I emerged from the ice cellar not as Kieran the dying prince, but as something the empire had no name for. A living void. A walking end.
The winter sun felt different now. Its warmth was data, not comfort. The cold of the air was a texture, not a sensation. I moved through the palace corridors like a ghost who had remembered he was never really alive to begin with.
Elara found me in my chambers an hour later, her face pale with waiting. When she saw me, she stopped dead.
"Your Highness... you're different."
"I am," I agreed. No point in denial. "And so is everything else."
She didn't flinch. That was why I trusted her. "What now?"
"Now we visit the Spider."
Prince Victus received me in his private study, a room lined with ledgers and maps and the faint, lingering scent of expensive ink. He did not rise when I entered, but his grey eyes narrowed, assessing. The fire in the hearth crackled, a表演 of warmth in a room that radiated cold calculation.
"You look well, brother," he said, his voice smooth as oil. "Remarkably well for a dying man."
"I found a cure," I replied, taking a seat across from him without invitation. "Heresy, apparently. You'd know all about that."
A flicker. The smallest tightening around his eyes. The 'V & Flame' patron recognized that I knew.
"I don't know what you mean."
"Of course you don't." I leaned back, letting the silence stretch. The void within me reached out, not to consume, but to listen. The room's mana whispered its secrets: the subtle poison detection ward on his wine decanter, the alarm threads woven into the window frames, the faint, sickly green residue of Glimmerblight on his writing desk.
He'd been in Lyra's temple. Or someone had.
"Gorven's dead," I said. "Orin's gone. Your network in the palace is fraying, Victus. The threads you've been pulling are snapping back toward you."
His composure cracked, just slightly. "You think I had something to do with the steward's death? The old blind fool's disappearance?"
"I think you're the 'V & Flame,'" I said flatly. "I think you've been funding heresy research for years, trying to find a weapon against Valerius. I think you found something in mother's old notes about the Starless Veil, and you've been poking holes in reality hoping something useful would crawl through."
The silence that followed was absolute.
Then Victus laughed. A dry, humorless sound. "You're more like her than any of us knew. She saw patterns too. Conspiracies in the spaces between stars."
"My mother," I said, "died because someone wanted her research buried. Was that you?"
"No." The denial was immediate, almost offended. "I was twelve when she was killed. But I read her journals afterward. She was tracking something, Kieran. Something beneath the palace. She called it the 'Hunger That Waits.' She believed it wasn't a threat, but an opportunity. A power source beyond mana, beyond affinity."
He leaned forward, his eyes sharp with a hunger of their own. "I spent years trying to find what she found. The cellar door. The sealed chamber. But it never opened for me. It only ever opened for you."
"You used me as bait," I realized. "The poison. The slow assassination attempts. You let them happen to see if I'd break, if I'd reveal the secret she'd hidden in me."
"I wanted to see what you were," he admitted. "I never expected you to become what you are."
We stared at each other across the desk, two predators acknowledging the other's teeth.
"I could kill you," I said. Not a threat. A statement of fact.
"You could. But you won't." He gestured to the maps on his wall. "Because you need what I have. Information. Resources. Access. You want something bigger than this throne room, don't you? Something beyond the empire."
The ghost of Maya's smile flickered behind my eyes.
"There's a girl," I said. "In another world. Dying. I need to reach her."
Victus's eyebrows rose. For the first time, genuine surprise crossed his face. "A girl. Not a throne. Not revenge. A girl." He laughed again, but this time there was something almost like respect in it. "Mother would have loved that. She always said the grandest quests start with the smallest, most human reasons."
"Can you help me or not?"
He was silent for a long moment, calculating. I could almost see the equations running behind his eyes—cost, benefit, risk, reward.
"I have access to the Starscribe Vault," he said finally. "The empire's oldest archive, beneath the Imperial Library. It contains pre-imperial texts, including fragments your mother translated. If there's a way to pierce the Veil, the answer is there."
"And what do you want in return?"
"Valerius." The name was ice. "He's moving against me. His faction in the military grows stronger each day. If he takes the throne, my research, my network, my life ends. I need him neutralized. Not killed—that would make him a martyr. Broken. Disgraced. Removed from succession."
I considered the request. It was simple. It was also the opening move in a game far larger than Victus understood.
"Show me the vault," I said. "Then we discuss your brother."
---
The Starscribe Vault was not a room. It was a cathedral.
Beneath the Imperial Library, carved into bedrock older than the palace itself, the vault stretched upward into darkness. Pillars of unadorned stone rose like petrified trees. Shelves lined every surface, filled not with books but with tablets—slabs of obsidian, jade, and a pale, veined material that looked disturbingly like fossilized bone.
The air was cold, dry, and tasted of nothing. No mana circulated here. The vault was a dead zone, intentionally designed to resist magical tampering.
"Only the Emperor and his designated heir can enter," Victus murmured, his torch casting dancing shadows. "Father granted me access when I became Master of Archives. He thought it would keep me busy with history instead of politics." A bitter smile. "He underestimated how much history is just politics with older names."
I moved through the aisles, drawn not by sight but by the void's subtle pull. The Star-Eater within me recognized something here. Not hunger. Recognition.
…kin…
The word surfaced, and I stopped before a tablet that was different from the others. It was larger, a slab of polished black stone taller than me, covered in spiraling script that predated the empire's language. But I could read it. The knowledge was just there, imprinted by the sphere's merging.
"The Veil is not a wall. It is a wound that healed wrong. To open it, you must reopen the wound."
Below the script, a diagram. A circle, intersected by seven lines. At each intersection, a symbol: Fire, Water, Earth, Air, Wood, Metal... and a seventh, blank space.
"The Seventh Element is not an element. It is the absence of element. Void. To scar the Veil, you must offer a feast of six, consumed by the seventh."
The meaning crystallized.
The ritual required the cataclysmic consumption of all six elemental magics in a single, focused point. A battle, a convergence, a storm of opposing forces. The void would be the catalyst, the consumer, the key.
I needed to create a war.
Not a skirmish. Not a political coup. A full-scale, magical conflagration involving Fire, Water, Earth, Air, Wood, and Metal mages at the peak of their power. And I needed them to die in that conflict, their released energy feeding the wound I would reopen.
Victus read over my shoulder, his face paling as understanding dawned. "You can't be serious. That would require... that would destroy the capital. Tens of thousands dead."
"Yes," I said simply.
He stared at me, seeing for the first time not a pawn, not a rival, but something genuinely other. "Who is this girl? What is she to you?"
I turned from the tablet, meeting his gaze with eyes that held the memory of galaxies dying.
"She's my sister. And she's the only reason any of you are still alive."
The weight of the statement hung in the ancient air.
Victus swallowed. When he spoke again, his voice was hoarse. "Then we'd better start planning a war."
---