Thrones of Shadow

Chapter 4

Chapter 4

**** Elara’s POV ****

The journey to the capital always made Elara nervous.

The winding road carved through thick woods, where sunlight dappled between the leaves like fleeting blessings. The cart she rode in with Old Rynn creaked with every bump, the wheels straining under the weight of crates filled with dried herbs, tinctures, and salves—products from the apothecary, bound for the capital’s outer market. Elara clutched her satchel to her chest, her fingers fidgeting with the fraying hem of her cloak.

It wasn’t fear of the city itself. It was something else—a heaviness in her chest, like the air changed the closer she got to the capital walls. Something unseen shifted in her gut every time they passed the old border stones: the ones with moss-eaten crests and ancient scripts no one seemed to read anymore. They stirred unease in her, like forgotten memories pressing against her skin.

"Almost there," Rynn muttered, flicking the reins.

Elara nodded, casting her eyes forward as the distant silhouette of the capital began to emerge through the thinning trees. Tall spires and domes kissed the horizon, smoke curling upward like veins of cloud. Even at a distance, the city exuded power. It was where the King ruled from his marble throne. Where nobles dined in silken halls. Where secrets nested in every shadow.

And today, she was stepping right into its heart.

---

The capital’s outer district was a riot of sound, color, and motion. Merchants barked out their wares. Soot-smudged children weaved through crowds, giggling and stealing fruit. The air was thick with roasted spices, burning incense, and the metallic tang of forge smoke.

Elara felt swallowed by it all.

Rynn took the cart toward the merchant's square, where they’d offload most of their stock. Elara asked to be dropped at the herb market, needing to restock rare roots and powders they couldn’t grow back home.

“Keep your purse close,” Rynn warned, squinting at the crowd. “And don’t wander too far. This city isn’t like ours. It watches you.”

Elara nodded. “I’ll be careful.”

She pulled her cloak tighter around her shoulders and stepped into the tide of people.

---

The herb market was less chaotic but no less strange. The stalls here were older, run by hooded vendors with sharp eyes and whispered tongues. Jars of glimmering powders sat beside withered plants wrapped in silk. A man with tattoos across his bald head offered her a vial he claimed could make her dream of the dead. She politely declined.

She moved slowly, collecting the items she needed—tamarisk root, nightbane leaves, powdered moonflower. Her coin pouch grew lighter, but her satchel heavier. All the while, the dream from the other night throbbed at the back of her mind: a castle she didn’t know, flames licking at a broken crest, the smell of smoke and blood and loss. And that pendant—cold against her chest even now.

The silver pendant she had awoken with two mornings ago dangled beneath her tunic, hidden from sight. She hadn’t told anyone, not even Rynn. She didn’t know why. Only that she didn’t want it taken from her.

“Elara.”

The voice startled her.

She turned quickly, her heart jumping—but the alleyway behind her was empty. Just a breath of wind. Just nerves.

She shook it off and turned back toward the stalls.

That’s when she felt it.

Someone was watching her.

Her skin prickled, that invisible thread of awareness tightening around her spine. She paused mid-step, her eyes scanning the crowd. Faces blurred—too many, too fast—but then she saw him.

A man. Tall. Cloaked in deep blue. Standing at the far end of the market, partially shadowed beneath an archway. His face was masked in black from the nose down, only his eyes visible. They were strange—sharp, piercing, not quite angry but intense, like he was analyzing her every breath.

Elara froze.

The crowd moved around her, but he remained still.

And then he turned and walked away.

Vanished behind the arch.

Her breath left her chest in a rush. She couldn’t explain the feeling. He hadn’t moved toward her, hadn’t said a word—but his gaze lingered even after he disappeared, like it had reached inside her and curled around something buried deep.

Was it just paranoia?

Or did he recognize her?

No. That was ridiculous. She wasn’t anyone important. She worked in an apothecary, mended children’s cuts, ground herbs for headaches. She didn’t know masked men who stared like they knew her soul.

And yet… something inside her whispered otherwise.

---

She tried to shake it off. Focused on finishing her errands. But even as she bartered with vendors, the man’s eyes haunted her. His silence. The odd sense of familiarity that chilled her.

As she turned to leave the market, her path was blocked by a hunched woman in tattered robes. She smelled faintly of sage and smoke, her eyes cloudy and unfocused. She clutched a gnarled cane and tilted her head as if listening to Elara’s breath.

“You’ve come far,” the woman rasped. “But your journey has just begun.”

Elara stiffened. “I… beg your pardon?”

The old woman’s mouth curled into a smile—too wide, too knowing.

“You were born beneath starlight. Marked in fire. Hidden by sacrifice.”

Elara took a step back. “Do I know you?”

“No, child,” the woman said. “But you will know yourself soon.”

She raised a withered hand and reached toward Elara’s chest.

Elara instinctively stepped away, one hand over her tunic where the pendant lay hidden.

The woman’s smile deepened. “Ah. You wear it already. Good. You’ll need it, when the crown remembers.”

A jolt of fear lanced through her. “What crown? What do you mean?”

But the woman simply bowed her head, turned, and shuffled back into the crowd—gone like smoke on the wind.

Elara stood frozen, heart pounding in her ears. Around her, the market continued as if nothing had happened. No one had noticed. No one seemed to care.

She didn’t realize she was trembling until she gripped the strap of her satchel tighter.

---

By the time she returned to the cart, the sun had begun to set, casting long orange shadows across the city walls.

Rynn looked up from the crate he was loading. “You look pale. Trouble?”

Elara shook her head, forcing a smile. “Just a long day.”

