The Cinder Oath
In Ravel, the seasons are enforced by an artifact called the Crown Seed, bound to an ancient oath chain of signatures. When the Seed is stolen from its vault beneath Knotspire, reality starts slipping. Dates argue with themselves. Streets shift. The season bells ring out of order.
Sable Vane, a junior Registry warlock, is blamed because the thief had her face. Under interrogation, Sable’s memories split. She remembers staying in her cell and also leaving. Worse, she manifests mouth fire, a power the Registry insists should not exist. The High Registrar, Oren Vale, calls her the missing signer, the lost signature that completes the oath holding the realm together.
A Cinderbreath woman, Vessa Pyre, breaks Sable out while holding the Seed, warning that someone is trying to rebuild the season order to serve one hidden faction. Then the real horror appears: an identical duplicate Sable who bleeds, binds, and can command Sable using the false name “Sable Vane.” Sable learns she has a true name burned into her palm, and speaking even a syllable weakens the duplicate’s control but also draws the Seed’s attention.
With help from Jory Quill, a shifter courier, and Mother Rook, a witch who protects forbidden records, Sable discovers the truth: the Crown Seed can edit reality’s record, and someone has used it to split Sable’s identity into two living versions. The duplicate is the controlled version meant to “win,” while Sable holds the dangerous missing signature House powers tried to erase.
As Knotspire destabilizes, Sable is pulled into Seed Court, a tribunal where the Seed judges truth and punishes lies by rewriting memory and flesh. There, Sable uncovers that House Vale, hidden inside the Registry, engineered her life to claim the Seed permanently. The final conflict is not just retrieving the Seed, but deciding who gets to be the signer: the obedient duplicate, or the whole Sable.
Sable defeats House Vale’s plan by refusing to destroy the duplicate. Instead she integrates the split, speaks her full true name with intention, completes the oath chain, and binds the seasons to the realm rather than a single bloodline. The Seed exposes House Vale’s hidden rule, the city stabilizes, and a new council of signers forms across witches, shifters, Registry, and Cinderbreaths.
The ending leaves one quiet threat: the Seed is stable, but awake. It will keep calling signers as long as the realm keeps trying to bury the truth.