The Soul’s Chorus

Chapter 10

The festival’s noise still rang in Kaelen’s ears hours later, a dull echo behind the profound quiet of his own rooms. It was more than sound; it was the residual hum of crowded hearts, forced laughter, and the cloying scent of spiced wine and sweat. He had just returned from his final perimeter check of the night, a ritual of solitary pacing that felt more like tracing the bars of a gilded cage one that held them all. The manor was asleep, a stone beast breathing slowly in the dark. His body ached with a tiredness that was more than physical, a deep-seated fatigue of the spirit. It was the specific ache of standing still, of holding a line, while the world beyond and within the manor walls subtly, inexorably, moved in wrong ways.

He lit a single candle on his desk, the scrape of the flint shockingly loud. The flame jumped, a frantic dancer, then steadied into a resolved pillar, painting his sparse room in shaky gold light and elongating shadows that mimicked the long limbs of pines outside. His room was like him: functional, orderly, stripped of indulgence. A narrow bed, a scarred desk, a shelf for a few practical volumes on history, combat, and botany, a stand for his weapons oilcloth, leather, and steel. The window was open to the cool night air, letting in the clean smell of dew and distant pine, a scent that always spoke of freedom and wildness, a taunt now. He was about to unbuckle his knife belt, to shed the weight of his office, when he saw it.

On the rough-hewn stone windowsill, placed squarely in the center where he could not possibly miss it, was a flower.

It was not a fresh bloom from the evening’s decadent arrangements. It was pressed, dried perfectly flat. Its color had faded from a vibrant, venomous hue to a bruised, memory-like purple-blue, but its shape was impeccably preserved. Five small, elegantly hooded petals, fused at the base like a delicate, deadly bell. A slender, pale stem, like a ghost of a spine. The candlelight seemed to avoid it, casting the flower into a pocket of suggestive shadow.

Wolfsbane.

His breath hitched, a sharp, involuntary sound in the silent room. He knew this plant. Every wolf did, from their earliest lessons. It was not a true poison to them, not the instant death of human fairy tales. But it was a powerful, uncomfortable irritant. Its pollen, if inhaled, could cause a racking cough and a weeping rash on sensitive skin. Its scent, when fresh, was strong, bitter, acrid—a natural repellent. It grew in high, lonely places, in craggy shadows where few things thrived, a flower of warning and isolation. In the old, non-verbal language of the forests, the language of scent and symbol that his kin still understood in their marrow, it meant: Keep Away. Danger. Do Not Touch.

Why was it here? On his sill?

He approached the window slowly, muscles coiled, as if the fragile thing might leap at him. He crouched down, bringing his eyes level with it. No note. No footprint in the fine dust of the outer stone. No lingering scent on the air except the night itself. The courtyard below was empty, geometric patterns of flagstones silvered by a half-moon hanging like a sliced fruit in the sky.

His first, trained thought was threat. A piece of hostile rhetoric left by a rival from another clan, perhaps, or a disgruntled member of Corbin’s own household who resented the upyoung guardian’s proximity to power. A warning to back off, to remember his place. But the logic crumbled as quickly as it formed. The act was too subtle, too… eerily personal. An enemy would have left a claw mark gouged into his door, a tuft of strange fur, a direct challenge. This was quiet. This was intimate. This was a whisper, not a snarl.

His second thought was like a quiet lightning strike, illuminating the landscape of his mind with stark, terrifying clarity.

Chloe.

She couldn’t have. She was under watch, locked in her rooms at the top of the west tower. Her guard was a rotating shift of stern faces. But he knew the routines. The guard changed for meals, for shifts; there were minutes of vulnerability, of distraction. A clever mind could exploit them. He thought of her in the festival crowd, the deliberate slip of the bracelet from her wrist. A test. A probe. Had this been another?

But why wolfsbane? Was it a message of anger, of distilled bitterness? A declaration that she saw him as a danger, a poison in her life, the direct agent of her captivity? The thought sent a sharp, unexpected pang through him, surprising in its strength and clarity. He had tried, these past weeks, to be not kind kindness was a suspect currency here but less of a jailer. To stand at his post without radiating hostility. To meet her occasional, probing questions with factual, if terse, answers. Had it all been a misreading? Had she only been storing up resentment, now crystallized into this desiccated symbol? The ache in his chest argued against it; it felt like a wound, not a correction.

He picked up the flower with great care, fingertips barely grazing the papery structure. It was incredibly fragile, a relic. As he lifted it, a faint, dusty, bitter aroma rose from it the ghost of its warning, a scent now as thin and poignant as old parchment. He carried it to his desk and sat down heavily, holding it under the direct gaze of the candlelight.

Keep Away. Danger.

But it had been placed. Not thrown at his feet. Not crushed on the stones below. Not shoved under his door. It had been positioned, centered, on the one boundary between his private space and the outside world. It was preserved. Presented. An offering, however fraught.

