The fires were long gone, but the city still burned in her dreams.

  Ophelienne often jolted awake before dawn among old tomes, haunted by the hollow feeling that she was failing her duties. It was always the same urgent memory of a vital task unfulfilled, only to vanish upon waking. She carried much over her shoulders those days.

  In the absence of all command, Lady Valiendre had become the lone authority in a city of ghosts. She wore no armor now. Her blade, seldom drawn, hung in silence —a symbol more than a weapon.

  Each day, the warden walked Garland’s cracked avenues. She spoke little, gave orders in brief, deliberate bursts, assisted where needed, observed by all, obeyed by most.

  Her first decision had been to send word to Gildsheaf Keep. Upon hearing of the tragedy, Lord Jaufre, ever a man of action over pageantry, dispatched what forces he could spare: fifty men-at-arms, three wagons of dried rations, and a dozen clerks from the provincial court.

  “We’re not rebuilding,” Ophelienne told the knight commander at their arrival. “Not yet. For now, we hold a perimeter.”

  With the dead piled high and the living too few, pyres had seemed inevitable. But Ophelienne refused.

  She ordered graves instead. And dug them herself alongside the troops. Row upon row they opened beyond the city walls, adding entirely new zones to the local cemetery. The graves were unmarked. But not forgotten.

  In time, the scorched plaza began to stir. Word had traveled to the outlying villages: Garland, though broken, was not fallen. Farmers and shepherds came in cautious trickles —some in search of shelter, others of lost kin.

  The Grand Academy loomed half-submerged in ash. Its once-proud fa?ade had collapsed inward, and its domed gallery yawned open to the sky like a cracked skull. Yet beneath the ruin, its bones endured.

  The library remained: damaged, but not destroyed.

  Every evening, Ophelienne descended into its archives alone.

  Scrying-lanterns, though shattered, still bled faint light, pooling weak glimmers across scorched tiles. The shadows were heavy, but they seemed to grant her passage.

  Many tomes were gone —incinerated or plundered. But some had endured: elder volumes etched with preservation sigils, and ancient vault-box texts too stubborn to burn.

  Among these, she found a journal marked with the Maussolum’s sigil. For days after, fell asleep with its pages open beside her.

  It was a ledger of sorts. Notes from the devil’s scribes. Rambling, but disturbingly methodical. There were lists of names of sorcerers, great and anonymous. Measurements of spell intensity. Diagrams of magical distribution, a draft for a system of arcane flow.

  More importantly, it proved that the pilgrims who clustered at the city's gate were not a random crowd.

  Ophelienne felt the cold of it settle in her chest. Even in the charred bowels of Garland, it was a deeper chill than ash or winter.

  What dire plot had they stumbled upon? There were more volumes. She would read them all.

  ***

  Mornings in Garland began not with bells, but with lists.

  Ophelienne stood before a chalkboard nailed crookedly to the husk of a scorched granary wall. The previous day’s requests had been rubbed off, replaced by the clean scrawl of today’s tasks:

  South wall breach – inspect and redirect rubble.

  Distribution of grain sacks: priority to elderly and orphaned.

  Three unburied dead found in cellar near Temple Row.

  She didn’t write the list herself —a boy named Corvel did that now. But she approved every line with a nod.

  A clerk approached, breathless. “Milady, the Gildsheaf lumber arrived —twenty beams, not thirty, but they sent nails this time.”

  “Then we reinforce the communal kitchen's east wing. Use two men from the gate watch.”

  “Aye, milady.”

  She moved on. Past the tents and smoldering bonfires. Past the line of children waiting for warm broth. Past the old woman sharpening her hoe on a broken sword.

  Wherever she went, people stepped aside.

  They did not bow. They did not cheer.

  But they watched and whispered her name with the kind of reverence forged not by birthright or title, but as a testament to her work.

  At midday, a mason called her over to inspect a rebuilt archway. She offered a correction to the keystone angle. He grunted in approval. “You’ve got the eye for stone,” he said.

  “No,” she replied, adjusting her glove. “Only the memory of what fell.”

  At sunset, she walked the perimeter. That was hers alone. No guards. No fanfare. Just the sound of her boots over grit and ash.

  Children left flowers on the steps of the ruined temples. Bread was left on her window ledge —never with a note.

  She did not speak often.

