The garden smelled of wet stone and crushed mint, dusk pooled between clipped hedges, and lanterns whose light had the soft, steady patience of old promises.
Uriel sat alone on the low wall, black wings folded but twitching now and then like a tired beast testing its limbs.
He sipped his tea and muttered, more to himself than anyone else, about strengths lost and bargains unpaid.
"I don't have the reach I used to," he grumbled, eyes on the wavering surface of the cup. "The Covenants, gone farther than my shadow. I can't stand with them yet."
A soft clack of glass above him made him look up. Coeus hung there, absurd and immaculate, white tuxedo stark against the dim sky, a cigarette held between slender fingers. Smoke trailed into the night like inked script.
"Where's Apollo?" Uriel asked.
Coeus's gaze narrowed. "You should not know that name, Uriel," he said, dry as a ledger page.
"I know many secrets," Uriel returned, voice flat, "that I cannot speak of yet." His wings flicked, and a shadow pooled under them. "Why are you here? Reunion with an old friend?"
"Information," Coeus answered simply. "About Aurelia Caelistra."
At those three words, Uriel's wings stiffened. Darkness seeped out from him like ink spilling across a map, and light seemed to recoil. He rose, the cup slipping from his fingers and shattering on the flagstones, but the shards made no sound.
"What about her—" he began, and the question carried a rasp like gravel.
Coeus lifted the cigarette in a small, practiced gesture. "Calm that, please," he said, and the smoke curled, indifferent. "It… interferes with the flavor. Good tobacco is not to be wasted."
Uriel let the darkness ease, the wings folded, the shadow sucking itself back beneath his coat like an obedient cloak. "Better," he muttered grudgingly.
"You attempted to kill her," Coeus said without preamble. It was not a question.
Uriel's jaw tightened. He did not deny it. "She is a calamity. She will unravel what stands, if left unchecked." His voice dropped, low and fierce. "I felt her… recently. There is a weight in the world now I didn't have before."
Coeus inclined his head. "Elaborate."
Uriel's eyes went distant, he spat the words out as if they tasted of iron. "I cannot. Not here. Not for you." He sounded simultaneously regretful and impatient.
Coeus's thin smile thinned. "Very well." He tapped ash with a careful finger. "Then tell me this, what do you make of her Aspect? The whispers say Remembrance."
Uriel barked a short laugh that had none of the pleasure in it. "Remembrance?" He looked at Coeus as if the archivist had stumbled into a joke. "Her power is Finality."
Coeus's brows rose, interest, not disbelief. "Finality?" he echoed.
Uriel's look hardened into something like prophecy. "Yes. She is a node by which endings are shaped. Not merely the reading of what was, the closing of what remains. Where she moves, threads knot and finish, cycles complete rather than linger. It is a force that prevents stagnation. It is both burden and balance." He let the words settle like stones. "An endless awareness of how things end."
Coeus's smoke paused in the air, a faint halo. For a long breath, he stared at Uriel, not as a stranger but as a man trying to fit an odd new puzzle into a hundred-year ledger.
"That complicates things," he said at last, softly. "Remembrance would reveal. Finality would enact."
Uriel smiled then, but it was a small thing with no mirth. "You archivists love catalogues. You will want to file her under one shelf." He spread his hands. "I only say this because the world changes when finality walks among us. People do not like their patterns ended."
Coeus flicked ash into the garden and watched it vanish into the stone. "I will note it," he said, voice even. "And I will proceed with care."
Uriel let his wings relax with an audible, slow exhale, the shadow around him tightening back into polite restraint. "Do what you must," he said. "But if she grows unchecked, if the balance shifts toward abrupt endings rather than measured conclusions, then we will all learn new definitions of grief."
Coeus regarded him a moment longer, then tipped his head in something close to farewell. He drifted upward, leaving the cigarette's smoke to melt into the dusk, and the garden settled back into ordinary evening sounds.
Uriel's tea turned bitter on his tongue as a cold wind cut through his thoughts.
The garden narrowed, the hedges blurring at the edges, and something, no more than a stitch in the weave of the evening, pulled at him. The world slipped.
It was not a single memory so much as a pattern, an echo that folded in on itself until moments stacked like glass plates.
