Chapter 2: The Ashen Return

The light was wrong.

It pried at Elinalise’s eyelids, a thin grey smear that offered no warmth. Her body registered the world in layers of pain before she even tried to move. The cold ground had leached into her bones, a deep ache that made her joints feel rusted shut. Overlaying that was a different kind of heat, one that didn’t come from any sun. It pulsed low in her stomach, a thick, feverish throb that had settled into a constant presence during the night, like a second heartbeat made of embers.

She pushed herself up from the filth, her arms trembling with a weakness that felt shameful. The servant’s cloak was damp and reeked of alley muck and smoke. Her silken gown beneath it was ruined, torn and crusted with things she didn’t want to identify. For a moment she just knelt there, breathing in the acrid dawn air. It still tasted of burning, though the roaring inferno had quieted to a sullen crackle from distant parts of the city.

The vow from last night sat in her mind, a cold stone amidst the physical misery. I will see you bleed. It wasn’t enough to just think it. Thinking was what got you killed, or worse, cursed and left in a gutter.

She needed to move.

Getting to her feet was a clumsy process. Her legs didn’t want to cooperate, the muscles stiff and unresponsive. That internal heat flared with the effort, sending a fresh wave of dizziness through her. She leaned against the grimy wall of the alley, waiting for the world to stop tilting.

When it steadied, she took stock. This was the Warrens, obviously. The narrow lane was lined with leaning shacks whose upper stories almost touched overhead. Trash and worse clogged the central gutter. A few doors stood open, revealing dark, empty interiors. People had either fled or were hiding. Probably both.

She knew this district, but only from maps and reports. As princess, her knowledge was academic—a layout of streets and estimated population figures for tax purposes. Using it to navigate in person was different. The map in her head was clean lines and labeled blocks. The reality was a labyrinth of reeking corners and sudden dead-ends.

But the castle’s position was a fixed point. The Dragon Keep sat on its plateau at the city’s heart, its high walls visible from almost anywhere when the smoke wasn’t too thick. Right now, a column of dirty grey smoke still rose from its general direction. They were likely still putting out fires or burning evidence.

Going back was insane. Every logical part of her screamed to run for the forest, to disappear into the wilderness and never look back.

The cold stone of her resolve pressed harder against that logic. Running meant leaving everything. It meant letting them have it all—her home, her father’s body, whatever remained of her legacy. It meant accepting that the violet light had won.

She couldn’t do that.

Pulling the hood tighter over her distinctive silver-gold hair, now tangled and filthy, she started walking.

The Warrens woke slowly around her, but not with the usual sounds of morning labor. Whimpers came from behind shuttered windows. Once, she passed an old man sitting on a stoop, just staring at nothing with red-rimmed eyes. He didn’t even look up as she moved past him, hugging the shadows.

She reached the edge of the slums where the buildings became slightly more substantial, timber and daub instead of just wattle. Here, she saw the first patrol.

Two Grenville soldiers walked down the center of the muddy street, their wolf-crested armor dull in the flat light. They moved with a casual ownership that made her blood run cold even as the curse-warmth pulsed hotter in response. One kicked over a rain barrel for no apparent reason, watching the water slosh into the street before moving on.

Elinalise pressed herself into a doorway alcove, holding her breath until they passed. Her heart hammered against her ribs, a frantic counter-rhythm to the slower, insistent throb inside her. The soldiers didn’t glance her way. Why would they? She was just another ragged refugee in a city full of them.

That was her advantage, honestly. They would be looking for a princess in silks, or a noble trying to escape with jewels sewn into their cloak. They wouldn’t look twice at a dirty girl in a servant’s rough-spun wool.

She moved from shadow to shadow, using the map in her mind to chart a course away from the main thoroughfares. The patrols were more frequent there anyway, establishing control over the key arteries. The back ways were quieter, though not safe. She crossed a small square where a makeshift gallows was already being erected by Grenville troops. The sight made her stomach twist, but she didn’t let herself stop.

The internal heat was a distraction, a persistent pull on her attention that she had to keep shoving aside. It seemed to spike whenever her fear did, tying her physiological terror directly to this new, cursed part of herself. She hated it with a clarity that cut through the fog of exhaustion.

