Crown of shadows and sin

The journey began in silence.

The Choir of the Dead did not walk they glided. Their feet never touched the earth, yet the land responded to their presence. Stone wilted. Trees twisted away. Birds fell from the sky in their wake. The world recoiled.

Alera followed, the soles of her boots touching what they would not. At first she thought they were heading toward the old passes toward the border of the wastelands.

But then the landscape began to change.

The forest around them dimmed, not from lack of light, but from something more unnatural. The trees bled sap the color of old bone. The air thickened, as though they were moving underwater.

And the sky…

It cracked.

There was no lightning. No storm. Just thin jagged lines appearing in the heavens fractures revealing a second sky beneath it, violet and void-black, spinning with stars she did not recognize.

Then the world shattered.

It happened without warning.

One moment she was walking beside the Choir, the next she stood on something that wasn't land at all. A wide plain of bone-white glass stretched in every direction, reflecting no light, casting no shadow. The air hummed like a dying heartbeat.

She looked up.

The sky was a swirl of deep amethyst. There were no suns. No moons. Only a burning spiral of color at the center, pulsing like an open eye.

And ahead of her, the palace.

It was not made of stone. Not carved or built. It looked grown out of marrow and grief. Twisted towers of rib and skull, bone bridges stretching over rivers of ash. Black spires pierced with shattered halos spun slowly in midair.

The Bone Court.

Her body recoiled. Her instincts screamed.

But the Choir moved forward.

So she did too.

As they approached the palace gates, Alera noticed strange shapes along the path.

Bones arranged in spirals. Stone hands reaching from beneath the glass. Whispers in languages she didn't speak echoed in her ears.

The gates opened without sound.

Alera stepped inside.

The palace interior was colder than death.

No torches. No warmth. Only phosphorescent veins running through the walls like glowing blood. The floor was warm beneath her boots but not like fire. It was the warmth of breath. Of something alive.

She followed the Choir through a long hall lined with statues.

Each one showed a different king or queen, their faces twisted in agony. Some held thrones on their backs. Others had crowns nailed into their skulls.

She tried not to look at them.

They passed into a central chamber.

There, the Bone Heir waited.

He stood at the top of a dais, beneath a throne far older than the Ember Throne. It wasn't shaped like a chair. It resembled a spinal column wound into a spiral, with ribs fanned like wings behind it. Every part of it pulsed faintly.

He was dressed differently now.

A crown hovered above his head literally hovered, never touching him. His robe flowed endlessly behind him, merging into the floor like he was part of the palace itself.

"You have come," he said, his voice still low and ancient. "Of your own accord."

"I made a bargain," she replied.

"Bargains are the oldest form of power."

She climbed the steps slowly. "This place… it isn't real."

He watched her. "It is older than real. It existed before your gods learned to name the stars."

She stopped just below the throne.

"What happens now?"

He smiled faintly. "You rest. You learn. You remember."

She frowned. "Remember what?"

"Who you are."

He turned from her and waved his hand. A doorway opened in the wall behind the dais.

"Follow."

She didn't move immediately.

Then: "And the child?"

He glanced at her. "He grows well. Curious, this one. A prince of two thrones. Your blood. My shadow."

"He is not yours."

"I do not want to possess him," he said softly. "I want to unleash him."

He led her down a spiraling corridor. The walls shifted as they walked first bone, then obsidian, then mirrors. Alera caught glimpses of herself as they passed. Not as she was but as she had been.

As a girl in the orchard with her sister.

As a queen bathed in light, smiling beside Kael.

As a woman drenched in blood, standing above a field of corpses.

And then… a version she didn't recognize.

Her face was crowned in fire. Her eyes burned black. Her belly glowed like the sun. And everyone around her was dead.

She looked away.

The room they entered next was strange.

Small. Round. Lined with shelves made of fused bone. But the shelves did not hold books. They held memories.

Tiny glass spheres glowed on each shelf. Inside them moments. Some frozen, others flickering like candlelight.

He picked one up.

"Do you know what this is?"

She stepped closer. Inside the orb was a battlefield. One she vaguely remembered.

"My father's last stand," she murmured. "Before the fall of the Sunborn."

"Correct," he said. "And this?"

He picked another.

A young woman was being crowned. She wore a white dress, tears on her cheeks.

Alera whispered, "My mother…"

"All memories live here. Even the ones you've tried to forget."

He gestured, and the room began to glow brighter.

Hundreds. Thousands. A lifetime contained in fragile glass.

He turned to her.

"Choose one. And relive it."

"Why?"

"To remember who you were… so you may become who you must be."

She hesitated.

Then reached for a sphere.

It pulsed when her fingers touched it.

A flash.

And she was no longer in the room.

She stood in her childhood garden.

Sunlight on her skin. The scent of spiced honey in the air. Laughter.

She turned.

Her sister, Lira, ran toward her, holding two wooden swords.

"Let's play!" Lira cried.

Alera felt herself smile. The muscles moved without command.

She took the sword. The duel began.

She remembered this day.

The last one before the fire.

The last time they were whole.

She looked around, searching for something anything that didn't belong.

And then she saw him.

The Bone Heir.

Standing beneath the apple tree.

Watching.

She dropped the sphere.

Snapped back into the room.

He smiled.

"You see now."

"You've always been there," she said. Her voice shook. "Even before I knew you."

"I planted the seed of fate in your bloodline. Yours is the culmination. The final note in a song I began long before this world had music."

She backed away.

"I'm not your instrument."

"You're not," he said. "You're my mirror."

She turned and left the room.

She needed air.

But there was no air in the Bone Court. No wind. No weather. Only the slow throb of something dead pretending to live.

She found a balcony.

It overlooked a sea of bones.

Endless. Motionless. Waiting.

She pressed a hand to her stomach.

The child kicked.

She spoke softly.

"I don't know what you are becoming. But I will never let him control you. I swear it."

Behind her, the Bone Heir's voice whispered again this time not aloud, but inside her mind.

"Then you must become more than what you were."