The Order of Elysia

Chapter 20- Chapterae Ardensis

No matter how many days passed, Lilly’s thoughts kept drifting back to that encounter on the terrace. To Sovayn's evil antics and to the way Thorndale had looked at her, not cold or unreadable as usual, but almost… disappointed. As though her words, "we’re even,” had meant something different to him than they did to her.

He had come so close that the air between them had nearly sparked and though she had pulled away in the end, she couldn’t shake the memory of the tension that had hung between them- unspoken and unresolved.

Even though Thorndale was on the Isle again, he hadn’t returned to the Pathseeker classes and others had taken over the archery sessions. Though she had spotted him once or twice on the island, crossing the causeway at dusk or emerging from the southern stairwell with that scarred man always next to him, he kept his distance. She couldn’t decide whether that was a relief or a punishment, as she still did not know what game he was playing.

After all, during their last exchange, she had called him a traitor and while she didn’t regret it, not exactly, she did wonder if she had pushed too far- played too close to the flame, but she was still breathing. For now, that would have to count for something.

Alaric, meanwhile, had grown even quieter in recent weeks. He still joined them for meals, still offered the occasional dry quip or gentle encouragement, but there was a growing distance in his eyes, the kind that came from spending staring at ink-stained pages rather than people for too long. Lilly suspected it had something to do with his glyph, or rather the absence of it, since of all of them, only he remained unmarked. She hadn’t asked, but she saw how often his gaze lingered on the wrists and necks of others during training and she felt for him.

Freya, on the other hand, seemed to flourish. Nearly every morning at breakfast, she’d show off some minor alteration: the softening of her cheekbones, the darkening of her brows or the length of her lashes. Her glyph allowed her to bend her appearance, like light refracted through glass. The changes weren’t perfect, not yet, but unmistakably hers. She laughed about it, calling it frivolous, but Lilly could tell she took pride in it.

Gavin’s abilities were less subtle. His speed had grown more precise, his movements like those of a predator testing its muscles. Ever since Emberwake, the back-and-forth tension between him and Raven had simmered down. Raven barely acknowledged him now, though Lilly caught her watching sometimes, not with longing, but with detachment. When Lilly had asked her about it, Raven had shrugged and muttered something about Gavin preying on the gullible, but Lilly had pushed back, noting that the women she’d seen around Gavin didn’t exactly strike her as naïve.

"They all knew what they were doing.”, she had said, but Raven hadn’t responded, bitterness clinging to her expression.

More recently, Lilly had spent several quiet afternoons in the Grand Amber Library, helping Warden Rannaith transcribe old manuscripts, a tedious task, but one that gave her an excuse to lose herself in silence. It was on one of those afternoons, when the library’s high windows poured bands of amber light across the polished tables and the smell of ink and vellum hung thick in the air, that Lilly met a woman in grey robes. The Chronicler looked to be in her late fifties, perhaps older, her face lined not so much by age as by long years spent under artificial light and she carried herself with a composed gravity. Her voice, when she spoke, reminded Lilly of dry parchment, soft, fragile even, yet carrying a weight that compelled attention.

She had stopped beside Lilly’s table to examine a scroll laid out across the wood, but her gaze did not linger on the text. Instead, her pale eyes drifted to Lilly herself, studying her with unsettling focus, as though she were a page waiting to be deciphered. After a silence that felt stretched too long, she finally said: “You look just like her.”

Lilly’s quill stilled in her hand and confusion flickered across her expression, as she only blinked at the woman with a questioning face.

“Gwendoline.”, the Chronicler added, her tone quieter, but laced with something that made Lilly’s stomach tighten.

“You knew my mother?”, Lilly asked, her voice unsteady, caught between hope and suspicion.

The woman gave a small nod, so subtle that Lilly wondered if she had imagined it. “Smart. Gifted. Too curious for her own good.” She paused, her mouth tightening as if the memory carried both fondness and unease. “It’s a shame she chose the wrong path.”

For a moment Lilly thought she meant the route her mother had taken on the journey to Volgard, the journey she never returned from, the one no one ever spoke of without changing the subject, but the way the woman’s words hung in the air made something twist in her chest. A different thought pushed forward, darker, heavier. “What do you mean, the wrong path?”

The Chronicler only smiled faintly and she lowered her attention back to the scroll. “Some roads are paved with good intentions, Miss Ayrelle and yet they still lead places no one should go.”

A chill crawled down Lilly’s spine and her fingers gripped the quill tighter, as if it might steady her. “Are you talking about the route on which she died- during her travels?”

The woman’s eyes flicked back to her, as if weighing how much to reveal. “No. Not that kind of path.”

“Then what?” Lilly pressed, her voice dropping to a whisper, though her heart hammered so violently it felt as if the sound must echo through the library. Her palms were damp where they touched the edge of the desk, the polished wood suddenly slick under her fingertips and she leaned in without meaning to, as though closing the space might force an answer.