After an hour of cautious travel, the castle walls loomed ahead through the haze. The postern gate on the southeastern side—the one used by gardeners and dung-carters—was heavily guarded. A squad of six men stood there, talking amongst themselves while smoke drifted from braziers meant to warm them.

Elinalise didn’t even consider it. She slipped into a narrow alley that ran along the outer curtain wall, heading for where the land sloped down toward the river. The castle wasn’t just built on a plateau; its foundations were laced with ancient waterways and drains from when the site had been a fortress long before it was a palace.

Her tutors had made her study every architectural plan, mainly to understand siege vulnerabilities. One lesson covered the old drainage systems, most of which were sealed off centuries ago when the plumbing was modernized. But one large culvert, part of an original river diversion, had been too massive to fill completely. They’d grated it over with iron and mostly forgotten about it.

Finding it in the overgrown riverbank scrub was harder than she’d hoped. The area was swampy and thick with nettles and brambles that caught at her cloak. The curse-heat made her skin feel overly sensitive, and every scratch seemed to burn.

She found it by nearly falling into it. The ground gave way slightly at the edge of a muddy embankment, revealing a dark hole half-hidden by deadfall and thorny vines. The iron grate across its mouth was rusted thick, but someone—poachers maybe, or children daring each other—had long ago pried two bars loose enough to create a gap.

It was a tight squeeze even for her slight frame. The rust flaked onto her hands and cloak as she wriggled through, the cold iron scraping against her back. For one horrible second she imagined getting stuck there, wedged in a hole as soldiers patrolled above.

Then she was through, dropping onto wet stone inside a tunnel that smelled of stagnant water and decay.

The darkness was absolute for several paces until her eyes adjusted to the faint light filtering through the grate behind her. The culvert was tall enough to walk in if she stooped slightly, its curved walls slick with moss. Icy water flowed around her ankles, soaking through her ruined slippers instantly.

She moved forward into the deeper dark, one hand trailing along the slimy wall for guidance. The sound of her own breathing echoed back at her, loud in the confined space. This was how vermin got into a castle. Now she was the vermin.

The tunnel began to slope upward gradually. After what felt like an eternity of groping through blackness, she saw a dim glow ahead—not daylight, but the dull orange flicker of torchlight reflecting on water.

The culvert emptied into a larger underground channel: one of the castle’s main drainage cisterns. It was a vast, vaulted chamber where several streams met before flowing out to the river. Torches burned in sconces along the walls here, their light dancing over dark water and mossy brickwork.

And there were bodies.

Three of them lay partially submerged near the edge of the channel where she stood, still wearing the livery of the castle’s under-stewards. Their throats were cut. The water around them was tinged pink, the color slowly diffusing in the sluggish current.

Elinalise froze, her breath catching. The massacre hadn’t been confined to the halls above. They’d swept through everything, even down here where cooks and scullions and laundresses worked.

A sound made her flinch—a distant clang of metal on stone from one of the passages leading out of the cistern. She couldn’t tell if it was friend or foe, and she had no way of knowing which was which anymore.

Choosing the darkest opening opposite the sound, she left the cistern and entered the network of service passages proper.

These corridors were marginally drier but just as deserted. The air grew colder away from the water, carrying with it new smells: old dust, damp stone, and underneath it all, the coppery tang of blood.

The signs were everywhere once she started looking for them.

A single leather boot lay on its side in the middle of a passage. A smear of dark brown streaked across a wall at shoulder height. Further on, she found a discarded pike leaning against a corner as if its owner had just stepped away for a moment. Then came the bloodstains proper—dark patches on the flagstones that hadn’t yet been scrubbed away. Some were small, just spatters. Others were large enough to make her step around them carefully. In one intersection where four passages met, a whole tableau was etched in violence: a broken shield bearing a kitchen boy’s insignia; a dented helmet; and a broad stain that had pooled in a depression in the floor before trickling toward a drain. Someone had died here fighting with pots and pans probably. It hadn’t been enough.

She moved through it all like a ghost. The feverish ache inside her seemed to resonate with the silence. It felt like walking through her own corpse. This castle had been alive yesterday—a noisy, breathing organism of people and routines. Now it was just stone and shadows and drying blood. Her home. Conquered. Cleansed.

