The scent came first.
Not the heavy incense of the Great Hall, nor the oppressive perfume of Kaelis' orchids in the arrangements.
It was an older, deeper scent, ingrained in the very stones of the Veridian palace: cold iron, burnt candle wax, and the damp marble that precedes the storm.
Elara—no, Anya—took a deep breath, and the air cut through her lungs like a blade of frost.
"Two centuries," she thought, the weight of the crown of platinum and rubies sinking not only into her skull but into her soul.
Two centuries in the past.
Into the body of the woman who would begin it all.
The empire, the wars, the sacred lineage that would one day sacrifice her in the name of a power she never possessed.
The mirror before her reflected a stranger.
Anangular face, eyes the color of a winter storm—a metallic, merciless bluish-gray. Black hair, as black as a moonless night, held together in an intricate web of braids and silver pins that shimmered like dead stars.
The Foundress.
Vilgate's Butcher.
The unwitting architect of her own death.
A tremor ran through her hands, encased in wine-colored silk gloves.
She clenched them, feeling the nails, not her own, longer, sharper, digging into her palms.
The pain was real.
It was an anchor.
"Your Highness?" Lyra's voice, her lady-in-waiting, echoed behind her, soft as dripping poison. "The ball awaits your presence. The corridors already whisper."
Elara turned, and the dress, a monster of royal purple velvet and gold brocade, trailed on the floor with a sound like a saw against polished stone.
Each fold, each thread, was a statement.
The wide sleeves embroidered with the solar falcon of the Veridian lineage.
The tight bodice that forced her to breathe in small, controlled sighs, a constant reminder: you are caged, even on the throne.
"Has Commander Kaelen Montgrave arrived?" her own voice sounded strange, deep and authoritative, so different from the soft, almost musical tone she had as a princess.
She touched her own neck, disguising the gesture as an adjustment to her diamond necklace.
"He has just crossed the east gate, Your Highness." Lyra's eyes gleamed with sharp curiosity. "He carries the scent of the road and the tension of the North on his shoulders. The rebellion of the No-Magicians is growing like a weed."
Kaelen.
The name echoed in her chest like the tolling of a funeral bell, but also like the opening chord of a forbidden symphony.
In the other life—in the future that was her present, her past, her nightmare—he had been her guardian.
Her confidant.
The man whose silver-gray eyes had seen her not as a princess without magic, a flaw in the lineage, but as Elara.
Just Elara.
And who, in the end, had been powerless to do but watch, motionless under the weight of loyalty, as the flames of political ritual engulfed her.
Now, he was there.
Young.
Whole.
Without the scars of the War, which she herself would orchestrate a decade from now.
Without the weight of the betrayal that would one day separate them.
And without the slightest idea that the woman he had sworn to serve was the architect of his own house's downfall, the weaver of the oblivion that would consume the Montgrave name.
"Excellent," Ela said, and the smile that stretched her lips was pure calculation, sharp as a dagger's edge.
The first of thousands.
The first movement.
"Let's welcome our hero. Let the ball begin."
The Great Hall was a spectacle of light and shadow, a golden lung of the empire breathing ambition.
Crystal chandeliers cast dancing flashes over a sea of silks and velvets, where heraldic colors screamed loyalties like living banners.
The orchestra played an intricate waltz by Lysandra, but beneath the violins, Elara heard the true concert: the whisper of silk being pulled to reveal discreet daggers, the dry clinking of goblets sealing paperless pacts, the soft scratching of pens on parchment in dark alcoves.
She descended the main staircase, each step a solemn drum in the heart of the empire.
The entire hall bowed like a wheat field in the wind, a wave of velvet and jewels.
Her own heart pounded a frantic, clandestine rhythm against her ribs, but her face was a mask of polished, impenetrable ice.
And then, she saw him, Kaelen.
He stood by the great carved oak doors, conversing with the old Duke of Thorne.
Even amidst the fauna of gold and pretension, he stood out.
Not because of wealth.
His commander's uniform was of simple wool, black as coal, with matte silver epaulettes.
It was because of his posture.
A living sword in a hall of ornaments.
His ebony hair was tied back, revealing a face marked not by age, but by the premature seriousness of those who bear the weight of the frontier.
His gray eyes, the color of the blade before battle, scanned the hall, analyzing, calculating, cataloging threats.
And then, they found hers.
The world shrank to the space between two columns.
