A dry chuckle escaped Elara’s lips, quickly stifled before it could disturb the dust motes dancing in the weak morning light. Today was no different from any other. This particular cycle of the sun held no special significance, no resonance in her heart. She had long since excised such frivolous observances from her internal almanac, especially the one marking her own birth. Everything would remain as it always was: precariously balanced, teetering on the edge of forgotten truth and encroaching ruin.
Seraphina bustled into the antechamber, her plump hands meticulously smoothing the worn velvet of a forgotten divan. She moved with the quiet efficiency of a seasoned seneschal, her gaze sweeping over the decaying grandeur of Vance Manor’s upper floor as if conducting a silent inventory. A faint cluck of disapproval escaped her as she noted the peeling gilding on a cornice, the cobweb-dusted portrait of a long-dead ancestor. Seraphina marked each flaw not with a pen, but with a familiar, mournful sigh, a testament to her unwavering loyalty to the Vance line, despite its recent, precipitous decline.
“He went to the washroom again,” Seraphina murmured, her voice hushed, as if fearing the very walls would listen.
Elara paused, her fingers tracing the arcane script on an ancient tome. “In his sleep? Like the somnambulist’s trance?”
“Aye, just so.” Seraphina wrung her hands. “A silent drift. Never a sound beyond the creak of the floorboards under his… his unseeing steps.”
“How peculiar,” Elara said, the word tasting of ash in her mouth. She remembered it vividly: a week after Valerius had first succumbed to the long slumber, a shadow had loomed in the darkened corridor. A tall, impossibly still figure, framed by the moonlight filtering through a grimy window, its eyes open and vacant. Elara had almost cried out, a scream lodged in her throat, her heart a frantic drum against her ribs. The figure, Valerius, had merely turned, a slow, deliberate pivot, then drifted back into his chamber. She still felt the cold sweat that had slicked her skin.
Seraphina started towards the master’s bedchamber. “He seemed calmer, perhaps a breath of fresh air… I should check his skin. It looks so clear, despite everything.”
Elara moved with a speed that belied her usual scholarly measuredness, catching Seraphina’s arm before she could reach the door. “He might stir.”
“He won’t,” Seraphina insisted, a slight irritation in her voice. “I tried before. Shook his shoulder a good half-dozen times. He’s like a stone effigy, my lady, nothing short of an earthquake would rouse him from that cursed slumber.”
Yet Elara did not release her grip. Her gaze flickered to the closed door, then away. A step back, then another. No matter Seraphina’s reassurances, the image of Valerius standing in the gloom, a silent sentinel, was seared into her memory. Better to keep a distance, to preserve the illusion of control.
A strange semblance of peace had settled over the manor in the past few days. The memory of Valerius’s brief, disoriented awakening, his desperate pleas for proof of his own existence, already felt distant, like a fever dream. Now, he lay like the dead, a placid mask on his face. Elara looked at the door, a silent, desperate prayer forming in her mind. *Please, just sleep like this. Just stay still.*
Seraphina, undeterred by the strange silence, continued her monologue. “Did you read the latest broadsheet, my lady? The one from Oakhaven? Young Lord Kaelen, the one who oversees the Guild of Timberwrights? Apparently, he’s in deep trouble. Whispers say he desecrated the old Standing Stones near the Western March. Turned the ancient grove into a barren quarry for some new development. A scandal, they call it.” Seraphina paused, her eyes narrowing. “You didn’t, did you?”
Elara scratched a stray tendril of hair behind her ear, her focus still on the tome. A slow exhale. “I merely provided… certain historical documents to a scribe who sought to understand the long-term impact of such an endeavor.”
Seraphina’s eyes widened, a dawning horror on her face. “You reported him to the scribes?!” she gasped, her voice rising to an indignant squeak.
“I merely… clarified the ancient legal protections for that particular sacred site,” Elara murmured, a hint of something akin to satisfaction in her tone.
“Are you not tending to our affairs, my lady?!” Seraphina’s voice was a furious hiss. “Didn’t I tell you, our survival hinges on managing the master’s needs, maintaining discretion, not stirring up the hornet’s nest in Oakhaven!”
Elara closed the heavy tome with a soft thud, a plume of ancient dust rising around it. Without a word, she turned and descended the grand, sweeping staircase. Seraphina’s indignant shouts echoed down the marble steps behind her, growing fainter with each stride. “Do you even possess an ounce of sense, Elara Vance?!”
Elara fought the urge to smile. It wasn’t only Lord Kaelen who abused the ancient ways, treating sacred sites as mere resources, neglecting their true purpose. A world that valued the whispers of old magic more than the brute force of feudal ambition would likely never come. And yet, she knew, deep in her marrow, that this was precisely the problem. The thought brought a strange, cold thrill.
*“Then Elara, see you later.”*
A sudden chill prickled Elara’s skin, not from the manor’s draft, but from an unwelcome whisper that seemed to slither into her mind. It was Valerius’s voice, or a phantom echo of it, a memory of his parting words from his brief awakening. The thought was disquieting. He hadn’t stirred in a week. Perhaps, in his shadowed state, he anticipated these longer stretches of dormancy, this slow shedding of… something. An affliction, he had called it. Or perhaps, something far more sinister.
---
Dust and the bitter tang of decay hung in the air, mixing with the scent of freshly disturbed earth. Elara knelt, a linen-gloved finger tracing the crumbling edge of what once was a powerful warding sigil, etched into the base of an ancient, gnarled Juniper. Its needles, usually a vibrant, deep green, were brittle and faded, coated in a fine, grayish film. She brought a gloved fingertip, dusted with the film and a minuscule crumb of the soil around the ward, to her tongue. A sharp, chemical bite. Corrosive.
