The room beyond was immaculate. Of course it was. Not a paper out of place. Not a single pen askew. The curtains were drawn to soften the light, lending everything a fragile hush, as if I’d entered a sanctuary rather than a seat of power built on other women’s silence.The desk stood at the center—p
(Violet’s POV)The gates opened with the same seamless precision I remembered—quiet, unhurried, and far too graceful for a house built on silence and subjugation. They welcomed me now as they had for years, but without purpose, without anyone left to perform for. The guards were gone. The servants,
Not in the sense that I was abandoned but that this moment was mine alone. The doors opened without command. The light beyond them was blinding, not from sun, but from flash after flash of press drones, media sigils, nobles’ personal archivists crowding the threshold, all of them desperate to catch
(Violet’s POV) They stood when I entered.Not out of respect or fear but out of awareness. The kind that settles into the bone when a room realizes the air has changed—when every whispered theory, every hushed debate, every what-if and no-she-wouldn’t finally walks through the doors wearing real s
I lifted the bundle and tipped it into the river. The ash fell in uneven strands, scattering across the surface before the water pulled it down—into the silt, into the memory, into the deep.The wind shifted, brushing against my cheek like something ancient exhaling through the trees. I didn’t whisp
(Violet’s POV)It took three hours by skiff and another hour on foot to reach what was left of the village.No one called it by name anymore. On court records it was listed only as a “neutral burn site,” part of the rogue raids that swept through the lowlands during the last territorial surge. But I