Chapter 40
He had seen men hold swords with less discipline than Evelyne held her knife. Her spine was straight as judgment, each slice of the plum clean enough to shame a physician. Impressive—and, if he was honest, a little terrifying.
A few minutes had passed since King Rhaedor excused himself from the dining chamber, leaving only Evelyne, him, and a handful of attendants quietly tending to their duties.
Alaric shifted, more to contain the tension in his shoulders than from discomfort.
He hadn’t slept much. The hours between midnight and dawn had become his sanctuary for the kind of research he couldn’t do in daylight—scouring old field journals, flipping through his own annotated volumes.
He’d made diagrams, charts, entire constellations of inked speculation.
His mind had drifted to the Echoes of the Old Gods.
Lucien had been the first to entertain the idea seriously.
In the Soleranos library, over an open scroll and two glasses of wine they’d debated what an Echo actually was.
Whether it was bound to bloodlines, born from curses, triggered by rare celestial alignments—or nothing more than coincidence shaped into myth.
Some sources claimed an Echo carried the god’s nature, struggles, and legacy like an inheritance no one asked for. That they might manifest divine gifts, dreams, or visions tied to the god’s original domain. That their births often coincided with omens.
And most dangerously, that Echoes could be the key to the return of magic. Return of the discovery, or the unraveling.
No one agreed on how they appeared. His grandfather leaned toward the theory of circumstance. Into people caught in the exact wrong moment at the exact wrong place, reshaped by it forever.
Alaric wasn’t so sure. Circumstance explained the how, perhaps, but not the why.
He tapped a finger once against the linen napkin in his lap.
Somewhere out there, if the stories were to be believed, the Drowned Flame walked again.
The god who had drowned in silence, might already be moving in the world.
Unaware, fate tugging them back toward a path that had been buried for centuries.
And if that was true, they wouldn’t stay hidden forever.
The conversation with Irashe still echoed in his mind, sharper than any wine.
It had stirred something—an itch he hadn’t been able to name until now.
He researched more about what happened in the capital of Kaer’Vosh.
The Circle of Binding was more than myth; it was a pattern, maybe even the origin of the symbol Evelyne had seen.
A tether between past and present. Unfortunately, he hadn’t brought many research materials with him.
The books he needed were scattered in his chambers in Solmara.
His gaze had drifted to Evelyne before he noticed. He always needed something to anchor him when his thoughts turned heavy.
But then she licked her lips.
A quick, unconscious gesture. But his brain did something stupid and ancient. He froze, halfway through repositioning his glass. Then he noticed her lips moving. And then something hit the plate. A spoon or maybe just reality itself, and the whole room snapped back into clarity.
Her voice cut through the haze. “You're back on Elareth already?”
Alaric blinked. “What?”
She stared at him. “I was speaking to you, and your mind flew off somewhere far away.”
He leaned forward slightly. “Apologies. I was too dazzled by your profound analysis of plum texture.”
Her eyes narrowed, so blue that, damn them, they were more storm than sky.
“It was about border treaties,” she murmured.
He cleared his throat, stalling. “For the record, if I had known border negotiations could be this stimulating, I would’ve been attending them half-naked to stay awake.”
She shook her head and prodded a plum with her fork, nudging it aimlessly to the side of her plate. A faint smudge clung beneath her eye. She kept adjusting her skirts, her focus darted often toward the door. Every so often, her fingers drifted toward the pendant at her throat.
Something had happened.
“Evelyne,” he murmured, “are you alright?”
“I’m fine.”
The answer was too fast. Rehearsed.
He didn’t respond. Just watched her reach for the sugar pot, she missed it by half an inch, then corrected.
Alaric sat back slightly in his chair. “No, you’re not.”
She didn’t bristle. Instead, she went very still. Her fingers curled slightly around the sugar pot. Her eyes stayed fixed on the surface like it might give her an answer.
He watched her swallow. She was weighing something. Her gaze flicked toward the doorway, then exhaled. He saw with his own eyes the moment she gave up.
Then, quietly—so quietly he almost didn’t hear it—she said, “I dreamed of Thalen.”
She did what?
“He was holding the veil,” she continued, her voice flat and small. “The one from Calveran. Blood-soaked. Just standing there. It was the same as the others. But this time it wasn’t Dasmon. It… it was him.”
Dreams.
Her hands twisted the napkin until the fabric bit into her fingers, knuckles blanching. She drew in short, shallow breaths, her gaze flicked up once.
His reaction wasn’t subtle—he’d gone still, eyes wide, mouth parted. Because he genuinely hoped he’d misheard her or that, saints willing, she was joking.
Evelyne pressed her teeth to her lower lip, fingers twisting together in restless motion.
“I shouldn’t have said anything,” she whispered, like the words themselves had betrayed her.
“No, you did right,” he assured, “How often?”
That stopped her. She blinked. “What?”
“How often do you have them?”
There was a long silence.
“Every week,” she admitted. “Now… more often.”
By the stars…
His thoughts scattered like startled birds—sigils, symbols, recurring visions, blood omens, Thalen, Calveran, gods.
He couldn’t catch a single one long enough to hold.
But he couldn’t ignore that either. Recurring dreams weren’t just fragments of memory.
They were patterns. Something that slipped through the seams of logic.
He nearly asked her to describe the veil. To recall the exact pattern, whether she remembered the placement of the sigils stitched there. Maybe it wasn’t random. Maybe it was connected. Maybe—
No.
His fingers twitched against the edge of the table.
Not the time. Not the place. Not while she sat across from him, barely holding herself together, tea untouched, food ignored.
She was just a woman trying to make it to the end of the day without breaking.
He leaned forward slightly, elbows resting on the table. “You don’t have to explain it,” his gaze held hers. “What matters isn’t why the dream comes, or what some council of greybeards would make of it. What matters is that it’s you. What do you need?”
The porcelain cup trembled in her hands. He wished, stupidly, that he could take it from her—pour the whole dream out with the tea and be done with it.
Her lips parted, a flicker of protest rising.
“Evelyne…” he raised his palm. “I don’t care if it’s omen or madness or both. I care that it’s troubling you.”
She didn’t respond right away. But her shoulders eased, just barely.
Her voice was quiet when it came. “Can we just sit here? A little bit?”
“Of course,” he said without hesitation. “I can tell you a story. Would you like it?”
She nodded once, the smallest movement, but it was enough.
He didn’t need more than that. If sitting still was what she needed, he’d anchor the whole godsdamned table.