Chapter 21
Chapter Twenty-One
The welcoming ceremony has always been held in what was once Sulara's temple.
That knowledge used to comfort me. I told myself that even though the Council erased the goddess of rebirth from history and built the House of Truth over her sacred ground, something of her remained.
That she was still here, guiding new residents toward their own rebirths. Their freedom.
Now, as I reach the door to the hidden passage within the temple walls, I wonder if I had it backward all along. What if she's been cursing us? What if every rebirth has been a new cage?
The door swings shut behind us, and darkness swallows everything. My hand opens instinctively. Fire blooms in my palm, casting dancing shadows on the ancient stone. I use the flickering light to guide us to the nearest latch—a small iron hook set into the wall.
I've only witnessed the ceremony twice, both times from this exact vantage point. Mother insisted on it. By the time the Council departed and I was allowed to descend, everyone had gone. Only the stones remained. The stones always remain.
I hold my breath, slip my finger into the hook, and extinguish my flame. The brick slides into the hollow beside it with a soft scrape of stone on stone. Orange light floods my vision. I blink against it, eyes adjusting.
Below, three figures in dark green hoods sit in a semicircle. A fourth stands beneath the open dome at the center of the rotunda. Two more figures in maroon flank the table. Veritas healers, here to perform their part.
The table holds the instruments of transformation. A small vial of clear elixir, and two green velvet pillows. One cradles a memory stone. The other, an amulet.
My stomach twists. Part of me hoped I'd witness a Veritas ceremony —gentle, respectful, the version I've always believed in. But Margot's vision brought us here. This is exactly what I'm meant to see.
I hadn't yet learned to make the elixir when Mother first brought me here. I was too young to understand what I was watching. I'm not too young anymore. I close my eyes as Malachi moves closer, his presence steadying me.
Then I open my serephony gift and let the room's emotions flood in. I find Anala immediately. Her familiar warmth, her steady resilience. I almost tune her out of habit.
Then I feel something else. Something that doesn't belong. Guilt. My eyes fly open. I can't see her face from here, but I search for it anyway. The Sages carry many emotions. Guilt is not one of them.
Movement below pulls my attention away. A hooded figure approaches the table and lowers their hood. From this angle, I can only make out short black hair. Warm brown skin.
They're instructed to turn. To face in our direction. I stop breathing. The resemblance is impossible to ignore.
The same skin tone, the same arched ears peeking out of the mop of brown hair, the same pillowy lips and sharp cheekbones. A younger version, but unmistakable. He looks exactly like Cas.
They instruct him to kneel. He does, slowly, as if the motion costs him something. And then I see his hands. Scarred. Trembling.
My gaze snaps to the Veritas healer beside Anala. I wait for her to ask the question that should come first. Are you here by choice? She doesn't ask. No one does.
I turn my gift toward the boy and let his emotions in. The agony hits me like a blow to the chest. I stagger backward. Malachi's arm around my waist keeps me upright. His presence steadies me enough to breathe. But I don't close the connection. I need to feel this.
Constantine's voice echoes through the rotunda. "One drop of blood, freely given. All memories surrendered. The price of sanctuary is trust."
The words are ceremonial. Sacred. They should mean something. And I guess they do. It’s just not what I always thought they meant. One of the Veritas healers steps forward.
She carries the vial, the blade, and both stones on their velvet pillow. Her approach is slow. Calm. The same way I approach injured animals at the clinic. I won't hurt you. Trust me. I want to help. And like those injured animals, this boy doesn’t seem to have a choice.
She kneels before him. Sets everything down with gentle precision. I don't know what I expected. Something violent, perhaps.
Something that matches the horror coiling in my chest. But her voice is soft as she begins the incantation, too low for me to hear. The words the healers speak are never written down. Never shared. The only text available to read is Constantine's. I'm beginning to understand why.
I focus on his emotions again, forcing myself to stay open. The sadness. The grief. They pour through me like ice water.