  But she was seen.

  And that was enough.

  ***

  Week after week, as Ophelienne oversaw Garland’s slow and solemn reconstruction, the restricted archives beneath the Academy called to her each evening —like a sealed tomb eager to spill its secrets.

  She always entered alone.

  Residual aether shimmered faintly among the dust-thick tomes, casting ghost-light across the darkened chamber. Runes etched into the vault doors glimmered with the memory of locks long broken. She passed them with reverent caution, as one might approach a crypt of kings.

  It was as if the books whispered —especially the volumes penned by the Maussolum’s own scribes during their occupation.

  Their bindings were stitched with human skin. Their clasps bit at her gloves when handled too hastily. Some would not open without the proper phrase, spoken just so. But Ophelienne was patient, and few things in this world could outlast her will.

  Through steady, methodical study, she uncovered the true scope of the Maussolum’s design.

  Magic, she realized, was neither innate nor personal. It was communal —a shared breath that passed through all living things. When a wielder died, their fragment of the current returned to the whole, to be redistributed among the survivors.

  The so-called pilgrims had not come to Garland by chance. They had been lured. Herded. Their deaths were deliberate —an alchemical equation in blood, crafted to funnel power into select vessels deemed receptive to infernal influence.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  Even now, those who had survived the massacre —Drustan chief among them— had grown stronger. She could feel it. She feared it.

  But that was not the end of it.

  In a sub-chamber labeled Resonant Harmonics, she unearthed a philosophical relic —a codex inscribed in Old Metric, poised somewhere between prophecy and cosmology.

  It spoke of moral harmonics. Of how not only Magic, but virtue and vice, cruelty and compassion, were bound by a similar metaphysical logic.

  When great evil arose, a corresponding good would manifest to balance it. Not by divine will, but by the very resonance of the world —a harmonic necessity. The cosmos abhorred imbalance.

  According to the ancient text, the first incarnation of the Supreme Prophet, founder of the Republic, had not been chosen by the heavens; Instead, he naturally occurred by the world's need. He was the inevitable answer to an ancient evil, whose name was lost to history even then.

  Ophelienne’s breath caught.

  The implications crashed down like stone.

  Had she led Drustan into the Holy of Holies... had he taken the High Seat and been anointed, the balance would have demanded a response. A counterweight. A greater evil would have risen to meet him.

  It was not a prophecy. It was physics.

  She closed the tome with trembling hands.

  And sat for a long time in the dim between shelves, surrounded by silence too vast to name.

  Could it be that the return of a great and ancient darkness would be triggered by the ignition of a beacon of light so bright it would cast long shadows over the land?

  If so... what did that make her, and her vow?

  ***

  One day, refugees began arriving. First in families, then in scattered bands. By the third week, the road to Garland was choked with wagons, carts, and the trudging feet of the displaced.

  They carried little. Their eyes were shuttered windows. Shepherds, orchard-keepers and mud-stained farmers, their stories always the same: peoples disbanded, fields burned, rubble left where homes had stood.

  The latest batch came from whatever remained of Ormen.

  They spoke of bandits —masked men who came in the night, slaughtering indiscriminately and driving survivors into the wilds. But the tales were too coordinated, too clean. Soldiers, Ophelienne suspected.

  She walked among the new arrivals in silence, offering water, order, instruction. Then she saw her.

  A familiar-looking girl sat near the edge of the plaza, legs wrapped in a patchwork cloak, her eyes fixed on nothing.

  “Miranda?” someone called her.

  Ophelienne remembered. The girl responsible for the goose mishap, months ago —though it felt like years had passed. She looked different now, thrumming with latent magical charge, like an overdrawn conduit.

  Ophelienne recognized the sensation. She’d felt it before —in Drustan, on the eve of Garland’s fall.

  Back then, Miranda had mentioned basic “Folk Magic” training in Garland. Now she carried raw, dangerous power.

  It confirmed everything Ophelienne had uncovered in the archives.

  The massacre had reconfigured the world.

  Lady Valiendre knelt and reached out to the girl, gently. “Where’s your mother?” she asked.

  No answer. The girl had been orphaned during the raids.

  “Come,” said the warden. “You’re safe with me.”

  But she wasn’t. None of them were.

  That same evening, a half-burned rider arrived from the south. What he bore was not rumor, but confirmation.

