Sonia M. Rompoti, MSc, Bsc

You voted for Nesta to test the magic at Valkyrie training and see whether the voice followed her. She did. It did. Naturally, it could not behave itself.

---

Valkyrie training started at sunrise.

Or, rather, it started when Emerie decided she had finished drinking her first mug of bitter tea, which generally coincided with sunrise, give or take a few merciful minutes for weather. Nesta appreciated the distinction. 

The three Valkyries met on the roof, where the first light caught on the mountains and turned Velaris briefly golden below them. Gwyn was already stretching, her copper hair unbound and her face bright with the sort of enthusiasm that should have been illegal before breakfast. Emerie stood nearby with her arms crossed and tea in hand, watching the horizon as though waiting for either an enemy army or the precise moment Gwyn’s cheerfulness became intolerable and could not breathe it in anymore.

Nesta arrived two minutes late.

“Nesta,” Gwyn called, as if they had not spent the previous evening together. “You’re late.”

Nesta checked the angle of the sun. “By two minutes.”

“Which is late,” Emerie said gravely. “For a Valkyrie.”

“I’m not the one holding a warm beverage to warm my hands. Some of us are committed to the suffering.”

Emerie took another deliberate sip. “Some of us are committed to surviving Gwyn and her cheerfulness before noon… naturally I need to be keeping my hands occupied.”

Gwyn ignored this. She leaned closer to Nesta and narrowed her eyes. “You’ve already been in the library.”

Nesta began stretching one leg. “Astonishing. Your powers of observation grow by the day.”

“You smell like old books.”

“And you smell like enthusiasm. We all have our burdens.”

Gwyn grinned. Emerie hid a smile behind her mug. Nesta turned away before either of them could examine her more closely. The silver shimmer had not left her hand. It was faint now, little more than an occasional glint beneath the skin of her palm, but the cold thread remained wrapped around her wrist. She had felt it throughout the hour she spent in the library pretending to read, while the same sentence waited patiently beneath her eyes. It did not hurt. It did not pull….. It merely waited.

So, naturally, Nesta had decided to test it. The roof offered open air, space to move and two Valkyries capable of restraining her if the experiment went south. There were few objects for ancient magic to destroy and no innocent bystanders.. unless one counted Gwyn’s optimism. It was as close to sensible as Nesta was prepared to get.

Emerie set down her mug. “Forms.”

They took their positions. 

The first sequence passed without incident: draw, turn, block, strike. Their wooden blades moved through the morning air in practised unison. Gwyn hummed beneath her breath until Nesta clipped the tip of her sword against Gwyn’s.

“If you’re composing a ballad about us again,” Nesta said, “make me taller.”

“I made you terrifying.”

“That was not the request.”

“Your posture,” Emerie said, tapping Nesta sharply between the shoulders with her blade. “Unless being terrifying now involves presenting your ribs to the enemy.”

Nesta adjusted without comment.

They began again.

On the second turn, Nesta reached towards her power.

Carefully.

She had learned the difference between touching power and surrendering to it. This was no desperate plunge into a bottomless well. She merely loosened her hold around the quiet, silver-dark place inside her and allowed the smallest thread to rise.

Cold tightened around her wrist. Her fingers tingled against the wooden hilt. Nothing else happened. Nesta completed the sequence and pulled the power back…. The voice remained silent. Who knew? Perhaps it belonged to the corridor after all. Perhaps the door had thrown its little performance, failed to impress her and retreated to sulk inside the wall.

The disappointment that touched her was absurd enough to be irritating. “Again,” Emerie ordered.

Nesta reset her stance. This time, when she pivoted, she opened the path a fraction wider. Silver light traced the veins across the back of her hand. The voice curled around her ear. “Again.”

Nesta’s grip faltered. Her blade swung wide, missing Gwyn’s defensive block by a clean foot. Gwyn stopped. “You all right?”

“Fine.”

“You missed.”

“Thank you, Gwyn. I had mistaken the empty air for your sword.” Nesta smirked.

Gwyn lowered her blade but did not move away. Emerie’s gaze narrowed. Nesta rolled her wrist. The silver light faded. The magic had followed her. Question answered.

Unfortunately, it had raised several more.

“Reset,” Nesta said.

“Nesta-”

“I said I’m fine.” Gwyn looked unconvinced. Emerie looked as if she had already decided to let Nesta lie this once. And so they reset.

