Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 235: Chapter 230: No One Will Miss Them

Location: Thornhaven Village / Training Clearing

Date/Time: 20 Ashwhisper, 9938 AZI

Realm: Mid Realm

The mornings had gotten easier.

Not easy — Lyria doubted mornings would ever be truly easy again, not with the weight of visions pressing behind her eyes like storms waiting to break and the constant, low-grade awareness of a bond humming in her chest like a second heartbeat she hadn’t asked for. But easier. The way a bruise stopped hurting when you stopped poking at it.

She sat on the porch step of her family’s cottage, mending a rip in Joren’s tunic. The boy had torn it climbing something he shouldn’t have been climbing — a tree, a wall, the new fortification stonework — she hadn’t bothered asking which. Eight-year-old boys climbed things. That was their entire purpose in life, as far as she could tell, and no amount of heritage was going to change that fundamental truth.

The necklace rested warm against her collarbone. Four days since the seed had been revealed, since she’d seen a stranger in a metal mirror and felt the world tilt sideways. Four days since Vaelith had gently suggested the necklace go back on, and the vine had retreated beneath its silver suppression like a fire banked for winter.

She looked like herself again. Freckles and all. Storm-grey eyes without the streaks of gold and green that had turned them into something otherworldly. Hair that was copper-gold-brown and nothing more — no threads of white and green woven through it like whispered secrets.

Just Lyria. The village prophetess. The girl who burned her own life away every time the visions came.

That was complicated enough.

The thread in her chest pulsed warm, and she didn’t have to look up to know Voresh was watching from the tree line. He did that — stood at the edge of things, patient as stone, never crowding, never pushing. Just... present. A copper-eyed constant at the margins of her awareness.

She’d stopped pretending it didn’t comfort her.

”You can come closer,” she said, not raising her voice. He’d hear. Demon senses were ridiculous that way. ”I’m only mending. It’s not exactly a private ritual.”

Movement at the edge of her vision. Then he was there — settling onto the ground beside the porch step with the controlled grace of someone who’d been sitting down for thirty thousand years and had gotten irritatingly good at it. He didn’t sit on the step itself. Too close. He chose the grass just below, where his head was level with her knees and his copper eyes could watch the village without watching her directly.

He always did that. Positioned himself where she could see him, but where his gaze wasn’t aimed at her. Giving her the choice of engagement. Offering presence without pressure.

It was infuriating, how good he was at it.

”The twins climbed the east wall again,” Lyria said, pulling thread through fabric. ”Kael made it halfway up before Sorvak caught him. Joren got further — nearly reached the patrol walk before Zharek plucked him off.”

”Zharek informed me.” The faintest shift in Voresh’s expression — not quite a smile, but the ghost of one. The kind of expression that would have been invisible three weeks ago, when his face had been copper stone and his eyes had held the flat emptiness of a man holding his last leaf by willpower alone. ”He said your brother called him a red-haired gargoyle.”

”That sounds like Joren.”

”Zharek was... pleased. He hasn’t been called names by a child in eight thousand years.”

Lyria’s needle paused. There it was again — that particular ache that came with knowing things. Not prophetic knowing. Just the regular, human kind. The kind that settled in when you learned that an eight-thousand-year-old warrior had been so long without children that being insulted by one made him happy.

She went back to mending.

The silence between them wasn’t empty. It was the kind of silence that had grown over twenty days of proximity and three strands of bond and one lullaby that had pulled her soul back from the dark — a silence that held more than most people’s conversations.

***

Elder Torvald arrived at mid-morning, his grey beard freshly trimmed and his Blazecrowned essence banked to its usual steady glow. He walked with the deliberate pace of a man who’d been keeping outcasts alive for decades and had learned that rushing frightened people more than patience ever did.

He wasn’t alone. Aldris walked beside him, and from the rigid set of her father’s shoulders, Lyria could tell this wasn’t a casual visit.

”Morning, Elder.” She set the mending aside. ”Papa.”

Aldris nodded. His pointed ears were pale at the tips — the elven tell for stress that he couldn’t control no matter how hard he tried. ”Lyria. Is your mother inside?”

”She was making tea when I came out. She might be lying down now.”

