Limerence moved like an ember on the wind, slow, drifting, and easily overlooked.
She wasn't silent the way Vell was. Where his stealth was a craft, hers was a show. He vanished with intent. She vanished not through skill, but because no one ever thought to look.
She followed the Lord Chancellor at a distance, her steps light but confident.
No one would stop her. No one would even question it.
The idea that someone like her would be skulking through the palace simply didn't occur to the elves. And that was her advantage.
The Lord Chancellor hadn't left the castle, and his steps indicated that he had a destination in mind.
The Chancellor walked alone.
No guards. No aides.
He didn't need them.
He had a reputation for being deadly in his own right, a master of combat.
His silver cloak trailed behind him, immaculate no matter where he walked.
Limerence followed him without hurry, pausing only once or twice to renew the fading vanishing powder.
He led her through an aging wing of the palace—windows sealed tight, sconces replaced with quiet crystal lights. No guest had walked these halls in centuries.
Then came the descent.
A narrow staircase spiraled twice before it opened into a passage even older. The air was cooler here. And it was as quiet as a sealed tomb.
He passed beneath an arch engraved with the royal crest. Despite its age, it was spotless.
A door stood ajar ahead. He slipped through it without pause.
Limerence waited. Counted to twenty. Then she crept forward and pressed herself just beside the entrance, careful not to cast a shadow across the floor.
It was a private chamber, circular, with a crescent-shaped table at its center. There were no windows, only hanging lanterns casting steady light.
Limerence narrowed her eyes.
Five others stood inside. She recognized them immediately.
Each represented a pillar of the united elven power structure: military, arcane, economic, agricultural, and civic.
Ministers, archmages, generals. Not just advisors but the backbone of the entire empire.
And all of them, Kalandir. Immortals in the truest sense, until the announcement of the queen's death.
The Chancellor didn't sit.
"They're all asking," he said. "Even the Irath, who so rarely travel beyond their own borders. They all want to know."
One of the others was a tall woman with porcelain skin and black-glass eyes. "They shouldn't be asking. Because what they suggest is impossible," she said.
"She didn't die," another added. "It is just something we cannot understand."
"We are kalandir," the obsidian-eyed woman said flatly. "We do not pass. We do not wither. We persist until the world itself ceases to spin. This? This is not that."
The Chancellor's voice lowered. "She was found cold. In her chambers. No wound. No blade. No curse. No trace of anything left behind."
"Then how?" someone whispered. "She was stronger than any of us. She ruled through centuries of collapse and still held it together. Nothing could have killed her."
"There were no signs of struggle," the Chancellor said. "No resistance. Just her, still, devoid of all life."
"We spent ten years looking," another voice said, bitterly. "Ten years of ritual autopsies, divinations, and memory-scrying, and still, nothing."
There was a long silence. It was so oppressive that Limerence almost couldn't breathe.
Not until someone finally whispered what she had begun to suspect.
"Could she… Could she have unmade herself?"
"She couldn't have," the Chancellor snapped. "We don't even know how. We are her kin, closest to her in blood and spirit, and even if one of us wanted to end, we wouldn't know how to begin."
"She should have told us," someone said, almost pleading. "If she discovered something... if she found a way... she should have said why she did it."
Limerence eased back from the doorway, her heart beating fast.
They didn't know either.