Grey woke before dawn, the pale light of morning casting long bars of silver through the tall, rain-streaked windows of the Harrower's Hall. Mist coiled thick outside, brushing against stone like fingers seeking entry. She sat upright in bed, breath held. The Spindle's Twin glowed faintly on the side table, resting beside the older thread-star. Both pulsed—one heartbeat apart, like lungs inhaling opposite airs.
She could feel it. A shift, subtle and shivering, in the lattice of the world.
Across the Veil, the act of unsealing Hollowmere had echoed. Soul gates trembled. Broken seals whispered to themselves in forgotten tongues. And in palaces far removed, thrones stirred in unease.
High in the crystalline towers of the Seelie Citadel, Caderyn woke with his teeth clenched.
In the drowned groves of the Undying Marsh, the Sleepless Seers wept ink.
In the hinterlands between law and dream, something old and hungry turned its gaze toward the girl with the twin threads.
Even the wind at the Hall's roofline whistled differently—as though it now carried omens.
By the time the sun had cleared the horizon, visitors had already begun to arrive.
The first was a hedge witch from the Wyrdwood, cloaked in trailing moss and dusted with crushed lavender. Her hair was wound into braids that flickered with iron charms. She carried scrolls wrapped in waxed leather, marked with thread-inked symbols that shivered when touched.
Next came a silent messenger from the Lake Court, clad in watery blues and pearls. He knelt in the threshold of the Hall's great entryway and held out a binding oath twisted in hair and silver. When Grey touched it, it shimmered once and vanished into her palm.
Spirit-crafters sent word via dream-silk—visions delivered through sleep to those who still remembered how to listen. Grey awoke from one such dream with tears on her face and a name pressed against her chest: "She Who Threads Light With Mercy."
Others came without introduction. Riders cloaked in fog. Pale-eyed wanderers who once danced for the Court of Reeds. One arrived with moths in her mouth and prophecy stitched into her skin.
Grey watched them all with something between awe and dread. They moved like myths given shape, relics of a time when stories still had teeth. Each one carried a silence that felt too heavy to belong to the living. And still they came, pressing symbols of allegiance into her hands as though she were already crowned. She didn't know what they saw in her. Didn't understand why their belief made her skin feel too small for her bones.
She whispered to herself, not for the first time: "I am not a weapon. I am not a queen."
They came not for power, nor conquest, but for something rarer. Hope.
Grey tried to receive each one with humility. Wickham, for his part, began organizing guest quarters with exaggerated ceremony, tripping over his own cloak and assigning rooms with dramatic gestures.
"You get the haunted suite. Yes, the one with the mural of a screaming deer. It's ambiance, darling," Wickham intoned with the gravity of a funeral priest, then immediately tripped over a rug and caught himself with a dramatic flourish.
"Just ignore the whispers after midnight. They only get aggressive if you snore."
He waggled his eyebrows at a beautiful, silent emissary that looked like she was from one of the coastal factions and handed her a skeleton key fashioned from what suspiciously looked like sugar glass.
"And you, my translucent duchess of tide and sighs, get the suite with the ghostly violinist. He only plays heartbreak at 3 a.m.—tres romantic."
From behind an armful of moth-silk bedding, Wickham shouted, "If anyone sees the poltergeist in the north wing, tell him dinner's at seven. He sulks if he's not invited."
Grey smiled, but it didn't quite reach her eyes. Beneath the weight of each arrival, she had begun to feel the stirrings of something vast and inarticulate—expectation without clarity. These were not mere visits. They were offerings, oblations, signs of something gathering. Yet no one could tell her what, exactly, they sought of her.
Unity? Leadership? Revolution?
She didn't know how to give what she couldn't name. And still they came, eyes bright with belief. She didn't feel like a myth. She felt like a girl wrapped in borrowed thunder.
That night, as the last guest settled and the Hall dimmed, Alaric found Grey on the rooftop garden. The air was cold but not cruel, and the city of the dead lay silent beneath them.
Alaric moved like something carved from intent—every step precise, effortless. His coat, jet-black and immaculately tailored, hinted at wealth and secrets better left unspoken. Silk sleeves rolled just once revealed inked sigils and forearms honed by quiet strength. An open collar offered a glimpse of chest and throat, more invitation than vanity.
Grey looked up, breath catching—not from cold, but from the quiet power in his presence. The light skimmed across his shoulders, revealing the restless grace beneath stillness. Her gaze lingered. Admiration had turned to ache, ache to something deeper. Around Alaric, even the air seemed to remember how to want.
She sat beneath the hornbeam tree, threads of fate loose at her shoulders, as if they too sensed that peace was only ever borrowed.
Alaric didn't speak at first. He sat beside her, his coat trailing, eyes turned toward the drifting clouds.
Grey shook her head once, as if trying to dispel cobwebs and cleared her throat quietly.
"It's starting, isn't it?" Grey asked, tone light but too quick, as if she could outpace the dread tightening in her gut. She crossed her arms, then uncrossed them, fingers twitching to fidget with anything within reach. "Go on, tell me I'm being dramatic. I'll pretend to believe you."
Alaric nodded slowly, his gaze unreadable. "You cracked open a silence that was supposed to stay buried. Now the Courts are listening—ears pricked, blades half-drawn."
Grey frowned, gaze dropping to her hands. "But what are they expecting of me? I didn't ask for this. I don't even know what they want."
