Mellirion exhaled slowly, her breath threading into the air like incense on cold stone.
Not anger.Not embarrassment.Just… remembrance.
The Greystone Valley incident.
The memory came not like a wound but like rot—slow, creeping, inevitable.
"I walk across valleys of shattered glass and stone trees; my feet ache under the amber hue, but I keep moving forward with my own will... until I hit a boulder. I roll in a sea of wine and fish made of clocks... until a hand comes from above. I can't see who it was, but the hand didn't look like it belonged to something pure; it was coarse and rough, but it pulled me out of it."
She woke up.
Sweating. Naked.
She blinked.
"78,000 AEW," she said. "Winter is coming," the girl spoke to herself, wearing her clothes. She said as she walked out of her chamber to the study room
The study room was dim, lit by amber glass lanterns and the slow smolder of a fire in the hearth that crackled as if whispering something only the books could understand. The long oak table was strewn with quills, scrolls, and a half-finished bottle of thornbramble brandy—its scent sharp and sweet, like old blood and crushed violets.
And at its head, waiting like a shadow cut from the room itself, sat Licolin Greystone.
He did not rise as she entered. He merely looked up from the map he'd been inspecting, one brow raised beneath the glint of his gold-rimmed monocle.
"Where is your sister?" he asked, his voice smooth but with an edge beneath it. Like a knife freshly honed.
His hair, gold-brown streaked with magenta—colors that shimmered faintly in the low light—was combed back neatly, though a single curl had rebelliously fallen across his forehead. His face bore the dignity of age without the wear. A sharp jaw, high cheekbones, and eyes like dry riverbeds—once full, now carved out and hollowed by time and knowing.
His attire was striking, regal in its quiet threat.
He wore a high-collared doublet of black velvet, the fabric deep and lightless, sewn through with thread-of-silver rune patterns only visible when the fire caught them just so. The shoulders were sharply structured, padded with thin lamellar plates beneath—formalwear for a man who'd been ambushed at court before.
Beneath that, a midnight wine-colored waistcoat, embroidered with fine obsidian beading in the shape of spiraling feathers, fastened with jet-black buttons shaped like raven skulls. His shirt was ivory silk, crisp, the collar laced with dark thread, bound at the neck with a brooch in the form of a pelican feeding a crow—the family's private sigil, known only to those invited behind closed doors.
His long coat swept the floor behind his chair, made of heavy wool-lined leather, dyed ash-gray, and reinforced at the cuffs with silver filigree. The lining was deep crimson—blood red—but only visible when he moved. The sleeves bore cufflinks in the shape of caged wolves, and faint burn marks showed where he'd caught fire once, years ago, and hadn't bothered to replace the coat since.
His boots—polished, steel-toed—tapped once against the floor as he shifted.
And around his throat, just barely visible, a thin chain of black steel glinted—a relic chain, cursed, most likely. He never took it off. Rumors said it whispered when he slept.
He looked up at his daughter, the firelight flickering in his monocle.
The fire crackled low in the hearth of the Greystone study, its glow casting long shadows across the polished mahogany floor. Scrolls lay unrolled across the table, their ink smudged, maps marked in blood-colored wax. Dust swirled in the air like the remnants of something once sacred and now forgotten.
Lincoln Greystone didn't look up as she entered. He merely tapped a gloved finger against the parchment before him, the steady rhythm like a ticking clock counting down to something unpleasant.
"Well?" he asked again, monocle glinting in the firelight. "Where is Veliranya?"
The words were simple. But beneath them—layered in the precise cadence of his voice—lurked the implication:You were supposed to keep her on a leash.
Mellirion's face remained unreadable.
"With Jorik," she said flatly. "That Ramar boy."
Lincoln's mouth twitched into something that might've been a smirk or might've just been a muscle tick.
"Hm. The low-caste one," he murmured, more to himself than to her. He leaned back in his chair, resting his palms together. "She sleeps around a lot."
Mellirion didn't flinch."With the lower Vurnus boys too," she added, the disdain curling in her voice like smoke. "She'll fuck anyone that gives her attention. even the lower ones."
Lincoln turned his eyes to her. They were flat, unreadable. Not cold—worse. Neutral.
He stood without another word, long coat whispering around his legs as he crossed the room. "Come with me."
It wasn't a suggestion. It never was.
