Chapter Twenty-Four
Some memories soften, worn and thin
The worst make homes beneath your skin
Rubinia Ashborne trusts plants more than people. More than herself most of all.
Plants obey laws older than kingdoms. Older than grief. Older than memory itself. They do not lie. They do not hesitate. They do not fail because they are tired, or afraid, or distracted by warmth and laughter when vigilance is required.
They simply are.
Root. Leaf. Resin. Bloom. Decay. Renewal.
Predictable. Reliable. True.
Things she cannot say about herself.
Her workroom smells of crushed green things and heated glass—sharp oils, bitter tinctures, mineral smoke, and the faint metallic tang of distilled elixirs.
The air hangs heavy with humidity from the simmering, bubbling elixirs lining the back wall where narrow glass coils spiral like translucent serpents.
Light filters through high arched windows of rippled crystal, fracturing into bands of gold across the stone floor.
Every surface holds evidence of work in motion—drying bundles suspended from rafters, mortar dust ground permanently into the grain of the central table, stains of amber resin hardened like preserved sunlight.
She reaches blindly for the half-empty flask beside the mortar and takes a sharp swallow of brask without tasting it. Bitter heat slides down her throat. Familiar. Necessary.
Some nights she drinks to forget Tali’s blood. Other nights she drinks because she wants to pretend Nalya is still here.
She forces her attention to sharpen, focus, and drags her eyes across the apothecary.
Nothing here is decorative. Everything here transforms. Rubi prefers it that way—transformations that obey.
She’s been this way since Maldrak’s Purge.
Since she was meant to protect Teddy’s wife and unborn daughter.
Since she was trusted to do something other than get in the way and drink unfathomable amounts of liquor.
Just be predictable for once.
That’s what Teddy had said.
She failed, of course.
Let her boredom win over duty.
Plants are predictable. People aren’t.
People are driven by an undeniable need to not be alone in the end. It makes them unpredictable by nature. Driven to seek out the warmth of another, the touch of someone safe, the comfort of a shared experience.
Because loneliness is its own kind of death. Not sudden or bloody or dramatic. Just a slow erosion of the self. A quiet voice that asks, night after night, whether anyone would notice if you disappeared. Whether anyone cares if you’re hurting. Whether anyone cares at all.
Most deny their needs for duty, service, a promise. But not Rubi. Rubi was weak. Selfish. Unable to withstand another night of loneliness. Now, she rots slowly. Quietly. From the inside out while everyone around her mistakes survival for healing.
She stands at the main workbench, sleeves rolled past her elbows, hands stained a faint green at the fingertips—the color of living chlorophyll pressed into her skin through long-held familiarity.
Before her, a shallow stone mortar holds a cluster of pale-veined leaves, their flesh thick with suspended oils that glisten faintly beneath lamplight.
She grinds them slowly. She’s not hesitating, she’s controlled, precise. If nothing else, she could be that. For a while.
The pestle moves in measured circles, pressure precise, rhythm steady, each turn releasing another thin ribbon of scent into the air. Bitter first. Then sweet. Then something sharper beneath, like the layers of scent when rain meets earth.
Her breathing matches the motion.
Inhale. Press. Turn. Release.
She does not rush extraction. Rushing leads to instability. Instability leads to unpredictability. And unpredictability—Rubi has learned—is where catastrophe takes root.
A thin curl of steam rises from the distillation basin beside her, carrying the pungent aroma of a plant changing states. She does not look at it. She feels its behavior the way other people sense shifts in temperature—an awareness honed by years of watching substances alter beneath her hands.
Transformation has rules.
Everything has rules.
Everything except grief.
Grief obeys nothing. Not tinctures. Not tonics. Not desperate prayers whispered over substances at midnight.
Her mind catalogs names of those she couldn’t save without conscious thought. Tali. Nalya. Lesara. Daelen. Merrik. The baby girl who wasn’t even old enough to be given a name.
Nalya’s face appears clearest of all. Hollow-eyed. Exhausted.
Rubi had measured powders with shaking hands while Nalya begged for sleep that didn’t come with nightmares.
None of it had been enough.
Her jaw tightens slightly at the thought, but the motion of the pestle never falters.
It can’t. Not now. Never again will she falter—she won’t let herself. She will not be the woman who does nothing twice.
Across the workroom, rows of labeled vials rest in rigid formation—powders of crushed bark, sedimented extracts, preserved petals suspended in clear solvent. Each one cataloged. Each one understood. Each one capable of becoming something else when placed in the correct relationship to another.
That is the beauty of apothecary work.
Nothing exists alone.
Everything influences everything else.
Bind. Release. Dissolve. Draw out. Neutralize. Amplify.
Cause and effect.
Balance and consequence.
The world, reduced to mechanisms she can touch.
Rubi leans closer to the mortar, examining the texture of the powder forming beneath the pestle. Almost ready. Another thirty rotations will break the final oil sacs.
She counts them without thinking.
Twenty-two.
Twenty-three.
Twenty-four.
Her hands do not tremble here.
Outside this room, she numbs herself enough to sleep. Inside it, she strips herself down to function.
Here, she is safe. Here, she can do something.
A faint draft slips beneath the door, stirring the hanging herb bundles overhead. Their dry leaves whisper softly against one another—a sound like distant rain, or quiet applause, or warning.
Rubi ignores it.
She presses harder.
The powder darkens, releasing a deeper, more volatile scent—the kind that clings to the back of the throat and lingers behind the eyes. Potent. Active. Ready to be tested.
Something in this room will yield to her.
Something will respond correctly.
Something will behave exactly as it is meant to.
