Page 141 of Haunted Crowns
Lord Hadrian frowned. “The day after tomorrow?”
“Yes.” Stephan leaned forward, voice carved from stone. “Avaristo thinks us broken. Leaderless. He is wrong. We strike before he can regroup. Before he expects it.”
Unease stirred across the room.
“That is madness—” someone began.
“No,” Stephan cut in. His voice cracked like thunder. “That is war. And war does not wait.”
The lords looked to one another. Doubt lingered, but so did something else. Fire.
Stephan’s tone dropped, deadly and sure. “If we wait, we play his game. If we move now, we end it before it begins.”
Lord Valcairn nodded slowly. “Then it must be decisive.”
Stephan met his gaze. “It won’t be a strike.” His voice turned blade-sharp. “It will be fire.”
Through it all, Eris didn’t move. She sat beside Stephan on Yori’s throne, its weight a quiet union of honor and burden. The council blurred. Voices dulled into static, a hum pressing against her skull. Her breath, her body barely registered because her mind was at war. Her gift had failed her.
During the attack, she’d felt everything—rage, venom, violence. But there had been too much: too many emotions, too many bodies, too much noise.
She hadn’t been able to trace it. She hadn’t been able to stop it, and now her family was dead.
She forced air into her lungs. Her fists clenched, nails biting into skin as she reached. Emotion slammed into her from thenobles around her—a wave of pride, suspicion, and fear, all of it too much, too fast.
Her vision dimmed. The feelings tangled, slipping like smoke through her grasp. Still, she pressed deeper. The pressure behind her eyes turned razor-sharp.
Stephan noticed. Even as voices argued over war and vengeance, his focus never left her. She was too still, too tight.
He leaned in. “Eris? Are you alright?”
She inhaled, fingertips pressing against her temple. “Almost,” she breathed. “I just need to—”
Stephan’s frown deepened. “What are you doing?”
She didn’t answer. She dove deeper as the flood thickened. Emotions clawed through her ribs, dragged at her spine. Her breath quickened. She was close.
Then she felt it, a thread, faint and hidden beneath the noise, a pulse of darkness woven through the council’s fury.
It was there.
She latched onto it, pulled, and traced its source. Pain erupted in her skull, slicing down her spine. She gasped, clutching the table as her vision tunneled. The castle felt it. The torches flickered, their flames curling inward. Shadows warped, as if the walls themselves had begun to recoil.
Then they heard it—a sound that was not quake, but something older, deeper. The castle exhaled, a vast, heavy breath drawn from the bones of Dragov itself, from places untouched for centuries. The walls groaned, and the ground shuddered.
Nobles staggered to their feet, bracing against the obsidian table as fear and shock cracked their composure.
Stephan’s pulse thundered. He had known many things in battle—the hush before an ambush, the breath before a blade struck, but this was not war. This was something waking.
Eris barely registered the gasps, the panic. She pushed deeper. Her gift had never stretched this far, never traced emotion with such clarity in a crowd so dense. Now she felt them all.
Every noble in the chamber stood exposed, their fear, doubt, and secrets laid bare. She could follow each thread to its source. She had done it. She had grown stronger. But something had noticed. A force older than her gift. Older than the castle.
Beneath the stone, a faint heartbeat stirred, pulsing through Dragov like veins. Something had waited, and Eris had just spoken its name. Her power was rising, and something ancient was rising with it.
Silence became suffocating. Eris opened her eyes. For a breath, she felt victorious. Her gift had sharpened—precise, capable of tracing emotion to its source. But then the air shifted. The castle’s energy warped unnaturally, like unseen eyes pressing against her skin.
Her lungs caught. The room felt distorted, the shape of it unfamiliar. She turned and saw them.