This is what the ceremony promises to remove. I just wish I could take it from him without him having to surrender anything in return. But beneath the grief, I feel something else. Resistance. Defiance. And anger. Gods, his anger burns through my sigil as if it were my own.
He takes the vial with a shaking hand. The damned elixir. He drinks it in one swallow and sets it down so hard the glass should shatter. His hands stop trembling.
His emotions begin to dim, but the defiance is still there, clawing at the walls closing in around it. Something clicks into place. A realization so heavy I can barely hold it. I push it down. I can't afford to fall apart yet.
The healer takes his hand, turns it palm-up, and draws the blade across his skin. The boy flinches but doesn't make a sound. Blood wells in the wound, dark and gleaming. The memory stone is pressed into his bleeding palm.
The amulet placed atop it. Another incantation, soft and inexorable. His body begins to tremble. Malachi's arm tightens around me.
“Breathe, Menace,” he whispers in my ear.
I bite my tongue and nod as my eyes fill with tears. I can’t breathe. I can’t. I don’t deserve to.
Not right now. I hold onto the boy’s emotions, his defiance, and then all at once everything stops. His trembling. His defiance. All of it is sucked into the stones in his bleeding palm. Gone.
The healer rises and helps him to his feet. He turns toward us again. This time, when I reach for his emotions, there's nothing. A hollow where a person used to be.
Constantine's voice slices through the silence. "On behalf of the Everlasting, I, Lord Constantine, receive your truth."
He stops mid-sentence. Someone gasps. The Veritas healer looks up, yanking her hood down.
Constantine does the same. Others follow—green cloaks, maroon cloaks, figures emerging from shadows I hadn't noticed.
All of them staring upward. Malachi goes rigid against me.
I follow their gaze to the open dome. The clouds are moving. Parting. Sprites, I think. But no …
Red spills across the parting clouds, and then I see it.
The moon.
Not a sliver. Not a glimpse through the Shroud. The full, perfect sphere of it, hanging in the sky. And it is red.
Red like a wound. Red like fire. The tears that were banked in my eyes trickle down my cheek as I look at it. I've never understood why ancient cultures built temples, wrote prophecies about it, and killed in its name. I do now. It is terrifying and beautiful.
Below, more gasps. I force myself to look away from the moon and find Anala. Her entire body is shaking. Freida moves to stand behind her, hands closing on her arms to steady her.
The gesture is practiced. Familiar from all the times Anala has had visions in the past and Freida has been there to catch her. Anala's head snaps back. Her eyes snap open and pure, burning silver eyes shine through.
No pupil, no iris, just light as she stares up at the blood moon. When she speaks, the voice that emerges is not hers. It is deeper. Darker. Ancient. It echoes through the rotunda as if the temple itself is speaking through her.
"When the blood moon rises and does not fall, the caged shall answer the kingdom's call.
One year the red eye watches from above.
One year to choose between duty and love.
From the drowned island, the flame still burns.
What was taken must be returned. The healer's hands will break the chain, but the price of freedom is all she contains.
When the last stone shatters and the Shroud falls, the blue flame will answer the kingdom's call. "
Then, silence. Below, Constantine raises his hands like a conqueror claiming victory. He says something, but I don't hear it. I can't hear anything except those words, echoing in my skull.
The healer's hands will break the chain.
But the price of freedom is all she contains.
Sleep won't come. I toss and turn until the sheets are tangled around my legs, then give up and reach for the journal.
The name at the top still makes my stomach clench. Lenora Bromwell. My professor. My mentor. My boss. Another person who lied to me. I keep reading.
My predecessor warned them that the elixir has only ever been used for people on their deathbeds.
It was meant to alleviate temporary suffering.
Not to be administered to the healthy. They also warned that the mushroom typically used has been contaminated by the curse.