She kept moving upward now. The passages began to look more familiar. This route would eventually connect to an auxiliary stair used by chambermaids serving the family quarters. Every step felt heavier than the last. The cold from the stones seeped through her thin soles. The heat inside her pulsed on. And all around her lay proof that her vow might already be too late for so many

The silence in the service corridors was a fragile thing. It wasn’t an absence of sound, but a holding of breath. Every distant echo, every drip of water from some cracked pipe, felt like a prelude to discovery. Elinalise kept her own breathing shallow as she navigated the familiar turn that should lead to the maids’ stair.

Voices stopped her cold.

They came from around the next bend in the passage, not loud, but clear in the stagnant air. Male voices, with the flat, hard cadence of soldiers. Grenville accents.

She pressed herself back against the wall, her body going rigid. The internal heat gave a sudden, uncomfortable surge.

“…should have been cleared by now,” one voice was saying, a tone of mild complaint. “I’m telling you, Korb, this place gives me the creeps. All these little tunnels. Like a rat warren.”

“Stop whining,” a second, deeper voice answered. Korb, presumably. “Clearing means checking. You want some royalist brat popping up behind our lines with a kitchen knife? Check the damn closet.”

There was a sound of a wooden door being yanked open, then a dull thud as it closed again. “Empty. Satisfied?”

“For this closet, sure.” Footsteps began moving closer to her position. “We’ve got three more levels to do before shift change. Lord Crell wants the whole upper keep swept before noon. Says there might still be ‘items of state’ hidden.”

The first soldier snorted. “Items of state. You mean jewelry he hasn’t pocketed yet.”

“Careful,” Korb warned, though he sounded more bored than concerned. “The man’s running the place now. His word is law until Lord Grenville arrives. Besides, he’s not wrong. They’re hunting a princess, not just silverware.”

The footsteps were almost at the corner. Elinalise’s gaze darted around the bare stretch of corridor behind her. No alcoves, no doors. Just ten feet back to the intersection with the bloodstain.

“You really think she’s still in here? Little highness?” The first soldier sounded skeptical.

“Doubt it. Probably got trampled in the streets or fell in the river. But orders are orders. We look everywhere.”

They would round the corner in three seconds.

Elinalise moved without conscious thought, lunging back the way she’d come and ducking into the first opening she saw off the bloody intersection. It was a narrow door, warped with age. It stuck for a heart-stopping moment before giving way with a soft groan.

She slipped inside and pulled it shut, plunging herself into absolute blackness and the overwhelming smell of stale lavender.

A linen closet. Her fingers brushed against stacks of rough-woven sheets on shelves.

Outside, the footsteps reached the intersection and paused.

“Hear that?” the first soldier asked.

“Hear what?”

“A door. Sounded like it closed.”

“Probably just settling. This whole damn place is settling on top of a bunch of corpses.”

There was a grunt. Then the footsteps started again, coming directly toward her hiding place.

Elinalise stood frozen in the dark, her back pressed against the shelves. The coarse wool of a sheet scratched her neck. She could hear her own blood pounding in her ears, a frantic drumbeat that seemed loud enough to give her away. The cursed heat in her core flared again, a wave of warmth that spread through her belly and made her skin feel too tight, too sensitive against the fabric of her clothes. It was maddening, this physical betrayal happening at the worst possible moment.

The footsteps stopped right outside the door.

A hand rattled the latch.

The door didn’t budge. The warped frame held it fast.

“Locked,” Korb said.

“You want to break it?”

A moment of silence. Elinalise imagined him weighing the effort against his boredom.

“For a closet full of bedsheets? Not worth the splinters. Mark it cleared and move on.”

The footsteps receded, continuing down the passage she had meant to take.

She didn’t move for a long time after the sound had completely faded. She just stood there in the scent of old linen and dust, waiting for her heart to slow from its gallop. The heat inside her gradually receded from its peak, settling back into that now-familiar, low-grade throb.

Lord Crell wants the whole upper keep swept. Items of state. Hunting a princess.

Each phrase landed like a stone in the pit of her stomach, right beside the embers of the curse. Crell wasn’t just betraying them; he was managing the aftermath like a steward taking inventory after a fire. The cold efficiency of it was worse than any shouted hatred.