He saw a woman with luxurious hair, light in the way her eyes held a quiet, dangerous warmth, and the image arrived with the pressure of familiarity so deep it felt like a bruise.
He was there, the blade between his fingers, the steel humming near skin. A single movement, and everything could stop, one breath, and hope might ripen.
The scene pulsed with the kind of choice that had become a strange refrain for him.
He remembered the knife's cool, the way the wind tugged at a cloak, the small, almost-mocking calm in the woman's face when she said, "You're… lost, aren't you?"
There was never the expected fear, only curiosity. That curiosity always snagged him, and something in the pattern faltered.
He lowered his blade. "Maybe," he said. "But you're walking toward something worse."
She tilted her head. "Then walk with me. If you're so sure, maybe you can change it."
He walked beside her instead of through her. They moved forward, months, years, that sense of time stretching and shrinking until it lost its edges.
Laughter in the rain. Quiet arguments over maps. She taught him to listen to the Aether's low heartbeat beneath stones.
He fixed broken things, and she threw fruit at him for forgetting to eat. There were mornings that tasted like ordinary bread and nights that felt like the only kind of truth possible.
They crossed borders, fought bandits, and shared water beside dying fires. Friendship folded into something slower, tenderer.
The nights were the hardest. When the fire burned low and the stars scattered like ghosts above them, he'd catch her staring into the dark, quiet, haunted.
"What are you thinking about?" he asked once.
"About what it means to change fate," she murmured. "If we can… or if we only trade one tragedy for another."
He wanted to tell her not to try, that it wasn't her place.
That fate, once twisted, only ever snapped back sharper.
But when she turned toward him, the reflection of the firelight in her eyes made him forget.
He took her hand instead. "Then we'll face whatever comes."
She smiled, faintly. "You make that sound easy."
"It isn't," he admitted. "But neither are you."
And she laughed. That laugh was one he could never forget, even through thousands of lifetimes.
They built a life. Or the closest thing to it. Quiet mornings, hunting trips, the occasional village tavern where she'd always win at cards and grin smugly when he pretended to be offended.
When she found out she was pregnant, she cried. He'd never seen her cry before. Not from pain. Not from fear. Only joy.
And then, like a dark seam that always reopened, a sickness, minor at first, then something that ate the color from a child's cheeks.
A curse written in the very threads of existence. She begged every healer, tore through every tome. He begged her to stop.
When she finally whispered, "I can save her," his heart turned to lead.
"Don't," he said, grabbing her arm.
Her hand trembled in his. "I won't let her die."
The air would ripple, rooms bending, black threads fraying edges, and the thing he feared would come before he could shape a word into warning.
Her eyes changed in the vision, hardened by something that was not merely grief.
It felt older than that, older and sharper, and whatever shifted within her answered the world with a coldness that was not easily named.
The small, human gestures frayed into vectors, a hand that had once cradled now redirected, and the child's breath thinned as if the room itself had been told to stop.
He remembered the choice, again and always, stand aside and let the calculus of that moment take its toll, or throw his body into the gap between intent and consequence.
The image of steel meeting skin returned like a bell, stark, ordinary, final. He felt heat, the metallic clarity of wound, the intimate weight of blood as if it were his own.
He reached for a face he loved and found only a translation of someone he no longer recognized.
As the world burned around her scream, he realized with a heavy heart that he didn't hate her. He never could. He only hated that he couldn't save her from herself. He only hated that he couldn't save her from herself.
When the vision loosened its grip and the garden righted itself, Uriel sagged against the wall. He rubbed his forehead as if he might erase the impression with friction.
A single tear slid free down his cheek, a small, traitorous proof that whatever those stacked moments were, they cut him deeper than he would confess.
He spat the word into the quiet, "I hate this."
-
The endless stacks of the Archives closed around Coeus like a city of paper. Lamps burned low in brass sconces, their light pooling on paper and spines stamped with sigils that remembered hands long turned to dust.
Coeus sat at a narrow table beneath an overhanging shelf, a thin ribbon of smoke slipping from his cigarette and tracing lazy calligraphy in the lamplight.
