Chapter Twenty-Nine
Some poisons kill, some merely stay
And slowly steal the self away
Rubi has not touched her flask for hours.
Not because she hasn’t thought about it—she has. The burn of it. The dulling quiet it brings. The softening of edges. The way it makes the world feel manageable again. Makes it feel like a place she can survive.
Her fingers twitch toward it.
Just once.
One swallow to blunt the terror. One burn to quiet the part of her that already knows she cannot fix this cleanly. Her hand closes around the flask. She lifts it halfway. Then stops.
No.
Not because she is strong. Not because she doesn’t want it. Because the work is louder than the wound.
Rubi shoves the flask across the table hard enough that it skids into a pile of parchment.
Purpose, then. If she cannot be sober for herself, she can be sober for this. Because purpose does what liquor never can—it does not soften the world. It sharpens her enough to face it.
The threvenar is cut with a binder strong enough to withstand her best extraction methods.
Someone cut the threvenar with a binder.
She hasn’t slept, hasn’t eaten. Hasn’t left the apothecary since the sun fell and rose again.
Rubi didn’t always drink like this. Didn’t always snort dreamroot and frostmint and voidroot and whatever else she could find like a soldier trying to forget the atrocities of war.
She didn’t do a lot of things before Maldrak purged Kryntar Castle.
Before she watched legacies, lineages, and lovers scorched from Zerynthia.
Before she blamed herself for part of it.
But alcohol burns memories from minds, and substances erase the ability to feel the ones that return, even if only for a while.
So she drinks. And she used threvenar. Smoked it, drank it, inhaled it if heat was all she had available.
Anything to forget. Anything to cast the memories into distant ghosts.
Rubi knows how threvenar works.
And this? This is all wrong.
She just can’t figure out how.
The air has grown stale with crushed leaves, heated tinctures, and the sharp tang of alcohol.
Candle stubs sag into puddles of wax across every flat surface.
Mortars crowd the worktable. Glass vials.
Dried roots. Scraps of parchment scrawled with hurried observations.
And at the center of it all, a shallow ceramic dish filled with onyx powdered threvenar.
Or what is supposed to be threvenar.
Rubi rolls her shoulders once, slowly, easing the ache from hours bent over the bench. Then she reaches for the mortar again.
Elandor had another batch of threvenar delivered to her from the Shades.
A fresh pinch of the powder goes in.
She grinds.
The stone pestle moves in steady circles—practiced, rhythmic, precise.
But the powder does not behave.
It should reduce cleanly. Break into finer and finer granules. That is the nature of properly dried threvenar—brittle, obedient, easily broken down.
Instead, the powder drags. Just slightly. Clings. Almost imperceptibly. Smears faintly against the bowl. So obscure it’s almost unnoticeable.
Rubi stills. She presses harder. Twists the pestle.
The substance gathers into soft clumps, flattening under pressure instead of fracturing. When she lifts the pestle, a thin sheen glistens along the stone that she hasn’t noticed before.
Slowly, she sets the pestle aside.
From her sleeve, she draws a narrow apothecary blade and scrapes the mortar’s surface. The residue stretches. Just slightly. A delicate filament—no thicker than spider silk—pulls free before snapping.
Her jaw tightens. It’s not fiber… certainly not an oil. It’s adhesive.
She scrapes again, gathering the smear onto the blade’s edge. Tilts it toward the candlelight. Gloss. Subtle. Almost invisible. But undoubtedly there.
This changes everything. If she can just figure out what it is, she’ll know exactly how to purge it from the system.
Because if those Memory Orbs are shattered and the threvenar still lives inside the veins of the Dravari—it won’t matter.
Freeing the memories is not enough. The people must remember, too.
Rubi moves fast. She’s close—she can feel it.
She prepares two bowls.
One filled with cold well water. The other warmed gently over flame until faint steam curls from its surface.
Equal measures of the powder fall into each.
She waits.
Pure threvenar disperses immediately. It blooms outward in dark clouds, dissolving into suspension with barely a stir. That’s why it’s so effective as a treatment—straight in water, consumed easily.
This does not dissolve evenly.
The powder darkens where it touches water.
Some particles sink heavily. Others cling to the sides leaving a rust-colored residue.