Nesta waited until the final strike of the sequence. Then she reached deliberately for the cold thread and pulled. Power rushed into her palm. Silver frost raced along the wooden practice blade, covering it from hilt to tip. The air snapped. Gwyn leapt backwards as a thin ribbon of light tore free from the sword and twisted above the ring.

For one suspended moment, it resembled handwriting.

Then the wind caught it and broke it apart.

Nesta released the power. The frost shattered from her blade and struck the flagstones in glittering fragments. Silence settled across the roof. Emerie looked at the frozen sword. “That was not part of the form.”

“No,” Nesta said.

Gwyn’s eyes had gone wide with scholarly delight, which was rarely a reassuring development for the trio. “Do it again.”

“Absolutely not,” Emerie said.

“I only want to see whether the writing forms properly.”

Nesta turned to her. “You saw writing?”

“Almost. It looked like the beginning of a word.” Gwyn glanced towards the place where the light had vanished. “Or a number.”

Cold moved beneath Nesta’s skin.

“Seven,” the voice whispered.

She closed her fist.

Emerie noticed. “Ok, start talking.”

---

Nesta considered refusing. Unfortunately, Gwyn possessed the sort of expectant face that made silence painful, and Emerie looked prepared to hold her over the edge of the roof until cooperation occurred.

“There is a new door in the library corridor,” Nesta said.

Gwyn blinked. “A new door?”

“It wasn’t there yesterday. It has no handle, no hinges and apparently no respect for privacy.”

“What did it do?” Emerie asked.

“Called my name. Told me I survived the promise. Put frost beneath my hand.” Nesta lifted the fingers that still held a trace of silver. “Then ash began leaking beneath it.”

Gwyn stared at her. “And you went to the library instead of telling us?”

“I had books waiting.”

“Voices in walls,” Emerie said flatly. “Silver ash. Secret doors. You are right. Nothing worth interrupting a morning’s reading for.”

“I did not open it.”

“How restrained of you…”

The roof door slammed open behind them.

All three turned.

The stairwell beyond was empty. Warm light spilled across the first step, then the next, illuminating a path downward while every other faelight in the stairwell remained dark. Gwyn looked delighted. “I think the House wants us to go.”

“The House also hid breakfast this morning,” Nesta said. “Its judgement is questionable.”

As if offended, the House sent Emerie’s empty mug sliding neatly across the stones until it stopped beside the open door. Emerie retrieved it. “It has made a compelling argument. Let’s go.”

All three of them abandoned training, as the House clearly guided them where it needed them to go. Doors opened before they reached them. Corridors shortened. One staircase flattened into a ramp beneath Gwyn’s feet and returned to steps the moment Emerie crossed it.

“Show-off,” Nesta muttered.

---

By the time they reached the eastern library corridor, the air had changed. The cold remained, but the door was no longer merely a seam in the stone. Symbols shimmered around its oblong outline, pale enough to vanish whenever Nesta tried to focus directly upon them. A handprint had appeared at its centre, carved shallowly into the wall.

And across the floor, the silver ash had finished writing. Gwyn read the words aloud. “Seven are gone.”

No one spoke for a moment.

The letters curved across the stones with elegant, deliberate strokes. The ash had not scattered despite their footsteps or the movement of air through the corridor.

Emerie crouched beside it without touching. “Seven what?”

“An excellent question,” Nesta said. “Perhaps the wall will produce footnotes.”

Gwyn had moved closer to the symbols around the door. “These are old.”

“How old?”

“Older than the script used in the priestess archives. Some of the shapes survived in ceremonial writing, but the structure is different.” She traced one in the air. “This one means witness. I think. And this might mean binding.”

“You think?” Emerie asked.

“Would you prefer I lie confidently?”

“Usually.”

Nesta studied the carved handprint. The cold thread around her wrist pulled for the first time. Not hard. An invitation rather than a command…. Still, she disliked it on principle.

“Clotho should see this,” Gwyn said.

“Eventually.”

“Nesta.”

“I came here to test the magic.” Nesta stepped over the silver words. “It seems rude to ignore the result.”

Emerie rose. “That is not what rude means.”

Nesta placed her palm into the handprint. The wall inhaled. There was really no other word for it. The stone contracted beneath her fingers and released a breath of air that carried no warmth, no scent and no sense of distance. The symbols around the threshold flared silver…..

---

…and the door opened.

Not inward or outward. The stone simply ceased to exist. Beyond it waited a circular chamber vast enough that it could not possibly fit inside the mountain where the House stood. Its ceiling disappeared into darkness. Its curved walls held no books, no cabinets, no familiar comforts of scholarship…. 

