Each night, Aurora dreamed of a field of red flowers and of Ymir standing just beyond it, smiling and calling her home.

  The Aetherial Academy had once been the pinnacle of magical learning, its towers as white as dove feathers, its spires stretching toward the stars like the fingers of gods reaching back. It had trained healers, battle mages, star-callers, and keepers of lore from every known land.

  Now, it was silent. The front gates, once bound in silver and song, lay shattered. The crest of the Aetherial Guardians still hung above the arch, chipped and half-burned, the feather blackened with soot. Ash blanketed the outer courtyard like snow.

  The statue of Deja the First Healer lay fallen, cracked in half, her face eroded and scorched. Aurora stood in the shattered entryway, as still as a statue. Her green eyes shimmered with unshed tears.

  “This was where I brought knowledge, where I stood beside Ymir. Where we dreamed.”

  Her voice broke, low and fierce. “Now it’s dust.”

  Lili placed a hand on her arm. “We’ll fix it. We’ll fix him.”

  Inside, the great atrium echoed with their footsteps. The hall was lined with shattered arcane mirrors, splintered glass glittering like frozen stars across the floor. The halls were no longer filled with people, milling about, talking about whatever they were passionate about.

  Bookshelves lay collapsed in places, scorched in others. Whispers lingered, the echoes of spells once practiced, laughter once shared. At the end of the academy stood the Library of the Endless. Its doors remained intact, massive and engraved with swirling constellations. Words in a forgotten tongue curved above them.

  All that has been. All that may yet be.

  Kegan placed a hand on the handle. “It's unlocked.” He pushed it open.

  The library was vast, cavernous, and circular, with rows of stacked shelves curving upward toward a glass dome now blackened by Rift-fire. Yet, the scrolls remained, hundreds, thousands, spun into walls like the web of some impossible spider.

  Alora’s eyes widened. “This place… It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen.”

  They spread out. Reading. Searching. Dust rose in their wake. Pages whispered softly as fingers passed over them. Hours blurred into a haze.

  Alora found it. Tucked in a scroll too old for its shelf, sealed in wax that bore the faint image of a broken mask, was a text handwritten in crimson ink. She carefully unrolled it, her eyes scanning the ancient script.

  “It’s the Ritual of Tethering,” she breathed.

  “Not the same as the final page. This is older. It predates the book of tomes.”

  Kegan came beside her, brow furrowing. “ Let me see.”

  Alora unsealed the scroll with slow, deliberate care. The wax cracked with a brittle pop. A symbol flickered beneath it, an opal crown crossed by a line of thorns. Kegan went still. The girls gathered close, their breaths shallow and eyes wide. Words unfolded in crimson ink, curling and pulsing as if they were still being written.

  Soul joining and closure,

  A rite of soul-joining. Of memory and sacrifice. To reach through the Rift and call one back, three bonds must be made. When name is lost, breath undone, light is swallowed by the sun, let those who carry soul and thread call back the love long thought as dead. The First shall bind in shadow’s grace, Where death and silence share one face.

  The Crown’s descent, A vow unspoken, yet unbent. Blood shall seal the paths once torn, wake the Queen the Veil has borne. Shadows dance in their wake to bring a light worse than fate. Should the queen choose another path, the Rift awaits.

  The call through grief and flame, where light remembers love by name. One taken, warped, but still may hear the whisper of a healer’s tear. But life for life the Rift demands, A mother’s dream, released by hands. Mourn the life that could have been had, or have the choice to be driven mad.

  Walk where wild things call, With heart unruled by stone or hall. A king uncrowned, a forest bride, Their bond not chained, but freely tied. When blood is mixed by wordless will, the land shall hush, the winds grow still.

  Flames alight. Three truths confessed. Three hearts shall burn, and none shall rest. In the circle drawn by love, The Rift shall tremble, tasting death.

  With shadowed step and hungering eyes. To seal the breach, to end the tear, return to where the light was bare. Where stars first sang, and time stood true, Begin again, when the world was new. Forget not that time does not bend. One cycle of the sun will end.

  Alora read it aloud, her voice trembling at first… but growing firmer with each line.

  The library, once still, seemed to breathe. When she reached the First Bond, the words struck her like a drumbeat deep in her chest.

  “The Queen of the Veil…” she whispered.

  The page pulsed, and Gravebloom shuddered in her hand as her fingers tightened. “The High Queen of Noctaire,” she said, eyes narrowing.

  “That name hasn’t been spoken in centuries. Noctaire was… a legend. A myth.”

  Kegan didn’t answer. He stood now by the far window, the blackened sky casting his face in ash-blue shadow.

  “Kegan,” she said, voice harder now, “what is this bond?”

  He turned, slowly. Eyes like silver flames.

  “The First Bond was forged before kingdoms had names,” he said.