The Chronicler hesitated, her pale eyes did not soften, but they did not harden either; instead, they seemed to turn inward, as though she were riffling through pages of memory too brittle to be handled carelessly. Her mouth tightened, the corners pulling in with a subtle tension that looked almost like pain and the pause that followed carried a weight that made Lilly’s skin prickle. It wasn’t unwillingness, not exactly, but more of a careful weighing of words, like single grains measured on an unseen scale. Lilly could almost see it, as though the woman stood at the edge of some line, deciding which truths were safe to let slip and which would be better buried.

At last the Chronicler’s voice came, soft but edged. “It is forbidden to speak about it.” The words hung in the air between them, final in tone yet frustratingly incomplete, like a door closing just as Lilly reached for the handle.

Lilly’s breath caught and her throat was tight with a mix of impatience and dread. She stared at the woman, unwilling to let the silence settle into something permanent. The Chronicler’s face was composed, but her stillness only heightened Lilly’s unease, as though the slightest wrong movement might cause the fragile connection between them to tear. Around them the library remained hushed, the only sound the faint scratch of quills in the distance and the occasional shift of parchment, yet to Lilly it felt as though the entire room had narrowed down to this single conversation, to the quiet battle of questions and withheld truths.

Her pulse thudded against her ribs as she forced the words out, her voice steadier than she felt. “ You said you knew her, how?” The question snapped like a string pulled taut and the desperation underneath it betrayed her.

The Chronicler’s expression shifted, the lines of her face easing into something that almost looked like nostalgia, though beneath it Lilly could still see a shadow of regret clinging to the corners of her mouth. Her pale eyes softened, as though caught for a moment in memory and when she spoke, her voice carried a strange mix of reverence and sorrow. “We had a mutual friend once. A man who believed knowledge was the highest form of devotion.”

The words landed in Lilly’s mind with the precision of a key sliding into a lock and something clicked. She leaned forward without realizing, her pulse quickening. “Do you happen to know someone named Parcival?”

The woman’s gaze flickered away, as though the name itself carried weight she had not expected and a silence stretched long enough that Lilly wondered if she had gone too far, but then a small smile ghosted across the Chronicler’s lips, faint and almost shy and it softened her in a way that startled Lilly.

“I do, you are a clever girl.”, she said softly, with a fragile wistfulness. Her hands rested still on the scrolls before her, but her eyes seemed to look past them, past Lilly, into some distance only she could see. “He was… an old flame. Once.”

The words felt strange to Lilly’s ears, almost jarring in their intimacy, because they belonged to an image of Parcival she had never considered, that of a man who had been loved, in a romantic sense, who had inspired affection strong enough to linger even now in the memory of a woman who spoke of him with a tenderness carefully folded into sorrow.

Lilly opened her mouth, the questions rushing faster than she could shape them, but the Chronicler was already gathering her scrolls with quick, practiced movements.

“If you’re wise,” she said gently, her tone carrying a strange mixture of fondness and warning, “you’ll leave the past where it lies. Your mother paid a high enough price for her questions.” With that, she gave Lilly one last look, almost pitying and tender and slipped between the shelves, her grey robes vanishing like smoke in the dim corridors of the library.

Lilly remained at the table, her quill lying forgotten beside the half-finished page, her hand still poised as if it might yet return to writing, though her mind had fled far from ink and parchment. Her heart pounded with questions she had no words for and no one left to answer them, the echo of the woman’s voice lingering as if it had been etched into the very air around her. She was clever. But she chose the wrong path. The phrase repeated itself with an insistence that made her skin prickle, pulling apart the fragile image Lilly had always carried of her mother and replacing it with shadows that did not fit, shadows she did not understand.

She replayed every word in her head, trying to decide whether the Chronicler had meant them as a warning, or as a condemnation, or perhaps as both and the more she thought about it the less certain she felt. What unsettled her most was the realization that she hadn’t even asked for the woman’s name. She had let her slip away between the shelves like smoke and now there was nothing to hold on to but a grey robe and a voice that had sounded like parchment. The oversight gnawed at her, what kind of Chronicler had she been, where exactly had she come from and why had she chosen to speak to Lilly at all? If she ever crossed paths with her again, would she even recognize her, or would she pass as just another robed figure among the countless keepers of the Order’s records?

The thought left Lilly with a hollow ache, as though the answers had been close enough to touch, yet already lost and she sat staring at the forgotten scroll before her, wishing she had held on a moment longer.

She was clever. But she chose the wrong path. What had she meant by that? That her mother had been entangled with forbidden magic, the kind the Chronicler’s would rather bury than name? It didn’t fit the image of her mother Lilly had carried all her life, one of a gentle, kind woman who brewed tea with steady hands and sang while she worked.