They held threads. Thousands of them. Silver. Gold. Blue. The deep red of blood dried against skin. They hung from iron hooks at varying heights, knotted at careful intervals and humming at a pitch Nesta felt rather than heard.

“Well,” Emerie said behind her. “That seems perfectly harmless.”

Gwyn stepped to Nesta’s side. Wonder had wiped every trace of humour from her face. “What is this place?”

Nesta did not know. But the power inside her did. The understanding rose with the certainty of a memory she had never lived. “Promises,” she said.

Gwyn looked at her. “All of them?”

“Oaths. Bargains. Things spoken and made binding.” Nesta stared at the nearest silver thread. Three knots glowed along its length, each one pulsing with a different rhythm. “Don’t ask me. I don’t know how I know.”

The voice brushed the inside of her ear… “You remember.”

Nesta ignored it and entered. Gwyn followed immediately. Emerie muttered something about scholars lacking survival instincts and came after them.

The chamber’s floor sloped gently downward. Threads stirred as Nesta passed, though the air remained still. Some reached towards her in small, curious movements. Others drew tight against the wall.

Then she saw the first empty hook. Silver ash stained the stone beneath it. Gwyn found the second. Emerie found two more farther along the curve. They counted seven in total.

“Seven are gone,” Gwyn murmured.

Nesta crouched before the nearest patch of ash. It looked identical to the residue outside the door: too bright to be soot, too fine to be ordinary dust.

“Don’t,” Emerie warned.

Nesta touched it.

The chamber vanished.

For one fractured heartbeat, she saw a figure moving between the threads. Dark robes. A hood drawn low. One pale, ink-stained hand reaching for an iron hook. A flash of silver. A thread snapping. Relief struck Nesta so violently that it almost brought her to her knees. Not triumph. Not cruelty. Freedom. Then the vision released her. Nesta rocked backwards. Gwyn caught her shoulder. “What happened?”

“Nothing.”

Emerie’s expression suggested that Nesta had now exhausted her permitted lie threshold for the day. Before either woman could challenge her, a deep red flicker lit the wall behind them. Emerie turned first. One thread hung apart from the others, thick and dark, its knots arranged in a severe geometric pattern. Its light stuttered weakly, brightening and fading as though struggling to maintain a pulse.

Emerie’s face changed. “I know those knots.”

Nesta approached. The thread drew taut.

“Illyrian?” Gwyn asked.

Emerie nodded. “An old blood-oath. Fealty to a lord or a bloodline. They haven’t been used openly in generations.”

“Openly,” Nesta repeated.

“Illyrians enjoy preserving their worst traditions in private.”

Nesta lifted her hand without touching the thread. Heat pressed against her palm. Beneath it lay something living, stubborn and furious, caught inside the pattern of the oath. The red light flickered again. Once. Twice. Then the thread pulled sharply towards the open doorway. Footsteps sounded in the corridor beyond.

“Nesta?” Cassian called.

His silhouette filled the entrance a moment later, wings drawn tight to avoid the stone. His hair was still damp from bathing and irritation had settled across his features with familiar ease.

“I’ve been looking for you,” he said. “The House deposited three breakfasts in front of me, opened every door in the library and then refused to explain why.”

His gaze moved past Nesta. He saw the chamber.

The irritation vanished.

“What did you do?”

“Why does everyone assume I did something?”

Cassian looked at the impossible room filled with luminous threads. “Instinct. And past experience.”

Gwyn began explaining before Nesta could decide how much to tell him. The new door. The ash. The seven missing threads. The ancient writing. When she mentioned the Illyrian blood-oath, Cassian went completely still. Nesta knew this stillness. She knew the difference between the warrior assessing a threat and the male trying to keep something buried…. And this was the second.

“What sort of blood-oath?” he asked.

Emerie described the knots. The colour drained from Cassian’s face. He looked down at his left arm.

“Cassian,” Nesta said.

He pushed up his sleeve. A thin line curved along the inside of his forearm. Nesta had seen it countless times and dismissed it as one scar among hundreds… but it was glowing now. Silver light brightened beneath his skin, faded and brightened again.

Once.

Twice.

From within the chamber, the blood-red thread answered in the exact same rhythm.

Cassian stared at the mark. “That’s not possible.”

The cold wound around Nesta’s wrist tightened. The voice leaned close. “His promise is breaking.”

Cassian looked up. “What?”

Nesta closed her silver-marked hand into a fist. “Tell me,” she said, “what you promised.”