The rusty hue bleeds into the water, where thin, membranous threads stretch and fold back into themselves like they’re searching for something to latch onto.
So thin, no one would notice if they weren’t looking for it.
And in places like Virellin where water was gathered from a collective well, no one expected it to actually be clean.
Rubi stirs the cold bowl first.
The threads break apart.
Then reform.
She stirs the warm bowl.
The effect worsens. Filaments elongate, tangling around the stirring rod. When she lifts it, a strand follows—thin, glistening, elastic.
It trembles in the air.
Then snaps.
Rubi’s breath leaves her slowly through her nose.
Water does not break it.
Water cannot disperse it.
Hydrophobic.
Rubi’s pulse spikes with the terrifying thrill of finally seeing the shape of the thing haunting her.
Her eyes flick to the flame.
Heat changes everything.
She pours the warm suspension into a narrow metal vessel and lowers it over fire. Not enough to boil. Just enough to coax reaction. Slowly, the liquid thickens.
A faint sheen spreads across the surface—lacquered, almost glasslike.
She dips a rod into the mixture and lifts.
A filament stretches upward with it. Thicker now. Amber-tinged in the light.
Resin.
The word settles in her mind with cold certainty.
Not oil. Not wax. Not fat. Plant resin.
She’d know the shape of resin anywhere—nature is the language Rubi speaks.
She adds a measure of distilled spirit next.
Alcohol darkens the solution immediately, drawing something hidden into itself. A scent rises—subtle at first, then sharper as warmth releases it fully.
Rubi leans closer.
Inhales.
Not sweet.
Not bitter.
Not green.
Dry. No—sun-baked.
A faint metallic tang lingers beneath it, like iron left too long beneath open sky. Like wind scraping across exposed stone. Like dust heated until it almost smokes.
Her brow furrows.
Rubi knows these lands—knows the climate and the topography.
Not grown here.
Not anywhere in Aevryn’s damp soils, full of jungle and plant life, mountain ranges and valleys. Not Nymeris. Full of cliffs and ranges, waterfalls and lakes.
This plant remembers heat.
Remembers aridity.
Remembers mineral earth.
Rubi already knows where it’s from, but she prepares the final test without hesitation—apothecaries don’t assume. Assumptions are what made her miss the obvious contamination in the first place.
A small ceramic cup. A splash of sour fermentation—sharp enough to mimic stomach acid.
Into it, she drops a bead of the resin-laced threvenar.
It should soften, break, dissolve. Instead, it tightens. Contracts inward, sealing around the powder like a protective shell. A thin translucent casing forms—slick, resilient, unyielding.
Rubi does not move for a long moment.
This is not just a binder.
This is a delivery system.
The binder forces the compound to survive digestion. To pass the body’s defenses. To enter whether welcomed or not.
Coercive absorption.
Her stomach turns at the loss of freedom, choice, autonomy.
This is fucking dominion.
One test remains.
She scrapes a hardened fragment onto a thin metal plate and holds it above open flame. The resin blackens. Bubbles. Chars. When it collapses into ash, she crushes the residue between finger and thumb.
Fine powder falls away.
Red.
Not brown.
Not gray.
Red-orange dust.
She rubs it across the inside of her wrist. It stains the skin the color of rust.
Rubi stares at the mark. Iron-rich soil signature. Mineral desert origin.
There are few places where plants drink this much metal from the earth. And only one known for harvesting sap so dense it hardens like lacquer in open air… one region whose caravans trade in medicinal resins capable of sealing wounds, preserving flesh, forcing compounds into cells.
Her fingers close slowly into a fist, grinding the red dust deeper into her skin.
She already knows.
But still—she whispers it.
“Caeloria.”
Like saying the word aloud makes it more real.
More true. The word settles into the apothecary like a stone dropped into deep water.
Everything ripples outward from it. The altered threvenar.
The forced absorption deep into the cellular system.
It makes sense. Makes sense why binders don’t work—they only reach the blood, the gut.
But this? It burrows so deep into the cell, lodging itself there for permanent ownership.
Not merely contamination. Not just corruption. Engineering.
Whoever designed this understood apothecary science at a level that should not exist outside royal laboratories.
She looks down at her stained hand again.
Rust.
Force.
Control.
