Chapter 17 Ezra
No study was safe in Lavinia's path. The last time I had invited her to assist with an investigation, my meticulously organized study had been reduced to a battlefield of books, parchment, and ink pots, each somehow relocated to a place that made perfect sense only to her.
Strangely enough... her method of studying ancient texts proved no kinder to bookshelves than her method of investigating murders, and I had expected nothing less.
“Ezra, everything Verith has taught us was wrong. It was fabricated... all of it. A lie built to keep men in power.” She never looked up from the book before tugging me down into the fortress of notes she had built around herself.
“I know, Stellina. The priest warned us the histories had been altered.” She snapped Translations of Ancient Verithean shut.
“No.” She looked at me, truly looked at me, for the first time since dawn. There wasn't excitement in her eyes. There was horror. “He warned us they had been changed. He never told us how much they stole. He barely scratched the surface. Ezra... it is far worse than we imagined.”
I settled beside her in the center of the room and looked around, taking in not the chaos she had created, but what surrounded it.
Her vines clung tightly to the walls, every stem wrapped in thorns.
She bit down on her lip, so fiercely a pale imprint had begun to bloom beneath her teeth.
I brushed my thumb across her mouth, gently coaxing it free from her grip.
When she looked at me, I found no excitement in her eyes.
Only rage. Not directed at me, or even at one man in particular, but at what had been done to generations of women.
“Tell me all that you have learned, Little Star.” I took her hands in mine, rubbing my thumbs in reassuring circles over her skin, and tears welled in her eyes.
“The texts have not just been altered; they have been perverted. Disemboweled and reassembled to fit a narrative that served only those who wished to cling to power. And then there was what the priest truly entrusted to us…”
She slid a stack of parchment toward me.
Some of it was cracked and yellowed, some of it written more recently.
I was careful not to crush the crumbling pages beneath my grip as I read the letters written by each priest in their line.
Each father had passed the records to his son.
Each son had added to them before entrusting them to the next.
Together they formed a journal that stretched across generations, chronicling the slow corruption of Verith, from the eyes of the only people determined to remember the truth.
My fingers tightened around the brittle parchment.
I found myself reading the same passage twice, hoping I had misunderstood.
Liv leaned over my shoulder and read along with me.
She pointed quietly to the passages she believed mattered most.
The further I read, the more impossible it became to reconcile the words before me with the history I had been taught since childhood.
The story of the first Diviner, the lines of succession, the promise of the gods, even the balance we were taught to maintain…
All of it had been twisted by men who feared true balance more than they ever revered it.
With each letter, my power grew more restless, rioting beneath my skin.
When I lowered the final page, my shadows broke free.
They coiled around the parchment and tangled with Liv's vines, restless as though they, too, rejected the words they had just witnessed.
Liv rubbed circles over my back, her hands trembling slightly. I took a deep, shuddering breath.
“I know what you are feeling. I am so sorry.”
Liv cupped my cheeks and placed a kiss on my forehead.
“There is one more story you must read.”
Until that moment, I had believed the letters contained the worst of it.
The look in Liv's eyes told me I was wrong.
She handed me a thick stack of parchment, then sat in front of me and held my hand as I read it.
The final bundle contained the letters of the first priest, the man who had begun the journal generations before.
They were written not for history, but for his wife and his son, desperate attempts to preserve the truth should he fail to survive what was coming.
He wrote to them of the horrors he experienced at the hands of the council he served.
He did not describe it as a political conflict or a rebellion.
He called it what it was. A genocide. The war that followed became known as the Great Reckoning.
That was not the most unsettling part. The events that spurred the war, the Great Reckoning, mirrored the events currently unfolding in Verith.
They targeted the women of power first, then the lines they hailed from.
Finally, they turned their sights on the soul bonds themselves.
The gods intended for true balance: good and evil, darkness and light, man and woman.
The men craved more than what they were gifted.
They detested that the gods had fashioned women as their equals.
So they destroyed the only people capable of standing against them.
They called the women The Detested, or Witches, and marked them for death.
Then they created their own version of balance.
Their own version of history. One name appeared again and again, on page after page. Stanhope.
“That name should not be on these pages…” I whispered it more to myself, trying to rationalize, understand.
“But it should be.” Liv stood and crossed the room.
“It all makes sense now. That is the reason the girls were not announced as errante’s. Why it was so easy for him to find them during the hunts. Some of them were born with that power; they did not steal it. He knew; he has always known.”
She poured two cups of tea and handed one to me.
“Ez… Ez... if he's been entrusted with a similar set of records, if his family preserved their own journals…”
Her hands trembled as her power surged through the room.
The vines lashed against the walls, their thorns lengthening as they reached for anything within their grasp.
I rushed to her side and pulled her into me, cradling her head against my chest.
Her breathing calmed, and she looked up at me.
“He is using it as an instruction manual, Ezra. He is recreating the horror that reshaped our history. And if he intends to follow in the footsteps of his ancestors… Then the horrors we've witnessed are merely the opening chapter.”
Her arms tightened around my waist as though I were a lifeline she was desperately clinging to.
She was right. For the first time since inheriting my father's title, I understood that I had never inherited a legacy. I had inherited the aftermath of a war that had never truly ended. If no one stopped Stanhope, Verith had only just begun to bleed.