The sisters stepped through the moon-washed courtyard, they bring the pithos approached the great house. Its white marble facade glowed like bleached bone in the starlight, flanked by guards whose spearpoints caught the light like frozen lightning. The air smelled of crushed lavender and something sharper—myrrh, perhaps, or the metallic tang of wealth.
Pheropyr lifted the teacher's bronze token. The guard's eyes widened—just a fraction—before he struck his chest in salute. Without a word, he turned on his heel, his armored boots clicking against the mosaic floor.
The house unfolded like a sacred text.
Corridors stretched into shadow, lined with busts of long-dead philosophers whose hollow eyes seemed to track their progress. Between them, ceramic planters overflowed with blossoms so vibrantly colored they looked painted by the gods themselves: saffron crocuses, hyacinths dyed Tyrian purple, even a pot of Persian roses that shouldn't have bloomed this far north.
Then they saw it.
A bolt of fabric cascaded down the central stairwell—a purple so deep it drank the torchlight. Pherodaro's breath hitched. *Imperial dye.* Enough to ransom a city-state, draped carelessly over a banister.
The guard led them upward, past frescoes of wars no historian recorded, past a life-sized statue of some armored hero with gemstones for eyes. The scent thickened—not just flowers now, but spikenard and pressed lotus, oils so precious they were literally worth their weight in silver.
By the third landing, the sisters had lost all sense of direction.
At last, they reached a door inlaid with ivory pomegranates. The guard murmured to a waiting handmaiden, who curtsied and retrieved a curious object from a side table: a tiny bell cast in the likeness of a Hiereia, her slender form holding the clapper.
*Ting-a-ling. Ting... ling.*
The sequence mattered. The sisters exchanged glances—each chime resonated differently, as if the sound itself had been tuned to some celestial scale.
"Enter." The voice beyond the door was aged honey, thick with Attic vowels.
The chamber beyond was a paradox: at once a scholar's cell and a queen's retiring room. Scroll cases lined the walls, but the couch was upholstered in that impossible purple. A silver-haired woman reclined there, her sightless eyes closed, her fingers tracing the teacher's token like Braille.
"Leave us," she said.
The handmaiden vanished.
The old woman laughed—a sound like parchment tearing. "To send two girls after those stones... Either he's gone soft, or you're sharper than you look." She rose with unexpected grace, her bone-handled cane tapping toward a writing desk. "Sit. This will take a moment."
As the sisters settled onto klismos chairs (their curved backs inlaid with mother-of-pearl dolphins), the woman began scratching on vellum with a gold-nibbed stylus. "Your teacher never understood the danger. That... *presence*... it doesn't just kill you. It makes you *feel* your death coming."
Suddenly, she lifted her face. Milky eyes fixed on Pheropyr. "Why abandon comfort for a ghost story?"
Pheropyr's knuckles whitened around the pithos. "The stones *mean* something. We may not grasp it yet, but—"
"—but you've tasted the mystery," the woman finished. She nodded. "Oh yes. Real as dreams, dangerous as prophecy." The stylus resumed its dance. "Yet here you sit, ready to trade your futures for answers."
A pause. Then, softer: "He chose well."
Abruptly, she stood. "Listen closely. The being at Ophiomer's ruin is no Hiereia. She observes no rituals, bows to no pantheon. Her power is... *other*." The cane struck the floor for emphasis. "Kings have wept before her. Generals soiled their armor. And her tests?" A mirthless smile. "Forty years. Not one soul has passed."
She extended the freshly inked scroll. Pheropyr glimpsed sigils that squirmed under the lamplight before the woman sealed it with a drop of black wax.
"Fail, and flee. There's no shame in survival."
The Hiereia-bell chimed again.
As the handmaiden escorted them out, the sisters caught a glimpse of the mansion's beating heart: a sunken garden where perfumed aristocrats sipped wine beneath orange trees, their laughter floating up like bubbles in amber.
Deeper into the house they went, down servants' stairs that smelled of cedar and lamp oil, until they reached an unmarked door. The handmaiden knocked in a pattern: *shave-and-a-haircut.*
Something heavy thudded inside.
The door creaked open to reveal three hooded figures. One—taller than the others—leaned down as the handmaiden whispered, her lips brushing the wool over his ear. The teacher's token changed hands.
No words were spoken.
Out back, a wagon waited, its plain boards belying the quality of its springs. "Silence past the city gates," rumbled a hooded man as he handed them up. "For all our sakes."
The pithos settled into straw padding as the wheels began to turn.
Above, in a window wreathed with jasmine, the blind woman pressed a hand to the glass.
"Ah, my stone," she murmured to the night. "Kind of miss them."