He watched the smoke as if it might answer him, an archivist's habit, ask a question of the air and see if the world returns an annotation.
"Interesting," he murmured to himself, not sure whether he meant the smoke or the thought.
Marcellin. Deceptive, a natural liar by temperament and trade. Coeus had catalogued such men before, they left signatures like smudges in ledgers.
Yet when Marcellin spoke of Aurelia's Aspect, when he framed Remembrance as a tool to be wielded, the words had come rounded and plausible in a way that made even Coeus's skepticism wobble.
A liar can still tell a truth if the shape of it flatters his purpose. That Marcellin would wish Aurelia's sight weaponized made sense, that he would try it made the mind uneasy.
And then there was Uriel. A stranger with wings of rumor and a temper that left the hedges of the palace garden whispering. He had told Coeus, boldly, without invitation, that Aurelia's power was Finality, not Remembrance.
The word sat wrong in Coeus's mouth, like an unfamiliar spice. Finality. Not a classification. Not an Aspect he could tuck neatly into an index. It was an act. An ending with intention.
Coeus exhaled, and the drifting smoke softened the lamplight into a wavering halo. He had nothing on Uriel. Not a file, not a mention, not even a rumor that held shape when examined. No lineage, no affiliation, nothing that tied the man to the world Coeus knew so thoroughly.
And yet…
Something about him tugged at the edges of Coeus's mind. A tone, a posture, a presence, like hearing a melody he'd forgotten he once knew. He could not place it, and the inability irritated him like a misplaced bookmark.
Familiarity without memory. Recognition without reason. It prickled at him in a way that made even the smoke taste strange.
He tapped ash into a chipped saucer and found the taste of the cigarette sour on his tongue. "This thinking makes my tobacco taste bad," he grumbled aloud, the complaint more to steady his hands than to scold the air.
When archives shift, the mind does the same, old certainties slide, and flavor changes with them.
Who, then, was Aurelia Caelistra that she should draw men like Marcellin and Uriel into the same orbit—two actors with such different eyes?
One spoke of calamity, of a force that would unravel what stands, and the other talked of utility, a lens to be pressed into service.
One sought to break, the other to build, yet both wanted the same thing: her.
Coeus tapped ash into a floating brass tray, watching the embers drift like miniature falling stars.
He frowned, "Why did Marcellin tell me any of this? He knows me better than most. He knows I'd never agree to such a scheme, not with my principles, not with my oath, not with a lifetime built on truth and record."
Coeus shook his head, "He had to know I would refuse. So why bring up Aurelia at all? Why reveal her Aspect, her potential, her weight in whatever tangled web he's weaving?"
"Troublesome jester…" he muttered.
Coeus rubbed his temple, "Maybe Marcellin wasn't planning anything at all. Maybe he just wanted to stir the pot, throw riddles into the air, and watch the Covenants scramble after shadows."
He let out a short, bitter laugh, "Maybe he said it purely for mischief… or for the thrill of the chase. Him darting ahead, the rest of us following the string he left behind. A cat‑and‑mouse game where the cat never knows if it's hunting the mouse, or if the mouse is just enjoying being chased."
Coeus let the idea settle, and a thin, contemplative smile touched his mouth.
"…Or," he murmured, "perhaps he wanted me looking in that direction."
He flicked the cigarette once more.
The ember glowed like a tiny, burning question.
"Maybe," he said quietly, "I should see her for myself."
The smoke curled upward.
Coeus clicked his tongue softly as he scanned the spines of the ancient tomes.
"Harthun Flameborne legacy…" he murmured, fingers drifting over embossed leather. "Who in the stars would've guessed a dragon would fall in love with a human and then—what—produce a bloodline that would run for…" He squinted upward, doing mock arithmetic with his fingers. "Grand-grand-grand-grand-grand—should I keep going?—grand-grand-grandchildren."
He huffed a quiet laugh. "Should I check on Harthun himself? Ask if his many-times-over granddaughter is thriving?" A pause. "No… he'd probably scorch me for the implication."
He pulled a heavy book free and let it fall open in his palm. His eyes flicked across the page.
"Well now… Caelistra lineage, Aramont Kingdom…"
A soft whistle, "So the old dragon's brood settled here, did they?"
