The ornate, winged gryphon on the parchment twisted in Roksana’s vision, a mocking echo of the sigil that adorned her own signet ring. House Vereska. Her family. Not just involved, but *leading* the weaponization of the Blighted Ash. Loris Vereska, the distant savant she had revered in her first life, could not have set this machine in motion. It was unthinkable. “Roksana?” Zorian’s voice cut through the ringing in her ears, sharper, more insistent than before. He watched her, his expression a tight mask of scrutiny, the hard lines around his eyes deepening. “Do you recognize it?” She forced her gaze from the ledger, pulling her mask back into place with a practiced ease that felt like tearing silk. “The Vereska sigil, General. Quite common. Many houses adopt similar motifs.” Her voice, a delicate instrument of composure, betrayed none of the tremor that shook her insides. She even managed a faint, dismissive flutter of her wrist. “My own family’s, of course, is far more refined.” Zorian’s lips thinned, a movement that spoke volumes of his disbelief. “Indeed. Your estate holds the only private vault in Zlatograd extensive enough to house the botanical trials this cargo demands. The ‘V’ points to your bloodline. Kazimir lies in an infirmary cot, gray rot eating through his muscle, while you posture.” A vision of Mazur's blackened forearm flared behind her eyelids—the damp, gray mold chewing through his muscle while she traded barbs. She rose, her skirt rustling like dry husks. “House Vereska served the voivodate long before your gryphons took wing. If you wish to slander my blood, do so before the council.” She tilted her chin. “Now excuse me. I am late for tea at the Azure Spire.” She swept from his office without another word, her exit a calculated blend of outrage and social obligation. His stare pressed against her spine until the brass latch clicked shut. The moment she was out of sight, her steps quickened, a desperate urgency propelling her through the polished halls of the Iron Gryphons’ citadel. If the house was stained, she would strip the rot out root and branch. The ancestral library occupied the drafty north wing, far from the gilded receiving rooms. Grimy clerestory panes threw cold light across tiers of warped calfskin folios. Dried tansy and crumbling parchment scented the gloom where Loris had locked himself away for decades, scribbling formulas while ignoring the household. Stripping off her mantle, she swept past the heraldic rolls and tax registries, striking toward the forbidden treatises. Loris used to pace the floorboards at midnight, muttering about border incursions and the need for a barrier against the gray drift. He had sought to turn the marsh-scourge back upon itself. Had the solar distillation been intended as armor rather than an atrocity? Her palms brushed the cracked vellum spines until she caught his cipher marks: iron studs pressed into goatskin. She dragged down an octavo volume. His angular hand crowded the margins, cataloging border weeds that survived the pale decay. Early entries sought a neutralizer; later passages blurred into obsessive notes on grafting, forcing corrupted spore-caps into live stem tissue to produce a self-limiting barrier. Then, a name: “Orlov.” Pavel. In her past life, she had hunted down the gentle scholar for his floral taxonomies, convinced his seed banks held the remedy. Here, in black gall ink, Loris had recorded their joint greenhouse trials. Pavel had supplied cross-pollinated hybrid orchids that fed upon the airborne contagion, intending them as an absorbent hedge along the frontier. Loris had built a lock; someone else had ground it into an axe to bleed the province. A blue refraction wavered over a hollowed baseboard behind the folio case—a residual salt-seal attuned to her house's cipher. She pressed her bare skin through the glass-like distortion, breaking the ward's lattice. A phantom projection resolved within the gloom. Loris stood before his glass retorts, haggard and sallow, facing a bulky silhouette draped in marten fur: Councilman Darian Volchkov. The councilor's baritone cut across the hiss of distant burners: “Your solar distillate is useless folly, Loris. An uncontained explosive, not a city wall. The syndicate will not pour guilders into your paranoia.” “It halts the ash!” Loris snapped, thrusting a blackened stem forward. “It binds the contagion into combustible crystals! With six months more, the frontier villages are insulated!” Volchkov's teeth caught the phantom light. “A harvest of ash-crystals commands ten times its bulk in silver among the southern baronies. Why cure a disease when panic triples the tariff on the antidote? Zlatograd requires revenue, not rustic peace.” Loris recoiled toward his bench. “You would seed the contagion inside our own walls?” The councilor stepped closer, looming over the benches. “You work too hard, Loris. The lower aqueduct needs masonry repair tonight. Wet limestone has a habit of giving way beneath an old scholar's boots.” The projection collapsed into spinning motes. Roksana stepped back into cold brick. Her elder had not perished of heart failure over his alembics; Volchkov had shoved him into the masonry sumps, plundered his notebooks, and turned his border safeguard into a trade racket. She pried at the wainscot panel beneath the burnt ward. Inside a brick cavity lay a silver-toothed key and a desiccated flower head. Its shriveled petals remained veined with dull amber, smelling faintly of sulfur—a prototype orchid bred to feed on the plague. Her palm closed over the brittle stem when boot leather crunched behind her on the mortar dust. “Searching for your legacy?” Roksana pivoted, sliding the dried bloom into her lace cuff. General Volkov stood outlined in the doorframe, his gray cloak stained with city slush, his gaze fixed on her curled hand. “My squad trailed the ledger’s courier here an hour ago.”

Echoes in the Archives