  “Between the Keeper of Souls and the one who ruled the boundary between breath and stillness. She raised an army of the dead and bound their names to memory. She was driven mad when her king imprisoned her after she had refused to fight for him. She was one of the greatest warriors of her time. Even Dramond feared her in battle.”

  He stepped toward them. Each step felt like a page turning.

  “Your books don't record her because she betrayed the King. But she existed. She was rumored to have a child before the Rift tore apart the lands.

  It is said that her bloodline was hidden in secret, cursed to forget the old ways. When she died, the souls wept; they gathered around her by the hundreds, and their tears grew a giant Nightwood tree. You have her magic, Alora."

  Gravebloom lit with a silent flare. A glow like violet fire pulsed from the runes hidden in its wood.

  Alora gasped, stepping back. The staff trembled violently in her grip.

  “No…”

  Kegan watched her quietly.

  “You carry her magic. Her will. You walked the Grave path. You are her image.”

  Lili’s voice broke the silence, soft and unsure:

  “Wait, so you’re saying Alora is… dead royalty?”

  “Worse,” Kegan said, with a dry smile. “She’s the Veil-born Sovereign, Heir of Noctaire.”

  “You can’t know that! How can anyone know that?” Aurora shouted at Kegan. Her hand came up to Alora’s shoulders.

  “I know a great many things. How could she have known to raise the long forgotten in the Highlands? How could she have known the spirits of old would teach her the forbidden magic? Think about it for a moment. It was all because of her bloodline.”

  The scroll continued to shimmer in her hand, the next lines forming beneath her fingers. Alora stood there staring at Kegan with a look of pure hate. He couldn't just know these things. Something wasn't right.

  “How could you have known what had happened on this journey? You weren't there. You couldn’t have seen,” she gritted out.

  “The spirits talk to me as well; they tell me a great many things.” Kagan sighed in defeat. Right now was not the time to try to convince her of things that would soon come to pass.

  “The other bonds,” Aurora read, voice lower now.

  “Light and the Taken.”

  Aurora was drawn to the words like a tide. Her eyes traced the passage. Each line felt like a blade across her chest.

  “It’s me,” she whispered. “ Ymir.”

  Kegan nodded once. “The Rift took him. Not fully dead, but not whole. That kind of wound… it twists what it touches.”

  Aurora’s fingers brushed the silver shard at her neck, the pendant Ymir had given her beneath the academy’s garden tree. It was warm now. Alive.

  “To call him back,” she read slowly, “I must give…”

  She stopped. The words on the scroll darkened, bleeding from red to a deep maroon.

  “I must give what I want most.”

  Alora stepped closer and continued to think out loud.

  “The possibility of life beyond the return. Of legacy. Of continuation. The chance of children… must be surrendered.”

  The words dropped into the room like stones into a well of sacred water. Aurora stood frozen, her hands trembling. Lili reached out, but didn’t touch, withdrawing her hand and letting it rest once again at her side. Kegan’s voice was softer now, nearly reverent.

  “The Rift does not trade in gold or blood alone. It asks for meaning. You would return one you love. The cost must be love unborn.”

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  Aurora exhaled slowly. She blinked back tears, one hand rising to her belly. She had dreamed of Ymir beside her, of fields and tiny hands, of laughter, and of a life together. The images she had been shown the laughing children running around. Had filled her heart with so much joy.

  She had craved that happiness. The hope of a forever with laughter and togetherness. She had to let that dream go. Ymir would just have to forgive her.

  “He’s worth it,” she said at last. “Even if it breaks me.”

  Silence answered her. Then Alora continued to read on.

  “The Wild and the Crownless King.”

  They looked at Lili. Who blinked, wide-eyed.

  “Don’t look at me. I’ve never worn a crown in my life. I dodged one, remember?”

  “It doesn’t mean royalty,” Alora murmured.

  “It means power unclaimed. A throne without a name.”

  Kegan’s brow furrowed.

  “There is one who bears it. I felt his presence once, buried, forgotten. But not lost.”

  “When you meet him, Lili… you’ll know.”

  Lili crossed her arms. “So I’m bound to a mystery man, Alora’s secretly queen of the dead, and Aurora has to give up her womb. Great. Perfect. When do I get to punch something?”

  The tension broke briefly. Aurora laughed through a tear. Alora gave the faintest of smirks.

  “You’ll get your moment,” Kegan said, amused. “Probably with a sword made of bones.”

  Lili perked up. “Okay, now we’re talking.”

  The scroll curled back on itself. Its ink faded to gold, but the weight of it remained. They knew what must be done, but not yet how. The Rift stirred beyond the hills, and the world waited for three bonds to be formed.