Because this time…
This time she does not ignore responsibility. She does not lie in a warm room, distracted by touch and breath and pleasure, while something irreplaceable vanishes beyond her reach.
The pestle stops.
Silence settles around her like a held breath.
Rubi presses the powdered leaves between two stained fingers, examining their breakdown, their release, their surrender.
“Everything breaks down eventually,” she murmurs softly. “I just have to find how.”
Then she reaches for the threvenar sample.
The predictable black threvenar powder pools in the bottom of a glass bowl. So ordinary in its appearance. So unassuming in its dangers—in the way it has rewritten the realms.
Rubi drags parchment closer to her, quill and ink already blotted across the workbench. Her records. Records that make no sense.
Test Thirty-Five. She marks the words at the top of a fresh sheet of parchment.
Test thirty-five after thirty-four failed attempts to find a binder for the threvenar. To safely remove it from the bodies of the Dravari people. To restore memory to them.
This is not right.
For Rubi, threvenar is predictable.
It is temporary—a sedative for memories, until it passes through the system. Or, for heavy doses, ushered out by detoxifying herbs.
She’s used threvenar countless times before—warriors who’d seen too much death, mothers who’d lost babies, children who’d witnessed the Purge.
It doesn’t stay—it dilutes memory. Softens it at the edges. Allows people to return to themselves without the sharp memories of horrors they’ve encountered.
Then, it’s removed. Drawn out by plants.
She’s pulled it out of the body, the blood, countless times before. Exact quantities vary from person to person, but she’s always been able to extract it.
Moonleaf. Bitterthorn. White marrow bark. River nettle. Salt reed extract. Lungwort.
They’ve always worked before.
Until now.
Now, they are marked as failures in her records. Repelled by the threvenar.
Despite the knot in her stomach, she composes herself. Sucking in a sharp breath, she takes the freshly ground ashmint powder and sprinkles it directly on the inert threvenar.
If the ashmint and threvenar did what they normally did, they’d bind. Attach to one another—inseparable molecules coming together as one.
Nothing happens.
The ashmint sits atop the threvenar, not binding. Not doing anything at all.
She waits.
One heartbeat.
Two.
It moves.
It moves… away.
Repelled.
Rejected.
Again.
A deflated huff escapes her. “Fuck,” she grunts, wiping the sweat starting to bead on her forehead.
She tries to compose herself, but…
Her fist slams into the workbench with a force that rattles her teeth. A frustrated scream rips from her throat. She leans on the workbench, hands still balled into fists.
“It shouldn’t be possible,” she mutters.
Her hands shake. Not from fear—from the screaming pressure building beneath her skin.
Rubi reaches automatically for the thin silver tin buried beneath parchment stacks.
Flicks it open. White powder. Crushed dreamroot and frostmint.
Sharp enough to cut through exhaustion. Sharp enough to keep feeling away for another hour.
She shakes loose a line of powder, depositing it on the workbench, and with practiced efficiency, bends over it, and inhales hard.
The burn hits instantly. Bitter. Chemical. Clarifying.
Better.
She focuses her mind back on the threvenar.
It’s resisting the bind.
It’s resisting removal.
As if…
Its binding sites are occupied.
A sharp pang of realization grips her. Her stomach drops so violently she braces against the table. She clutches her chest as if she can hold in her shock. As if she can contain what this means.
Because if she’s right…
It means the threvenar is already claimed by something else.
Already bound. Already sealed. It means…
“It’s been altered to prevent extraction,” she murmurs.
Fuck.
Thoughts flood her.
It’s not contaminated.
Not degraded.
Not unstable.
Engineered.
It has to be.
Because this is not natural threvenar. This is not the native Zerynthian threvenar she has grown up using and extracting.
Breaths rush in and out in ragged pants, recognition landing like a warhammer in her mind.
This behavior is impossible under normal conditions.
So these are not normal conditions.
She moves.
Fast and efficient despite her theory.
She reaches for detoxifying powders from the back wall, striding swiftly back and forth between the wall and workbench to drop the samples with a heavy clatter against the surface.
She places empty sampling dishes before them, and places a pinch of threvenar in each dish.
She moves to each bowl of powder, and adds a dusting atop the threvenar.
Moonleaf.
Bitterthorn.
White marrow bark.
River nettle.
Salt reed extract.
Lungwort.
She needs to see it again.
Needs to convince herself she’s wrong.
The powders sit atop the threvenar.
One heartbeat.
Two.
Nothing.
Three.
Fou—
Movement.
They separate.
Detoxifying herbs move away from the threvenar.
Repelled. Repulsed. Rejected.
Holy fucking Stars.
The problem isn’t the binders.
It’s the threvenar.
It’s been altered.
Which means…
She closes her eyes, loosing an exhale of pure, unadulterated fear. Because she realizes: people aren’t temporarily sedated. They are chemically occupied.
This is not threvenar.
This is occupation.
And someone designed it that way.
No one designs permanence by accident.
She looks at the powder. Not a sedative. Not a treatment. A claim. Something placed inside the body and taught never to leave. And if it cannot be removed…
Then memory itself no longer belongs to the person who lived it.
Her pulse pounds.
Engineered. Locked. Permanent.
Not a mistake.
A system.
Someone has turned memory into territory, and claimed it.
Her throat tightens.
This is not healing gone wrong.
This is rule.
This is power.
This is someone deciding what the world is allowed to remember.
Her hands steady.
Fine.
Then she will be the one who breaks it.
Because she could not save Tali.
She could not save Nalya.
But maybe she can still stop this from swallowing everyone else whole.