Chapter 1 – Where the Wind Fell Silent | The Celestial Thread

Elarion, Year 312 After the Sundering

Northridge Province, near the ruined spire of Elumir

The smoke of the ruined spire still lingered in the air—weeks old, but stubborn, like it had nowhere else to go.

Kieran crouched low in the brush, his fingers tracing the carved hilt of the blade that wasn’t his. It had belonged to his mother—a woman with fire in her voice and starlight in her veins. A woman who vanished five winters ago, along with every mage west of the Brightmere.

He squinted toward the tower, now nothing more than bones and shadow.

Behind him, a quiet rustle.

“You’re going to get yourself killed,” whispered Myla, stepping out from the thicket like a ghost. Her cloak was dusted with snow. Her hair—a wild curtain of obsidian curls—whipped in the wind. “Again.”

“I’m not inside yet.”

“Not yet. But you’re thinking about it.”She kicked a pebble. “Just like last time. And the time before that.”

Kieran offered a grin. “Maybe the third time’s the charm.”

She didn’t smile back.

In the distance, the ruined tower moaned—a low, haunting sound that made the hairs on his arms rise. Something was waking. Or watching.

Maybe both.

“Let’s go,” Myla muttered. “Before whatever’s in there remembers how to scream.”

He hesitated—just long enough to see it.A flicker. Not in the tower, but in the sky.

A pulse. Like a vein. Like a thread.

And then it was gone.

The wind shifted.

Kieran blinked up at the sky, but the thread of light—if it had ever truly been there—was gone. Just cloud now. Bruised gray, pressing low, pregnant with snow and something heavier.

Myla was already walking. “Don’t stare at it,” she muttered.

“At what?”

“The sky. It’ll stare back.”

He followed, steps crunching behind hers, eyes still dragging toward the spire. The ruins loomed taller with every step, black stone jagged like broken teeth. Ivy still clung to the walls, dead and frost-bitten.

“You really believe the old stories?” he asked as they climbed the rise.

She didn’t look back. “Which ones?”

“That the mages could hear the stars. That the Celestials used to walk through fire and not be burned.”

Myla hesitated. “I believe something burned them.”

They reached the edge of the ruin. The tower’s base had crumbled inward, exposing the heart of the keep. A rusted staircase curled downward into shadow.

Kieran knelt. He touched a stone, rubbing his fingers across a faint groove.

Letters. Not written—carved. Old runes. Familiar.

His heart skipped.

“I’ve seen these before,” he whispered. “On my mother’s staff.”

“You said she never let you near it.”

“She didn’t,” he said, standing slowly. “But once—when I was little—I saw it leaning against the window. The stars were shining through it. And I saw the symbols light up.”

He stepped closer to the ruins, almost reverently.

Myla’s hand closed around his arm. “We shouldn’t be here.”

“Then why did you follow me?”

She didn’t answer right away.

Finally, softly: “Because I saw it too.”

Kieran turned.

Her eyes were wide, fixed on the crumbling wall—no, on the shadows within.

A shape moved. No sound. No breath. But the air changed.

The ash in the wind suddenly swirled upward, dancing around them like a thousand gray fireflies.

And in the dead quiet, something began to hum.

Not a song. Not language.

Resonance.

Low. Ancient. Like the memory of a song from another life.

Kieran clutched his mother’s blade, heart thundering.

Then—faint and distant—he heard it.

A voice.

One word.

Awaken.

Elira had stopped walking.

Kieran didn’t notice. Myla didn’t either. But something—something older than the wind and colder than the snow—had brushed against her mind.

Not a memory.

Not hers.

A vision.

She stood before an obsidian mirror.

A crown balanced crooked on her head, too heavy, too cold. A coronation robe—gold-leafed, embroidered in sigils she recognized without knowing—hung from her shoulders like a shroud.

“Breathe, my Lady,” whispered a handmaiden made of half-light and half-shadow. “You look every bit the queen you are becoming.”

Elira didn’t answer.

Because none of this was real.

None of this was hers.

The room felt familiar—but like a story told to her in childhood, not a place she’d lived. She reached toward the mirror, and her reflection flickered—her face, then someone else’s, then nothing at all.

“I’m not her,” she whispered.

“Not who?” the handmaiden asked, though her voice sounded distant, hollow.

“My mother,” Elira murmured.

But she didn’t even know her mother. Not truly. Not like this vision wanted her to.

Beyond the chamber’s windows, horns blew across distant mountains, announcing a coronation for a queen who had never walked this palace. A king’s ashes rested in a crypt she had never seen. Servants hurried in corridors her feet had never touched.

Yet everything felt known.

As if she were watching a life meant for someone who shared her bones.

She stepped away from the mirror. Her footsteps rang on marble that wasn’t real. At the bottom of imagined steps, a figure waited—tall, cloaked in starlight, the same figure she had dreamed once as a child.

