Romane von Juliet writes

Kael's POVI went myself this time, no reports waiting for me over breakfast, no captain relaying secondhand what he'd seen. I needed to see the house with my own eyes.The house looked lived in from the street. Someone had swept the porch recently, the flagstones clear of leaves. Flowers still bloomed in a small bed along the front wall, tended well enough that they hadn't gone to seed. Smoke stained the chimney, dark against the grey stone.The moment I stepped inside, the illusion fell apart.The wardrobe stood empty, not a single garment hanging from its rail. The cupboards held no food, no dishes beyond what looked like a single cup and plate. No books anywhere, no letters, no photographs on any surface. One chair. One table. One bed, stripped bare of blankets.It looked less like a home and more like the idea of one.I crossed to the table and ran my hand across its surface. Dust covered most of it, thin and even, except for one clean square near the center, sharp edged, as thou

Kael's POVI didn't leave the chamber right away. I stood there with my hand still resting near the iron door, staring at the crest carved into it until my captain finally broke the silence."Should we return with more men?"I shook my head and looked back the way we'd come, toward the tunnel that had swallowed the archivist whole. "He came this way. He knew this place better than we do. That means he's walked it more than once.""He disappeared, my lord.""He didn't disappear. He simply knows something we don't." I turned to face him fully. "Don't waste men watching the archive anymore. Find the archivist."My captain nodded, waiting for more."Search his registered home. Quietly. Question the servants who know him, but tell no one why you're asking. I want to know who he was before he became royal archivist. Someone remembers something. Find them."For the first time in days, I knew where to look next.Seraphina's POV>>>>>I returned to the smaller library once Mara had gone to see

Kael's POV>>>>>>>The chapel was smaller than I expected, barely large enough to hold a dozen worshippers. Old benches lined the walls, half collapsed with age. A broken altar sat at the front, its stone face cracked down the middle. Dust covered everything, thick enough to show our own footprints the moment we stepped inside.My captain walked me through it exactly as he'd found it the night before. The door. The silence. The hour of waiting that led nowhere.I didn't believe a man simply vanished inside four stone walls. I started touching things instead of looking at them, running my hand along the altar, pressing against the walls, checking the floor beneath my boots.That was when I found the scratches.Faint lines cut into the stone floor just in front of the altar, the kind left by something heavy dragged across the same path again and again over years, not days. I crouched and traced one line with my fingers."Help me," I said, and my captain set his shoulder against the altar

Kael's POV>>>>>>>>I kept my hand on the door and waited. Nothing came back to me. No footsteps, no rustle of paper, no light bleeding out from beneath the frame.I circled the building once, checking every window along the way. All of them sat dark, all of them shut tight. By the time I reached the front steps again, I had almost convinced myself I'd imagined the sound in the first place, a trick of an old building settling in the cold.I hadn't imagined it. I knew the difference between wind through a loose shutter and the particular, deliberate sound of a page being turned by hand.I looked back once before I left. The archive sat exactly as it always did, dark stone and shuttered windows, nothing about it different to anyone who hadn't stood where I was standing. And yet the silence felt occupied, as though someone on the other side of that door had simply gone still and was waiting for me to leave.I slept badly that night, the sound of those pages turning over and over in my min

Selene's POVI reached the outskirts of the Northern Capital after four days of hard travel, my legs stiff from the carriage and my patience thinner than it had been when I left Black Hollow. I did not ride through the main gate the way a noblewoman would, banners announcing her arrival before her carriage even reached the guards. I changed into plain wool in a roadside inn an hour outside the city and finished the journey on a hired cart, just another traveler among dozens entering the capital that day.I took a room above a tavern near the market square, small and unremarkable, exactly what I wanted. My first thought, once I'd set down my bags, wasn't of Seraphina at all. It was simpler than that.I need to understand what the King is protecting.I found my answer sooner than expected, sitting near the hearth over a bowl of stew I barely touched. Two merchants at the next table talked over their own meal, voices loose with the kind of ease men have when they don't think anyone worth

Seraphina's POV>>>>>>>>I woke before the sun had fully cleared the eastern wall, the hooded figure still moving behind my eyes the way it had all night. I thought about telling Kael. I got as far as reaching for my robe before the note stopped me.Some truths are safer buried.Someone inside these walls had written that. Until I knew who, I wasn't certain who deserved my trust and who only wore the appearance of it. So instead of going to Kael, I dressed and went out to walk off the restlessness.I hadn't meant to come this way, but somehow I found myself standing before the old archive, the gravel path having carried me there without my noticing.The heavy doors stood locked when I reached them, the windows shut tight against the morning light. I crouched near the steps and touched the edge of one footprint pressed into the mud. It clung damp to my fingertips before I wiped it away on my skirt. The larger print overlapped a smaller one beside it, both still soft at the edges. Whoeve