Ash still drifted hours later, a slow, silver snowfall over the ruined chapel. The courtiers had fled; even the guards whispered as if afraid to wake something still listening. Myrren knelt amid the soot, pulse trembling against her ribs. Begin again still hummed through the stones, less a command now than a pulse beneath her skin. The Queen’s body was gone, but the scent remained: iron and rose, bone dust, lavender smoke. It led not upward, but down.

She pressed her palm to the flagstones. Warm. Breathing. Beneath the altar, a seam of air exhaled, cold and sweet as honeyroot.

Ori found her there before dawn, skirts dusted in ash, torch trembling in her hands. “Saints, Myrren! everyone’s saying you vanished with the Queen’s corpse.”

“I stayed.” Myrren’s voice was raw. “The scent didn’t die with her.”

Ori hesitated, gaze darting to the cracked altar. The spiral of ash remained burned into the floor, faint but unmistakable, its edges still pulsing red like a heartbeat. “It’s whispering,” she murmured.

“It’s breathing.” Myrren brushed aside fragments of bone and found the seam again, hairline, deliberate. A hidden hinge disguised as stonework. When she pressed, the flagstone shuddered and released a sigh of dust and cold air.

Below, a stair curled into darkness.

“Myrren, no.” Ori’s grip caught her sleeve. “You saw what happened to the Queen. If this is Veil work..”

“It is,” Myrren said. “That’s why I have to see it.”

The torchlight spilled ahead as they descended. The air changed to damp, laced with mildew, honeyroot, and frost-mint. Scents she knew too well. The passage opened into a crypt no larger than a prayer cell, lined with relics and crumbling ledgers. Shelves of glass vials glimmered faintly under waxed dust.

Her breath hitched. Among them, one vial stood untouched by decay. Black glass. Spiral mark etched into its wax seal, the same sigil she had once carved as a child.

Cordelia’s Tonic.

Her first poison.

She lifted it carefully. Inside, the liquid gleamed faintly silver, the scent a harmony of honeyroot and frost-mint like her masking blend. Every muscle in her body remembered the night she had brewed it, the way the child’s breath had faltered, the way guilt had rewritten her life.

Ori’s whisper trembled behind her. “That’s impossible. You burned those.”

“I did.” Myrren’s fingers shook. “But this one never left the palace.”

Something stirred in the corner, a glint of gold ink on the wall. Myrren leaned closer. The same phrase from the Queen’s dying spiral was carved above the altar niche, letters half-erased by time: Bind what breaks.

The torch guttered. From somewhere deeper in the crypt came a faint scrape, a stone on stone, or breath.

Myrren turned, vial clutched tight, as the air behind them shifted.

A voice drifted from the stairwell, smooth as poured mercury.
“Touch nothing, Mistress Vale. You have already tampered with enough ghosts.”

Kael stepped into the torchlight, dust ghosting the edges of his physician’s cloak. The gold stitching on his cuffs caught the faint red shimmer from the spiral burn above. In his gloved hand he held a vial of his own, empty but gleaming as if freshly washed.

Ori moved to block him. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“I might say the same.” Kael crouched beside the shelf, his breath fogging faintly. “The King’s private chapel, sealed since his death..” He paused, eyes flicking to Myrren. “Since his illness, rather. The Queen forbade any to enter. Yet here we are.”

Myrren tightened her grip on the black vial. “You know what this is.”

He smiled without warmth. “I know the scent. Honeyroot masking frost-mint, distilled beneath the full moon. Cordelia’s Tonic.”

Her stomach lurched. He said it like an accusation wrapped in admiration.

“You used it,” Kael continued softly. “Or perhaps the crown did. The residue from the King’s goblet bore the same signature. Faint trace of memory-binding resin beneath the sweet.”
He lifted his lantern toward the carved phrase on the wall. “Bind what breaks. The Veil’s creed. This was no chapel; it was a laboratory.”

Ori whispered, “Then the Queen..”

“The Queen weaponized it,” Kael said. “The King’s illness was not contagion but command. A measured dose, enough to silence thought, not body. Until someone altered the formula.”

Myrren’s mouth went dry. “Altered how?”

Kael’s gaze flicked to her, almost pitying. “Your child’s accident perfected their design. Honeyroot steadies the mind before it collapses. They refined it, used it on him, then on her. The perfect obedience poison until the spiral cracked and turned on its maker.”

He rose, the glow catching his spectacles. “You should be flattered, Mistress Vale. Your genius crowned and killed them both.”

The words struck harder than the accusation. Myrren felt the vial pulse in her hand, warm and rhythmic, like a heartbeat syncing to hers. For a breath, she thought she smelled the King’s sickroom again: iron, lilies, despair.

“No,” she whispered. “It was never meant to..”

A heavy thud above cut her off. Footsteps. Boots, deliberate, descending. The torchlight flared gold, swallowing Kael’s cold glimmer.

Thane’s voice filled the stairwell, raw and burning. “So this is where you hide your truths.”

Thane’s light struck the crypt like a sunrise breaking through storm glass. The spiral carvings caught fire in answer, lines of molten gold searing across the stone. The sudden brilliance forced Myrren’s eyes shut. When she opened them, Kael had already stepped back, face pale, spectacles flashing.

“Your Highness,” he began carefully. “You should not be here..”

“Neither should she.” Thane’s voice shook. His lightbinding flickered across the vaulted ceiling, casting their shadows in trembling silhouettes. “And yet wherever death blooms, I find her at its root.”

“Your Highness..” Ori started, but he silenced her with a glance, a crack of pain, not cruelty.

“Myrren.” His gaze found hers through the haze, equal parts devotion and ruin. “What have you done?”