He didn’t speak.

But he saw her.

And he wept.

The palace around her blurred. Columns bled into mist. The crown dissolved into dust. The figure faded like a dying ember—

And the world snapped back.

Elira gasped, hand braced on a fir trunk, breath trembling. Myla and Kieran were already several paces ahead.

She pressed a shaking palm to her brow.

“Not mine,” she whispered. “They’re not my memories.”

But the ache did not leave.

Something in the fog behind her shifted—something old, something that knew her truer than she knew herself.

Dusk bled through the forest like watered ink, turning trunks to pillars and leaves to stained glass. The wind had gone thin and cold. The birds were silent; even the insects kept their counsel. The only sound was the hush of boots over fallen oak, and the soft chime of Myla’s pendant.

They traveled light—bedrolls lashed tight, waterskins half-full, rations counted like prayers. Kieran led, scanning the dimming woods with instincts carved from fear and memory. Myla followed, scribbling impressions she didn’t yet understand. Elira came last, hood shadowing her face, a simple sword—the one Kieran had gifted her—hanging at her hip.

A grove opened ahead, ringed by firs and carpeted in damp leaves. A fallen beech lay across the clearing, its heartwood splintered pale as bone. Kieran raised a fist; they stilled.

“What is it?” Myla whispered.

Kieran touched the soil, then the bark. “Echo.”

“From the ravine?” Myla asked. “From—”

“Not sound,” Elira said softly. “Memory.”

She drew back her hood. Her eyes glowed faintly—coals under ash.

“We keep to the Spire,” Kieran murmured. “Before the Sunring fades.”

Myla paused. “What is the Sunring, exactly?”

Elira exhaled. “A crown of light drawn over our world at high day. A shield. It has waned for a generation. And when it falters… older darkness remembers its name.”

“And the Spire?”

“A conduit. An altar. A gate.”

Myla nodded. “Traveling light makes sense. Secrecy.”

“Secrecy most,” Elira murmured. “Crowns paint targets.”

The wind shifted. Oak char. Iron.

Kieran’s grip tightened on his mother’s blade. “Smoke.”

“From a camp?” Myla asked.

Elira didn’t answer.

Her vision rippled—omens, bells, a horn struck from beneath the world—

She blinked it away.

Kieran was already examining the fallen trunk.

“Something burned in the wood,” he murmured.

Myla circled wide. “Here,” she said. “Look.”

A symbol had been carved into the beech: a ring thinned into an oval, crossed by tight-thread lines, a star at its center—four long points, two short. A twisted echo of the Sunring.

Myla touched it and hissed. “Warm.”

Kieran drew his blade.

Elira felt the sword at her hip grow heavy, as though it recognized the mark. “This was in the council hall,” she murmured. “Scratched near the hearth. Same hand. Or same hatred.”

“Echoes,” Myla whispered.

A leaf drifted down, touched the mark, and smoldered without smoke.

Kieran exhaled. “We’re being invited.”

“Or measured,” Elira said.

They moved on.

The forest held its breath.

A shimmer gathered between the trunks—a thin filament of pale light, trembling like a swallowed dawn.

Elira lifted two fingers; they froze.

“A strand,” she whispered. “Alive.”

Shadows pressed at its edges.

Kieran stepped in front of her. “Back.”

The filament spasmed—and vanished.

“First proof,” Elira murmured.

“First warning,” Kieran said.

A scream broke the silence.

Myla’s.

They ran.

Bursting into a clearing, they stopped.

An ancient oak towered there, bark black as obsidian, split with molten gold. Heat and frost battled in the air.

Beneath its glow, a figure knelt.

Broad-shouldered. Bare-chested.

But not human.

Stone and sand fused to flesh. Eyes dim yellow. Fog breathing with its breath.

A Veyr.

It turned.

And something in its gaze recognized Elira.

It withdrew a jagged blade from Myla’s stomach.

She gasped.

The Veyr stepped backward into fog; the mist sealed around it.

Kieran fell beside Myla, hands shaking.

“Elira—she’s slipping—”

A pulse throbbed through Elira’s bones.

The oak’s gold veins glowed.

Calling.

She approached and pressed Kieran’s knife into the bark.Light spilled like molten honey. Sap oozed—alive.

A drop touched her skin.Light raced up her arm.Every ache vanished.

She gasped.

Kieran’s voice broke. “Elira—”

She knelt beside Myla. “What do we have to lose?”

She touched the sap to the wound.

Light crawled beneath Myla’s skin. The torn flesh sealed. Breath steadied.

Myla lived.

Elira stared at the vial trembling in her hand.

“What is that?” Kieran whispered.

“I… don’t know.”

Her veins hummed—heavy, watchful.

And far off in the fog, something enormous stirred.

“Maybe,” Elira whispered, “we weren’t meant to find it.”