The forest loomed on the outskirts of Greystone Land—deep and old. The trees were black-barked and tall, their roots gnarled and rising from the ground like claws reaching skyward. The sky above had dimmed to iron gray, and no birds sang here. The only sound was the hush of dead leaves underfoot and the occasional groan of wood shifting in the wind.
"Why are we here, Father?" Mellirion asked, her voice quiet.
Lincoln stood with his back to her, his hands behind him in perfect posture. His coat hung heavy with damp from the mist that clung to the trees like breath to glass.
"This was once an industrial center," he said. "During the reign of Rokhan Ellarion—the Industrialist. He brought steel to the sky, flame to the rivers, and thought himself a god because machines obeyed him."
He paused, as if expecting the forest itself to interrupt him.It didn't.
"Then came the 'accidents.'"His voice was faintly amused, as if the word itself were a joke meant for older ears. "And the fall of technology. The collapse of every tower, every engine, every lie dressed as progress."
Mellirion narrowed her eyes, stepping cautiously through the brush.
"This place has a heavy mantra concentration," she said, her breath curling in the air. "It stinks of old spells. Forgotten rites. This would be a perfect site for Rakshasa nests."
Lincoln said nothing.
Instead, he moved aside the tangle of dead branches with a slow, deliberate motion—revealing the earth beyond.
It wasn't Earth anymore.
It was bone.
A field of it.
White, cracked, and piled—some still wearing the scraps of cloth that hadn't fully rotted away. Skulls grinned from the undergrowth. Finger bones tangled in roots. Ribs like broken wings stuck out from the soil like failed prayers.
Mellirion took a single step back.
"Victims?" she asked. Her voice was not afraid. Just heavy.
Lincoln turned to face her fully, the bone-pale light of the clearing gleaming off the lens of his monocle. His eyes—one magnified and distorted behind the glass, the other shadowed by dusk—held no warmth.
"Yes."
The word was soft, steady, final.
"The first ones," he continued, his voice as flat as the windless air. "When the collapse came and the mantra surge tore through the machines, they died screaming. From the inside out. Eyes melted. Blood boiled. Skulls split open from the force of unfiltered invocation."
He lifted a gloved hand, gesturing vaguely to the scattered remains.
"And those who didn't die…"He paused. A small, almost imperceptible shrug."…became something else."
Silence pressed down between them like a hand on the throat.
Mellirion didn't speak at first. She stared at the field of bones—some bleached to chalk, others stained with soil and ancient rot. The breeze was colder now. Or perhaps it simply chose now to be felt.
When she finally spoke, her voice was brittle.
"You brought me here… to remember?"
Lincoln stepped closer, the hem of his long coat brushing the dead leaves. He placed one hand on her shoulder, gentle as dust settling on stone.
"No."
He let the word sit for a heartbeat.
Then his tone shifted—no longer gentle, no longer parental. Instructional. Detached.
"You have until evening," he said, "to determine which bones belonged to a scholar, which to a warrior, which to a merchant, and which to a menial."
Mellirion turned to him, blinking once in disbelief.
"What?"
Lincoln didn't explain. He adjusted his collar with a flick of his fingers and turned, already walking back toward the trees.
"Oh," Licolin added, his voice light with cruel indifference as he stepped into the treeline, "and try not to get eaten by a Rakshasa while you're at it."
He didn't look back.
Then he was gone—swallowed by the forest's shadowed throat, the sound of his boots fading beneath rustling leaves and breathless silence.
Mellirion stood alone, the trees hemming her in like prison bars made of bark and age. Around her, the field of bones stretched in every direction, glinting faintly in the dull light. Some jutted from the earth like jagged teeth. Others lie half-buried beneath old moss and windblown leaves.
Her breath curled in the air, thin and pale, barely visible.
And somewhere beyond the trees—she knew it—something watched her.
Its presence clung to the edges of her mind like cobwebs in a dream. It did not move. It simply existed. Waiting.
She ignored it.
She had to.
With a slow inhale, she stepped forward and began the task.
One bone at a time.
Her fingers closed around a cracked femur, the marrow long turned to dust. Too thick for a scholar. Too short for a warrior. The wear was wrong for a laborer's frame. She dropped it and reached for another.
And another.
And another.
