Chapter Fifty-Four
ELYSSARA
The Archivist retrieves a small orb from the folds of his robes, its surface shimmering like frozen Starlight.
“This,” he says, reverent, “took years to find—in the vaults beneath Queen Maireth’s kingdom. A Memory Orb. A preserved memory of the Dawnmere line.”
The name cuts through me like a blade.
Dawnmere.
My blood. My family. The lost monarchy. The truth.
Within the orb, light coils and shifts—a trapped aurora, restless and waiting.
“Think of them as bottled rivers. A current that once flowed free, now caught, contained. Still alive, still moving. Just waiting for release,” Elandor says wistfully.
He holds the orb in his palm, offering it to me. But I don’t move. I freeze. Because I know I’m on the precipice of… something.
“You see, some things cannot be destroyed, no matter how kings may try. They can only be… hidden. This one, Elyssara, I’ve guarded. Kept it safe, no matter how many have tried to come for it,” Elandor says, encouraging me to take it.
I’m with you. Kael’s voice, solid and unwavering, pushes down the tether, emboldening me. You will not face this alone, my love.
And before I can think, I reach for it.
The smooth crystal feels warm in my hand, the Starlight and silver trapped inside dance—bending into each other, around each other like lovers between sheets.
Elandor gestures to place the orb inside the prism, and my hand moves before I can stop myself, to place the orb in the very center of it.
The prism activates.
A flare of light bursts outward in response, before settling into a soft glow that hovers just above the orb.
Light unfolds in the air like water poured upward, forming suspended shapes and sounds like a projected illusion.
The memory from the orb flashes to life in a display that I instantly recognize—the streets of Virellin.
Beautiful, sacred, and merciless—the past never dies; it only waits to be witnessed.
Kael’s palm wraps around my thigh, squeezing me. Letting me know he’s here. With me. And the pressure grounds me the way an anchor moors a ship.
Rain falls in silver sheets. Lanterns gutter in the wind. The smell of smoke and rot fills my lungs, even though I know I’m not really there. I know because the child in the alley—mud-streaked, trembling—is me.
She’s so small. So impossibly small.
And for the first time, I grieve her—this little girl forced to become something feral just to endure the years that followed.
Guards drag a woman through the street ahead, her threadbare trousers torn and smeared with blood, her chestnut hair clinging to her face.
My mother. Lesara Dawnmere. Her wrists are bound in iron, her bare feet slip on the cobbles, but she doesn’t stop fighting.
Not even as one of them strikes her across the mouth, sending her reeling.
“Run, Little Star!” she screams, her voice ragged and raw. “Run!”
The sound of it guts me.
I remember the panic—the way my chest burned, the way I wanted to run to her instead.
“No!” I cry, voice broken and raw.
The guards jeer, dragging her forward, before a heavy crack to her head with the hilt of a sword sends her sprawling to the cobbled streets. Unmoving. Lifeless. Blood spilling from her head.
My father lies broken in the mud behind them. His sword has fallen from his hand. The blade half-buried in filth.
I can’t breathe.
Because this is how I remember it.
How I’ve always remembered it.
The moment everything ended.
But this time, it’s not the hazy details from twenty years ago. It’s the living memory in detail I can’t escape. The memory from someone who saw it all.
The contents of my stomach rise in my throat, burning and wretched.
But then—the light shifts. The image trembles, like the memory itself is remembering something I never saw.
“She’s the last one,” one of them says. “The king will want her alive.”
Alive.
For a heartbeat, I forget how to breathe, how to think, and desperation for answers burrows so deep it feels like it's ripping out my insides.
My small frame tucks behind a crate, making myself so small I fold into the shadows. As if I was always meant to find safe harbor in dark places.
My mother’s scream echoes through the night, strangled and rasping. Her pleas to leave. To run. But I can’t leave. My legs won’t work. Instead, I swallow my sobs. I press them down so far I forget they exist. Instead, I burrow deeper into the darkness.
They haul my mother forward by her hair towards a wagon, her limp body scraping against the stones like her life means nothing. Like she isn’t my mother.
“There will never be an Earthbound on the throne again, Dawnmere bitch. The Dawnmeres will be forgotten. Like they never existed,” a guard snarls low into her ear, uncaring if she can hear or not.
A cloaked figure appears from the alleyway. A round-bellied figure casting a long shadow over my mother, hood pulled low, a dagger dripping from his palm that glints under lantern light.
“Remove your hands from the woman,” he commands, voice cold as steel.
And somehow, it sounds familiar.
The guards snicker at him.
“Or what?” one taunts. “We’re on orders from the king. Stand down, sir. Or you’ll be hanging from the gates before dawn.”
The tall figure steps closer, unafraid. “I will not ask again. Unhand the woman.”
The guards laugh, as if the man’s words are an idle threat. They drop my mother’s lifeless frame to the filthy streets, and close the distance between them.
“Well, go on, then. Show us what you’ll do about it,” one man jeers, pushing the hooded figure in his broad chest.
But that’s all he does—
Moonlight glints off the hooded figure’s blade, before it carves a fatal slice through the guard’s throat. He crumbles to the stones, face pressed into the filth of Virellin the same way my mother’s is.
The young girl with auburn hair and eyes like emeralds, hidden in the darkness, crawls across the slick earth, clawing her way across the stones. She sees no more. A lifetime of pain and anguish forged into her soul in heartbeats.
But the memory continues.
The hooded figure stands blood-slicked and victorious, surrounded by bodies, his boot still pressing into a twisted neck.
But he bends down to my mother, his hands gentle and tender as he brushes chestnut hair from her beaten face.
“Come here, love. I’ve got ya,” the figure rumbles.
And that’s when I know.
He scoops up my mother, holding her in his arms, pulling her to his chest as if she’s precious. Sacred.
Then, she moves—
Her eyes groan open, desperate to see his face.
“My— My daughter,” she rasps, her voice barely more than a whisper.
“I’ll find her. I’ll take care of her. But first, Your Highness, you need to leave Dravara,” the man murmurs, his eyes darting around, keen and alert.
My mother coughs, blood spilling from her lips. “I can’t. I can’t leave her,” she begs.
“You must. I’ll get you out,” he promises. “But first, you need to heal. I’m taking you to The Underbelly.”
The big-bellied man shakes his hood from his head, and rich, mahogany skin with eyes born for rebellion stare back at me.
Exactly as I thought—
Fucking Gellesk.