The parcel arrived at dawn.
Not with fanfare. Not with ceremony.
Just a courier, cloaked in travel soot and the gray leathers of a royal-appointed errand man. He didn't ask for an audience. Didn't request a seal or witness. He simply handed the steward a wrapped box no larger than a bread loaf, bowed once, and left without waiting for a receipt.
Thalric was still dressing when the steward knocked, his fingers stiff against the clasps of a too-small overcoat.
"It's for you," the steward said, placing the box carefully on the desk. His face was pale. Sweating. "From the Crown."
There was no name on the parcel. No return mark. But the ribbon bore the palace crest burned into black silk.
Thalric waited until the man left before unwrapping it.
The lid gave way to soft cloth—gray velvet, smoother than anything else he'd touched since awakening in this world. Wrapped around something delicate. He peeled it back.
A single feather.
Jet-black. Impossibly sharp at the quill's base, its edges touched with faint burn marks. It shimmered faintly in the morning light—metallic but warm, as if it remembered fire. And beneath it, nestled like a secret: parchment sealed with silver wax.
No writing. Just the same sigil carved into the chapel's wall. The spiral.
He broke the seal.
No letter. No instructions. Just a name inked in dark crimson:
"Ashvael."
He said it once aloud.
The candle beside him flickered. Not extinguished. Not caught in draft.
Just… flinched.
Thalric stared at the feather again, fingertips grazing the edge of the burnt vane. It sang, faintly, in the silence of the room—not music, not thought. Just… pressure. Coiled heat without release.
Something about it pulled at memory.
Not Percival's.
His.
He had held something like this once—centuries ago in Veymar's northern temples. Fire-etched feathers said to come from phoenix-born serpents, used in ceremonial blood wards. But those feathers burned away on contact. They didn't… remain.
He wrapped it again carefully.
Locked it inside the drawer beneath the journal.
Not because he feared it.
Because he recognized it.
This world had no magic left—or so the scholars claimed. No gods, no arcana, no living remnants of the Old Orders.
But someone had sent him a name meant only for those who remembered differently.
Ashvael.
And feathers that refuse to burn don't arrive by chance.