I should have just picked the one I felt most comfortable with, but my stomach churned at the idea.
I hated that the High Court discredited the simple right to choose, but more than that, I hated that I was failing to find a way out that did not feel like a cage.
I wanted to feel what it would be like to be free. To make my own mistakes. But I had forty-eight hours left, and I was standing in the largest library in Haelen, searching for a miracle in the dust.
The musty air of the Royal Archives greeted me as I walked through the archway, thick with the scent of aged parchment, crumbling leather, and iron-gall ink.
Outside, twilight was draining from the sky, the last threads of light thinning behind the narrow windows.
I trailed my fingers along the spine of a chained volume. Generations of names had passed through these pages. Bonds recorded. Lineages traced. Lives documented as though they were tidy entries in a ledger.
A true bond was not something one hunted through indexes. It was supposed to find you. Yet here I stood, scanning titles like a merchant searching for fabric.
“Lost in thought, child?”
I turned to find Keeper Sora stepping from between two shelves. Her silver hair was gathered neatly, her movements unhurried. She wore thin frames that sat low on the crooked bridge of her nose, and her long white robes were an almost blinding contrast to the shadows of the chamber.
“Keeper,” I said, bowing my head as I gestured to the messy stack of books behind me. “Thank you for the access. I am afraid I was getting ahead of myself with the rummaging.”
“You are welcome to do as you please here, Kaelia,” she said, waving off the apology with a faint curve of her mouth. “We can dispense with the ceremony if we are to spend the night among these stacks. Now, tell me—what is it that weighs so heavily on you?”
“It feels,” I began with slight hesitation, “as though everyone is waiting to see whether I succeed or disappear.”
Sora did not flinch at the bluntness of it. She merely adjusted her glasses, her gaze steady.
“People fear what disrupts order. And you, Kaelia, are currently a very loud disruption.”
I frowned at that, not sure if it was a dig at my stubbornness, or a nod to the thousands of Haelenians who never thought to question the law.
I did not have time to question her, because she was already moving, her shadow lengthening against the rows of ancient leather.
She guided me deeper into the labyrinth, her fingertips brushing certain spines as though greeting old companions. We stopped before a section marked with an intricate glowing crest—a sun eclipsed by a crown. She pulled three thick, unadorned volumes and laid them on a heavy oak table.
“Our history does not begin with decree,” Sora said, opening the book with careful hands. “It begins with the Sayel. Before the High Court, before the Veythar—there was only resonance.”
She turned a page, revealing two spirals curved toward one another. “The Architects understood that for the world to hold, souls had to align. The Sayel was not a choice; it was a reflection. Two people meeting and realizing they were already one.”
I leaned closer, the candlelight flickering against the faded ink. “What happened to it?”
“Greed,” she said simply. “People decided they were better than fate. They wanted to bond for land, for titles, for bloodlines. They turned their backs on resonance and started choosing for convenience. They broke the balance.”
“What does that have to do with the Veythar?”
“Everything. When we stopped seeking the Sayel and started bonding for convenience, we created hollows—invisible fractures in the fabric of our realm. Nature does not like an empty space, Kaelia.”
She flicked the page to a drawing of dark, smoke-like figures pouring through a crack in a mountain.
“The Veythar were the consequence. They are creatures of the Void, drawn into our world to fill those hollow places. But they are too heavy for our realm.”
“The War of Veil and Void,” I whispered.
It was the largest war in our history, a cataclysm that allowed the Umbral realm to bleed into our own and press its jagged borders against the human provinces centuries ago.
“Yes,” she confirmed. “In its aftermath, the Elders realized that if we could no longer find the Sayel, we had to simulate it. So the Lunthra was born.”
She flicked the page and tapped her blunt nail on a drawing of the Thrynn Bridge. “As you know it, every mortal must be bound by their twenty-first year, or they are surrendered to the Veythar to maintain the barrier.”
“A trade,” I murmured.