The Palazzo Rosso, pre-dawn
Esmé awoke before the light came, her breath caught in her chest like something had been taken and returned too quickly.
She sat up in the dark, heart thudding, one hand to her throat.
The air in her room was thicker than it should have been. Not warm. Not cold.
Just… watching.
She rose, not bothering with a cloak, and crossed the room barefoot. The corridor beyond was silent, but not empty. She felt it.
Something in the Veil had shifted.
And it was calling.
She didn't speak a word as she climbed the spiral staircase to the highest chamber in the east tower—a room the Council called the Oraculum, though none used it often.
It was said the Veil ran thinnest there.
The door opened without protest.
Inside, moonlight filtered through a ring of tall arched windows. Dust motes shimmered like suspended stars. A single mirror stood at the center, framed in bone and polished obsidian.
Esmé approached slowly.
The pendant at her wrist began to pulse.
The mirror showed no reflection.
Only darkness.
Then—movement.
It wasn't an image.
It was a sensation.
A thrum beneath her skin. Like words forming without sound, symbols pressed into her thoughts without language.
She closed her eyes.
And the Veil spoke.
You walk unthreaded, child of memory,
You carry more than fire.
But what you break, you must also bear.
She opened her eyes, gasping—but the mirror was unchanged. No voice. No shift. Only silence.
Then her pendant cracked—just slightly, a hairline fracture splitting the rose in two.
Esmé staggered back.
The voice echoed one last time, deep and ancient:
The rose must wither before it blooms again.
———————————————————
She found Luca in the solarium not long after, pacing near the windows as if he'd already known something had shifted.
His eyes locked on her instantly.
"You felt it," he said.
She nodded, still breathless. "It… it wasn't a vision. It was a message. Direct. From the Veil."
Luca frowned. "What did it say?"
She repeated the words slowly.
When she finished, he was silent.
Then he whispered, "It knows you. It's watching you."
"No," she said softly. "It's waiting for me."
———————————————————
They brought the fractured pendant to the Matron.
The elder woman turned it over in her hands, brow furrowed.
"This isn't just a crack," she murmured. "It's a split in the bond."
"You mean my power?" Esmé asked.
The Matron looked up. "No. I mean your path."
————————————————————
The Council convened by nightfall.
What had begun as a hidden war was now becoming something else. The Codex. Thorne. Valtheran. The Council was no longer responding to threats—they were chasing the shape of something forming beneath the known.
And at the center of it was Esmé.
The girl who remembered too clearly.
Who loved too fiercely.
And who had now heard the Veil itself.
————————————————————
Later, alone in the garden, Esmé sat under the bare-blooming rose tree and traced the fracture in her pendant with trembling fingers.
Luca joined her quietly, carrying a book she didn't recognize.
He sat beside her.
No words for a while.
Then he opened the book—an atlas of Veil sigils—and turned it toward her.
"You're not the only one it speaks to," he said. "But it hasn't spoken to me in a hundred years."
"Why now?" she whispered. "Why me?"
"Because you're not bound by history," he said. "You're reshaping it."
She leaned into him, the chill of his presence grounding her.
"Do you think I'll survive this?" she asked quietly.
"I think you already are."
He pressed the book into her hands.
"Next time it speaks," he said, "speak back."
————————————————————
In the dark beyond the garden wall, a shadow moved.
A figure in red, watching.
Waiting.
And in his hand, a piece of the third Codex fragment began to glow.