The Order of Elysia

Chapter 18- No more waiting

Two weeks had passed since the ambush in the woods and with them came the slow but undeniable arrival of winter. The mornings had grown colder and a silver mist now clung to the grass in the early hours like a veil that refused to lift. She hadn’t seen Thorndale since that day, as the Pathseeker training had been led by one of the other Wardens and Lilly wondered whether it was true that he had left the Isle, but she was somewhat relieved not to have to face him. Had he been transferred or had he perhaps even run away?

Rumors were beginning to circulate through the halls of the Isle; quiet murmurs, whispered at shared meals or passed between hands in the form of notes. Of emissaries being turned away from border towns, of military drills in the western provinces and of Zarvath’s silence.

Lilly had been questioned the day she was discharged from the clinic and she had confirmed the official version of the story: that they had found a dead Zarvathian soldier at the camp, but when they reached the part about the ambush, she merely said that she didn’t know where the attackers had come from, which was true and that she had been injured before she had a chance to get a good look at them. Warden Monella had been present during the questioning and Lilly shuddered at the intense stare the old man had fixated her with throughout the entire conversation.

She had told no one. Not Raven, not Alaric, not anyone else and the secrecy was tearing her apart. Thorndale’s lie burned behind her lips like smoke, too volatile to release yet too heavy to swallow. She had kept it to herself, the truth of what they’d found in that camp and the strange placement of the Zarvathian armour, too clean, too perfectly displayed. The unease she had seen in Thorndale’s eyes when she noticed it. The fact that he had claimed the attackers were Zarvathian soldiers, as if reading from a script already written. Even Rurik had noticeably avoided her over the past few weeks and hadn’t paid her the slightest bit of attention, not that she minded the least.

But why? The questions clawed at her, day after day. Was Thorndale playing a dangerous game behind the Order’s back, weaving intentional lies into the tapestry of conflict or was it just the official version of the story, simply a lie meant to protect the truth, even though the Order knew about everything? And why had they even been attacked at all? Could it be that someone had realized they were too close to uncovering something that wasn’t meant to be seen?

Raven and Lilly walked side by side along the shadowy path back toward the dormitories, after one of Rannaith’s long lectures. The lesson had been about sacrifice, how some Disciples didn’t survive their first mission and how others buckled under the burden of glyphs they never asked for. Rannaith had spoken in that clinical way of hers, citing cautionary tales wrapped in duty.

Lilly hadn’t said a word the whole walk back. The path between the lecture hall and the barracks was quiet at this hour, moonlight threading through the crooked branches above. She stared at the worn cobblestones, her hands stuffed deep in her sleeves and her heart heavy.

"I don’t want to end up like them.”, she finally muttered, almost too low to be heard. "Trained into obedience, walked into death like a good little soldier.”

Raven glanced sideways. "You’re not them.”

"Aren’t I?”, Lilly’s voice cracked. "My whole life has been picked apart and stitched back together by people who never asked what I wanted. I don’t get to choose, I just survive.”

Raven’s voice sliced through the fog of her thoughts, her tone low and steady, not coddling, not pitying, just honest. "Don’t let anyone make you a victim, Lilly.”, she said, pausing to meet her friend’s eyes. "Stop letting anyone treat you like one.”

Maybe that was all she needed to hear, or maybe it was something she’d been waiting to give herself permission to believe. Either way, something slowly shifted in Lilly; Raven was right, she did not want to live her life as a victim. The weight in her chest had begun to feel like a constant companion, a coiled pressure that pressed in whenever she let herself linger too long on the past, on what had been taken from her, but she was done with it- with the silence, with the guilt, with feeling broken or unwanted- she was strong and she knew it.

Lilly didn’t respond immediately, but her lips pressed together and she gave the slightest nod before she turned away, her steps faster, more purposeful now. She didn’t head toward her quarters and she didn’t want to sit still and stew in the memory of Telia’s soft voice, urging her to report the glyph, to hand over the last piece of herself she had any real say over. Not tonight. Instead, she made her way toward the outer edge of the Order’s training grounds, where the shadows stretched long and the torches flickered low and where no one would ask too many questions if someone was practicing alone.

