Chapter 15: The Silence That Shattered
It happened at dusk.
The palace was quiet, the silver tree blooming in the garden, the servants moving like shadows. Alaida had just returned from the fountain, her hands still damp with healing water, her heart full of strange peace.
She didn't see the men waiting.
They wore cloaks of the royal guard—but their eyes were wrong. Cold. Calculating. They didn't speak. They didn't bow. They simply seized her.
She cried out once.
Then silence.
---
Thalion felt it.
Not the sound. The absence.
He turned from the war council, cloak sweeping behind him, and strode through the halls like a storm. The garden was empty. Her chamber—undisturbed. The crystal lion on its pedestal had cracked.
"She's gone," he said.
The steward paled. "Taken?"
Thalion's voice was ice. "By someone who knows how to hide."
---
Alaida woke in a carriage.
Her wrists were bound—not tightly, but enough. The air smelled of iron and moss. She was not in the palace. Not in the forest. Somewhere between.
Lord Viremont sat across from her.
"You were becoming dangerous," he said.
Alaida met his gaze. "Because I was kind?"
"Because you were seen."
She closed her eyes, whispering to the pulse beneath her skin. The magic was quiet. But it was listening.
---
Thalion stood at the edge of the garden, fists clenched, cloak torn.
"She was mine to protect," he said.
The seer stepped forward. "Then go where kings do not go."
Thalion turned.
"To the wild," the seer said. "To the place where silence breaks."
And Thalion, for the first time, left the palace not as a ruler.
But as a man chasing the thread that had stitched his soul back together.