The music became a distant hum, muffled by the blood roaring in her ears.
For a moment, just one, Elara didn't see the commander, the soldier, the loyal pawn.
She saw the man.
The one who brought her bitter herbal tea on cold nights of study, when the court considered her useless.
The one whose hands, rough with calluses and sword scars, enveloped hers—small, unmarked, useless—with a tenderness that hurt more than any contempt.
He inclined his head, a strictly formal movement, an angle of military precision.
But his eyes didn't leave hers.
There was a fissure there.
A confusion that scratched the polished surface of her loyalty.
'You seem different to me,' his gaze said, intense and scrutinizing. 'You seem to me… an echo.'
Elara broke the contact first, an act of force that felt like an amputation, and turned to receive the Baron of the South's honeyed homage, his smile a perfect artifact.
Each wave of his gloved hand, each word exchanged, was a move on a giant chessboard that only she could see in its entirety.
She had already planted the first seed weeks ago, through obscure channels: a rumor, carefully irrigated with convincing details, about a rich silver mine beneath the lands of the Duke of Thorne—lands that bordered those of the Montgraves.
In a few weeks, the mining dispute would begin.
In a few years, it would become a bloody feud over inheritance.
In a century, it would be the legal basis, written by herself as Anya, for the Crown to confiscate the Montgrave lands for "feudal instability."
She swallowed hard, feeling a metallic and bitter taste on her tongue.
Victory.
It tasted of ashes.
Minutes later, an opportunity arose during the fourth ball, when the waltz gave way to a slower, more intimate pavane.
She "accidentally" isolated herself on the balcony overlooking the Winter Gardens, a space of white marble and dormant wisteria.
She knew her movement would be observed.
She knew the sovereign's absence would generate waves.
She knew, with a certainty born from knowledge of the future and the heart of the past, that he would follow.
The air outside was a blade of pure cold, smelling of impending frost and sleeping earth.
The music arrived muffled, an elegant and irrelevant ghost.
She rested her hands on the marble balustrade, feeling the cold penetrate her thin silk gloves and bite her skin.
Real.
Everything was horribly real.
"Your Highness should fear the frost," the voice came from behind her, not as an intrusion, but as an inevitable consequence.
Deep, laden with a resonance that made something deep within her clench and then shudder.
She didn't turn. "A commander facing the icy winds of the North worries about the frost from a palatial balcony, Lord Montgrave? Sounds like poetic nonsense."
He stopped beside her, maintaining the exact distance prescribed by protocol—an arm's length—but she felt the radiant heat of his body like a furnace.
She smelled him.
Waxed leather, ash and juniper soap, and beneath it all, the clean, almost metallic scent of distant snow.
"I worry about the well-being of the crown that sustains the kingdom," he replied, his voice with a sharp edge, as if trying to decipher a code. "Especially when that crown seems… unanchored tonight. As if it floats above us, instead of weighing on its shoulders."
He notices.
By all the gods, he notices.
She finally looked at him.
The pale moonlight, filtered through a thin mist, greyed her features, deepening the shadows beneath her eyes and around her firm mouth.
'He is exhausted,' she thought, a sharp pang of guilt piercing her armor. 'The rebellion in the North consumes his men and his peace. And I, with my seeds planted in the shadows, will make that flame become a wildfire.'
"The weight of the crown," she said, letting a thread of genuine melancholy, not Anya's, but Elara's, weave through her voice, "is a peculiar loneliness, Commander. Sometimes I feel as if I'm building something so colossal, an edifice of laws and legends, that not even I, centuries from now, will be able to control the shadows it will cast."
He watched her, his eyes scanning her face no longer like a map of enemy territory, but like an ancient scroll with blurred text.
"Every construction, however glorious, requires foundations. And foundations…" He paused, the word hanging in the cold air between them. "Demand sacrifices."
Sacrifice.
The word echoed like a punch to the gut.
The image exploded behind her eyes, vivid, tactile, foul-smelling: the platform beneath the red moon, the runes gleaming with a hungry light, the impassive face of Queen Mother Vivel, the cold blue flames rising, rising, consuming flesh, identity, future…
She took a step back almost imperceptibly, her fingers gripping the marble as if it were the only real thing.
"Some sacrifices," she whispered, looking not at it, but at the stars, an alien arrangement she was still learning to name, "don't strengthen. They change. They excavate parts of you and replace them with… emptiness. Or with a determination so cold it merges with the stone itself. Scars that no one sees, but that alter the entire contour of the soul."
