They brought the Sun Temple's acolytes into the council as if holy faces could hold a room together. Candles had been trimmed and polished until the wax glinted like small moons. The priests filed in with their robes folded in a way that made them look less like men and more like moving doctrines, and the temple's attendant scents — orange peel, crushed bay, beeswax — wrapped the council like a benediction and a rebuke.
Kaelen leaned back in his chair and kicked his boot against the table leg. Serving nobles were supposed to sit straighter in holy places, but he'd never been good at pretending his bones were anything but tired. Across from him Duchess Mariya Serefin kept that face she saved for bad negotiations: warm enough to keep you from suspecting knives, cool enough that you never felt safe in her smile.
"You should not have come alone, Prince," she said. Her voice held the soft firmness of a woman used to balancing ledgers and lean men. "People will think you fragile if you wander off without an escort."
"I thought someone had to be the one to look foolish sometimes," Kaelen replied. "Besides —" he waved to indicate the temple and the priests "— they'll be nicer to a foolish man who smells of mud than to a foolish man who smells of silk."
Mariya gave a faint, almost imperceptible snort. Their small, private laughter flicked like a candle. It felt human in a room full of men who measured the price of bread in treaties.
She leaned forward, voice turning blunt. "Roderin Morvannis is not hiding any longer. His banners are moving, Prince — quietly, but they are moving. People in the grain towns say a quarter of his levy marched last moon."
Kaelen's hand found the rim of his cup and held on like an anchor. "So he's decided to test the field."
"Not just test," Mariya said. "He's probing. He's watching for a weak latch. He's used to winter and the kind of hunger that makes men swear differently. He's not a man who wants the crown because he loves crowns. He wants the land to call itself his and his to take the taxes. He thinks the empire is a ledger, not a thing you keep people in."
"We need something," Kaelen said. "A clear message that the Valtra can still secure roads and food. Words won't hold if people wake to empty pantries."
Mariya tapped a finger against the wood. "A convoy of grain through Coldridge Pass. Patrols raised with local commanders who can be trusted. And send men to the border towns with a mandate — punish brigands, reward informants. Make the people see they will not be abandoned. Make the wolves know they can't pick enough so there's no fat to steal."
Kaelen nodded. "That's reasonable."
"You'll find most reasonable plans sound like skirts to nobles: too short to cover anything important." She smoothed her hands as if smoothing the idea into a cloth. "You'll need a show of force that does not look like war. A demonstration."
Kaelen turned that over. "We could send a small host to the pass. Enough to keep the road, not enough to look like an invasion."
"Good," Mariya said. "And you should be seen making the offer to Harlan. Let him know the grain is going to the towns, not to lordly coffers. A visible, honest distribution. He hates spectacle, so keep it quiet. He likes that."
"If he talks, it will be on the record then," Kaelen said. "He doesn't trust a paper."
"He trusts bread and a witnessed distribution." Mariya's tone left little room for argument. "And Prince — if the north moves you might want Varin Taerol to come to the capital. His knowledge of the old temples is… useful. People hear magic and either fear it or rally to it."
At the mention of Varin, Kaelen's jaw tightened by a memory more than a prejudice. Varin Taerol had the odd, damp smell of someone who lived among old stones. His face had a habit of looking like he was listening to things no one else could hear. Kaelen had wanted him near because the Taerol house had access to memory the rest of the court had lost, and because, in a world where oaths could be paper-thin, old faiths fed the shape of people's courage.
---
Father Malric's moon-scented hand nearly missed Kaelen's when he took the prince aside after the council. The priest had a tired, sharp look about him — the sort of man who'd learned that prophecy is a thing you hand to other people because it makes them carry the weight.
"You cannot trust all visions," Malric said, quieter than he'd been in public. "Not because they are false, but because men twist them to their convenience. I tell you this as a man who has watched men twist and then burn."
"I'm listening," Kaelen said. He did not like being talked down to, but he trusted Malric in the way you trust someone who knows how you sleep.
Malric brushed a bony hand over one temple and said, "I had a passage last night. The moon spoke to me like it had been lecturing for years. It said —" he paused and sounded embarrassed for poetry "— it said only this: 'Night will come to those who wear the crown's shape without binding it.'"