She wanted to explain the scent trail, the old formula and Kael’s revelation but her words tangled like roots. “The Queen’s poison wasn’t hers. It came from before, from my past..”

“Your past,” Thane repeated, laughter breaking sharply from his throat. “You mean the experiments you swore were destroyed?”

Her pulse hammered. “I burned them.”

“Then why,” he demanded, striding forward until the glow haloed them both, “do I smell them on the dead?”
His hand caught her wrist, the one still clutching the black vial. The glass gleamed between them like proof of a crime. “You loved me once. Was that a lie too?”

The sentence hit harder than any accusation. His face, golden and desperate, hovered inches from hers; the heat of his light seared her skin, but she couldn’t step back. He wasn’t shouting now. His voice was the sound of someone unraveling.

“When I defended you before the crown,” he whispered, “they said my heart would be my ruin. Tell me they were wrong.”

“I can’t.” The truth slipped out before she could stop it.

He flinched as if struck. The lightbinding flared uncontrolled, burning across the stone like sunlight gone mad. Ori cried out, shielding her eyes. Kael pressed himself against the far wall, murmuring equations under his breath as if logic could contain grief.

“Myrren,” Thane said again, quieter, more human. “If the Queen used your poison, then it began with you. Tell me this isn’t the spiral I think it is.”

The word spiral trembled between them like a curse. Myrren’s throat tightened; she could smell its answer before she found words, ash, honeyroot, the faint sweetness of decay. She looked at the vial in her palm. The liquid shimmered softly, as if aware of his light.

“Everything we are,” she said, “was made in that spiral. You, me, the crown. It chose us long before we could choose each other.”

His expression fractured. “Don’t give it that power.”

“It already has it.”

The silence that followed was unbearable. Light burned the edges of his irises, his pupils shrinking to gold pinpoints. She wondered if he even saw her anymore, or only the ghosts of every betrayal he feared.

Kael’s voice intruded like a blade of ice. “Perhaps you should ask yourself, Prince, who truly benefits from her ruin. The Queen’s death frees no one, it binds succession tighter. If the spiral commands begin again, someone intends another cycle.”

Thane turned on him. “You speak as if this were a pattern to study.”

Kael smiled faintly. “Everything is a pattern to study.” He bowed, mock-courteous, and backed toward the stair. “And every experiment ends where it began.”

He vanished into the shadows before Thane could answer. The echoes of his steps faded, leaving only torch crackle and the uneven rhythm of two hearts refusing to sync.

“Myrren,” Thane said at last, softer, almost pleading. “Come back to the light. Whatever this is, I can fix it. We can start again.”

The phrase clawed at her. Begin again. The same words the Queen had spoken in death. The spiral’s whisper. She shook her head. “You can’t fix what was made to repeat.”

He caught her shoulders. “Then I’ll burn the spiral itself.”

His light flared, brighter and hotter. The gold reached for the wall, scorching through the carved creed Bind what breaks until the letters cracked and crumbled into ash.

“Myrren!” Ori’s scream broke the trance. “Stop him!”

But she couldn’t move. The air around them shimmered, thick with mingled magic: lightbinding, scentcraft, the faint undertow of shadow that meant Corven felt her fear from somewhere distant. The vial throbbed in her grip. When the light struck it, the liquid turned opalescent, swirling between silver and black.

Something shifted beneath their feet a tremor, deep and deliberate. Dust sifted down from the ceiling. The spiral etched on the floor flared again, red this time, pulsing in rhythm with her heartbeat.

Thane released her, staring as the glow crawled up his boots like a living flame. His voice broke. “What have you done?”

Before she could answer, the torch extinguished itself, plunging them into a darkness laced with the scent of frost-mint and blood.

The dark wasn’t empty. It pulsed.

Myrren’s breath fogged, tasting of honeyroot and ash. Every heartbeat echoed twice, once in her chest, once beneath the floor. She could still feel the warmth of Thane’s hands on her shoulders, though he stood somewhere beyond the black.

“Thane?” she whispered.

A faint glow bloomed across the stone not gold this time, but red, seeping upward through the cracks like liquid fire. The spiral wanted to move. It turned slowly, drawing her in, and with each rotation memory slid sideways: the child’s bed, the King’s cup, the Queen’s bleeding eyes, all replaying, reshuffling, demanding she choose which was real.

Ori’s fingers found hers in the dark. “Don’t look at it.”

“I can’t stop.”

“Then listen.” Ori’s voice shook, but her grip was fierce. “What you’re seeing, it isn’t new. It’s what they made you remember.”

“Who made me remember?”

“The Veil.” The word broke like a sob. “You didn’t just make the poison, Myrren. They made you make it.”

Thane’s light sparked again, a flicker across his face, bewildered, terrified. “What is she saying?”

Ori turned toward him, eyes shining in the red glow. “When the King fell ill, she wasn’t herself. I found her in the infirmary days before, writing formulas she didn’t recognize, speaking words that weren’t hers. The High Whisperer used incense, a memory poison. She woke clean, believing she’d never brewed a drop.”

Myrren felt her knees give. “No…”

“You made the poison,” Ori whispered, “but you weren’t you.”

The spiral flared white-hot, the light slicing through their shadows. Thane staggered back; his binding guttered. Myrren clutched the vial as the wax seal cracked, releasing a thin curl of silver vapor that rose like breath and traced a perfect circle in the air.

Somewhere far away perhaps in another loop entirely she heard Corven’s voice whisper through the smoke: Every confession is a beginning.

The vapor touched her skin. The world folded inward.

When the light returned, Thane was gone. Only the vial remained, empty and pulsing faintly in her palm, its glow the color of ash.

And beneath her feet, the spiral began to turn again.