Chapter Six
Beware the hearts the Stars entwine
Fate loves to sever sacred ties
Elyssara feels it before anyone else does. The way the air around him feels… wrong.
This is more than grief. More than warring realms. More than the pressure of the crown. She knows him—knows the feel of his rightness. And this isn’t that. Like something essential has shifted—and she wasn’t there when it did.
Her eyes notice the faint darkening beneath Kael’s skin, slithering through the veins on his hand like a serpent.
For half a heartbeat, their eyes lock. But he snaps his gaze away, curling his fist tight.
She reaches for him through the tether but again, she’s met with a cold, hollow void.
My love, where are you? Let me in.
And the silence that answers feels deliberate.
She sends the words, but they float at the boundary of his mind—denied entry.
Fuck.
“Teddy and Seren, find Lara and the witches. Rally them. We need their alliance,” Kael announces, forcing his voice into neutrality. Like finding the witches isn’t world-altering.
But Elyssara sees his strain in the way the veins bulge in his neck. He’s fighting something. And losing ground. But now is hardly the time to push him.
Seren nods, shoulders pulled back proudly. She won.
And the thought makes Elyssara beam—Seren is finding her power. While Elyssara feels like it’s slipping through her grasp.
“Ah!” Elandor calls from behind his desk, a tuft of wiry gray hair poking up over the edge of the desk. “Here it is!”
He unravels a large roll of parchment, frayed and snagged at the edges. He stretches it over the table that splits the room in half, gesturing to pin the corners with candle holders and ink pots.
The last time Elyssara stood in this room, her mother had walked back into her life like a ghost wearing flesh. Hope had bloomed so violently inside her she’d nearly drowned in it. Now, all that remains is the echo of her absence. The memory of her warm blood spilling across Elyssara’s bare hands.
“There we are,” Elandor huffs, smoothing his hands over the parchment in pride.
A map.
A map of Caeloria.
Elyssara’s never seen one.
And this map? It’s a study in cruelty and excess.
Caeloria sprawls across the parchment in scorched ochres and iron-stained reds, its borders jagged and unforgiving.
Vast deserts dominate the continent—salt flats cracked like broken bone, dunes and seas marked with warnings instead of names, and blackened badlands where ink thins as if the cartographer feared to linger too long.
Trade routes are etched in resin-ink, thin and deliberate, cutting through the wastelands like veins feeding a single heart.
That heart? A place called Azhareth. There, fortresses rise impossibly from the desert like defiance itself, their walls marked thicker than any city elsewhere in the realms—one gate in and out.
Azhareth gleams, drawn larger than scale allows.
Its domes and towers are inked in careful symmetry, surrounded by walls, arsenals, and supply vaults.
This is not a land built for living. It is a land engineered to endure, to dominate, and to bleed its enemies dry before they ever reach its gates.
“Our Shades have been working on securing this map for a decade,” Elandor explains. “Almost impossible to breach the walls of the city proper.” His eyes land on Kael’s. “We thought you may need it.”
He pauses for a moment, dragging his gaze from Kael, to Elyssara, to Kael, back to Elyssara. “For the Memory Orbs.”
The Memory Orbs.
Elyssara has known the time to take back the Orbs would come. Only, looking at the map of Caeloria—the unforgiving terrain, one gate in and out of the capital, and the vaults beneath Azhareth Castle where the Orbs apparently are… well, it all seems impossible.
“We’re going,” Kael announces without commotion. His eyes cut to Elyssara. “Both of us.”
She knows he would follow her to the end of the realms. But his declaration startles her.
Lately, he’s barely touched her, barely looked at her, barely slept at her side.
She’s woken alone almost every morning, no warmth left in the sheets where he’d laid.
Like he’s already started leaving her… just slowly enough that no one else would notice.
Kael doesn’t falter. “I killed Maireth’s son—she’ll be coming for me. I want to get to her first.”
Elyssara’s heart shatters in an instant.
It felt like devotion. Togetherness. Love.
But this? It’s strategy. And strategy does not love her back.