There was a silence.
Not an emptiness, but a dense space, laden with the unspoken.
Only the sound of two breaths, almost, but not quite, synchronized.
His warmth was a physical presence, a magnetic field she needed to distance herself from to survive, and to which she was irresistibly drawn.
"I…" Kaelen's voice faltered, a rare tremor in that normally so steady instrument.
He seemed to be fighting against himself, against his own discipline. "I believed I understood the cost of duty, Your Highness. But lately, my dreams… are infested with ruins."
Elara froze inside. "Ruins?"
"Fragments. Disconnected images. A circular room with books that don't exist, with metallic covers, pages that gleam. Sad music, in a mode I'd never heard, played on an unknown stringed instrument." He turned his face completely to her, and for the first time, she saw not the general, but the man behind the armor: perplexed, vulnerable, haunted. "And a face. Always the same face, obscured by smoke and the distorted glow of… fire."
Elara's heart stopped.
The air seemed to run out.
Does he remember?
Not with his mind, but with his blood.
With his soul.
The bond we weave into the future.
A tenuous thread of shared tea and understanding silences.
It's cracking the fabric of time, leaking into this past like a feverish dream.
She should discourage him.
Ridicule the weakness of speaking of dreams.
Keep him away with Anya's ice.
It was the safe plan.
The correct move on the board.
Instead, her hand, moved by an impulse prior to any strategy, moved.
Her gloved fingers hovered in the cold air, inches from his hand, bare, strong, marked by a pale scar on the back, resting on the stone.
She could feel the heat radiating through the small vacuum, a promise of life in a world of masks and marble.
"Perhaps," she said, her voice hoarse with an emotion she couldn't name, a dangerous mix of longing, guilt, and a forbidden love that spanned ages, "some ghosts aren't from the past, but from the future. Warnings of paths yet unpaved. Echoes of… choices yet to be made."
Their eyes met again, and this time, there was no protocol, no politics, no empire between them.
There were only two castaways, one aware of the deluge, the other merely feeling the tide change, floating above an abyss of centuries and a betrayal yet to be born.
The sound of hurried, decisive footsteps on the stone balcony separated them like a sword stroke.
Lyra emerged, her face pale beneath her hood, breathless not from running, but from contained excitement.
"Your Highness! Pardon the interruption. The Chief Emissary of the Church of the Primordial Sun has just arrived. He demands—demands—an immediate audience." His eyes gleamed in the dim light. "He claims to have been visited by an urgent vision. A prophecy… that directly involves Your Highness."
A different kind of ice, sharp and deadly, ran down Elara's spine, freezing that brief instant of humanity.
The Church.
The Ancestral Cult.
The guardians of the dogma that she herself, as Anya, would help establish.
They shouldn't move so soon.
Their visions shouldn't be so… precise.
The timeline was already creaking beneath her feet.
She nodded, Anya's cloak falling over her shoulders like armor being fastened. "Lead him to the Private Audience Chamber. I will."
As she passed Kaelen, her dresses brushing lightly against the stones, she couldn't help herself.
She paused for a fraction of a second, without turning, her words escaping as a sigh laden with a warning and a confession.
"Commander Montgrave…" her voice was almost a whisper, just for him. "Guard your dreams well. In a world built on convenient truths, they may be the only real things we have left. And the most dangerous."
She left, feeling his gaze—intense, inquisitive, laden with a new and dangerous suspicion—pressed against her back like a physical weight, a brand of fire.
In the cold, oppressive privacy of her chambers, long after the last lights of the ball had faded, Elara removed her gloves.
The light of a single tallow candle flickered in a silver candlestick, casting long, trembling shadows that danced on the bare stone walls like anxious specters.
On the table stained with ink and history lay a single parchment, delivered by the bony hand of the Emissary.
The seal of the Primordial Sun.
A disc with sharp rays had been broken.
Her words, written in a tense, angular handwriting, burned before their eyes:
"Thus speaks the Sun through the Veil of the Moon:
Beware, O Foundress, whose hands shape the dawn.
The Serpent of Time bites its own tail, and the poison is memory.
A rootless soul flourishes in foreign soil, watered by the tears of ages.
She builds with the hands of the Destroyer and sows with the heart of the Beloved.
Her shadow stretches longer than her life, and her echo speaks louder than her throne.