He turned the meaning over in his mind, like examining a strange stone found on a path, feeling for its fractures and weight. What if the message wasn’t “You are poison to me.”? What if it was, more desperately, I am poison. A confession of her own perceived toxicity in this household, her dangerousness to the established order. Or, This situation is poison. A shared diagnosis of the slow, corrosive farce of the betrothal, the political machinations that were twisting them both. Or even, more dangerously, a joint alert: Beware. For both of us.

The interpretations unfolded, petals of possibility. He remembered her at the festival, a statue of stillness in crimson silk amidst the whirl. The fleeting, desperate pressure of her fingers on his shoulder, a touch that bypassed armor and lodged in memory. The look they had shared in the chaotic dark after the bracelet’s return a raw, electric flash of mutual understanding, stripped of pretense. That look had not said keep away. It had said, with terrifying simplicity, I see you. And you see me.

He thought of the silver chain around her neck, fine as a spider’s thread but unbreakable. Wolfsbane was an irritant. Not a killer, but a source of constant, low-grade distress. A thing that caused a burn, an itch, a persistent discomfort. Was she comparing her own existence to the flower? Beautiful in a stark, unusual way, distinctive, born in isolation, and painful to touch? A living warning sign to others?

A silent, symbolic dialogue was beginning in the dark corridors of the manor, a conversation written in objects and absences. She had spoken first, with a single word made of dried petals and ancient meaning. Now it was his turn to answer. But how? And what, in the name of the moon, could he possibly say?

The practical paths before him were clear, and each felt like a different kind of betrayal. If he took the flower to Corbin, laid it on the lord’s polished oak desk, it would be proof of her rebellious spirit, her continued resistance. It might mean punishment, stricter confinement, the removal of her few remaining privileges. The thought made his stomach clench, a physical revolt. He saw Elder Orin’s warning face from his youth: “The lone wolf starves, Kaelen. Loyalty to the pack is the only law. Do not confuse duty with sentiment.”

But this wasn’t sentiment. He clung to that distinction. This was intelligence. A coded signal from an asset under duress, a prisoner in a tower trying to establish contact. To intercept her first, fragile attempt at communication and throw it back at her captors felt like the deepest kind of treachery, not to her, but to his own role as a guardian. A guardian protected; he did not facilitate the breaking of a spirit.

If he ignored it, tossed it from the window to be lost in the night, he was rejecting the dialogue. He was choosing the clean, safe, lonely path of the obedient tool. The path that led, with grim inevitability, to the Blood Moon ceremony, to her standing beside Corbin at the altar, her eyes finally, utterly empty. The path where he was merely the man who shut the door on the cage.

He could not do that.

His eyes, scanning the room almost frantically, fell on a small, empty wooden box on his shelf. It once held whetstones for his blades. He opened it, the hinge whispering. He emptied the fine grey dust of stone and metal from it, then lined the bottom with a soft, unused piece of cloth from his weapon-cleaning kit. Gently, so gently he could feel the cellular fragility of the flower through his calloused fingertips, he placed the pressed wolfsbane inside. It looked both profoundly lonely and immensely significant in the little box a captured secret, a specimen of defiance, a question awaiting its reply.

He closed the lid. The soft click was a period in their strange sentence.

He would not answer yet. Prudence, and the habits of a lifetime, demanded caution. He needed to be sure. He needed to watch her now with a dual vision: the guardian observing his charge for signs of threat or despair, and the conspirator watching for signs of further communication. He would listen not just for words, but for silence, for placement, for the language of things.

He blew out the candle. The room was plunged into monochrome, dominated by the cool, analytical light of the half-moon. In the sudden blueness, he sat for a long time, elbows on his knees, looking at the small, plain box on his desk. It seemed to pulse with a quiet energy. The flower was no longer just a plant; it was a question mark etched in organic matter. It was a risk deliberately shared. It was a tiny, courageous act of defiance that now involved him.

The boundaries of his duty had just rewritten themselves. He was no longer just a guardian enforcing a lord’s decree from a distance. By choosing to keep the secret, to hold her word in trust, he had become a participant. He was a keeper of a forbidden flower, and the dangerous hope it represented. The walls of his functional room felt different now not a refuge, but an operations room for a silent war. The night air carried not just the scent of pine, but the charge of a collaboration yet unspoken.

In that silent, moon-washed room, the weight of the small box felt greater than any weapon he had ever borne. Guarding a person was one thing. Guarding a possibility, a spark of resistance in the dark, was another. It was a terrible, exhilarating responsibility. And as the first hints of dawn began to bleed into the edges of the sky, Kaelen knew, with a certainty that stilled the last echoes of the festival in his soul, that this was the most important duty he had ever been given.