She shoves down her hurt, unwilling to let him see it. Because if she lets it surface now, she won’t be able to do what comes next.
“I get the Orbs. You take out Maireth. Understood,” she confirms, her tone stripped and icy.
His dark expression falters. A fracture of tenderness splitting through the cracks. He huffs an exhale. “My love—”
“It is done!” Elyssara cuts him off, and no one dares to breathe.
She knows he’s fighting something within himself, but hurt rarely plays by rules of fairness.
“We need to find the dragons,” Elyssara murmurs, voice broken and raw. But she needs to keep going. Because if she stops, she’ll break completely.
Movement is easier than feeling.
He still loves her—doesn’t he?
Jax elbows Elandor in the ribs. He startles with such theatrics his spectacles tumble from his nose and sprawl across the table.
“Ah yes. Th— That’s me, I suppose,” he stammers, plucking the stack of parchment from under his arm, and rifling through them again.
“Melders are impossible to track, seeing as they’re unable to Meld at present.
But what we have been able to discover is their likely patterns of behavior. Sleeping, eating, climate—”
“Spit it out, old man,” Jax interjects impatiently, a scowl on her face. Though that’s not unusual.
“Yes, yes. Of course. We’ve deduced their habitat to be somewhere warm with flourishing food supply—their appetites are extraordinary.
Any reports we have are quite ancient now, but many reference their affinity for volcanic rock, caves, hot springs.
They have been known to lie dormant for long stretches.
Of course, our studies on such matters only began at your last visit to Nymeris, so I assure you that our works are far from complete,” Elandor fusses, apologizing for work that he undoubtedly believes is insufficient.
But it’s enough for Elyssara.
“Vyrhal,” she breathes.
Her mind drifts back to the stories Revryn used to tell her. The volcanic forges of Vyrhal. Famed weaponsmiths. Air drenched in ash and sweat. Card games that drained his pockets and his ego simultaneously.
Ronyn’s brows lift.
“Shall we go home, old boy?” he asks Tarrakai aloud, earning odd glances from the others.
Home is not a place I can name. Only something I can feel. Tarrakai’s voice rumbles through Elyssara’s mind.
And Ronyn hears it, too.
And it is not your home, vessel. You have not earned the right. Tarrakai grumbles his rejection.
“Tarrakai says he’d be delighted to go home and find his kin,” Ronyn announces, ignoring the disdain dripping from Tarrakai’s retort.
“What do you say, Jaxxy? Come with me? I need to keep working on my tail tricks, if you know what I mean?” Ronyn teases, wagging his eyebrows.
“Every fucking person on the continent knows what you mean,” Teddy grouses, but he can’t hide the smirk that breaks free.
But Jax’s cheeks have flared red. “Do you have to say everything that comes into your head?” she groans.
“You should thank the Stars themselves for the absolutely debased things I don’t say, Jaxxy Dewhirst. Don’t worry, I’ll whisper those to you later.” He winks like he’s won, but Jax buries her head in her hands.
“Holy fucking Stars—can we stay on task?” Elyssara laughs.
“Obviously I’m on threvenar,” Rubi announces.
“Not like you fools could reverse a complex compound that roots itself in the blood stream.” She kicks her feet onto the table, pulling out a pungent satchel of ground herbs, and dipping her finger in, before smearing it on her tongue.
“Nope—that’s for the geniuses around here, right Elandor? ”
But Elandor doesn’t move, completely unsettled by her antics.
“Could you do it without having to enter an altered state of consciousness, Rubes? Fuck,” Teddy protests.
Rubi’s face contorts into one of disgust. “Would it fucking kill you to have a good time, Teddy?”
But Elyssara watches his face—the way it falls, the way his shoulders drop. Like maybe, it would actually kill him to have a good time. Like joy is something he no longer trusts himself to reach for.
“Roles have been assigned. Seren, you’ll open us Gateways at nightfall,” Kael declares, pushing to stand. “Rest, eat, do what you need to do for today. The realms won’t wait any longer for our action.”
But Seren isn’t done.
“Wait! I made something for us to stay connected.”