Magic shifts like breath around me.
The palace groans under the weight of something unseen.
Something remembering.
"Caelen's betrayal isn't personal," Vireon says beside me,
his voice a velvet dagger.
"It's prophecy."
He doesn't sit on a throne.
He stands in the shadow of mine.
He won't kneel.
Because he once built this kingdom with me.
"He's afraid of the past," I murmur.
"But the past is mine. I made it bleed for me."
"You made it bleed with me," Vireon replies.
"And the world was better when it feared us both."
But something is wrong.
Every step I take in my palace is echoed by me.
Not the woman I am now…
But the woman I buried in fire.
The Queen of Silence.
The one I was before they erased me.
In the Hall of Mirrors, I see her.
She looks like me.
But crueler.
Hungrier.
Draped in starlight and shadow.
A crown of bone and blue flame on her brow.
She smiles.
"Why are you pretending?" she whispers through glass.
"We were always made for war… and for him."
I raise my hand
fire crackling in my veins
and the mirror cracks but doesn't shatter.
She lingers.
Watching.
Waiting.
That night, Vireon appears uninvited in my chamber.
"He's struck a deal," he says.
"Caelen has awakened Eristra."
I freeze.
Because Eristra is not a woman.
She is a curse.
A forgotten deity I once bound in the name of peace.
Caelen has set her free.
And the only person who can re-bind her…
is the version of me I've tried to kill.