Maireth may be supplying it, but she knows only one person can be forcing it down the throats of the Dravari people: Thalmyr.
Thalmyr fucking Lurian.
It makes sense now—the alliance between Dravara and Caeloria. It wasn’t new. It was established. Eldric was always walking into a trap, and Kael sent him there to negotiate an alliance that wasn’t even an option.
Fuck.
Panic flares sharp in Rubi’s chest, a cold sweat dripping down her spine. Because somewhere, far beyond the safety of the walls and wards of Nymeris, Kael and Elyssara are walking willingly toward the heart of it.
Rubi does not reach for her flask. Not now. Now she gathers the samples. Labels them with steady hands that no longer tremble.
A sharp knock strikes at the door.
Rubi snaps her eyes up from her work, only just realizing the sting rimming them, and Teddy’s head and shoulder peek through.
“Are you busy?” he asks.
But Rubi wastes no time. She strides across the room, and grips his arm, pulling him through the door.
She pokes her head around the door frame, darting her eyes down the hallways.
“What?” Teddy pushes, his voice hushed and urgent.
Rubi closes the door softly behind herself, and paces across the room, chest rising and falling too fast.
“I’ve made a discovery, Teddy,” she breathes softly, but there’s no denying the intensity in her demeanor.
Teddy’s eyes fall on the workbench, the shelves—the chaos. He takes it all in, calculating, assessing.
“The threvenar isn’t just cut with a binder, Teddy. It’s laced with a powerful resin that can transport the threvenar into the cell,” she begins, worrying her bottom lip with her teeth.
“Dumb it down for me, Rubes. I speak war, not plants,” he snaps impatiently.
“The threvenar has been engineered with a powerful resin that encapsulates the threvenar and carries it beyond the bloodstream and into the cells themselves—it embeds itself permanently there, Teddy. Threvenar can be purged from the bloodstream. Not the cells. There are no binders powerful enough to draw the threvenar and resin out,” she pants.
And then she says the one thing she’s been dreading.
“I can’t get it out, Teddy. I can’t fix this. ”
The admission tears something loose inside her.
Rubi Ashborne can distill poison from blood. Slow fever from a dying child. Separate nightmares from sleep. Purge water from drowning lungs. She has coaxed bodies back from the edge of death with plants, powder, heat, and stubbornness.
But this?
This is not illness.
It is design.
And she does not know how to dismantle it.
She drags her hands through her hair, squeezing her eyes tightly.
She cannot fail. Not again. Never again.
“So the memories aren’t just being suppressed,” Teddy says slowly.
“No,” Rubi whispers. “They’re being occupied at the source.”
But Teddy steps forward with that look he gets when he’s strategizing.
“Who is supplying the resin?” he demands, his eyes narrowing.
Rubi swallows thickly. Resignation etched across her face.
“It can only come from one place,” she whispers. A heartbeat passes. Two. “Caeloria.”
The words land like a sentence passed. A verdict.
Teddy’s eyes fall closed, his shoulders dropping.
“So Thalmyr buys the resin from them, and pays them to protect the Memory Orbs as well,” he says, voice gravelly and raw. It’s not a question.
“Yes,” Rubi admits anyway, and it tastes like ash on her tongue.
“Explains their wealth,” Teddy mutters to no one in particular.
“Kael and El,” he says, interrupting himself. “Fuck. They need to know. They need to know why Maireth and Thalmyr are allied—what they’re walking into. I’ll tell them through the amulet.”
He strides toward the door, like a man on a mission to save the realms. To save his king. His best friend. He reaches for the door knob, and draws the door back. Before he steps out of the apothecary, he turns back to his sister.
“Rubi,” he says, and her eyes lock on his. “You’ll find a way,” he says. “Not because you have to prove anything. Because this is what you do, Rubes. You take what was made to destroy people, and you make it answer to you.”
He stills in the doorway.
“You’ve been trying to disappear for years, Rubes. Maybe this is finally something worth staying for.”
And he slips into the hallway before waiting for a response.
He’s right.
Resolve settles over Rubi as she pulls her shoulders back, sets her jaw.
She needs to find Elandor. She needs to know exactly what the resin is. Exactly what she’s working with. And exactly who fucking knows.
Because if she can’t… there’ll be nothing left to save.