prince signed away harvests, the lullaby he'd hummed under the eaves when he was seven and certain the world was still kind. Memory was a hard currency here; a prince learned early which pieces to spend.
Fifteen yards away the High Inquisitor raised the Tribunal Sword. His robes were stitched with sigils that shimmered like wet bone. He would be the one to speak the kingdom's final lie into the air.
"By the authority of the Twelve Crowns and the God-Throne," the Inquisitor intoned, slow as a blade being whetted, "Erevan Veyra, seventh son of the Emperor, is condemned for treason and for profaning the sanctity of the Crowns."
Erevan's lips moved. No plea. No prayer. He mouthed one sentence no one could hear.
"Tell them the truth," he said to the Mirror.
Silence, like ice, pooled across the plaza. The executioner's muscles bunched; the crowd leaned in. The sword fell.
The sight that followed should have been ordinary — the red arc, the twitch, the body going slack. Instead, the air between blade and throat shimmered, as if something unseen had taken a breath. The sword bit, then stalled. The executioner jerked. For one thin, bright second, the whole world had the sick sensation of watching a puppet wriggle its last string.
Erevan's head tilted. A thread of blood trailed sharper than a seam. He exhaled, and the exhale was not his alone.
From his wound the Mirror answered.
A sound more ancient than breath rose out of the shattered glass: not a voice but a tearing — like silk being stripped from bone. The Mirror cracked along an inner seam and a blackness, viscous and bright as a starless sky, spilled out. It moved like oil and like smoke, and where it met the air it made soundless music — the sound of names being taken.
The crowd screamed then, the sound of all those who had ever been told a lie in this city. Children who had been promised bread and given stones. Servants who had been sold with their children's futures. The sound was a raw animal that stripped language from mouths.
Erevan's eyes opened, and the plaza saw, at first glance, nothing of a man but a space. Night condensed where pupils should have been. People in the front row felt, viscerally, as if something had run a finger along the inside of their skulls. Hundreds saw the sudden presence of threads — pale, glittering filaments that rose from their chests, their throats, their eyes — threads that the blackness touched and tasted.
He tasted crowd. Not the metallic tang of blood; something colder: memory. A woman's hand at a window, a boy's scraped knee in spring, a soldier's last coin. The blackness drank them and left tiny, precise blanks where those moments had been. Each swallow was an inventory update: one less secret, one more debt reclaimed.
The Inquisitor recoiled. "By the Twelve—" he began, but his lips failed and produced only a ragged sound. His creed fled him like a coward. Half the crowd began to vomit, as if they had been made to ingest their pasts.
A shard the size of a coin split free from the Mirror and plunged, with laughable deliberation, into Erevan's mouth. It slid down his throat with the patience of a legal document. The taste of it was all iron and frost and an understanding spread across the back of his teeth. With that shard lodged in him, the Mirror's voice spoke clearer, not from without but from within:
"You carry what they stole," it said. "You are the ledger. Will you balance the books?"
Erevan's jaw worked. He remembered his mother, how she had tucked him in and whispered that a son must sometimes be a ledger and sometimes a ledger's tally. He remembered the First Prince's smile when he signed away a village in exchange for a treaty. He remembered the way his brothers had learned to make cruelty look like policy.
"Balance," he breathed. The word felt like acceptance and promise both.
The First Prince, watching from the balcony, found his throat gone dry. He saw, in that instant, a future where the ledger returned unpaid. He had not imagined empathy could be threatening until it became hunger in another man's mouth.
Erevan's corpse — for he had been cut, and for all intents the world had decided him dead — rose then, not with ceremony but with small, domestic cruelty. The noose slackened and fell from his shoulders like old skin. He sat up on the platform. Blood slicked his lips, and his fingers, as they flexed, left prints in the dust that smelled faintly of rain on iron.
He looked at the crowd as a buyer looks at wares.
Names escaped his lips. Low and deliberate, each syllable removed a thing from someone in the plaza: a lie, a childhood lullaby, a father's map. Hands went to heads. Eyes rolled white. People staggered as their histories were amputated.
He called the First Prince's name last.
When the syllable left him, it was not revenge he tasted — it was arithmetic. The Mirror answered him, and in the answer was a bargain as old as theft.
"You may take," the voice promised, "but every taking makes you less of what you were. A coin spent is a memory lost. Do you accept the cost?"
Erevan smiled then — not from joy but from an ivory resolve. He had been taught to quote prices his whole life. He had learned the markets where favors were sold. He understood cost.
"Yes," he said.
The crowd could not be sure whether the sound they heard next was a scream or a sob. The plaza trembled. Somewhere, a child's toy rolled and its painted eyes looked forever upward.
Above the noise the Mirror hung on its frame, now spider-veined with black. One of its shards, still hot with the taste of other people, glinted in the sun like an accusation aimed at the First Prince.
Erevan's mouth moved again, and this time the voice was colder, speaking for both him and the dark lodged in him.
"First Prince," he whispered, and the name he spoke was not the one the city used. It was the sound of an old ledger being closed, final and small.
The First Prince's smile died.
Erevan rose to his feet.
The bells fell silent.
And the corpse began to walk.