Her bow felt light in her hands, familiar and steady and as she slipped behind the archery range, she drew a deep breath and centered herself. The memory of her glyph pulsed faintly beneath her skin, a quiet warmth where it rested above her heart and she let her fingers brush the fabric covering it before she strung her bow. No more waiting.

She would train, learn to protect herself and develop her glyph on her own. Learn its shape and rhythm and limits without asking permission from those who didn’t understand what it meant to wield something powerful in silence. The Order didn’t need to know, not until she chose to tell them.

Lilly adjusted her stance on the uneven ground behind the abandoned archery range, where wild roots pushed up from the earth beneath her boots. The moon hung low and half-shuttered behind clouds, but she didn’t need much light; she could feel the glyph, alive, like a buried ember flaring whenever she reached for it.

It hummed; a resonance more than a sensation, vibrating just beneath the surface of her sternum, coiling outward in subtle waves that synchronised with her breath, her pulse and her focus. She nocked an arrow, exhaled slowly and aimed at the farthest target, almost twice the distance of what they usually trained with. She let the arrow fly, felt the string snap forward with a clean hiss and missed. The arrow hit the dirt just shy of the target, too low.

Lilly frowned and reached inward as she pulled another arrow. The glyph faintly stirred in response to her will, a subtle ripple under her ribs and the skin around it tingled, not painfully, but insistently, like lightning-bolts dancing along her nerves. She touched her chest lightly through her tunic, closing her eyes for just a second to sink deeper into the strange, intuitive link that had grown between her glyph and her instincts.

She didn’t know what command word to speak, or if she even needed one, her glyph had never responded to spoken activation. It moved with her, not because of her and it felt as if it wove itself into the exact moment her intent crystallized.

She loosened the arrow and this time, as it sailed, the air shimmered faintly around it. The trajectory bent, subtly at first, then more sharply, not in a curve that defied physics entirely, but enough to veer around the tree limb that would have blocked it, enough to strike the outer ring of the target.

Her breath faltered, as she tried again, from a new angle- off-balance, a twist in her hips as she aimed. This time she focused on an acorn in the tree above the target, barely visible at that distance. Her mind flickered with the image of the arrow piercing right through the small fruit and the glyph responded. The arrow jerked unnaturally in the air, like a marionette on invisible strings and struck the acorn right in the middle, splintering it in half. Lilly let out a half-sound, part breath, part gasp and stumbled a step back.

It wasn’t just aim correction or bending the shot; her will amplified the glyph’s hit, adjusting the path in the air itself. It was beautiful and made her feel capable, as if her very intent shaped reality. She grabbed another arrow, fingers trembling, not from fear but from anticipation; this power didn’t belong to the Order, it belonged to her.

Lilly lowered the bow slowly and let the arrow fall from her fingers, her chest rising and falling with shallow, controlled breaths. The air was cool against her skin as she tugged the hem of her tunic aside, just enough to expose the skin over her heart.

The glyph pulsed faintly in the darkness, silver and spectral like moonlight caught in motion. For weeks it had seemed elusive, half-formed, blurred at the edges like something glimpsed through fog, but now it looked clearer. The shapes were still intricate, delicate like curling smoke and composed of a bent arrow, surrounded by a layered halo, but the haze that once softened its edges was lifting. The outer lines were defined now, etched into her flesh with impossible precision, thin like hairline cracks in glass, but glowing faintly from within. Lilly stared down at it with something that teetered between reverence and fear. Her connection to it felt stronger than it had that first day in the washroom stall, when panic and exhilaration had fought for dominance in her chest. Back then, it had felt foreign, too big for her, but now... now it felt like something she could almost understand.