Alaric leaned back against the stone wall, voice quiet but firm. "The Seelie have been unchecked for too long. Their light has grown blinding, not benevolent. The balance tilted when no one was watching, and the smaller factions—the old spirits, the solitary hedgecraft, the nameless things that predate even the Courts—they have no champion. They want peace, not power. But they're fading. And no one remembers them but each other."
He looked at Grey then, eyes luminous with quiet reverence. "They think you can restore the balance. Not as a ruler. As a reckoning. You woke something in Hollowmere. They believe you can wake the rest."
"I didn't mean to lead anything," Grey said quietly, tucking her knees up to her chest. "I was just trying to do the right thing. I didn't think anyone would actually... follow." She winced, as if the word itself might turn into prophecy. "Honestly, I thought they'd all laugh and go home."
Alaric turned, catching the starlight in his ink-dark hair and golden eyes.
"This won't end with a crown or a kiss, mo chridhe," he said. "It will cost you more than you think."
Grey's breath hitched, but her voice didn't waver. "Fine," she said, too steady, too quick. "Then I'll pay it. Not like I've got a queue of better offers waiting." She tried to make it sound like a joke, but it didn't quite land—and didn't need to.
Alaric didn't smile, not exactly. But his gaze gentled, and he reached forward to cup Grey's face, thumb brushing just below her eye as if wiping away a tear that had yet to fall.
"Of course you will," he said softly, as if it were the simplest truth in the world. "Because you never know when to stop caring, even when you should. Because you still think kindness is a strength."
They stared at each other for a moment, and then Alaric sighed, resigned.
"And I'll pay it with you," he said. "Not as your sword. Not as your shield. As your shadow—faithful to the last echo."
It sounded like more than a promise to Grey, but the question died in her throat when Alaric reached over and laid a hand over her heart—long fingers pale as ashwood and precise as a craftsman's, the kind of hand that could string a bow or scribe a blessing in the same breath. His knuckles bore faint scars, the stories of forgotten wars etched into skin pale as frostlit stone. It was the hand of someone who had broken things, and then spent centuries learning how to mend them.
Grey felt something more than just body heat pass through the warmth of the touch but was too overcome with the sudden emotion blooming in her chest to give voice to it.
And in that quiet, sacred hour, with the Hall holding its breath around them, Alaric moved his hand in a slow, ancient pattern over Grey's heart—once, twice, a third time—his fingers trailing sparks too subtle to see, too old to name. The air shimmered faintly with the memory of power, something older than the Courts, older than war. Grey felt only warmth blooming in her chest, like sunlight behind a curtain.
She didn't know what it meant, only that it felt like being held.
He whispered no words, yet the spell took root. It was a binding, born not of chains but of choice—of devotion shaped into something sacred. Magic ran from Alaric's palm into Grey's threadlight, lacing itself between them like silvered breath.
Grey didn't see the glow that flickered briefly beneath Alaric's skin. Didn't feel the faint tightening of fate as their paths coiled closer than they ever had. But Alaric felt it. And he accepted it.
A bond offered freely. A shadow pledged in silence.
Grey leaned forward, rested her forehead against Alaric's, and whispered:
"I'm glad it's you." The words were soft, shyly spoken, but carried a weight that surprised even her. "Even when you're maddening. Even when you brood like it's a competitive sport."
They lingered in the hush between words, letting silence stretch and settle around them like a second cloak. Grey talked in half-thoughts and dry humour, and Alaric listened the way he fought—attentively, without flinching. Eventually, she yawned mid-sentence, blinked as if surprised by her own fatigue, and leaned in to press a kiss to his cheek. "Don't go brooding yourself into a weather system," she said, rising with a stretch. "Try sleeping sometime."
Alaric huffed a breath that might've been a laugh. She vanished into the stairwell with a final glance over her shoulder, threads trailing faintly behind her like silvered smoke.
He remained on the rooftop long after Grey had gone. The stars wheeled overhead, indifferent and eternal, and the night pressed close with the hush of unseen wings.
He ran a hand through his hair, breath slow and measured, though his chest ached in a way he couldn't name. Grey had accepted the future with eyes too steady for someone who didn't yet understand the full weight of it. That courage—quiet, unassuming—was what undid him.
Alaric looked down at his palm, where the last glimmer of the binding spell still hummed. It had cost him something. More than Grey would ever know. The purpose-binding was old magic, older than even the Courts. It was used rarely, almost never now. A vow laced into one's own essence, carved from life-thread and willingly burned. It could not be broken. Not by time. Not by treachery. Not even by death.
No Fae invoked it lightly—especially those who understood what 'forever' truly meant. And he had done it without hesitation.
For a girl with moonlight in her hair and iron braided into her spine. For a girl who still didn't understand that her mercy was the sharpest blade ever wielded.
Alaric's eyes drifted shut.
He had seen kings rise and empires fall. Had watched the Courts rot from within while pretending they were eternal. He had stood in fire and shadow, and not once had he sworn this vow.
Not for Isolde.
Not even for Caderyn
But for Greylene Wyrde, he had given a piece of himself he could never take back. His throat tightened.
Grey would change everything. And it would cost them both. But Alaric would walk beside her—willing, bound, and unafraid. He wanted to be there for whatever choices she would make.
"Mo chridhe," he murmured, eyes on the stars. "I have already chosen."