When she finally trusted her legs to hold her, she eased the door open a crack. The corridor was empty. She listened for a full minute before slipping out and moving in the opposite direction from the soldiers. The maids’ stair was compromised now. She needed another way up.

Memory supplied it: an older, disused vent shaft that connected the laundry drying rooms to the old solar vents. It was more of a climb than a walk, but it bypassed two main floors.

Finding the access grate behind a defunct boiler was easy enough. Pulling it open without making a shriek of rust was harder. She managed it by shifting her weight slowly, letting the metal complain in quiet increments until there was space to squeeze through.

The shaft was tight and choked with decades of dust that rose in clouds as she climbed, making her eyes water and threatening to choke her coughs back down her throat. The physical strain made the curse-heat pulse in time with her movements, a sickening rhythm of exertion and inner fire.

She emerged at last into a deserted anteroom off the family wing, brushing grey powder from her cloak and hair. Here, the signs of violence were different. Not bloodstains, but violation.

The double doors to her father’s chambers stood open, one hanging crookedly from a shattered hinge.

She approached slowly, each step feeling heavier than the last.

The room was a wreck. Her father’s massive oak desk had been split down the middle, as if someone had taken an axe to it in search of hidden compartments. Scrolls and ledgers were scattered across the floor like autumn leaves, many torn or trampled. The tapestries depicting historic battles had been ripped from the walls, leaving pale rectangles on the stone. His collection of ceremonial swords was gone from their racks; only empty brackets remained.

But it was the space before the cold hearth that held her gaze. The rug was gone. The floor there was just bare stone, scrubbed recently enough to still be damp in patches. No body. No armor. No sign that the Dragon King had ever lived or died here.

They had taken him away. For display? For desecration? She didn’t know. His absence in this ravaged room was louder than any corpse could have been. It screamed that he was truly gone, erased from his own space as thoroughly as they were trying to erase his line.

The cold fury that had carried her this far solidified into something sharper, something brittle and clear. She turned away from her father’s empty chambers and went to her own.

The sight wasn’t any better. Her doors were broken inward. Silken gowns from her wardrobe were strewn about, some ripped as if checked for hidden items, others just tossed aside. A porcelain washbasin lay in shards on the tiles. Her writing desk had been upended, its contents spilled. Someone had taken a knife to her feather mattress, spilling stuffing across the floor like strange snow.

They had been thorough. But they hadn’t known about Old Kella.

Kella had been her nurse until she turned ten—a woman with hands like leather and a voice that could shatter glass at fifty paces. She’d also been paranoid about “courtly snakes,” as she called them. On Elinalise’s twelfth birthday, when she’d been given these chambers, Kella had shown her something. “A lady needs a place for her own secrets,” she’d whispered conspiratorially. “Not in jewel boxes or under floorboards. Those are the first places they look.”

She’d led Elinalise to the grand fireplace. It was never used for real fires anymore; a smaller heating stove did that work. The hearth was deep and lined with decorative river stones. Kella had knelt, her old knees cracking, and wiggled one stone near the back left corner. It wasn’t loose to casual inspection. You had to press up on its left side while pulling forward. With a gritty scrape, it came free. Behind it was a shallow hollow just large enough for a small pouch or, as Kella insisted, “something truly important.”

Elinalise crossed the room to the hearth now. She knelt amidst the debris of her former life. The river stones were cool and sooty. Finding the right one by touch alone was difficult. Her fingers slipped over smooth surfaces until they caught on a particular edge.

She pressed up and pulled. The stone resisted at first, then slid out with a shower of ancient mortar dust.

The hollow behind it was dark. She reached in. Her fingers touched cool metal.

She drew out a small object wrapped in oiled cloth. Unfolding it revealed a heavy silver seal about the size of her palm. It bore the intricately carved crest of House Dragonheart: a dragon coiled protectively around a mountain peak, its wings unfurled. It was not for official decrees—that was a larger, golden seal kept by the Chamberlain. This was her father’s personal seal. The one he used for private correspondence. For letters to allies he truly trusted. For documents he didn’t want recorded in the public ledgers.

He had given it to her on her sixteenth birthday. “For when you need to speak with my voice, and I am not there to give it,” he’d said, his own voice uncharacteristically soft. She’d hidden it immediately, thinking it a sentimental gesture more than a practical one. Now its weight in her hand felt like an anchor.