"Which means?" Kaelen asked.
"It means the crown without a hold on the people will be a thing men tear down in the dark. Beware men who promise the quick answer. Beware men scented with coin-sweet words. The moon calls for patience in a land that will sell itself for haste."
Kaelen wanted the priest to spit out a name, to hand him a ready sword. Instead he had a half-metaphor and a warning that clattered its way into Kaelen's shoulders like a second coat. It was not comfort. It would not have been meant to be.
"You think the gods are picking sides," Kaelen said finally. His voice was small with fatigue.
"I think men hear their own reasons in the gods' mouths," Malric answered. "But the gods are not silent. They do what gods do — they make people afraid."
---
Varin arrived that night in a weathered cloak, and with him came the drift of the Taerol forest. He looked as if the rain had deliberately chosen his beard to live in. Cael followed, hair still chalked with ash from the candle he'd been sucking in the shrine the night before.
"You should rest," Varin told Kaelen as if they were old friends who'd met at a river to talk over a fish. His voice was straight and unceremonious. "Magic is not a lever you pull when people have knives. It is a thing that asks for a price and gives you a brief advantage. Use it badly and you'll have more problems than before."
Kaelen blinked. "You said you had a map."
Varin unfolded a thin scrap of leather inscribed with a hand that looked like it had been gnawed by damp. The lines were faint, a series of marks and a crude drawing — a hill, a ruined ring, the notation: *First Dragon Temple — Ashgrove.* The old temples were the kind of thing that made elders cough and scholars lean forward. *First Dragon* meant a ruin older than the Empire's founding and older than the gods the court currently agreed upon.
Cael reached for the map with a hand that trembled the way someone trembles when about to touch warm coals. "I found it in the Taerol archives," he said. "In a box where the monks put things they hoped no one would ask for. There was a notation in Varin's handwriting: 'If ever the crown needs the old voice, do not call unless the blood has been paid.'"
"You said that aloud?" Kaelen asked.
Varin shrugged. "I said an interpretation. I did not tell them the last line. I thought it better they not know until they had decided what kind of debt they'll pay."
Elara watched the map like a hawk watching a rabbit. "So we go dig up old gods?" she asked, tone skeptical. "Because when has that ever made anything simpler?"
"Because sometimes old things remember how to keep people together," Varin answered. "Not because they want kings, but because they remember a certain order. That memory is a sharp thing. It can be used. It can also cut."
Kaelen pushed his chair back. He thought of promises, of grain wagons and the Wolf's conditional trust. He thought of bolts on palace walls and of Alric's quiet face. He did not want to bring gods into the business of making men keep promises. He did not want the dead speaking and being taken as authority by armies. But he was also a prince who had just been given a map that might change the moral calculus of a siege.
"Pack light," Elara said, standing, the motion decisive. "If we go, we do not go as parade. We go as a small party that can run if it finds teeth. Bria would kill me if I went alone, but she's needed here."
Cael's face had the odd sheen of someone perched on the edge of something vast and a bit terrifying. He'd never been to a ruin like the ones Varin whispered about. He had not the arrogance of youth so much as a hunger. "If there's an old altar, if there are old words, maybe they'll tell us how to keep the people safe," he said. "Maybe they'll tell us something that has been lost."
"You mean, maybe we call a god," Elara said flatly.
"Or maybe we find a relic that proves Valtra means to be the protector," Cael corrected. He spoke gently, like a man trying to hold a fragile thing.
Kaelen looked at them both. The sun had gone to a dull coin somewhere past the horizon, and the moon had the thinness of a scythe. "We'll go tomorrow at first light," he said. "Just us three and Varin. Quiet. If this is a thing we cannot manage, we try and walk away with our lives. If it is a thing that helps people, we come back with it honestly."
---
Dawn found them saddling brief mounts and moving under the kind of sky that had a single, stubborn blue. The road narrowed as the city fell away and the world opened into the older maps where the Taerol writings had pointed: a track undulating across heath and through a wood that smelled of old sap.