  They didn’t speak for a long time. The Library of Endless stood as a hollow shell of its former grandeur, charred columns still bore the glyphs of arcane schools, and entire wings had collapsed into tangled ruins of glass and ash. Yet scrolls still waited on leaning shelves, some pulsing faintly with enchantments too ancient to fade.

  Dust fell like snow. The silence was not empty; it was heavy on all of them.

  Aurora paced near the central reading table, her boots leaving ghost-thin footprints on the soot-laced floor. She hadn’t spoken since Alora read the lines about the price.

  The chance of children…

  It echoed as a stone dropped into water. It didn’t matter that she hadn’t made that decision yet. It didn’t matter that she had never told anyone, not even Ymir, about the small dreams, the tiny visions of a life they might one day create. But now, the choice was gone. Ripped from possibility.

  She pressed her palm to the stone wall, biting her lip so hard it bled.

  “He’s worth it,” she had said.

  And she meant it. But that didn’t make the ache less cruel.

  Across the room, Alora sifted through scroll after scroll, her fingers trembling. She wasn’t sure if it was the old magic or herself.

  Veil-borne Sovereign. Heir of Noctaire.

  A title spoken as if it had always been hers, carved into fate. Yet she hadn’t known. No one had told her. The priests had trained her to serve, not to rule. Her magic had always felt wrong to them; it was too sharp, too deep, and too aware. Now she understood why.

  She sat down hard in a chair, face in her hands. So much information to take in was almost overwhelming. She couldn't remember her mother’s face; anything before her time at the Citadel was a blur. A distant, fractured dream. She would have remembered her mother telling her something this profound, wouldn’t she?

  Gravebloom lay across her knees, its core pulsing faintly. Each flicker seemed to align with the beat of her own heart. She wondered if she were to open herself fully to the Veil now, what would she see? Would it speak her name? Or call her something else?

  “Alora Noctaire,” she murmured under her breath. “What else have you hidden from yourself?”

  In the far left alcove, Lili perched on the edge of a shattered desk, legs swinging idly, flipping through a moldy book called A Treatise on Temporal Folding and Soul Displacement. She gave up on page four.

  “Okay, so. I have to bond with a guy who might not exist, in a magic marriage pact, to save the world.” She grumbled quietly to herself.

  She tore a dead leaf from her hair.

  “Sounds a lot like my mother’s pitch for my wedding to Tolvar, son of Moss-Back. At least this one doesn’t snore.”

  She narrowed her eyes at a floating crystal hovering near the ceiling.

  “Note to self: if magic says ‘you must give blood freely,’ clarify that blood does not mean emotional baggage.”

  Kegan stood in the shadows near the easternmost shelf.

  His fingers trailed along the broken spines of ancient grimoires. His eyes gleamed faintly with curiosity, and something darker. He knew the ritual had come too soon. He’d hoped… they’d have more time. But it had chosen Alora. Now, so much was happening. Too fast. All too familiar.

  His memory flickered, if only for a moment, back to Deja and Tymir. They had once stood there, brimming with hope. They had since fallen. Yet, a part of him felt drawn to it. The soul-bond transcended mere magic; it blurred the lines between life and death. The ancient practices, his practices, were coming to life once more. Through Alora… they might finally take form.

  He turned a brittle page in a book older than most kings.

  Rift origins: See Tears of the Nameless. See also: Exile of the Hollow Crown.

  The glyph at the top of the page had been burned away. Only one phrase remained, barely legible in blood-brown ink:

  What enters with the reclaimed shall not forget the way.

  “Found something,” he said aloud.

  The others turned. Alora rose, brushing soot from her palms as she walked over, her shoulders stiff. Lili was already peering over Kegan’s shoulder.

  He reread it.

  “What enters with the reclaimed shall not forget the way.”

  Alora frowned. “So… whatever comes through with Ymir… it’ll remember. It’ll know us.”

  “More than that,” Kegan said, voice low. “It may already be watching.”

  Aurora felt a cold wind rise behind her spine, though no window was open.

  Lili cracked her knuckles.

  “Great. Shadowy watchers, death weddings, Rift monsters, and emotional growth. My favorite combo.”

  Alora returned to the table and unfurled a new map. The center bore the mark of a temple long buried beneath stone, an ancient ritual site marked Oath root, in the Old Tongue.

  It was where the First Flame was once said to have fallen.

  “I think we have our first destination.”

  “To begin again,” Aurora whispered, “when the world was new.”

  The map showed them places that were further away than anyone had traveled. Islands off the coast of the mainland. Desserts that were vast and almost endless. Great bodies of water surrounded their seemingly small world. The mountain ranges that stretched between the grove where Lili had been had just been the beginning.

  “That's a lot of walking,” Lili said, looking defeated.

  The girls gathered maps and scrolls that they thought they would need, placing them in a discarded satchel found beneath one of the tables. The day was waning on, and they still hadn’t found everything they needed. One by one, they left the room.