She rewrapped it carefully in its cloth and tucked it deep into an inner pocket sewn into her gown, the only part of her clothing not completely ruined. As she did so, her fingertips brushed against something else already in there—a few hard crumbs, likely remnants of bread from yesterday’s forgotten breakfast. A lifetime ago.

The sound of boots echoed from the corridor outside her chambers, methodical and getting closer. Another patrol, sweeping through as ordered.

Elinalise slid the stone back into place, smearing mortar dust with her palm to obscure any fresh marks. She rose quickly, scanning the room for any other exit besides the broken main door and the window that opened onto a sheer drop. There was none.

The footsteps stopped right outside.

The footsteps paused just outside the splintered door. A low murmur of voices, then the broken door was pushed wider, swinging inward with a groan.

Lord Crell stepped through the wreckage of her room.

He looked exactly as he had last night in the feast hall—same grey robes, same composed expression. The only difference was the two Grenville soldiers flanking him, their faces hard beneath their helmet rims. They scanned the room with professional detachment, their hands resting on their sword pommels.

Crell’s gaze swept over the torn gowns and shattered porcelain before settling on her. There was no surprise in his eyes. He had expected to find her here, or somewhere like it.

“Leave us,” he said, his voice quiet but carrying.

One of the guards shifted his weight. “My lord, the princess—”

“Is unarmed and in her own chambers,” Crell finished, his tone allowing no argument. “Wait in the corridor. Close the door.”

The guards exchanged a look, but they obeyed. They stepped back, pulling the shattered door as closed as it would go. The sound of their boots receded a few paces, then stopped. They were waiting right outside.

Silence filled the space between them. Elinalise stood by the hearth, the weight of the seal a cold brand against her thigh through the fabric of her gown. The cursed heat inside her seemed to coil tighter under his scrutiny.

Crell took a few steps into the room, his eyes cataloging her state with that same administrative precision he’d used on tax reports. The filthy servant’s cloak, the matted hair, the grime on her face. His gaze lingered on her flushed skin, on the slight tremor in her hands that she couldn’t quite control.

“You look unwell, Elinalise,” he observed. No ‘Your Highness.’ Just her name. It was a dismissal more complete than any insult.

She said nothing. Words felt like ash in her mouth. What could she say to him? Every memory of kindness—the honey cakes, the silence in the hay—was now a lie wrapped in poison.

“The spellcaster’s work, I assume,” Crell continued, nodding slightly as if confirming a hypothesis. “A residual effect from the lineage curse. I wondered if you were close enough to be caught in the periphery.” He spoke about it like a minor logistical oversight, a ripple effect from a planned operation. “A feverish agitation of the blood and spirit. Quite ingenious, really. A permanent… discomfort.”

Her fingernails bit into her palms. The heat pulsed, a sickening affirmation of his words. Lineage curse. So that’s what the violet light had been meant to do. Not just kill her father, but taint the bloodline itself.

“Why?” The single word scraped out of her throat, raw and quiet.

Crell tilted his head slightly, considering the question as if it were mildly interesting. “Why what? The betrayal? The curse? They are two parts of the same answer.” He clasped his hands behind his back, adopting a lecturing posture she knew well. “Your father was a relic. Noble in his way, but stubborn. He believed in oaths, in ancient pacts with dragon-kin that haven’t been seen in centuries. He refused to see that the world is consolidating under powers that understand leverage and force, not myth and honor.”

He took another slow step closer. She didn’t retreat, though every instinct screamed to put distance between them.

“House Grenville understands the future,” he said. “They offered a partnership—a merger of territories, with me as administrator of this region. A practical arrangement. Your father would have seen it as surrender. So surrender was arranged for him.”

The coldness of it was breathtaking. It wasn’t passion or hatred. It was a ledger entry. A better deal accepted.

“And me?” she whispered.

A faint, almost imperceptible smile touched his lips. It wasn’t cruel. It was… satisfied. “You are the final entry in that ledger. The last Dragonheart.” His eyes flicked over her again, noting her shiver, the sweat at her hairline despite the room’s chill. “Killing you would have been simple. Martyrdom has a certain inconvenient power. It inspires fools to futile gestures.”