He closed the book with a slow, deliberate tap of his finger on the cover, "Truly interesting. I don't know if this is a game or not," he muttered, voice dipping with curiosity, "but you've piqued my curiosity, Marcellin."
-
Aurelia sat up, rubbing her temple.
"What is Remembrance, really?" she murmured. "I can use it easily enough, pull a laugh from the air, or the scrape of a boot, but the word itself slips when I try to hold it."
She glanced toward the window, thoughtful.
"Maybe I should ask the others what they think. Their opinions might help me understand."
She found Sebastian alone in the sparring hall, polishing the flat of his blade. The afternoon light made the steel look like a second sky.
"Brother," she said, "Tell me, what is Remembrance to you?"
He looked up, blinked, and set the blade aside. He gave the question the kind of consideration a man provides a command in the field. "It's memory made useful," he said finally. "You recall what happened, and you change so it doesn't happen again. Remembrance is the part of us that trains, so our mistakes don't become someone else's deaths. It's responsibility."
Aurelia chewed on the word useful as she walked toward the servants' wing, then through the gardens to Rowena's little kitchen, where steam and herbs fought over the air.
Rowena wiped her hands on a towel and grinned when she saw Aurelia.
"Remembrance?" Rowena said, as if answering a favorite riddle. "It's a recipe and an experiment. It's what you keep in a pot to make the next batch better. You remember what heated, what burned, what sweetened. It's patterns, not ghosts, that repeat because it works. It's not sorrow. It's craft."
Aurelia scribbled a line in the margin of a book she carried for the exercise: Remembrance = responsibility. Remembrance = pattern.
The definitions sat like different spices on her tongue. None of them tasted quite right in the way she wanted.
She caught their father in his study. Duke August paused mid-paper, spectacles tugged down his nose.
He folded his hands over a map whose borders he'd been worrying at for the last hour.
"Remembrance," he said without hesitation, "is a legacy. It's what you pass on, resources, oaths, names. It's how a house remembers who it is. We put stones in place so children will not have to relearn rulership by fire. Remembrance keeps the line steady."
Her mother was in the garden pruning a row of lavender. She smiled when Aurelia came near, scissors glinting between her fingers.
"To me," she said, "Remembrance is a comfort. A song we hum so someone who is gone is not entirely gone. It's what you do when you hold a hand through a grieving night, when you keep a story alive so the grief can have company and then, perhaps, soften. It's tenderness that endures."
Aurelia stood for a long time in the herb-scented air, the four answers like the spokes of a wheel.
Each turned a different way: duty, craft, legacy, solace.
None of them matched the tiny tremor in her chest when she thought of the visions that sometimes came unbidden.
None of them told her how she could shape what she could already do, the reading, the anchoring, the odd erasure she still mistrusted.
She tried to reconcile them the way she tried to braid two filaments of Aether: fold, test, ease.
The house's shadows lengthened. She walked back toward the training yard, their voices still in her ears like a small chorus.
Alone among the stone dummies and sun-bleached practice swords, Aurelia let the question be quieter.
She reached without looking, light-touch, not command, and held an echo, small and bright, it was her as a child, her laugh caught on the air where a game had once been.
She could replay it like a page turned gently. She could anchor it so her house would never forget that moment. She could dim it until it was no longer sharp.
Each possibility felt true under her hands, each carried a different weight.
Responsibility, she thought. Pattern. Legacy. Comfort.
None of them quite fit the shape that sat inside her. Perhaps, she considered, Remembrance could be all of those things in different measures.
"Maybe it could be the way one chooses to hold what should not be lost, whether as a lesson, as a recipe, as law, or as solace."
Aurelia straightened, the Aether settling around her fingers like a curious animal.
She had always sought answers from others: teachers, family, books.
This question, this word, might require something else.
She set her jaw with the small stubbornness that had seen her through exams and court whispers. "I will define it," she told the empty yard aloud, more to make the idea take shape than to declare it to anyone. "Not because my father or my sister or Sebastian says so. Because it has to mean something to me."
A faint thread of silver Aether lifted and curled around her wrist as if in agreement.