  The “bandits” in Ormen had worn royal armor beneath their cloaks. Steel forged in Lauflen. Blue sashes. Orders signed and sealed. It was war.

  Days later, after the only true battle in their offensive, Lauflen’s Blue Banner was raised over the walls of Gildsheaf Keep. Other villages fell in rapid succession. The border defenses had collapsed. It was a quiet, methodical conquest that met little resistance.

  Ophelienne stood atop a crumbling spire of the Academy and watched the rolling hills with growing dread.

  Jaufre’s men —what few remained— had regrouped in retreat. She found their captain in a ruined watchtower and asked for news from the front.

  “They had spies inside Gildsheaf,” he said, voice flat. “Saboteurs. The bloody gates were opened frae the inside, they were.”

  “And Lord Jaufre?”

  “Away. No’ a peep since.”

  There was no time. Garland would soon fall again.

  Ophelienne summoned the guard and declared that Garland would offer no resistance. They protested —in vain. It took little to convince them that the city lacked the means, the will, and the numbers to endure a full-scale assault. Lady Valiendre urged the people to flee, to save themselves while escape was still within reach.

  She then summoned her most trusted scribes and entrusted them with her research —sealed notes, ciphered volumes, the ledger of Maussolum’s followers. She ordered them to vanish, to seek out the most remote refuge they could survive in for years if needed, and to guard the texts at any cost. Once they had departed, the knight set fire to the Academy’s library.

  Finally, she packed light and prepared to leave on her own journey. Miranda stood waiting at the gate with a bundle under her arm. The girl said nothing, but her eyes gleamed with an otherworldly knowing.

  They left together before dawn, following the old trade road east.

  Ophelienne did not look back. She left her shield —emblazoned with the crest of House Valiendre— resting upon the grand staircase of the Academy.

  The future would be written elsewhere.

  ***

  Few dared tread the frontier anymore. Hamlets scattered across the foothills had emptied — their fields left to rot, their gates unbarred, their hearths gone cold.

  Ophelienne and Miranda moved beneath gray skies, their shadows long upon the rain-slick path.

  The certainty Lady Valiendre had once lived by was gone. In its place: quiet resolve, and the weight of a different kind of knowledge.

  She had been wrong.

  Not in her intentions, but in her posture. She saw it clearly now: she had tried to cage destiny in discipline, to mistake control for virtue. She had loved the world as a commander loves a battlefield — from above, with tactics and maps. Never truly from within.

  Drustan had deserved more. So had the Cloak, for all its bravado and grief. Even Thaerion, guarded as the elf was, had intuited truths she had refused to entertain.

  Now they were scattered. Her blade had not saved Garland. Her strategy had not prevented war. But perhaps her understanding — bitterly won — might yet serve a purpose.

  She glanced sideways.

  Miranda walked lightly, humming under her breath, eyes lingering on every gnarled root and low-hanging branch as if they were secrets worth knowing. The girl’s pace was easy, but the air about her shimmered faintly. Power clung to her in strands — coiled, waiting. Not dangerous, but potent. Not yet shaped.

  Magic had changed her. Magic had changed everything.

  Ophelienne recalled the ancient treatise she had found beneath the Academy ruins: Good rises with Evil. Not as blessing. As balance. If Miranda now bore such magnitude, someone, somewhere, had paid the price. And someone else, eventually, would answer for it.

  The knight exhaled, watching her breath pale against the wind.

  “This time,” she murmured, “we face it together.”

  Miranda turned, curious. “Did you say something?”

  Ophelienne smiled, the expression slow and unguarded —a thing she hadn’t allowed herself in years.

  “I said we should rest soon. But not just yet.”

  Miranda tilted her head, studying her. “You talk different now.”

  “Do I?”

  “Yeah. Less... stone.”

  Ophelienne laughed, brief and warm. “I’ve learned to listen. That takes the sharp edge off a person.”

  Miranda reached up and took her hand without asking. “You’re not what I expected. Not after Garland.”

  “I’m not what I expected either,” the knight replied softly.

  Ahead, a narrow ribbon of smoke curled above the horizon. Too distant for detail. Too steady for a storm. A village, perhaps. A camp. Or something worse.

  Ophelienne gave Miranda’s hand a gentle squeeze.

  “Come. Let’s keep moving.”