Hours passed. The light changed. Shadows lengthened. Her knees ached from crouching. Her hands grew red from the cold, grit embedded in her skin from centuries of dust and bone. Her breath grew ragged with frustration, her jaw clenched tight enough to ache.
None of it made sense.
The warriors had merchant hands—thin, uncalloused, fingers long-faded from any grip of blade or spear. The scholars bore shattered limbs, as if they'd died clutching something they didn't understand. One skull was filled with golden teeth, gleaming mockingly beneath the moss; another was split wide open, cracked like a melon crushed underfoot.
Caste. Trade. Worth. It had all bled into the soil together.
Death, impartial and methodical, had stripped the distinctions away like a careless god wiping a slate clean.
With a frustrated growl, Mellirion hurled a femur into the brush. It vanished with a dull snap of twigs and leaves, as if the earth itself swallowed her fury.
Her breath came hard now. Cold. Raw in her throat.
And then—standing amid the endless dead, surrounded by centuries of forgotten names and bones that no longer remembered what they were—she snapped.
She threw back her head and screamed into the heavy, colorless sky.
"DOES IT EVEN MATTER!?"
Her voice echoed, then faded into the stillness. No birds. No wind.
The trees offered no reply.The sky remained mute.And somewhere beyond the treeline, the watcher did not blink.
"It does not," a voice answered.
She turned—eyes wide, body braced. A figure stepped from between the trees, shadow uncoiling into form.
Licolin Greystone.
He emerged from the brush as if the forest had birthed him, his coat dusted with bark and bone-dust, the glint of his monocle catching what little light remained. There was no malice in his eyes. Just certainty. As though he had always known how this would end.
"There is no difference," he said, stepping forward, voice low, nearly reverent, "between those who lived in luxury and those who died in austerity."
He moved through the bones without looking down, boots stepping over ribs and skulls as if they were nothing more than autumn leaves.
"There's no natural way to tell which corpse belonged to a scholar, which to a warrior, or which to a servant. Because in the end, they were all the same."He stopped in front of her. "They were all people. And the soil does not remember your name."
Mellirion stared at him, a flicker of something like betrayal—or maybe just confusion—cutting across her face.
"You… you were there?" she asked, voice quiet. Raw.
Licolin tilted his head, a hint of amusement dancing at the corner of his mouth.
"Always."
His hand extended—not commanding this time, but offering.
"Come, dear daughter. Let me tell you my story."
And Mellirion took it.
The forest behind them remained still, as if listening. The bones at their feet lay unmoving, but the wind shifted with a whisper of change.
The past had found its breath again.
They walked in silence for a time, through trees ancient enough to remember what cities had been buried beneath them. The forest floor grew thicker with roots, and thinner with sky.
Then, quietly, Licolin spoke.
"My father—your grandfather—was a great trader," he said. "Friend of the Church, companion to saints and serpents alike. He knew Rokhan the Industrialist. Dined with him. Bartered with him. Watched him raise towers of steel and skyglass as if the gods themselves whispered blueprints in his sleep."
His voice held a note of something rare—nostalgia, perhaps, or something shaped like it but burned hollow.
"In the year 72,000 AEW, he left for the Sea of Glass."He paused, as if seeing it now: that infinite expanse of cursed water.
"Beasts greeted him—krakens, serpents, water wyrms, sea crawlers. Leviathans born from nightmare, things that had drowned kings and broken ships with nothing more than a ripple. And still, he sailed."
Mellirion listened, quiet as the branches above.
"When I was your age," Licolin continued, "I learned his ship had sunk. No survivors. Just scraps. Timber soaked in salt and silence. But his body… or what remained of it… turned up not in the sea, but in the hands of desert cultists."
His jaw tightened.
"The Agony Cult. From the dunes of the Bleeding Desert. Flesh-harvesters. Bone-singers. Heretics, as the Church called them."
He looked ahead as he walked, not meeting her gaze.
"I was furious. Furious that a man of such rank, of such legacy, had his corpse desecrated by outlanders. That the Church would not lift a finger to reclaim him. That the world had already moved on."
His hand curled slightly at his side, gloved fingers tightening.
"That was the first thing I ever killed for."
A beat.
His eyes, once hard with doctrine and distance, shimmered beneath the dying light. Not with tears—Licolin Greystone did not weep—but with something broken, something no longer content to stay buried beneath ritual and discipline.
Then his voice cracked.
"I waged war."
It wasn't an admission. It was a detonation.
