Not in the skin, but deeper — as though something old had cracked beneath her bones. Madeline felt it as she crossed the causeway into the Royal Reliquary, where the tombs of kings and long-forgotten saints lay beneath cathedrals and courtyards. It was a place of silence, reverence... and secrets.
Ithan had told her to seek Throne Hall VII, a chamber buried beneath layers of blocked archives and sealed records. “They were called the Unworn Thrones,” he had whispered. “Built for those who would rule after the Founding, but never did. Seven stones. Seven names. Seven absences.”
Seven was not a safe number anymore.
The guards didn’t bother her. She wore her scholar’s robes, bore the king’s seal in her satchel, and walked with the ease of someone meant to be there. Few would stop a scribe, and fewer still would question one who walked like they already knew the answers.
But the path to Throne Hall VII was not straight.
She moved through the catacombs beneath the reliquary, past the resting places of queens, scribes, generals, and holy martyrs, until the marble faded to blackened stone and the walls narrowed. Dust gathered like webs. The only light came from her lantern — its flame guttering more each step she took.
At last, she found the door.
No lock. No runes.
Just a slab of dark slate, smooth and cold.
She touched it.
And it opened.
The room was circular — vast and echoing — but it was not empty.
Seven thrones rose from the stone like teeth from a buried skull. Each was different: carved from a different stone, etched with a different pattern, sized for different bodies. One was cracked down the center. One was scorched. One had bloodstains dried into the armrests that no years had worn away.
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Madeline stepped forward.
The mark on her wrist throbbed.
At the center of the room stood a pedestal.
On it lay a scroll.
She reached for it with shaking hands. It was sealed with wax — the same crown-with-jaws mark that had followed her for weeks.
When she broke it, the air shifted. Cold rushed through the room like breath.
And the whispers began.
“Oathbreakers.Watchers.Those who turned away.They were kings. They were cowards.They were us.”
Madeline read the scroll aloud, half against her will. The ink was deep red. The script was older than common tongue — the dialect of the Binding Songs, used only in rituals.
“Here lie the thrones of those who chose silence. Who saw the mouth open and sealed it with forgetting. Who burned memory to ash. Who buried Saldrith and called it peace.”
Her voice faltered.
Because she could feel it now. Beneath the floor. Beneath the thrones. Not just the weight of history — the weight of something alive.
She stepped back.
And the room responded.
The thrones groaned.
Cracks split through the floor like veins.
One of the thrones — the one made of obsidian — shuddered, and from its base came a low sound, like a breath drawn by something long buried.
Then a voice, deep and knowing, echoed not from the stone but from her own mouth:
“We are the Seven Who Forgot. And now we remember.”
Madeline clutched at her chest, stumbling. Something was moving inside her — not a spirit, not a possession, but a memory so deep and wide it threatened to split her mind in two.
A face flashed behind her eyes — her grandmother, younger, kneeling in a circle of kings, holding a blade of bone.
She saw herself — not as a child, but in robes of ash, arms marked with seven sigils.
She screamed.
And then the thrones fell silent again.
She staggered from the tomb at dusk.
Her hair was damp with sweat. Her fingertips were black from gripping the edge of the cursed scroll. And her eyes — in the mirrored surface of a polished pillar — were not the same color they had been that morning.
They shimmered now, faintly, like old silver.
Like memory made flesh.
Outside, the bells were tolling.
Not for mass.
Not for a king’s death.
But because someone — or something — had broken into the royal catacombs from below.
And the seals were failing.