Her jaw tightened. She ripped off her gloves, abandoning them on the parched earth, and strode directly towards the bustling mercantile hall nearby. Its newly polished facade gleamed, obscuring a significant portion of the old Juniper, a silent sentinel that had guarded the southern approach to Oakhaven for centuries. Elara pushed through the heavy oak doors, the din of trade momentarily silenced by her abrupt entrance.
“Guildmaster Jorn!” she called, her voice clear and cutting through the murmurs.
A burly man with a florid face and an apron stained with grease looked up from haggling over a sack of grain. “Welcome! Ah, you! Please, leave!” He frowned, recognition flickering in his eyes.
“Are you trying to extinguish them again?” Elara demanded, her gaze sweeping past him towards the back of the hall where a new, flimsy wooden fence encroached further upon the ancient tree’s root system.
“I know not what you speak of, Lady Vance.” Guildmaster Jorn roughly clapped a hand on her shoulder, attempting to steer her back towards the entrance. She, however, planted her feet firmly, clutching the doorframe. Her knuckles were white.
“Last spring, you applied that blighted iron-salt solution to the Elderwood saplings, did you not? Killed a dozen of them, shriveled their leaves in a day.”
“If you persist in disrupting my trade, Lady Vance, I shall summon the town guard.” He glared, his face growing redder by the second.
“This time,” Elara pressed, ignoring his threat, “you’ve been pouring corrosive alkahest around the Juniper’s roots. I can taste the residual salts on the very earth, Jorn. It’s weakening the ancient ward carved into its base.”
Customers began to murmur, their whispered conversations turning towards the confrontation. Guildmaster Jorn’s face darkened, a vein throbbing in his temple. This meddlesome scholar, always poking her nose where it didn’t belong, threatening his hard-won prosperity.
“I thought it strange the Juniper’s needles continued to wither, even with the rains,” Elara continued, her voice gaining a cold edge.
“I never sought your counsel, Lady Vance! This is no concern of yours!” He shoved her, harder this time, pushing her completely out of the hall and onto the cobblestones. He narrowed his eyes, but to Elara, the flicker of apprehension, the nervous tremor at the corner of his lips, was an open book. Guilt.
“Your family’s fortune dwindled, did it not, Lady Vance? Because you kept prying into forgotten lore, meddling with dusty old records that held no sway in the modern March, instead of attending to your rightful duties. You remember that, yes?” Jorn spat on the ground near her feet.
“I remember.” Elara’s voice was flat, devoid of emotion.
“If you remember, then cease this madness!” He flung his hands up in exasperation. Everyone in Oakhaven knew of Elara Vance, the last of her line. Her notoriety had only grown after the broadsheet article detailing her role in Lord Kaelen’s recent disgrace. Many residents, she knew, were fooled by her quiet demeanor, her scholarly appearance, which utterly contradicted her tenacious, often inconvenient, convictions. This lore-keeper didn’t bother to understand people’s practical needs. She rushed to preserve ancient sigils and forgotten flora, regardless of the inconvenience, and most thought her entirely mad.
“Just shut your mouth and leave, alright?” Jorn’s voice was raw with fury. “I have every right to do as I please with the ancient things on my property! They obstruct my sign, block the sun from my stalls, and attract too many old gossips! I will never summon your… your particular talents for aid! Stop being a nuisance and go! You are overstepping your bounds, Lady Vance!”
“Then who would do it?” Elara asked, her voice unexpectedly quiet.
Jorn blinked. “What?”
“If not I,” Elara repeated, her gaze unflinching, “then who aids this decaying Juniper and its forgotten ward?” She pointed a trembling finger at the ancient tree, its branches skeletal against the sky. “I know you’re attempting to rid yourself of it, Jorn. It partially obscures the new mercantile hall’s splendid sign, does it not?”
Guildmaster Jorn’s face stiffened, the bluster draining from him. He couldn’t meet her gaze.
“Every morning, you apply corrosive solutions. You chip away at the ancient root stones. You pour waste oils into the soil. You’ve even begun to carve crude, defacing marks into its bark to hasten its demise,” Elara’s voice trembled, a deep, resonant vibration. “What will become of them if I abandon my vigilance? Even if they appear as nothing more than crumbling rock or twisted wood to your unseeing eyes, these are living things, Jorn! These are ancient anchors of magic, placed here to guard this very town! Once they have laid their roots, once their purpose is set, they deserve to exist!” The uneasy, repressed feelings that had simmered in Elara since dawn, the echoes of ‘that day,’ now surged, culminating in an overwhelming, emotional outburst.
“Who are you to extinguish these things? What authority grants you that right? What transgression have they ever committed against you?” A deep, primal sickness churned in her gut. She could almost feel the small, trembling hand that had once held a charcoal pencil, recalling the stacks of ‘reflection papers’ she had been forced to write as a child, forced to witness the destruction she was powerless to stop. “It is not just that they are used, Jorn, but that they are then discarded. It is not fair.”
Guildmaster Jorn bristled, angered by her childish stubbornness, by the sheer audacity of her accusation. Yet, as he met the fiery, almost incandescent intensity in her eyes, a strange constriction tightened in his chest. He found he could not breathe, his bluster dissolving into a choked silence.
“Do you wish to hear a chilling truth, Jorn?” Elara asked, her voice dropping to a low, dangerous register. “Even after your breath departs your body, these ancient things will endure.”
They would witness centuries unfold. They would stand, silently, long after his grand mercantile hall crumbled to dust. Elara gritted her teeth, not to hold back tears, but to contain the raw, unyielding force of her conviction. It was a promise. And a threat.