"I killed their men. Their women. Their children."
Each word dropped like stone into water—no echo, only weight.
His hands, once still, now trembled at his sides. Not with shame, but with the memory of what it had cost him to feel nothing back then.
"I burned their shrines. I salted their holy places. I watched them scream beneath the suns of the Agony Desert until their skin split from heat and spell."
He took a step forward, into the clearing. The ground crunched beneath his boot—bone dust and thorn roots tangled together in pale defiance of time.
"And when it was done—when there was nothing left of their line or their chants or their sand-born legacy—"He exhaled, a breath like poison escaping the lungs of a dying man."I took what was left of my father's body and I built a monument on top of it."
He looked at Mellirion now—really looked.
"From their bones."
The air grew still around them, the forest holding its breath, as if stunned.
A gust of wind stirred the ash, and something skeletal shifted beneath the soil.
"I told myself it was justice."
He laughed once—dry, bitter. A sound like something old cracking beneath strain.
"But I think it was grief. Grief that needed something to bleed. Something to burn."
In the clearing, choked with ash and ancestral ghosts, Licolin stood before Mellirion—not as a war-binder or the iron-willed master of court, but simply a man. A man who had once drowned in love… and dragged others down just to feel the pull of breath again.
Mellirion stepped forward, her voice quieter now, her tone softer, trying to ground him in anything that still held shape.
"But… at least Grandfather got a proper burial, right?"
Licolin's eyes flicked toward her. Not with anger. With exhaustion.
"I thought so."
He drew in a slow breath.
"But then word came—a corpse had washed up near the coastline. Long after the blood dried. Long after the monument had already been built."His voice wavered at the edges, like parchment exposed to flame."It was him. My real father."
Mellirion went still.
"His actual corpse," Licolin continued, almost to himself. "After so many years. Bloated. Broken. Picked clean by sea crawlers, half-eaten by salt and storm."
He stared into the thorns as if he could see through time.
"He never reached the Agony Desert. Never saw those cults. He died in the storm that claimed his ship. Slain by a slave who served aboard with him—a man the same shape and height. The thief stabbed him in the back, stole his jewelry, his cloak, and leapt into the sea. He was the one they found. The one I mistook."
His jaw clenched.
"All that blood I spilled—"
His voice cracked now, raw and thick with the taste of what he had never dared say aloud.
"I waged war for the killer of my own father. I built a monument from the bones of people who had nothing to do with it. Because I… even I couldn't tell the difference between a noble and a slave."
He turned to Mellirion slowly.
And what gleamed in his eyes was not madness.
It was clarity.Unforgiving.Unavoidable.
"I couldn't tell my father from the thief."
And with that confession, the wind stilled, as if the forest itself was listening.Not out of reverence.But out of fear.
The clearing held its breath.
Except for the sound of the past cracking open.
Licolin's voice dropped into something quieter. Not weakened—worn.
"When I saw the corpse—my father's real corpse—I burned it."
A pause. A breath. A kind of quiet collapse.
"I burned his remains and left the monument untouched."
Mellirion didn't speak. There was no space for words yet.
Licolin's gaze turned to the ash at their feet, the bones beneath the thorns, the monuments built on mistakes and misnamed bodies.
"Because it didn't matter."His voice was steel again now. Not sharp—blunt. Unyielding."There was no difference between them when they lived. There was no difference when they died. One was clothed in silk, the other in rags—but beneath the skin, they bled the same. Died the same. Were used the same."
His hand lifted as if to pluck a memory from the air, then fell again.
"Varnus was a material creation," he said coldly, "a system of value spun by the Church and enforced with scripture and steel. A tool for power. A lie."
The bitterness in his voice had faded. What remained was something colder.Final.
"The Church of Aetheria—the sparrows of mistletoe, perched on their altars, preaching purity while hoarding rot beneath their robes."
He looked at her now, truly looked.The fire in his eyes was not fading.
"I rejected them. And I rejected their Varnus."
He stepped once more into the heart of the clearing, the bones whispering beneath his boots like broken prayers.
"There is no divine order, Mellirion. No sacred caste. Only the silence that follows, and what you choose to build in its shadow."
And for the first time, Mellirion saw him—not as the father she'd feared, nor the judge she'd obeyed.
But as a man who had lit the world on fire just to see what truths might crawl from the ash.