A Thread to Follow

The silence hung in Celeste's room just long enough to seem purposeful.

She still hadn't answered my question.

Or maybe she had, just not in words.

Tell me, Alarion, how does it feel, to be erased?

It was not a question to ask lightly.

I met her in her gaze, looking for something behind those eyes — some clue, some indication of what she was thinking, some crack in her carefully curated facade.

But there was nothing.

Only waiting.

Only control.

I exhaled, steadying myself. "I wouldn't know."

Celeste hummed, her fingers drumming gently on the chair's armrest. "Not yet."

Now the air in the room felt heavier.

Asura, next to me, hadn't said a word since we'd entered. But I sensed the change in her posture — the silent alertness, the gravity in her quiet.

Celeste wasn't talking to only me.

She was watching both of us.

Measuring something neither of us could see, yet.

….

Celeste leaned back in her chair, sighing as though she'd foreseen the course of this conversation every step of the way we walked through it.

Then finally she gave me something.

Not an answer.

A thread.

"There's a place not far from here," she said, in a smooth, measured voice. "You can't find it on any map. But if you know where to ask, they'll tell you about the forsaken bastion beyond the eastern lowlands.'

She cocked her head a little, looking at me. "Or what remains of it."

My pulse slowed.

A stronghold.

Something abandoned.

Something erased.

Asura's voice was soft but definitive. "Why are you telling us this?"

Celeste's lips quirked faintly but the expression was inscrutable.

"Because someone should."

The significance of those words hung heavy between us."

Nothing is Given Freely

I gritted my teeth and willed myself to think.

She was giving us just enough to guide us toward something. But not enough to know what we were walking into.

I didn't like it.

I hated that it felt like I was running after something somebody wanted me to discover.

Celeste must have sensed the hesitation in my eyes.

Her voice lowered — just slightly. "You asked why knights were disappearing."

She gestured just enough to suggest that I put two and two together. "You wanted to know what they were erased from."

She paused for a moment after speaking before concluding, "You should start there."

The Unspoken Warning

Her smile flickered almost imperceptibly and disappeared.

For the first time, there was a change in her expression.

No hesitation. Not fear.

But something resembling caution.

"Watch where you're looking, Alarion."

The way she said this — low, deliberate, with a weight to it, under the surface—made my stomach tighten.

She wasn't just directing us.

She was warning us.

I didn't know what yet.

But I had a sense we would know soon.

....

We walked out of Celeste's chamber without another word.

Nothing had changed, and yet the halls of the knight order felt more frigid than ever before.

I let out a breath, raking my hand through my hair. "An abandoned stronghold."

Asura walked along with me, unfaltering. "It's not abandoned."

I frowned, glancing at her. "What?"

She didn't look at me. "Those kinds of places never stay vacant."

She was right.

I suspected that we weren't just moving toward ruins.

We were on our way to something different.

Something waiting.

And for the first time, I wasn't confident that we were prepared.

…

Flecks of snow drifted down from the sky, quietly and unhurried.

They stuck to my cloak, dissolved into the heat of my skin, and vanished into the still husk of the forest road. Winter had weighted the world into stillness, the breath of it a slow exhalation between trees.

It should have been peaceful.

It wasn't.

Celeste's presence still lingered in my mind, like the ghost of an unfinished conversation.

The tone she'd used—carefully measured, as though she already knew where this path would take us long before we ever walked it.

Asura sat next to me, appearing unwound, but I knew from experience.

She was thinking what I was thinking.

There was a long pause before either of us spoke.

"What do you make of her?" I finally asked.

It took Asura a moment to respond. She didn't put her thoughts into words.

Instead, she allowed the silence to settle between us, heavy as the sky before a storm.

Then—"She's dangerous."

A simple answer. But I felt the weight of it.

I took a breath and blew it out, watching it spiral into the chill. "You think she's lying to us?

Asura shook her head, barely. "Not lying. Just not telling us all of it."

She gripped her horse's reins and scanned the road before them. "She's not like the others."

I knew what she meant.

The nobles we'd met previously—that had clung to their power with desperation, always reaching for more.

Celeste didn't grab anything.

She sat. She watched. She waited.

And when she did speak, she never wasted her words.

The Woman Who Orders Without Ordering

I ran a gloved hand over my reins, the leather warm and worn under my fingers.

"I don't know why, but … I believed her."

Asura's eyes ranged towards me, keen in the dimming light. "That's the problem."

I frowned. "You think she is manipulating us?"

A pause. She then added, "I don't think she needs to."

The snow fell on, covering the vacant road in white.

"Asura," she said again, her voice less loud.

"Have you noticed?"

I glanced at her. "Noticed what?"

The reins tightened slightly in her grip. "People take her at face value all the time. Without realizing it."

I reflected on our conversation, how Celeste had been the master of that meeting without ever raising her voice, without ever asking for it.

She'd shared enough for us to go ahead.

And we had taken it.

As if there were anything other way to go?

I swallowed the knot of unease that coiled in my throat.

She didn't tell us to go to the stronghold.

She didn't have to.

Trust and Caution

The road snaked ahead, through frost-frosted trees, distant peaks of the mountains swelling in the twilight.

We were walking toward something we wouldn't come back from the same.

Asura let out a slow breath. "I don't trust her."

Yes, I said, but at a lower volume. "Neither do I."

But the truth hung in the air between us, unsaid.

And yet … we were still following her lead.

A Presence Unseen

The trees whispered in the wind, the hush of snowfall absorbing sound.

Too quiet.

Too still.

My hairs stood up on the back of my neck and I straightened in my saddle.

Something was watching.

Not an animal. Not another traveler.

Something else.

Asura must have felt it too.

She didn't stir, didn't tense, but I noticed how her fingers slipped toward the hilt of her dagger.

The last we encountered this feeling was back in the abandoned village.

There'd been something that night, watching. Listening.

And now, it was here too.

I gripped my sword more firmly. That whatever waited at the stronghold… was not waiting alone.