What you build will fall. What you name will be a curse. What you love… will be your fire."
They knew.
Not everything.
Not her name, not her origin.
But they felt the rupture.
They perceived an anomaly in the fabric of destiny.
The game had not only begun.
The first opposing move had been made, and it was a prophecy.
'Ironic,' she thought with a dark humor bordering on despair. 'They're using against me the very weapon I planned to forge.'
With slow, deliberate movements, Elara brought the parchment to the flickering candle flame.
She watched the fire, yellow and orange, lick the edges, consume the black words, transform the "sacred vision" into black, twisted, fragile ashes.
The acrid smell of burnt paper and melted wax filled the room, a smell of endings and guarded secrets.
And then, a sound came.
Outside, in the empty, dark corridor, reserved only for the royal guard and night servants, footsteps.
Solitary.
Heavy, but restrained.
They stopped on the other side of her massive oak door.
There was no knock.
There was no voice.
Only a thick, living silence filled the space between the wood and the darkness, laden with a presence she would recognize in any life, in any time.
Elara stood motionless, her hands still hovering over the ashes of the prophetic scroll, her eyes fixed on the crack in the lower part of the door.
A sliver of faint torchlight from the corridor cast a pale yellow streak on the polished stone floor.
Kaelen.
Had he heard?
Perhaps he had heard the emissary.
He had seen his restrained expression.
And now he was here.
Standing.
Deciding.
On the other side of the barrier of wood and protocol, Kaelen remained motionless, his right hand hovering over the cold, familiar hilt of his longsword. His heart pounded against his ribs, a solitary and confused war drum in the silent darkness.
The emissary's words, spoken in that fanatical voice, still echoed in his ears.
Serpent of Time.
Uprooted Soul.
But it wasn't words that brought him here.
It was what his eyes witnessed.
While waiting in the corridor adjacent to the audience chamber, a tiny crack, a flaw in the monumental carpentry, a long-forgotten slave's carelessness, entered his field of vision.
And through it, he saw.
Not her directly, but her reflection in the enormous silver mirror embedded in the opposite wall of the room.
And for an instant, a single, devastating instant, the image in the mirror was not Empress Anya Veridian.
The mask of polished ice, the relentless determination, the majestic posture.
It had all crumbled.
In that place, reflected in the silver, was a woman whose face he had never seen in his sovereign, but which was viscerally, painfully familiar.
Eyes wide, not with Anya's icy fury, but with a deep, helpless dread, that of a child lost in the dark. Her mouth slightly open, not in command, but in a silent sigh of utter anguish.
It was the expression of someone completely alone, torn from everything he knew and loved, and thrown into the void.
The expression that haunted him in his darkest dreams, which he had sworn never again to allow to appear on any face under his protection.
The air left his lungs as if he had been punched.
The reflection vanished as quickly as it had appeared, replaced by the rigid posture, the impenetrable profile of the woman who commanded empires.
But the vision was etched in fire on the slate of his mind, clearer than any battle, truer than any oath.
Now, before her door, the hand that had moved away from the sword's hilt was cold, and her fingers tingled with aimless energy.
The music of the ball had ceased long ago.
The palace slept, or pretended to sleep.
The only sound was the blood pulsing in her temples and the echo of a question born from the ashes of all her certainties, monstrous and impossible, taking shape in the silence of her soul:
Who… who, by the old and new gods, is truly inside my queen's head?
Inside the chamber, Elara heard the footsteps receding.
Not hurried, not furious.
Slow.
Heavy.
Like those of a man who had just seen the world shatter and now needed to learn to walk on the shards.
She leaned back in the high-backed chair, the weight of future and past centuries crushing her in a single unbearable pressure.
The first movement had been made.
The first historical seed, planted.
The first fissure in the veil of reality, opened.
And somewhere, deep in the chest where Elara, the sacrificed princess, still trembled and breathed, a small flame of something that was neither vengeance, nor strategy, nor cold calculation, began to burn.
It was only pain.
Pure, raw, human.
The pain of having been near him and knowing that every step towards him was a step towards her ruin.
She looked at her empty hands, illuminated by the dying light of the candle, and whispered to the thickening shadows, to the sleeping empire and to the future she was condemned to build.
"Then it begins."
Outside, in the now empty corridor, a single fragment of unburned parchment, blown under a rug through the half-open window, held half a prophetic verse: "...it will be your fire."