Madeline woke with dried blood beneath her fingernails.

  It wasn’t hers.

  The sheets of her bed in the scriptorium chamber were soaked with sweat, and her lantern — which she had left on the writing desk — lay shattered on the floor, as though flung by a sudden force. The window was open. The night air bit cold.

  She sat up slowly, heart pounding, breath shallow.

  Her hands trembled as she reached for the journal she always kept nearby. She flipped past blank pages to the one with her grandmother’s name: Tamsin Elryan. There was a sketch there — a charcoal rendering of her face from an old family miniature. Kind eyes. A quiet mouth. Wrinkles earned by work.

  Madeline touched the image. “What did you do?” she whispered.

  Because now she had seen it — or something of it — in the ruins beneath Stonehold. The rune had burned not just into the stone, but into her mind. It whispered still, even in silence. Worse than a curse. Not words, but weight. As though something old and terrible had placed a finger on her soul and said:

  You.

  And now something had changed in her.

  The mark was on her wrist.

  It hadn’t been there the night before. But now, just below the skin of her right arm, a faint circle of raised, pale lines — a crown with open jaws — shimmered with something like heat when she touched it. It pulsed faintly, not with pain, but with memory. Not hers.

  Her grandmother’s?

  No. Older.

  She wrapped her wrist quickly in linen and hurried through the sleeping scriptorium, her boots loud on the worn stone. She needed answers — and only one person might have them.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  Ithan Varrow was already awake, poring over a map that looked older than the current dynasty. Candles ringed the desk. His eyes flicked up when Madeline entered, but he didn’t speak at first.

  He didn’t have to.

  He saw the mark on her wrist, barely hidden.

  “I feared this,” he said.

  “You knew,” she said, voice low, shaking. “You knew this would happen.”

  “I knew it might,” Ithan said. “When you first brought me the name. When you sketched the runes. But I prayed we were wrong. We’re not.”

  Madeline pulled up a chair. “Tell me everything. Don’t hold back this time.”

  He studied her for a long moment, then nodded once.

  “You know of the Sable Order — warriors, inquisitors, the king’s fire in the dark. But before them, before even the first Crown Charter, there was another name. The Binders.”

  She nodded.

  “They weren’t warriors. They were memory-keepers. Ritualists. Their role wasn’t to kill what was cursed — it was to seal it. Beneath stone. Beneath oath. Beneath blood.”

  Madeline’s throat tightened. “My grandmother—?”

  Ithan opened a weathered codex and turned it toward her.

  On one page, an ink drawing of a woman kneeling before a circle of kings, her arms bare, marked with seven sigils.

  Tamsin Elryan.

  “She was the last Binder,” Ithan said. “Not because the line ended. But because she made it end. She sealed something so powerful, so corrosive, that she burned her own name from the records. And it worked.”

  He looked at her hand.

  “Until now.”

  Madeline looked down at the mark. “Why me?”

  “You’re blood,” he said. “But more than that. You’re a reader. A scribe. A vessel. The seal requires a mind to bind to. That’s how it works — not by strength, but by memory. The longer you carry the mark, the more it will remember through you.”

  Her voice cracked. “And when it remembers enough?”

  He didn’t answer.

  He didn’t need to.

  That night, she dreamt of fire.

  Not just any fire — a fire that did not consume. A fire that danced through stone and memory, leaving behind charred names and melted crowns. In the dream, she stood in a room of thrones, all empty, save one.

  The Hollow Crown.

  And behind it — not a god.

  But a woman.

  Her face burned. Her voice was like cracked bells.

  “Daughter of silence,” she whispered. “Binder reborn. You carry the wound of the world.”

  Madeline knelt.

  Not by choice.

  Her body moved on its own.

  And the woman leaned close — breath like smoke, skin like ember.

  “Let me show you what was taken. Let me speak through you.”

  Madeline screamed.

  She awoke with her hand pressed to the wall.

  She had drawn the symbol again, in soot.

  But this time — there were teeth behind the crown.