The ruins were beautiful.

  Even four hundred years into their death, even eight months into her renewed expansion, Ash-Mordhen had bones that were beautiful. Wide streets in a sensible grid. White stone with carved details. A central plaza built around a fountain that had probably been something to see when it still ran.

  A thin, even layer of ash covered everything. Not fire-ash — this was finer, more complete. The ash of things that had been reduced to their last possible state and stayed there.

  The Sealstone was insistent in my hands. Rhythmic pulse, spreading up my arms. The mark on my wrist had been glowing steadily since we entered the city limits.

  "She's in the plaza," Lyra said quietly. "I think. At the fountain."

  We moved through the streets in a tight group. Dren ahead. Tam behind. Lyra beside me. Nobody speaking.

  I smelled her before I saw her. Not a scent exactly — more like the absence of one. A cold clean zero where warmth should be.

  She was sitting on the fountain's edge.

  Not what I expected.

  I don't know what I expected. Something dramatic, probably. Something that matched the weight of four hundred years and the ruins of a city and the still forest and the ash people.

  She looked like a woman.

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  Ordinary height, ordinary build, pale grey from head to toe — hair and skin and clothes all the same flat grey as the ash around her. She might have been fifty or she might have been ageless; it was impossible to say. She was sitting with her hands in her lap and her eyes on something I couldn't see.

  When we came into the plaza, she looked up.

  "Ashborn," she said. Her voice was tired. Not weak — just tired, in the way of something that has been exhausted for a very long time. "They sent you."

  "Nobody sent me," I said. "I came."

  Something moved across her face. The ghost of something human.

  "We are alike," she said. "Do you know that? The mark comes from ruin. The power comes from ruin. You were shaped by something breaking, same as me." She tilted her head. "I was someone's child, once. I had a village. A name that wasn't Seraphine." A pause. "I didn't choose this either."

  "Neither did I," I said.

  "Then why stop me?"

  I looked at her. Really looked.

  She was right that we were alike — in origin, in the shape of what had happened to us. Unwanted power, isolation, the long slow damage of being alone with something you didn't understand.

  But she'd had four hundred years of it. And no one had ever come.

  "Because it doesn't end with you," I said. "Whatever happened, whatever was done to you — turning everyone else into ash doesn't fix it. It just makes more of the same thing." I held the Sealstone steady in both hands. "And because you're tired. I can hear it."

  She was quiet for a long moment.

  "Four hundred years," she said. Just that. Like the weight of it was the only answer to everything.

  "I know," I said. And I didn't know, not really, not like she did. But I knew a smaller version of it — three years of exile, three years of making myself invisible, three years of sitting alone with something I didn't understand and was too afraid to use. Three years had nearly broken me.

  Four hundred.

  "Is there a version of this," I said carefully, "where the binding is a rest? Not a punishment. An actual rest."

  She looked at me.

  "That is an unusual offer from someone holding the Sealstone," she said.

  "I mean it."

  The grey eyes studied me for a long, long moment.

  "Do it," she said finally. Quietly. "Before I change my mind."