Chapter 6 Quiet
Chapter six
Quiet
-Maris-
Maris lost track of the days by the time the first week closed its iron fist around her. She had not caught sight of Kael since he found his way into her chambers.
Each morning, the twin wraiths appeared at dawn, silent as the grave, rousing her from restless, haunted sleep.
They dressed her in fitted leather, the same pitch-black uniform as the castle’s trainees, tailored precisely so no movement would betray her.
Then they guided her down to the courtyard, where Valea continued to direct the drills.
Valea’s voice was sharp and crisp, her copper hair braided like a war banner. No sympathy shone in those amber eyes, only a kind of brutal respect for Maris’s refusal to break.
Corin and Riven had been notably absent along side there king, but Maris was not permitted to train alone.
Every day, Astrielle , the copper-haired devil — who Maris swore wasn't born of this world but summoned, stepped into the ring. Astrielle wore red leather laced so tightly it showed every cruel curve, a dagger gleaming at her belt like a serpent’s fang. She circled Maris with a predator’s smile.
“Stand straight, mortal,” she hissed under her breath, low enough Valea would not scold her. “Or do you fear you’ll shatter that pretty porcelain skin?”
Maris lifted her chin, refusing to flinch.
Astrielle’s eyes glimmered coldly. “Maybe the King likes you pathetic. Easier to feed on that way, hmm?”
She feinted left, then drove a sharp blow to Maris's side, sending her staggering.
Valea barked from the edge of the ring, “Again!” before Maris could answer, forcing them back into combat drills.
Astrielle’s strikes were merciless, so quick and vicious they left Maris with breathless bruises and trembling limbs.
Yet even as she sparred, Maris caught a glimmer in the way Valea and Astrielle sometimes looked at each other — a silent understanding, a shared history.
On the fourth day, Astrielle landed a hit meant to humiliate, hard enough to send Maris flailing, grace undone. The strike would have killed her had it been a real blade that made contact.
Valea snapped at Astrielle with more bite than usual.
“Enough. You will not maim her.”
Astrielle spat on the ground, glaring. “You trained me better than to hold back, Mother.”
The word struck Maris like a thrown blade.
Mother?
Valea didn’t deny it. Her jaw flexed once, then her expression hardened, a wall slamming shut.
Valea is Astrielle’s mother.
It explained so much, their similar shades of copper hair, the way Valea’s authority weighed doubly on Astrielle, the fierce pride and bitterness dancing between them like twin knives.
It made Astrielle’s cruelty somehow sharper, Maris realized, born of trying to live up to a merciless legacy.
By midday, Valea would call them to a halt, and Maris would limp to the study hall.
There, the lore keeper, Master Aldwyn — waited in his austere gray robes, his eyes still covered by the strip of dark cloth. Maris thought if she saw his eyes they would hold knowledge so deep it would feel like drowning to meet them.
“Sit,” he commanded, a hint of kindness in his gravelly voice.
He assigned her towering piles of books — histories of Achyron, the tangled, blood-soaked pantheon of the five gods, the curses laid down with thunder and ash.
Maris would study until her head pounded, tracing maps of kingdoms long lost, reading stories of monstrous gods who split rivers with their rage or scorched whole cities to punish the nightbound.
She learned of storms that stripped entire harvests bare, of nightmares that clawed into children’s minds until they never woke again, of entire fae forests burned by divine wrath.
And through it all, Aldwyn watched her, a hawk measuring prey.
“Commit these to memory,” he ordered, tapping a heavy finger against one battered book. “Lore is the only armor the gods have not yet stolen from us.”
Evenings stretched long and silent, and gods she was ashamed of how she missed the sharp spark of a voice that could match hers in wit. She turned, searching the shadows like they might whisper his name. Kael. Why did it feel like the air shifted with his continued absence?
Whenever she asked where he had gone, Valea’s expression would ice over.
“Our king is occupied with matters that do not concern you.”
No explanation, no hint of when he might come back. And so Maris spent her evenings reading by the hearth, the flames cracking and whispering, a constant companion through the hollow silence of the enormous room.
Sometimes, she found herself longing for the King’s gaze, as brutal as it was protective. At least then she felt seen.
By the seventh day, the quiet felt like a punishment.
The only warmth was the glow of the fire on her pale skin, books stacked like sentries around her, their ink as dark as the nightbound kingdom itself. Even the silence began to feel like a living thing, breathing against her throat, reminding her of everything she had lost.
As she turned another brittle page that evening, slumped on a velvet cushion by the hearth, her tired eyes caught a scrawl of ink that should not have been there.
It was squeezed in the margin of one of Aldwyn’s assigned tomes, so cramped and thin it nearly vanished among the printed text.
“The fifth god is not dead, only dreaming.”
Maris froze, heart thrumming.
No chapter she’d read — not a single lesson under Aldwyn’s harsh gaze had ever mentioned this. The lore insisted the fifth god had fallen silent, lost to the ages, her name struck from even the oldest records.
But this? Someone’s careful hidden hand had written a warning. She ran her fingertip over the words, half expecting them to burn her.
Dreaming?
She swallowed, glancing toward the locked chamber doors as if Aldwyn himself might storm in to catch her discovering what he had meant to bury.
Goosebumps prickled along her spine, uninvited and immediate.
What did it mean, that a god still dreamed? That something so powerful, so ancient, might yet awaken?
She closed the book carefully, but the letters seemed to echo inside her mind, as if they were only meant for her eyes, they rung against her skull until she could barely think of anything else.
The fifth god is not dead, only dreaming.