Sara's response: "In the end, none of this will matter if we do not act now. "
Three gifts necessary: Siphony (specifically landsiphoner), empathy, and serephony Ingredients: Shroud mushroom, water from the Whispering Ponds, dried sap from the commiphora tree Subjects tested: Maidens from the Valley of the Innocent
I stop reading. Maidens from the Valley of the Innocent. Tested. Did they volunteer, or were they taken the way the legion guards were?
Findings: When handled by three gifted individuals, the Shroud mushroom proves more effective than the red-capped variety.
Reversal: We've discovered that lion's mane may reverse the effects. Two years have passed, and the subject given the reversal elixir appears to retain her memories.
Our concern: What happens to the memories once extracted? A simple stone cannot contain them indefinitely. The emotions attached to those memories are even more concerning. Where will they go?
Update: This will be my final entry.
The state of Lunaris is grim. Everything appears fine on the surface. It is not. The society that promises freedom and peace is built on lies.
The memory stones are kept hidden in specific locations beneath Lunaris. The Shroud—which began as nothing more than dark clouds in the forest—has expanded into something far worse. The stones seem to be feeding it. All those suppressed memories. All that pain.
We must put an end to this. I am afraid of what will happen if we're caught. But I am more afraid of what will happen if we don't try.
I'm certain the High Sage was wrong about one thing.
In the end, nothing will matter, except everything.
I read it again. And again. And again. The stones contain memories.
But memories are just one part of what makes a person whole. What happens when you strip away the rest?
I think of the boy who looked like Cas. The emotions I felt in him before the ceremony.
The resistance, the defiance, the desperate anger.
I felt something similar once, years ago.
It's impossible to fathom that I'd confuse the two, but everything is about perspective, and resistance can feel a lot like hope.
But hope doesn't survive what they do to people here.
I look at my hands. My fingernails are stained black from years of work with the elixirs. Every vial I brewed. Every stone I touched. Every extraction I enabled.
I think of the laborers dying in the street, screaming for families they weren't supposed to remember. I think of the pleasure gardens, where grief becomes entertainment.
I helped build all of it.
I think about the Shroud. The Shroudmaidens. We've been told our whole lives to fear them. Soul eaters. Monsters.
But the Shroud feeds on stolen memories. On pain. On everything we've taken from people without their true consent. Maybe the monsters aren't in the forest. Maybe the monsters are us.
Maybe the monster is me.
The weight of it crushes me. I bury my face in my hands. I defended the Sages my entire life. They let us keep our gifts.
They helped us hone them. They gave us purpose. But every elixir I made fed the Shroud. Every stone I filled added to the darkness. I wasn't helping people heal. I was helping the cage grow stronger.
The door creaks open. I don't look up. The bed dips beside me. A hand settles on my back, warm and steady, and his thumb traces slow circles against my spine. I try to stop crying. His gentleness makes it worse.
"Menace." His voice is rough. Quiet.
I take a shaky breath and wipe my face. When I finally look at him, he's glaring at the journal in my lap. He picks it up and tosses it onto the table like it's poisoned. When he turns back to me, his jaw is tight. But his eyes are soft.
"What do you need?"
The question cracks something open in my chest. Not what's wrong? Not why are you crying? Not what did you find? Just, what do you need?
Gods, how many times have I asked people that question, and yet no one has ever asked me. Not my brother. Not my friends. Not the Sages who shaped my entire life. No one has ever considered that I might need anything at all.
I throw my arms around his neck before I can stop myself. He doesn't hesitate. His arms close around me, engulfing me in warmth, in safety, in something I don't have a name for. When the sobs come, he doesn't try to quiet them. He just holds me tighter.
I don't know how long I cry. Long enough for him to shift us both beneath the covers, to lay us down, to pull me against his chest. The sconces extinguish themselves, one by one.
The door clicks softly shut—his magic, or mine, I don't know.
His arms never leave me. For the first time in days, I sleep.