All Chapters of Ember Crown of Promise: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

The bell in Saint Varyn’s tower rang the way bad news always did. Slowly, deliberately, and without apology.Alina of Brackenmere hovered around the edge of the herb garden, her fingers still wrapped around a stem of basil. The leaves were warm from the sun, their scent sharp and clean, but the sound of the bell cut through everything else. It moved over the palace walls and into the city beyond, heavy enough to settle in her chest.Three tolls.Not a celebration. Not a funeral.A summons.She did not need anyone to tell her what that meant.Beyond the low stone wall, the palace rose in pale tiers, its windows catching the morning light like watchful eyes. From a distance, it looked strong. Up close, it always felt tired. The banners were clean and the courtyards swept, yet something unseen weighed the air. The kingdom felt stretched thin, as though it had been holding its breath for years and was running out of air.Beside her, Mara clicked her tongue softly.“They rang it for you,”

The corridor outside the council chamber was cooler than the rooms she had left behind. Stone walls drew warmth out of the air and into themselves, leeching heat the way secrets leech certainty. Torches burned lower here, their flames subdued, as if the palace had quietly instructed them to conserve themselves. Everything felt restrained. Waiting.Alina stepped into the hallway and stopped.Cael stood near the eastern archway, hands clasped behind his back, posture unassuming in the way of someone who had learned early that movement invited attention. He might have been mistaken for part of the stonework if not for the alertness in his eyes. When he saw her, something flickered across his face. Relief, brief and carefully restrained, gone almost before it formed.“You should not linger,” he said quietly.His voice barely disturbed the air.Alina studied him for a moment, taking in the stillness, the deliberate neutrality of his stance. “Do they always argue like that?”“Yes,” Cael rep

The corridor beyond the Crown chamber felt like both release and accusation.Alina pressed her palm to the stone wall and closed her eyes. The cold steadied her. Her breath came slow, deliberate, as if she were reminding herself how to exist outside expectation.Mara was beside her instantly. “You did nothing wrong.”“They didn’t ask for right,” Alina said. “They asked for proof.”Her voice sounded thin in the wide corridor.By the time they reached the outer hall, the palace had already begun to rewrite what happened.Servants leaned into doorways, whispering with bright, hungry eyes. Clerks hurried past with ink-stained fingers and urgency etched into their faces. Guards shifted positions, as though movement alone could keep disaster at bay.The air outside was warmer. Alina inhaled deeply, like someone surfacing from deep water.Then she heard it.Not Saint Varyn’s bell.A smaller sound. Controlled. Metal tested gently against metal.Somewhere inside the palace, someone was making

High Priestess Sera waited where the torches burned lowest.The corridor narrowed there, the stone darker, older, as though the palace itself had thinned with age and memory. The flames along the wall did not flicker brightly. They held steady, subdued, casting shadows that clung instead of danced.Sera’s hands were folded at her waist. Her posture was still. She looked as though she had been there for hours, listening to the palace breathe, counting the moments between footsteps and whispers. She did not turn when Alina approached.“You should not have gone to the Chapel of Ash,” Sera said.Alina stopped a few paces away. The words did not sound like rebuke. They sounded like grief.“I needed quiet,” Alina replied.“Quiet is not always rest.”Mara hovered close, her presence a familiar weight at Alina’s side. “They are pushing.”“Yes,” Sera said. “And you are pressing back with silence.”Alina crossed her arms, not defensively, but to feel solid, anchored in her own body. The palace

Night fell without ceremony.No bells rang to mark it. No proclamation echoed through the corridors. And yet the palace did not relax into darkness the way it usually did. Lanterns burned longer than necessary, their light steady and watchful. Guards paced more slowly, as if sound itself had become something to manage. Doors were closed carefully, not slammed or barred, but pressed shut with deliberate restraint.The palace was listening.Alina did not return to her chambers.She walked instead through the older halls, where the stone bore scorch marks from centuries of incense and fire. The ceilings were lower here, the walls closer, the air heavier. These corridors remembered things the newer wings pretended had never happened. Here, prayers had once been shouted instead of whispered. Here, vows had been broken in silence and paid for in flame.She had walked this way before, though not recently. Not since she had learned how to avoid places that asked questions she did not yet have