The ruin sat like a thorn-head in a clearing: low walls of blackened stone, a ring of shattered columns half-swallowed by ivy, and in the center a hollow that tasted like a mouth. Above it hung a weather the air had made of itself — not quite sunlight, not quite shadow. Cael's hands were white on the reins.
They entered the ring with the muted manners of men entering a graveyard. Varin moved ahead, touching stones like a man checking a pulse. His voice slipped into old syllables and none of it made the hair on Kaelen's arms rise in simple fear so much as in the precise, small terror of curiosity.
They found carvings in the broken lintel: a coiled beast whose wings were suggested by leaves and whose eyes had been gouged out long ago. A horned sun, an old moon, and lines of script Kaelen could not read. There was a smell of ash not wholly natural beneath the undergrowth.
Cael knelt by the center altar and placed a hand on the stone. It was warm as if some breath had been laid to it only hours before, but the camp's smell — smoke and bread and damp wool — had not reached that warmth. He closed his eyes and leaned in.
"Light speaks to me more than words," Cael murmured. "There are patterns. A promise broken, a bargain unpaid. The temple remembers the ledger."
Varin's jaw twitched. "Then we must be careful with what we ask."
They had only time for a small reading, a chant like a bell sounded once. Cael's skin prickled and he coughed as if something had crawled in his lungs. A thin thread of flame — not a burning fire but a flash of light like someone lighting a candle under water — rose from the altar and licked the air. In it, Cael saw a figure: a crown of ash, hands stained, thousands of faces looking up and then falling.
His eyes flew open and the world seemed to stutter. "Night will fall on the crowned," he breathed, and his voice sounded not like his but like someone else's at the edge of his throat. He clutched his chest as if the vision had bruised something inside.
"Elara!" Kaelen barked. "Is he—"
Varin raised his hand, old and steady. "He has touched the temple. That takes a toll. It will not be free."
Before anyone could move, a sharp sound cut the clearing — the snap of a bow string, then the thud of a bolt burying itself in the altar's rim. Dust rose. From the treeline a shadow sprang, a man or two trying to make off, a practiced movement that intended to frighten and to steal whatever the Taerol party had come for.
Elara's blade was a clean arc before Kaelen knew she'd pulled it. She moved with the kind of speed that ate distance; the first attacker hit the ground with blood ringing from his mouth like a bell. The second tried to run but a foot found his ankle and tore him down. Kaelen felt the hot bite of near panic and the cold twin edge of relief.
The clash had been brief. The attackers were small, poorly equipped, more opportunist than assassin. But they had come with a carelessness that spoke of bigger hands behind them: men sent to make sure the finding of old things was not comfortable for those who would use it.
Varin gathered the scraps of blackened cloth and the bolt and did not speak. Cael sat with his head bowed and something like pain fractured across his features.
As Varin tried to tell them what he had seen — a fragment, an image, not a sentence — the ground shifted. A thin stone in the altar cracked like someone whispering hate. The ruin groaned as if settling deeper into a grave. Stones loosened. Ivy tensed.
"Back," Varin ordered. His voice had gone from scholar to man who had seen foundations give. "Away from the circle."
They moved as one. The temple sighed like an animal and then fell. Columns crashed inward, sending a plume of dust that choked the air with old rot and the taste of ancient fire. Elara grabbed Kaelen and pulled him as a block slammed nearby; for a breath he understood the meaning of being small and helpless beneath a world that decided to move.
When the dust settled, the altar lay in splinters. A piece of carved stone they'd hoped might be a relic had been split in two and something — a small, smooth black thing like a bead — had tumbled into the mud. Cael was on his knees weeping, not from pain so much as from the loss of the shape he'd seen.
Varin lifted the bead carefully as if it might still be breathing. He turned it in his hand. In the center, under a sheen that was almost like a film, a faded line was visible: "Night will fall on the crowned, but dawn will rise in blood."
No one spoke for a long while. The words were not prophecy yet; but they were a thing heavy enough that the three of them felt like the world had tilted. The temple had said something, and whatever it had said did not comfort.
They left the ruin with their prize — small, dangerous, half of something — and with more questions than answers. The road back to the capital felt longer, because the knowledge of a warning changes the weight of every step.