A look passed between Torvald and Aldris. Quick. The kind of look that adults exchanged when they thought children weren’t paying attention, which was foolish, because Lyria had been paying attention to everything since she was old enough to understand that the world wanted her dead.

”I’ll look in on her,” Torvald said, his tone pitched to sound casual and failing. ”Brought some of that willow bark she asked about.”

He hadn’t. Lyria could see his hands were empty except for the walking stick he carried more out of habit than necessity. A Peak Blazecrowned cultivator didn’t need support to walk across a village.

He wanted to check on Kaela. And the fact that he was being careful about it meant he’d noticed what Lyria had been noticing for days.

Her mother was unravelling.

Not dramatically. Kaela wasn’t the dramatic type — she was the type who held everything together until the seams showed, and then held it together some more, and didn’t stop holding until her hands shook and her wings pressed flat against her back and she went quiet in a way that was worse than screaming.

Four days since the vine. Four days since Kaela had watched her daughter become something that confirmed every truth she’d spent forty years burying. The demon blood wasn’t a trace. Wasn’t a ghost of a grandfather’s misfortune three generations removed. It was strong enough to produce a Shan’keth vine at fourteen. Strong enough to rewrite her daughter’s appearance. Strong enough to mean everything Kaela had told herself about her family’s history was a lie.

She’d barely spoken since.

Torvald disappeared inside. Aldris lingered on the path, hands opening and closing at his sides.

”How is she, really?” Lyria asked, quiet enough that the words wouldn’t carry.

Her father’s jaw worked. ”She sleeps. Or pretends to. Eats when I put food in front of her. Holds the little ones when they crawl into her lap.” His voice roughened. ”But she’s somewhere I can’t reach, Lyri. Somewhere inside herself where I don’t have the words to follow.”

Voresh had gone very still beside the porch. Not intruding. Just... present. The bond carried something warm and steady — not comfort exactly, but the absence of judgment. The feeling of being witnessed without being weighed.

”Vaelith could—” Lyria started.

”Your mother won’t see the demon healer.” Aldris said it without bitterness, but the exhaustion beneath the words was vast. ”Won’t see any of them. She’s polite — she hasn’t been rude. She just... closes. Like a door shutting.”

Lyria set the mending in her lap. She wanted to say something helpful. Something wise, something a prophetess should say, about time and healing and the weight of truths too long denied. But she was fourteen, and her mother was broken, and no amount of prophetic sight could show her how to fix that.

”Give her time, Papa.”

It was all she had. It wasn’t enough. From the way Aldris nodded — too quickly, too carefully — he knew it too.

***

The vision came at noon.

No warning. No slow build of pressure behind her eyes, no creeping sense of wrongness at the edges of her awareness. One moment she was walking the perimeter with Voresh — their afternoon routine, checking wardstones, a quiet circuit of the village that had become something she looked forward to more than she’d admit — and the next, the world turned to white fire.

She gasped. Staggered. Her wings flared instinctively, upsetting her balance rather than helping it, and the wardstone path tilted wildly beneath feet that were suddenly uncertain of where the ground was.

Arms caught her. Strong, careful, familiar. Voresh moved without hesitation — one arm around her waist, the other hand catching her shoulder, guiding her down to the moss beside the path before her legs gave out entirely.

”Lyria.”

His voice. Low, steady, the anchor-tone he’d used every time this happened since the lullaby. Not a question. A statement. I’m here. You’re here. This is real.

She felt his essence shift — not the explosive half-transformation of the last time, but something deliberate. Controlled. Wings emerged from his back with a sound like leather unfolding, copper-bronze membranes spreading over them both and blocking out the sky. A shelter of scales and bone and thirty thousand years of protection instinct, and through the bond, a flood of warmth that said: I have you. Fall.

Lyria fell.

***

The vision opened on a room she’d never seen.

Stone walls. High ceilings. Candelabras throwing warm golden light across tapestries depicting scenes of worship — hands raised toward radiant suns, white-robed figures in attitudes of prayer. Beautiful. Expensive. The kind of beauty purchased with other people’s suffering and displayed without shame.

A woman paced before a desk covered in scrolls.

