“Does your holy scripture say anything about a Saint who refuses to climb onto the pyre?” Nusha’s question hung in the cool, damp air of the monastery’s scriptorium. The stone chamber, usually reserved for illuminated scrolls, now housed Giorgi’s chaotic legacy: a stack of leather-bound journals, their pages scrawled with his neat, looping script. Levan had retrieved them from the ruins of her clinic, a gesture both thoughtful and infuriatingly hopeful.
Levan’s brow furrowed, his earlier smile dissolving into a thoughtful frown. “The prophecy speaks of sacrifice, yes, but for the greater good. To break the shackles of the Gray Blight, to return the realm to its glory.” He paused, picking up one of the notebooks. “It doesn’t mention a reluctant Saint who prefers to dismantle the pyre for firewood.”
“Good. Then we’re ahead of schedule,” Nusha said, snatching the volume from his grasp. “And for the record, I prefer to dismantle the entire concept of the pyre. Now, these.” She touched the bundle of bindings, their edges frayed. “Giorgi’s last notes. He was investigating my bloodline for the Silver Lily. He believed they held the key to the rot.”
Murtazi, coiled on a precarious stack of scrolls, flicked a segmented ear, his six amber eyes tracking their conversation with disinterest. He let out a low rumble, a sound somewhere between a purr and a rusty grinding wheel.
Nusha flipped open the first volume. Its leaves were a labyrinth of glyphs, cryptic annotations, and heraldic crests. “He taught me basic family ciphering, but this… this is a code wrapped in an enigma, tied with a bow of pure spite.” She ran a finger over a particularly intricate diagram. “It’s like he wanted only me to read it, but also wanted to make me suffer for the privilege.”
“Perhaps he did,” Levan murmured, moving closer. His scent, a mix of old leather, pine needles, and something faintly metallic from the monastery’s ironwork, drifted to her. “He knew your… gifts. And the Zakarovs’ unique brand of secrecy.” He leaned over her shoulder, pointing to a recurring motif. “This glyph. My mother’s mother used to tell me about it. The 'Veiled Eye' of the imperial line. But your house adapted it. Made it more… predatory.”
Nusha glanced at him. “Your elder kin? I thought your whole lineage was gone.”
“They are,” Levan said, his voice dropping, the light in his eyes dimming for a fleeting moment. “The blight claimed them all, one by one. My father, my mother, then my sisters. Even the matriarch who raised me, the fiercest soul I ever knew, succumbed.” He traced a thumbnail along the desk. “She’d tell stories of the old peerage, their peculiar obsessions, their antique glyphs. She said the Zakarov blood was always the most dangerous, chasing a power no mortal should wield.”
Nusha found herself studying his profile, the angular hook of his nose, the tremor rattling his knuckles against the desk. It was a crack in his facade she hadn’t seen before, a glimpse into the raw grief that fueled his rebellion. It made him feel… closer. Less like a charismatic stranger, more like a fellow survivor.
“I’m sorry,” she said, the words feeling alien on her tongue. She wasn’t accustomed to offering condolences, especially not to someone who embodied everything she ran from. The words surprised even herself.
Levan gave a wry, almost imperceptible shake of his head. “Don’t be. It’s the truth of this Empire. We either fight it or fall to it.” He cleared his throat, rubbing the cuff of his sleeve. “Her tales also spoke of their archives, their libraries. They believed knowledge was the ultimate shield. And their marks were often keys, not just declarations.”
He pulled a small, tarnished silver medallion from beneath his tunic. It was etched with a delicate, intertwining vine pattern. “This was hers. She said the pattern was a simplified form of an archaic shorthand, used to hide messages in plain sight. Perhaps Giorgi adapted a similar system for these pages, knowing you’d recognize the clan style.”
Nusha took the pendant, her fingertips skimming his rough knuckles; a jolt snapped through her skin, warm and mundane. The silver was cold and greasy with oil. She examined the vine pattern, then glanced back at Giorgi’s page. “A cipher within a cipher. He used a variation of the 'Weaver’s Knot', but with a personal offset. Your heirloom, the way the leaves are woven…” She pointed to a cluster of ink dots. “It’s an overlay. A double translation.”
For the next few hours, the scriptorium fell into a rhythm of hushed whispers and the rustle of turning pages. Levan, surprisingly, proved to be an invaluable assistant. His knowledge of old folklore and highborn eccentricities unlocked several of Giorgi’s more obscure references. Nusha, armed with her grim schooling and Giorgi’s habits, assembled the puzzle. Murtazi, meanwhile, snored loudly, occasionally twitching a leg as if dreaming of particularly obnoxious rats.
“There,” Nusha murmured, her nail indenting a deciphered passage. “He names the ‘Cradle of Azura’. A buried relic, deep within my family’s ancestral lands. The wellhead of our… gifts.” Her voice thinned. “And then this: ‘The relic, warped by ambition, bred the Gray Blight. A failed bid for unending life. Immortality bought with bile and decay.’”
Levan leaned in, breath hitching against the parchment. “Failed? So the plague… it was engineered?”
“An alchemical rite gone wrong,” Nusha said, scanning the margins. “My kin sought mass immortality to outlast dynastic ruin. But the Cradle, once twisted, didn’t grant life. It mandated unending putrescence. The original vector of the Blight, as Giorgi puts it, is the relic itself. It leaks outward, sickening Aznavan mile by mile.”
She looked up at Levan, the grim realization settling in her gut. “My kin didn’t just breed the blight. They spawned the exact pathogen humming behind my ribs.” Her voice dropped to a rasp. “The Saint doesn’t ‘sever the plague at the root’. The Saint rips out her own spine to do it.”
The revelation hung in the air, heavy and dark. Levan stared at the ink as if it might burn through the table.
A harsh cough cut through the silence. “So, this is where our leader hides, eh?”
Nusha spun around. Standing in the scriptorium doorway was a man she recognized as one of the Silver Lily lieutenants, a burly, scarred individual named Karlo, whose presence always felt like a thunderclap. His mouth pulled crooked over a jagged beard.
“Levan, you’ve been absent from the council for hours,” Karlo said, his voice thick with accusation. “While the rest of us strategize and fight, you’re here, poring over old books with… *her*. A Zakarov witch. Have you truly become so blinded by affection that you’d let her poison your mind with these dark arts, just as her kind have poisoned our land?”