He paused, letting his meaning hang in the air.

“But this?” He gestured vaguely at her. “This cursed existence you now endure? This is better. You will carry the mark of your family’s end within you, always. A living reminder of their failure. A princess reduced to a… condition.” He said the last word with deliberate softness. “You will run, and you will hide, and every moment of your life will be poisoned by that spell’s remnant. Every alliance you seek will be threatened by it. Every moment of peace will be undone by it. You will be known, if you are known at all, as a creature of scandal and sickness. That is a far more fitting end for your lineage than a clean death.”

Elinalise stared at him. The fury was there, a frozen lake inside her, but beneath it ran a new and terrible understanding. He wasn’t just letting her go out of some twisted mercy or forgotten affection. He was engineering her punishment. Her life was to be the evidence of his victory.

“You’re a monster,” she breathed.

“I am a pragmatist,” he corrected gently. “Monsters are inefficient. They rage and destroy without purpose.” He turned slightly, looking toward the broken door. “My purpose is served. The kingdom is secured. The heir is… handled.”

He turned back to her, his gaze flat and final. “I will not have you killed, Elinalise. Consider it my last lesson to you: some fates are worse than death. Yours will be one of them.”

With that, he walked past her toward the door. He didn’t look back.

He pulled the shattered door open. The two guards outside snapped to attention.

“This room is clear,” Crell told them, his voice resuming its normal, authoritative tone. “The princess is not here. She likely perished in the city fires. You will report that.”

“Yes, my lord,” one guard said, confusion evident but obedience immediate.

“Come,” Crell said. “We have inventories to complete in the west wing.”

He led them away down the corridor, their footsteps fading.

Elinalise stood frozen in the center of her ruined room. She likely perished in the city fires. He was giving her a story. A disappearance. He was also leaving the path to the door—and beyond it, the castle corridors—unguarded. Not out of carelessness. It was a deliberate part of the plan. The prisoner allowed to escape into a world that was now her prison.

Her hand pressed against her pocket where the silver seal lay heavy and cold. The other hand went to her lower stomach, where the curse simmered. His words echoed. A living reminder. A creature of scandal and sickness.

The frozen lake of fury inside her cracked. It didn’t melt into hot rage; it shattered into a million sharp, clear pieces. Each piece was a resolve. Each piece was a needle of intent.

He thought her punishment was to be her curse. He thought her legacy would be infamy. He thought he had written her final entry.

She walked to the broken doorway. The corridor was empty. She could hear distant sounds of occupation from other parts of the keep—voices, dragging sounds—but this wing was quiet for now.

She didn’t run. Running was what he expected. She walked. With deliberate steps, she moved back into the arteries of the castle, the servant passages now known to her as pathways of escape rather than corridors of service.

The journey out was a blur of shadows and hushed sounds. She passed a courtyard where Grenville soldiers were stacking bodies onto a wagon. She slipped past a pair of cooks in unfamiliar livery carrying sacks of flour into what had been her family’s kitchens. No one looked twice at a dirty girl in a servant’s cloak. She was already a ghost in her own home.

She retraced her path downward, through the cistern with its pale bodies, into the cold water of the drainage culvert, and out through the rusted grate into the grey afternoon light by the river.

The city still smoked. But the sounds were different now—not screams and battle, but the sounds of consolidation. The hammering of new signs over old shopfronts. The barked orders of patrols establishing curfew.

Elinalise pulled her hood up and melted into the flow of displaced people trudging along the river road, their faces blank with shock. She walked among them, one more piece of human debris left by the conquest.

But inside, where Crell thought he had placed only a curse, something else now burned alongside that feverish ache. It was colder. It was harder. It had the weight of silver and the sharpness of a vow made in a filthy alley.

He had cemented her path, all right. Just not the one he imagined. It didn’t lead to hiding or shame. It led straight back to him, and to everyone who stood with him. The road would be long, and every step would be accompanied by this unwanted fire in her blood. But she would walk it anyway.

Princess Elinalise Dragonheart, cursed heir to a fallen kingdom, disappeared into the smoldering ruins of her city, carrying nothing but a stolen seal and a promise written in ice and embers. The first chapter of her vengeance had ended. The next one, however long it took, was already beginning.