A jolt of unease ran through her as she realized how little she truly knew about Gwendoline Ayrelle. Her mother had died young, on a journey no one liked to speak of and so many details had been left unspoken. Lilly didn’t even know if her mother had borne a glyph. The thought left her shuddering and though the library was filled with light, shadows pressed in around her. Before she could follow the thread any further, a rush of footsteps cut through her thoughts. Konrad came hurrying down the corridor, breathless and flushed, with a wild look in his eyes.

"Lilly- here you are! I need to talk to you.”

She blinked at him, startled. "What’s going on?”

"I saw something.”, he said, lowering his voice and glancing around as if afraid someone might listen. "During Arcane Theory. I wasn’t paying attention, just kind of letting my eyes wander the shelves and then, there it was- a sphere, brass, about this big.” He held his hands apart to show the size. "It looked just like the one you showed me.”

"Are you serious?”

Konrad gave a quick nod. "Come on. If we’re fast we might still catch Neacht-”, but Lilly didn’t waste another second. Without weighing the consequences, they darted through the corridors of the Temple and sped past curious onlookers. The sun was beginning to dip outside, casting long shadows across the marble floors when they reached the familiar carved wooden door of the Arcane Theory chamber.

Konrad knocked twice, then a third time, louder, but no one answered, but when Lilly tried the handle, the door creaked open without resistance. She hesitated. "Do we…?”

Konrad was already slipping through the gap. "We won’t touch anything.”

Lilly couldn’t help but grin, she hadn’t expected this side of Konrad at all. She’d always assumed he was the type to follow rules and stay obedient without question. She followed, her heart pounding with the thrill of doing something she definitely wasn’t supposed to. The classroom was empty, the rows of benches bathed in the light of the late afternoon sun filtering through gothic windows.

Together, they moved to one of the cabinets near the back and there it was, unmistakable. The brass sphere gleamed softly under the dusty glass, perched on its stand like something waiting to be remembered. Lilly stared, the sphere sat nestled between two cracked tomes, unassuming but unmistakably the same object as Lilly’s orb. Her fingers hesitated for half a breath before she reached out and wrapped them around the cool metal surface. A delicate tag hung from its base, its ink just faded enough to make the name hard to read. "Chapterae Ardensis”

"Do not touch that!”, sneered a furious voice, shattering Lilly’s focus like glass on stone. She flinched and turned, still holding the sphere. Warden Neachtain’s robes whipped behind her as she marched across the room like a storm made flesh. Her eyes were ablaze, her expression somewhere between rage and disbelief.

"I- we just wanted to know what the artifact is called. I was just curious, I didn’t mean any harm. ”, Lilly stated truthfully, already placing the object gently back on the shelf.

Neachtain didn’t even blink. "Intent does not lessen the crime. You broke into a classroom outside of class hours and were seconds away from tampering with an artifact of unknown classification. Do you have any idea how dangerous some of these objects are.”

"We didn’t-”

"You didn’t what, exactly?”, Neachtain interrupted her coldly.

Lilly opened her mouth, but the Warden raised a hand, silencing her. "I don’t care who touched what, both of you are responsible.” She reached into her robe, withdrew a small stack of slips and scratched their names across two separate citations with her silver-tipped stylus.

"I’ve seen students handle the artifacts before. Even last week during-”, Konrad intervened hastily.

"That was under my supervision.”, Neachtain snapped. "You do not lay your hands on Order property without permission.

Unauthorized access to restricted materials. Violation of artifact protocol. Ayrelle, that’s your second citation, isn’t it?”

Lilly’s voice was barely above a whisper. "Yes.”

FORMAL CITATION

Disciple: Melody Ayrelle

Offense: Unauthorized handling of arcane property

Details: Entered classroom without permission and handled magical artifacts without supervision

Filed by: Warden Fiora Neachtain

Severity: Level II - Second offense. Repeat offense risks of expulsion or execution

Neachtain’s gaze narrowed.

"You do realize, I presume, that for someone with your background, another citation will not earn you expulsion or reassignment.” Her voice dropped to something almost surgical. Lilly stood frozen, unable to speak, her heart pounding so loudly she was sure the whole Isle could hear it. Did that mean she just needed one other citation to be executed? f**k.

There was a flicker, subtle, but unmistakable, at the corner of Warden Neachtain’s mouth, as if she savoured moments like these. Her eyes lingered, as she handed over the slips and the faint, arched lift of her brow made it clear: she enjoyed the sting of punishment, the humiliation.

Konrad took his citation wordlessly, his expression tight. He didn't meet Lilly’s eyes until they had left the classroom and Neachtain behind them, but when he finally looked at her, there was no thrill of discovery left on his face, only lingering frustration.

"Great. Just brilliant.”, he muttered.