Lilly found Konrad in the northern courtyard, the coldest corner of the grounds where the sun rarely lingered long. He sat alone on a weathered bench beneath a tree and as always, his nose was buried in a book, his long legs stretched out before him in careless ease, one ankle crossed over the other. In his free hand he held a mug, thin curls of steam rising into the crisp air, carrying the faint scent of tea. The late afternoon light slanted low across the space, weak and silvery, catching the planes of his face until his pale skin seemed almost luminous. For a moment Lilly only stood there, watching, feeling the familiar pull of hesitation in her chest.

“Konrad?”

He looked up at once, his brows lifting slightly in recognition. His grey eyes were quick to focus on her, though his voice when he spoke carried the same calm weight it always did when she interrupted his studies.

“Lilly. Do you need something?” It was not unkind, but concentrated, as if his mind still lingered on the words he had just been reading.

Lilly lowered herself onto the far end of the bench, the wood chilling cold beneath her pants. Her fingers slipped inside her coat, brushing against the cold curve of metal hidden there. She could feel its weight pressing into her palm as if urging her to either reveal it or bury it forever. She stared at it in silence until her breath misted once more into the air and then she drew it out, her voice careful and restrained.

“I wanted to ask you something and I’d appreciate it if you kept this between us.”

The shift in her tone caught him at once. His posture straightened, he closed his book over one finger so he would not lose his page and he set his mug carefully onto the stone at his feet. “Alright.”, he said, leaning forward slightly. “It is a pleasure to help. What is it?”

Her hand opened slowly and she turned the brass orb so that the dying sunlight played across its polished surface. It had no seams, no hinges or grooves, nothing to suggest it was anything more than a flawless sphere of metal, yet the heaviness of it seemed disproportionate and he held the object out between them.

“Have you ever seen anything like this before? Or read about it?”

Konrad leaned closer, though he did not touch the sphere. His eyes fixed on the orb with the intensity of a scholar trying to peel away its secrets with thoughts alone. The reflection of light shifted across his irises as he studied every angle.

“No engravings.”, he murmured, more to himself than to Lilly. “No latch. No mechanism. Just… brass.” His frown deepened and then he lifted his gaze to her. “Where did you get it?”

“My father left it to me.”, Lilly answered, her voice softening, almost swallowed by the weight of the admission. She shifted the orb back into her palm as though reclaiming it from scrutiny.

Something eased in Konrad’s face at the mention of her father, a subtle softening that made him look gentler. He drew back slightly and folded his hands together in his lap, his voice more deliberate now. “I’ve read a great deal about history, about the Order, about the gods and the Veil, folklore from before the Empire’s rise… but artifacts? Not as much yet and I have never come across anything like this. Perhaps it is simply for decoration.”

“Not even in the old relic registries?” Lilly pressed, her brow furrowing.

He shook his head with certainty: “Nothing. And I would remember, trust me.”

She closed her fingers tightly around the orb, startled at how warm it had grown against her skin, as though it had been waiting for her touch and its heat curled into her palm like a pulse. “Thank you anyway.”, she said at last, slipping it back into her coat with a care that bordered on protectiveness. “I didn’t know who else to ask.”

Konrad’s expression shifted again, this time into a broad smile that seemed too bright against the somber air of the conversation. Pride flickered in his features, the unmistakable joy of being trusted when it came to knowledge and he tilted his head with a spark of eagerness. “Lilly, if you want me to look into it deeper, say the word. I would consider it an honour.”

Her lips curved faintly, though her voice stayed soft. “If you stumble across anything, I would appreciate it if you tell me. Thank you for the offer.”

She rose then, the orb tucked securely against her chest beneath her coat, heavy as a heartbeat. Konrad watched her go, one hand resting on his closed book, his expression thoughtful and tinged with curiosity he could not quite disguise and though Lilly left him there with his mug and his silence, she could feel the weight of his lingering attention on her back as surely as she felt the weight of the orb pressing against her ribs, a burden she carried away into the deepening twilight.