Auburn hair. Green eyes. Tall, moving with a predator’s restless energy that her elegant white-and-gold robes couldn’t disguise. Lyria recognised her from the first vision — from the death visions, from the hunting parties, from every nightmare the prophetic rune had burned into her sleeping mind since the night her gift awakened.

High Priestess Sharlin.

She was furious.

Not the cold, calculated fury of a woman in control. This was frustration boiled to the surface, cracking the composure that Sharlin wore like armour. She gripped a scroll in one hand, knuckles white, and when she spoke, her voice carried the brittle precision of someone holding back a scream.

”Five hundred,” she said. ”The quota is five hundred this quarter. Five hundred — and I barely fulfilled three hundred and twelve last time.”

The figure standing at attention near the door didn’t flinch. A shadow guard — Lyria could see the dark essence clinging to his armour like smoke, the kind of soldier who operated in the spaces between official Temple business and the things the Temple pretended didn’t exist. Peak Apexblight, at minimum. The shadow guard didn’t recruit anything less.

”The eastern provinces are becoming difficult, Your Radiance.” His voice was flat. Professional. ”Three villages have lodged formal complaints with their regional lords. Missing children. The numbers are drawing attention.”

”I know what the numbers are.” Sharlin threw the scroll onto the desk. It rolled across the surface and fell off the far edge. She didn’t retrieve it. ”I’ve been managing the numbers for eight thousand years. But the Soulbloom synthesis requires specific quantities, and the entity does not accept excuses.”

The guard waited. He had the look of a man who’d learned that silence was safer than words when the High Priestess was in this mood.

Sharlin pressed her fingers to her temples. Paced three steps. Turned. Paced three steps back. ”We can’t take more from the current sources. Too many eyes, too many questions. One more missing child from the eastern villages and we’ll have a delegation in the throne room demanding investigations.” Her mouth twisted — ugly, desperate. ”Where am I supposed to find an endless supply of children that no one will miss?”

She wasn’t asking the guard. She was asking the room, the air, the frustration coiled in her chest. The question of a woman solving a logistics problem — the way someone might puzzle over grain shortages or supply chain disruptions, except the supply chain was children and the product was horror.

The guard shifted his weight. ”There is... one possibility, Your Radiance.”

Sharlin’s pacing stopped.

”The Mid Realm.” The guard’s tone remained flat, but something in his posture straightened — the subtle adjustment of a man who knew his next words would land well. ”The mixed breeds. The half-blood settlements in the primordial forests.”

”What about them?”

”King Aldren of Ironveil has petitioned the Temple again. Third time this year. He wants assistance eradicating the outcast settlements along his western border.” The guard paused. Let the information breathe. ”His exact words were: ’They’re breeding worse than rats. Every season, there are more of them, squatting on land that rightfully belongs to the crown.’”

Sharlin went still.

Not the stillness of shock. The stillness of a predator catching a scent.

”Mixed breeds,” she said slowly. ”In the Mid Realm.”

”Nearly eight hundred thousand of them, Your Radiance. Scattered across the primordial forests in hundreds of settlements. No kingdom claims them. No royal house protects them. The humans despise them. The elven courts pretend they don’t exist.” The guard’s voice dropped — just a fraction, just enough to give his next words the weight of a door swinging open. ”No one will miss them.”

Something shifted behind Sharlin’s eyes. The frustration didn’t disappear — it transformed. The tight lines around her mouth loosened. Her pupils dilated. The expression of someone watching a problem they’d been beating their head against for months suddenly dissolve into nothing.

”No one will miss them,” she repeated. Softly. Almost wonderingly. ”No one has ever missed them.”

She moved to the desk. Pushed aside scrolls and ink pots until she found a map — large, detailed, showing the Mid Realm’s vast primordial forests with scattered markers indicating known outcast settlements. Dozens of them. Scores. Hundreds.

Her finger traced the clusters. ”Population estimates?”

”Roughly eight hundred thousand total, Your Radiance. Approximately four hundred and fifty thousand children.”

Sharlin’s finger stopped moving.

And she smiled.

