The black feather remained where it was for three full days. Elara did not touch it. It was a silent witness, a constant reminder that the walls had eyes and the shadows, ears. Every time she entered the chambers, her gaze was drawn to that dark point against the parchment's white.
The Ravenant's presence forced her to act faster, to be more audacious. If they were gathering information, she would give them a myth to digest.
The instrument for her first fabricated prophecy was the Court Poet Laureate, a middle-aged man named Lior. He had ink-stained fingers and a permanently distant look, as if always listening for rhymes in another room. He was perfect: talented enough to craft verses that stuck in memory, vain enough to believe his inspiration divine, and ambitious enough not to ask questions when the Empress herself summoned him for a special project.
She received him in the Winter Garden, under a wisteria arbor not yet in bloom. The pretext was simple: a new hymn for the Harvest Festival, something about unity and shared destiny.
"I want something that feels ancient," she began, her fingers touching the cold rim of a tasteless tea cup. "As if it has existed for centuries, just waiting to be found. A theme of duality resolved. Perhaps an eagle."
Lior, seated on a stone bench that must have been cold, raised an eyebrow.
"An eagle, Your Highness? A noble symbol, certainly. But the solar falcon is your house's emblem."
"Exactly," she said, and let a small smile show. It was a calculated move. "But imagine a two-headed eagle. Each looking a different way—east and west, what was and what will be—yet sharing the same heart, the same purpose. A metaphor for this realm. Unity forged from duality."
She saw the poet's eyes light up. He nibbled the end of his wooden stylus.
"Two heads… one heart. Inner conflict resolved in devotion. It's strong, Your Highness. Almost prophetic."
"It is precisely the tone I want," she whispered, letting the word 'prophetic' hang in the garden's damp air. "Prophetic. Like a lost fragment of the Vorian Canticles. Use old words. Images of cycles—winter yielding to spring, night carrying the seed of day."
He scribbled frantically in a worn notebook.
"And the melody? Solemn? Triumphant?"
"It must sound like a truth that has always been here," she replied, and her voice sounded lower, almost hypnotic, even to her. "Something a peasant might whistle in a field and a priest might chant at an altar, and both would feel they were plucking the same string of the world."
The poet departed, eyes bright with the fire of commissioned creation. She remained behind, the weight of her own words sinking into her like a stone in a pond.
This was the first conscious lie, architected to become sacred. In weeks, the song would spread. In a decade, it would be cited in land disputes. In a century, scholars would write treatises on its hidden meaning. In two hundred years, it would be the poetic justification for unifying the minor kingdoms under one banner… just before crushing them.
The weight was different from anything. Not the weight of a crown, but the weight of an epitaph she herself was writing for a tomb not yet built.
Two days later, Lior returned with the first verses. She received him in the study. The Ravenant's feather was gone—Lyra had discreetly removed it—but the sensation of vigilance remained, a constant chill on her neck.
The verses were beautiful. More beautiful than she expected. Melancholic and grand, they spoke of twin mountains and a single river born between them.
She read them, and a chill that had nothing to do with the cold crept up her spine. It was her lie, clothed in a beauty that made it dangerously close to truth. She made small changes, inserting keywords that would echo in future political crises.
"It is perfect," she said, and her voice sounded hollow even to herself. "Make five copies. One for the Royal Archives, one for the Great Library, one for the Sun Temple. The other two… let them leak. Among the minor bards. Let it seem discovered, not created."
He bowed, elated, and was almost at the door when she spoke again, without thinking.
"Lior."
He turned.
"Your Highness?"
"Where… where do you think ideas come from?"
The question escaped before she could stop it. It was Elara's question, not Anya's.
The poet paused, considering. His face lost a bit of its professional shine.
"I don't know, Majesty. Sometimes it's as if they're already in the air, and we just breathe them in. Other times… it's like digging a stone out of a very dark place."
He hesitated.
"This one came easy. Almost… ready-made."
He left. She was left with the last phrase echoing. Almost ready-made. As if the lie were already there, waiting for someone to say it aloud.
The door opened again before she could process the thought. It was not Lyra.
It was Kaelen.
He entered and closed the door behind him. He carried the scent of the outdoors—a cutting wind, damp road-earth, and that metallic smell that came from armour after a full day. His face was marked by a fatigue beyond the physical, etched in the corners of his eyes and the firm line of his mouth.
