CHAPTER 132: THE SONG OF OLD

The wall groaned as it shifted, stone scraping against stone. Dust rained down, and a cold breath of air escaped from the darkness beyond.

Leroy lifted the torch and stepped inside, removing his mask. The darkness obscured his vision.

The space opened wider than he could have imagined. His eyes widened as the flame licked across shapes. Arched doorframes were swallowed by dirt, fragments of frescoes clinging to walls, and broken chandeliers hanging like skeletal remains.

He had stepped into what looked like the husk of an old mansion, long buried beneath the city. The air was heavy with age, dust thick as ash, time itself left to rot.

Furniture still stood in strange defiance. Faded couches slumped against the walls, a half-rotted table sagged under its own weight, and a cracked mirror leaned precariously, its silvered glass clouded and dull. Shreds of moth-eaten fabric still clung to the chairs, a ghost of velvet once rich and soft.

This wasn’t just a tunnel. This was history, sealed away.

But whose mansion was this? It wasn’t the old palace for that ruin lay on the city’s outskirts, demolished so thoroughly no stone stood upon another. Yet the architecture whispered of the same era.

Leroy walked deeper. His footsteps echoed hollowly across the stone as his hand brushed carved patterns worn smooth by time. He could almost hear the ghost of laughter, of music, and the life of a home buried alive. It wasn’t a grand mansion, no larger than his own estate, but the silence here unsettled him.

Because the silence wasn’t empty, it felt like a calling, as if something was waiting for him here. He rubbed his chest as if that would erase the unease he felt around here.

Rooms branched off into shadow, but he ignored them. His chest tightened. The pull inside him grew stronger, tugging at him like a thread wound tight around his ribs.

He was close.

He pressed forward into the darkness, where a narrow staircase wound down. The wood groaned and cracked beneath his boots, threatening to give way, but he kept his balance and descended.

At the bottom, a murmur reached him... soft, steady, like a chant. He followed, his pulse quickening. Ahead, pale light spilled from beneath an old door, not the flicker of torches but something whiter and purer, like a fragment of the moon had been locked inside.

His heart pounded. Some deep part of him knew that this was it. His search was over. Relief surged through him. He had found her.

At the same time, his heart pounded unknowingly.

He shoved the door open. Blinding brilliance flooded his vision, burning sharper than the torchlight in his hand. He pressed his palm against his brow, squinting into the brilliance that spilled like moonlight caged in stone.

And there... bathed in the glow... stood Lorraine.

The sight of her was like breath after drowning. His wife. His anchor. His lost, impossible hope.

But his relief curdled as quickly as it came.

She wasn’t standing as he remembered. Her posture was rigid, her face serene, eyes closed as though in trance. Her lips moved with careful precision, each sound cutting through the chamber like silver bells, with words Leroy had never heard spoken aloud in this world.

Old High Veyrani.

Not recited, not studied. Spoken.

Perfectly. Fluidly. With the grace and weight of someone who had lived and breathed it.

The hair along Leroy’s neck rose. Scholars had devoted lifetimes to reconstructing the royal tongue—disputing over syllables, inventing tones, piecing together fragments like broken glass. Yet here it was, whole, flawless, pouring from her lips with the ease of memory rather than study.

The chamber itself seemed to lean in to listen. Each syllable trembled through the stone walls, as if the mansion recognized its own language, awakened after centuries of silence. Before her knelt two men shrouded in black, their bodies quivering, as though the very sound of prophecy was too much for mortal bones to bear.

Leroy’s heart hammered with part fear and part awe.

What was this?

Who was she?

Then her eyes opened. Until now, he had only seen her half-lit profile, but when she turned fully to him, the breath stalled in his chest.

She glowed.

Her eyes blazed with a light not her own, but silver-white, like twin moons caged within her skull. Her hair shimmered as if every strand had been spun from moonlight. This was his wife’s face, yet the gaze that fixed on him was not hers. It carried an emotion he had never seen before, something unearthly, unreadable, terrifying in its beauty.

He froze. Because he had seen those eyes once before.

The memory struck like lightning. Years ago, under the vyrnshade blossom shrub, he had sat in the dusk, foolishly contemplating whether to eat one of its poison blossoms, when a rustle broke the stillness. Two eyes had glowed at him from the underbrush, bright as an animal’s in the dark, but sharper, steadier, deliberate. He had screamed, and from the shadows had emerged his little mouseling, stick in hand.

He was scared at first, but after talking to her, he had ignored what he saw, convincing himself it was a trick of the light.

But those eyes... he recognized them now. Those were the same eyes that landed on him that night, even if it was for a brief second.

Lorraine, no, it was not his wife there. Whatever spirit lived inside her smiled. The curve of her lips was familiar, yet the expression was so foreign that Leroy’s blood ran cold.

And then she sang.

Her voice poured out like a hymn born of heaven itself, each note so clear it seemed to split his soul.

"O child of light, O flame reborn,

The stars proclaim thy story.

Forgotten thou walk’st, in shadow and shame,

Till love shall rise in glory.

For vengeance thou burn’st, for justice thou reign’st,

False crowns shall fall before thee.

Yet kind is thy hand, and mercy thy throne,

Restorer of thy glory."

The two kneeling men shook, entranced. Leroy stood as if bound, every muscle locked, his chest tightening with something he couldn’t name. He understood fragments of the old tongue, enough to catch the edges of the meaning, but comprehension slipped like water through his fingers.