It was the worst thing Lyria had ever seen. Worse than the cribs. Worse than the grinding stones and the drainage channels and the small dark-haired girl who’d said please. Because the cribs were horror already accomplished — suffering already inflicted. This smile was the moment horror was invented. The instant a woman looked at eight hundred thousand living souls and saw raw material.

”Cattle,” Sharlin breathed. ”They’re cattle. An endless supply.”

She began to move. Fast now — the frustrated pacing replaced by the sharp, efficient movements of a commander seizing an opportunity. She pulled fresh parchment from a drawer. Dipped a quill. Began writing with the speed of someone whose mind was racing ahead of her hand.

”The children first. All of them. Every mixed-breed child — rounded up, sorted by age and essence potential. Transport to the eastern compounds immediately. Four hundred and fifty thousand.” She said it the way someone might say four hundred and fifty thousand bushels of grain. Units. Product. ”The females of breeding age — keep them. Breeding stock. We’ll need proper facilities. Not the current chambers — those were designed for dozens, not thousands. Establish breeding pens in the Upper Realm. Requisition the old garrison complexes along the northern wall — plenty of space, easily converted.”

”And the rest, Your Radiance? The elders? Males past usefulness? Those without viable essence channels?”

Sharlin didn’t look up from her writing. ”Kill them. They serve no purpose.”

The guard’s expression didn’t change. Not a flicker. Not a twitch. He’d heard orders like this before, or he’d trained himself to hear them without flinching. Lyria’s soul screamed.

”The passageways.” Sharlin stopped writing. Set the quill down. Her green eyes found the map again, tracing the marked portals that connected the Mid Realm to the Lower Realm. ”Every Mid Realm passageway is under Temple jurisdiction. All of them. Once we begin collection, I want them sealed. Every last one.”

”The Lower Realm will object—”

”The Lower Realm.” Sharlin’s lip curled. ”Barbarians squatting in the mud, playing at civilization with their primitive little academies and their laughable cultivation. What are they going to do — send a strongly worded petition?” She flicked her hand, dismissing an entire realm. ”Seal the passageways. Break them if necessary. Who needs those savages? Let them rot on the other side.”

”Timeline, Your Radiance?”

Sharlin looked at the map one more time. Eight hundred thousand markers. Eight hundred thousand people who had built lives in the gaps between kingdoms that didn’t want them, who had raised children and planted gardens and argued with their neighbours and fallen in love and grown old in communities that existed because nowhere else would have them.

”Thirty days,” she said. ”Begin preparations immediately. I want the shadow guard mobilized — full deployment, every Peak Apexblight operative we have. Hunters briefed and equipped. Passageways staffed and ready to seal on my command. Collection begins on the first of Frostforge.”

”Your Radiance... the scale of this operation. Eight hundred thousand subjects, across hundreds of settlements spread over half a million square miles of primordial forest. The logistics alone—”

”Are your problem.” Sharlin’s voice went cold. Flat. The warmth of her eureka moment curdling into something harder. ”I don’t care how you do it. Burn the forests if you must. Drive them into the open. They’re vermin — they’ll scatter, and scattered vermin are easy to herd.” She turned back to her desk. ”Thirty days. Not thirty-one. The entity is growing impatient, and I will not be the one to disappoint it.”

The guard saluted. Palm to chest, fist to shoulder. The Temple’s gesture of obedience, performed by a man who was about to organize the systematic capture, enslavement, and slaughter of eight hundred thousand people.

He left.

Sharlin sat alone in her golden room, surrounded by tapestries of worship and the smell of expensive candle wax, and began planning the details of a genocide with the focused attention of a woman balancing household accounts.

***

The vision didn’t end.

It should have. Lyria felt the boundary — the place where the scene would normally dissolve, where the prophetic sight would release her and let her crash back into her own body with a headache and a nosebleed and the weight of what she’d seen.

But the vision held. Tightened. The room dissolved, and in its place —

Time.

Rushing forward. Not days. Not weeks. Months. Years. The prophetic gift grabbed the thread of Sharlin’s plan and pulled it taut, following it into the future it would create if nothing changed. If no one stopped it. If thirty days passed and the shadow guard descended on the primordial forests, and eight hundred thousand people were swallowed by a machine built for grinding.

Lyria saw.