  Kegan was the last to leave the scroll chamber.

  The others had moved to rest among the ruins of the long-abandoned reading hall, but something pulled at him, a whisper at the edge of sense, a familiar ache of magic, old and waiting.

  He paced along a cracked wall behind the High Arcane shelves, running his fingers across the stone. Then he found it. A ripple in the dust. A sigil nearly invisible, etched in glass-thin script. He pressed his hand against it, and the stone shifted.

  A cold breath exhaled from a hidden seam, and the wall slid inward with a deep, grinding groan. He had waited for the right moment to reveal this to them. They were not ready to know everything about his past. He was not ready to tell them everything. Some secrets should stay hidden.

  “Ladies,” he called.

  She and the others returned, each one blinking at the now-revealed stairwell. It spiraled downward, choked with violet mist and lit by bioluminescent runes that pulsed along the walls like the heartbeat of a sleeping god.

  “This place doesn’t show up on the floor plans,” Lili whispered.

  “Because it wasn’t built,” Kegan murmured. “It was grown.”

  They descended. The deeper they went, the warmer it became, not from fire, but from magic. It was living, breathing, and ancient.

  At the bottom, a silver door carved from living crystal opened without a handle. Kegan pressed it open as the door slowly opened.

  Within was a circular chamber, domed and vast, its walls covered in scrolls of soul-script, floating grimoires, and bound volumes that sang to themselves in forgotten dialects.

  A massive hourglass stood at the center, filled with starlight instead of sand. Before it sat a ghost.

  He was thin and long-bearded, robed in layers of tattered velvet. A dozen quills floated around him like hummingbirds, scribbling across pages as he muttered to himself.

  He did not notice them at first. Or perhaps he did, but simply forgot to say so.

  “That page goes there, no, no, no, no, she’ll trip over it if you stack it that way, Bah! Who put ink in my tea again?”

  Kegan cleared his throat. The ghost jumped. Then blinked.

  “Ah! Visitors. Students, yes? No? Oh, dressed all wrong. And that one,” He pointed at Lili. “She looks like she tried to marry a thunderstorm and lost.”

  “I won,” Lili said flatly.

  “Even better!” he beamed.

  “Now then, what century is it? What’s the king’s name? Have the frogs learned to fly yet?”

  “Sir,” Alora began, stepping forward gently, “what is this place?”

  “This?” The ghost looked around, puzzled.

  “This is… well, this is where we keep the parts of reality that don’t quite behave.”

  He snapped his fingers, and a book turned a somersault in midair.

  “My name is Nimuel the Ever-Otherwise. Former Archivist of Tethers, Fifth Rank! Retired. Dead. Not necessarily in that order.”

  Aurora approached slowly.

  “You kept records of the Rift?”

  “Oho! Of course, of course. Yes. Awful stuff. Necessary. Dangerous. Like plumbing the soul.”

  He tapped his forehead.

  “Does terrible things to the memory.”

  Alora glanced at Gravebloom, which pulsed faintly in her grip.

  “We’ve read the verses.”

  “Ah. But verses are only the sugar. You’re here for the meat.”

  Nimuel floated down from his perch and drifted to the hourglass, tapping its base. The starlight within flared.

  “What you call the Rift… it doesn’t exactly steal souls.”

  “It shows them a world where they are not bound by rules. Or pain. Or memory.”

  He turned to Aurora.

  “Your tether is still in there. But he’s forgetting why he wants to leave.”

  Aurora’s breath hitched.

  “ You must speak to the tear itself,” Nimuel said, voice suddenly clear. Go to the place he was taken. Stand upon the echo of his last breath. Tell the Rift, you agree.”

  He drifted closer.

  “Once your sacrifice is known, it will let him choose. But if he hesitates too long… if the sickness spreads…”

  He shook his head sadly. “He will no longer remember what it means to be whole.”

  Alora clenched her fists. “Then the ritual is not just for tethering. It’s to preserve him.”

  “Indeed,” Nimuel said.

  “It must be done before the Rift makes him a vessel for something else.”

  Kegan stepped forward, arms folded. “You’ve seen this before.”

  “Oh yes. Four times. Or five. Difficult to say. One of them was a goat.”

  Lili raised a hand. “Wait, was the goat cursed or just dramatic?”

  “Both,” Nimuel said cheerfully. “You’d have liked her.”

  Aurora moved to the center of the room, standing beneath the hourglass.

  The light fell across her like snowfall. “Then I’ll go. To where he was taken, I’ll give my answer.”

  Her voice cracked, but she did not fall. “He’s worth it.”

  Nimuel smiled faintly. “Ah, love. A terrible glue. But sometimes the only thing that sticks.”

  The scroll she carried pulsed softly. The first line of the ritual, long unread, shimmered in her memory:

  When name is lost, and breath undone…