Chapter 1
When the ashes grow cold, the silence begins to speak. And those who can listen to the silence can never escape their fate.”
— Prophecies Written in Ash, The First Parchment
Ashes had a memory. People merely thought this a legend. They believed it to be nothing more than the grey dust left behind by fire, imagining the wind would carry it away to distant lands. Yet, the old historians, the scholars who had devoted their lives to tracing the remnants of lost kingdoms, and the seers whose names had long been forgotten, claimed otherwise. Fire forgets. Stone forgets. Mankind forgets. But ash… never.
The northern wind of Elarion carried the same scent, no matter the season. Damp stone, charred cedar, and the smell of smoke that had seeped into the earth centuries ago. That scent was woven into the childhood of everyone living in the North. But no one knew it as well as Aeris Virelith. For the Virelith Estate was built upon the edge of a cliff. Directly below the precipice lay an ancient city that no longer appeared on any map.
Asterion.
Once, it had been the most magnificent city of knowledge in all of Elarion. Now, it was nothing more than a graveyard of blackened stones and silence.
Morning was just breaking. As the sky slowly shed the indigo of the night, mist spread over the valley like a thin veil. The pale light filtering through the high windows of the estate cast long shadows across the stone corridors, and the old portraits adorning the walls stared into the darkness with dull eyes, as if they had been watching the same silence for centuries. No birds sang. They had long since stopped nesting in this valley. Legend had it that on the night Asterion burned, the sky remained black for days, the smoke masking even the sun. Since that day, no bird had ever landed upon the ashes.
Aeris pulled back the heavy velvet curtains. The cold air struck her face. She took a deep breath—as she did every morning. She looked out at the same view, and every morning, she pondered the same question.
“Can a city truly mourn for this long?”
She had never found the answer.
There was a soft knock at the door behind her.
“My Lady.”
The voice of Elen, the elderly servant, was as gentle as ever.
“They are waiting for you in the library.”
Aeris asked without turning her gaze from the valley.
“Again?”
“The Chief Archivist says that you must be the one to open the chest that arrived this morning.”
The young woman frowned involuntarily. Over the last few weeks, old chests had been arriving from the northern border one after another. Burned parchments, broken seals, soot-stained tablets… It was as if someone were bringing a long-dormant past back to the surface, piece by piece.
She draped her dark navy cloak over her shoulders. The silver moonflower, the emblem of the Virelith family, glimmered faintly. As she walked through the corridors of the estate, her footsteps echoed against the stone floor. This building held more memories than it did the living. The scent of old ink drifted between the walls, and the shelves reaching up to the ceiling silently guarded thousands of books, maps, and volumes written in lost languages.
The Vireliths were not warriors.
They were the protectors of knowledge.
For according to their creed, a kingdom could be rebuilt, and a palace could be reconstructed. But knowledge forgotten would be lost forever.
When the massive doors of the library swung open, the scent of warm beeswax greeted Aeris. Hundreds of candles were burning, creating flickering shadows among the shelves that stretched toward the ceiling. In the center of the hall, resting upon a long table made of black oak, stood an ancient chest reinforced with iron. Its surface was completely covered in soot, as if it had spent centuries within the fire.
The Chief Archivist bowed his head slightly.
“You have finally arrived.”
Aeris approached the chest silently. The moment she placed her fingers upon the iron, an indescribable shiver ran through her. For a fleeting second, she thought she heard whispers coming from very far away. Words that could not be understood… broken sentences… and a single word.
“Fate…”
She pulled her hand back quickly.
“What is it?” the Archivist asked.
“Nothing.”
She had lied.
The chest was cold. But that cold was not of iron… it was the cold of a tomb.
She took a deep breath and slowly turned the rusted lock. The metal groaned in pain, as if moving for the first time in an age. The lid opened heavily.
Inside, there was only a single parchment.
No gold…
No jewels…
No other documents…
Only a single scroll, blackened and charred at the edges.
Aeris lifted it with care. The moment the ash from the parchment spilled into her palms, every candle in the room flickered in unison. It was as if an unseen presence had taken a deep breath.
The Chief Archivist looked around, startled.
“The wind?”
Aeris did not answer.
Her eyes were fixed upon the parchment.
The scorched ink was difficult to discern. Some lines had been completely erased. Yet, at the very top, a single sentence remained legible.
“When the ashes grow cold…”
There was no continuation.
It had been torn.
Or…
Someone had deliberately scraped it away.
For the first time, Aeris’s heart raced with an inexplicable dread. It was as if this incomplete sentence had been waiting for her for centuries, waiting to be finished.