He grunted. “That’s the capital for you. Eats good souls alive if you linger too long.”

Elara climbed up beside him, her satchel clutched in her lap. She didn’t speak as they rode back through the gates, out of the city’s reach. But her mind spun.

The pendant. The masked man. The old woman’s cryptic words.

“When the crown remembers.”

What did it mean?

And why did part of her feel like she already knew?

---

That night, long after she had returned home and the apothecary windows were shuttered against the cold, Elara sat alone by her small hearth.

The pendant lay in her palm, catching the firelight.

A silver crest, shaped like a phoenix rising from flames. Around its edges, a language she couldn’t read. Symbols too old, too delicate to be decoration. It wasn’t something one bought from a street vendor or found in the dirt.

It was made with purpose.

And it felt like it had always been hers.

****Lucien’s POV****

The silence in the Shadow Chamber was sacred. Only the hum of candle flames broke through the thick tension that hovered like a shroud. Maps of the kingdom lay sprawled across the obsidian table, inked with coded markings, troop movements, and whispered threats. Lucien stood at the center, clad in a black doublet woven with silver threads, the mark of the Shadow King glinting like frost on his chest.

The air was cold despite the torches lining the chamber walls. A message had arrived—one of interest, perhaps even importance. But it was the whisper behind the words that gnawed at Lucien’s focus, a whisper echoing the past. A past he thought buried beneath the bloodied stones of the old palace.

Cassian, one of his oldest spies, bowed before him now, kneeling as custom demanded. His dark eyes gleamed with unease.

“She was seen in the southern quarter of the capital, my king,” Cassian said, his voice measured but strained. “The girl. The one matching the portrait from the ruins of Caelharrow.”

Lucien’s jaw stiffened. “And you’re certain?”

Cassian hesitated—just a breath—but it was enough.

“She fits the description, sire. Hair like burnished gold, not flaxen. Eyes—violet. A rarity in itself. She was buying medicinal herbs. The apothecary owner called her Elara.”

Lucien’s fingers curled against the edge of the table. “Elara.”

A soft sound on his lips. It didn’t belong to the world he ruled now, a world of shadows and blood. It was a name from another time.

“She was with no guards?” Lucien asked, calculating. “No sigil, no crest, no retinue?”

“None. She traveled with a merchant caravan. Harmless. Provincial.”

“But you don’t think she’s harmless, do you, Cassian?”

The older man looked up. “No, my king. I watched her from the shadows. There’s something in her. A quiet composure… like someone raised to be more than a commoner. I’ve seen noble-blooded women tremble at the sight of the capital. She stood in the middle of the royal square, eyes wide open. Watching. Listening.”

Lucien exhaled slowly, brushing his fingers across a frayed piece of parchment—one of the last sketches of the Caelharrow crest before it was burned in the revolution. A lion devouring a sun.

The same crest that had been scorched across the dreamscape of a little girl long thought dead.

“Could she be the lost heir?” Cassian asked.

Lucien didn’t answer right away. He moved toward the wall, where rows of ancient records and hidden genealogies sat beneath lock and spell. With a twist of a hidden sigil, he opened a panel and retrieved a battered leather-bound book—The Lost Lineage of Caelharrow.

He had memorized the page already. A girl child. The third born to Queen Ilaria before the m******e. No one ever found the body. Some claimed she died in the fire; others whispered she had been smuggled out by a loyalist servant. But there had been no proof, no magic trace, no pendant… until now.

Lucien had built his empire on certainty. On shadows and control. And yet now, this Elara had stepped into the light like a prophecy long delayed.

He returned to the table. “Where is she now?”

“Returned to the south, I believe. She left before sunset. But not before a member of the Crimson Blades tailed her briefly. They reported that she possesses a pendant.”

Lucien’s brow lifted.

“A pendant, you say?”

Cassian nodded. “Obsidian, with markings that match ancient Caelharrow sigils. We didn’t get close enough to examine it directly. She keeps it tucked beneath her cloak.”

Lucien crossed the chamber, his boots whispering against stone. He poured himself a measure of blood-red wine, letting the liquid swirl while his mind calculated. It was too early to declare her heir. Too dangerous to act without certainty. The Court of Vultures—his council of nobles—would claw her to pieces if they sensed weakness.

But he had to know.

“Send Ciro,” Lucien ordered. “Quietly. I want her watched every day. If she truly is of the old bloodline… then the very kingdom may rise against me. And if she’s not…” He let the sentence trail, letting Cassian fill in the silence.

Cassian bowed again. “It will be done.”

As the spy departed, Lucien turned back to the flickering candlelight. He lifted the sketch from the ruined palace once more—the face of a child drawn in faded ink. Large eyes, a hint of mischief and nobility, hair that looked like it was always catching sunlight.

It had haunted him once, in his youth, when he stood beside the rebellion’s leaders and watched the royal family perish.

He remembered a whisper then—something his mentor had said just before they stormed Caelharrow’s gates.

> “Do not hesitate, Lucien. Royal blood, no matter how young, carries the stain of power. And power left alive will one day return to take your crown.”

He hadn’t believed it then. But now…

He returned to the edge of the map, finger tracing the path from the capital to the small southern villages where Elara had come from. His kingdom had enjoyed silence for too long. Peace always festered into unrest. And if there was a hidden flame beneath the ash, it was time to snuff it out—or decide whether to let it burn everything.

Lucien downed the wine in a single motion.

He would meet this girl. Not as king. Not as the emperor cloaked in shadow. But as something else. A presence. A man from the mist.

If she was truly who they suspected, he would know the moment he looked into her eyes.

After all…

He had killed her family.

And the dead always left echoes.