"Your Highness. My apologies. The Commander-General is with the inquiry council. The northern border report could not wait."
She nodded, indicating the chair across the desk.
"Then speak."
He sat, but did not relax. As he listed clan movements, skirmishes in the hills, and the worrying depletion of winter provisions, his eyes were not on the report. They were on her. Studying her hands, the way she held the pen, the slight tremor she tried to hide.
"The mountain clans are using new tactics," he said, turning a page with a dry gesture. "Attack patterns not in our manuals. It's as if they are learning. Adapting in a way that feels… familiar."
He looked up.
"You issued direct orders to change patrol formations last month. Without going through High Command."
It was a statement, not a question. She kept her face impassive.
"The realm's defence is my final responsibility. I saw flaws in the old schematics."
"Flaws no one else saw," he observed, his voice soft but persistent. "And your new insistence on the grain records from the western provinces… it is meticulous. Almost academic. You have always focused on military might, not barnyard accounting."
A coldness settled at the base of her stomach. He wasn't just observing; he was comparing. Noting the differences.
"Military might marches on an empty stomach, Commander," she countered, keeping her voice steady. "An empire is made of wheat and steel. Do you find that strange?"
He stared at her for a long moment, and the mask of the loyal officer cracked enough to show the confusion of the man behind it.
"Everything about you has been strange, of late," he admitted, his voice lower. "Since the ball. Since the archives. They are small things. A phrase here, a habit there. A familiarity with… concepts that do not yet exist."
He set the report down on the desk.
"So I have been conducting my own investigation. Not into the clans. Into my own house. The Montgrave records in the Royal Archives."
Elara's heart lurched.
"Why?"
"Because if the world around me is changing," he said, and his grey eyes caught hers with an intensity that hurt, "I need to know what is real. The records are clear. The Montgraves have always served. But there are gaps. Inconsistencies. And in one such gap, I found mention of a small jewel. A brooch shaped like a falcon. Said to have been given to an ancestor by a kind princess. In thanks for loyal service. But there are no names. No details. Just an… echo."
He did not mention having lost it. He was probing. Testing the waters.
"History is made of echoes, Kaelen," she replied, choosing each word as if stepping on broken glass. "Some are just whispers. Others can be shouts that time has muffled."
He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. A weary gesture, too intimate for an empress's study.
"And dreams? Are they shouts or whispers? Because mine have grown worse. Now there is a music in them. A sad melody, with words about eagles and woven fates."
Elara nearly held her breath. He is connected. The prophecy I just created is already leaking into his dreams.
"Dreams are just dreams," she forced herself to say, but her voice wavered slightly at the end.
"Are they?"
He looked at her, and for the first time she saw a spark of genuine frustration, something close to desperation, in his gaze.
"What if they are memories? Of a place I have never been? Of a person I never knew… yet miss as if I had lost a piece of myself?"
The question hung in the air between them, heavy and naked, and it made Elara's entire façade shudder internally. She wanted to tell the truth. To scream that it was her, that he had known her, that the absence he felt had a name and a face and smelled of chamomile. But the price was too high. It was the price of the future world.
She stood up, turning toward the window. The sky outside was the same opaque grey as always. She broke the eye contact, which had become unbearable.
"Perhaps you are merely exhausted, Commander. War consumes the mind."
She heard the sound of the chair being pushed back. He was leaving. Relief and pain mixed in her chest into a bitter, indecipherable emotion.
He walked to the door. His hand grasped the bronze handle. The silence stretched, full of all the unspoken words that had filled the room like a mist.
Then his voice came, low, laden with a sadness so deep it seemed to crack the air:
"Sometimes, Your Highness… I have the feeling I am searching for someone who never existed here."
The door opened and closed with a soft click.
Elara stood motionless before the window, her eyes vacant on the gardens outside, his words echoing in her mind with an incessant rhythm.
Someone who never existed here.
He was right. Elara, the princess, had never existed in this timeline. She was a ghost, an anomaly, a seed from a rotten future planted in the wrong soil of the past. And the only person who seemed to miss that shadow, who seemed to hear the echo of that silenced voice, was the man whose world she was quietly dismantling, brick by brick, verse by verse.
And on the desk, the verses of the new, "ancient" prophecy gleamed in the weak daylight, a lie destined to shape the future, while the truth—their past, their love—agonized silently in the empty space between two closed doors.