The days that followed took on a new, exhausting rhythm. Elara's gilded cage was no longer silent. It was filled with the phantom echoes of magic she was learning to hear, and the relentless internal drill of Kaelen's lessons.
Be the empty cup.
She practiced in the sterile quiet of her room, sitting for hours by the cold fireplace. She would focus on a single, enchanted candle sconce—a simple, constant trickle of Fae-light. Instead of trying to drain it, she would simply feel its energy, acknowledge its existence, and hold her own internal void in a state of passive readiness. It was a mental muscle she'd never used, and it ached with a new kind of fatigue.
Lysandra continued her silent ministrations, but the handmaiden's moss-green eyes now held a flicker of wary observation. She noted the untouched food, the new stillness in Elara's posture, the faint, unhealthy shimmer that sometimes lingered on her skin after a training session with the King. The servant was a spy, but she was also a barometer. If Lysandra was noticing changes, the rest of the court would soon follow.
The thought was a cold knot in Elara's stomach during her fifth lesson in Kaelen's study. Today's exercise was "discernment." An array of objects lay on the black table: another ward-stone, a spool of thread that hummed with a preservation spell, a dagger whose edge held a cruel, sharpening enchantment, and a small, withered flower that radiated a faint, sad magic of lost love.
"Identify the nature of the magic," Kaelen instructed, leaning against his desk with his arms crossed. "Not by sight. By the signature of its energy. Tell me which is protective, which is preservative, which is aggressive, which is sentimental."
Elara closed her eyes, extending her senses. The hunger stirred, interested, but she held it in the state of open calm he'd taught her. The objects glowed in her mind's eye, each a different constellation of feeling.
"The stone is… a shell. Hard, static. Protective," she said slowly. "The thread is a loop, constant, gentle. Preservation. The dagger is… a scream. A focused point of wanting to cut." She hesitated at the last. The flower's magic was a dim, aching pulse. "The flower is… a memory. A ghost of feeling. Sadness."
"Sentiment," Kaelen confirmed, a note of approval in his voice. "Good. Now, from the dagger only, draw the smallest amount of its aggressive intent. Just a taste. Remember, you are sampling the flavor of the magic, not consuming the meal."
This was more dangerous. Drawing on an enchantment of violence. She focused on the "scream" of the dagger, visualized the empty cup, and allowed a single, sharp note of that aggressive energy to flow into her.
It hit her system like a swallow of raw spirits. A hot, reckless anger flared in her chest, a sudden urge to shove the table over, to meet Kaelen's challenging gaze with a snarl. She clenched her jaw, forcing the foreign emotion down, letting the void within her dissolve its intent, leaving behind only a sterile burst of power. She exhaled sharply, her hands trembling.
"Aggression, when siphoned, can trigger aggressive emotion," Kaelen noted clinically, as if reading from a scroll. "You must learn to isolate the energy from its emotional payload. Or be prepared to manage the consequences."
He was about to continue when a soft, chime-like sound echoed in the room. A crystal on his desk pulsed with soft blue light. He frowned, a flicker of genuine irritation crossing his features. "Remain here," he commanded. "Do not touch anything." He strode from the study, the door sealing shut behind him with a whisper of magic.
Alone for the first time in his sanctum, the silence felt different. Deeper. The artifacts seemed to watch her. The map on the wall whispered of distant, magical conflicts. The hum of the keep's power was a living thing here, concentrated and complex.
Be the empty cup.
She practiced, turning her senses to the room itself. She let the myriad magical signatures wash over her—the cool intellect of the stored scrolls, the dormant potential of the weapons, the ancient, grounding power of the stone itself.
And then, she felt it.
A discordant note. A faint, ugly vibration that was sickeningly familiar. It wasn't in the room. It was below. Muffled, contained, but unmistakable.
Blight.
Her eyes flew open. She looked at the floor, as if she could see through the stone. The vibration was coming from directly beneath the study. Not the sealed chamber where the sample was kept. Somewhere else. Somewhere close.
The hunger inside her sat up, alert and eager.
This was no simple, contained sample. This felt… active. And it was hidden in the heart of the Shadow King's private domain.
Her mind raced. Kaelen was hunting the source of the blight. He believed it was a weapon from an enemy. But what if the enemy was closer than he thought? What if the traitor wasn't just among the court, but had access to here?
Or a darker, more terrifying thought: What if Kaelen himself was not just hunting the blight, but cultivating it? The scholar-king, experimenting with a terrible weapon, using her as a tool to understand it…
No. She rejected the thought as soon as it formed. The cold fury in his eyes when he spoke of the blight's encroachment had been real. The risk to his borders was real. But the presence of active blight here was also real.
She had to know.
Moving silently, she went to the wall-map. Her eyes scanned the intricate illustration of the keep. There, near the base of the King's Tower, was a small, marked chamber labeled in elegant script: Auxiliary Containment.
Auxiliary. A secondary site. Hidden.
The chime sounded again, a series of rapid pulses now. Kaelen would be returning.
Elara hurried back to her chair, forcing her breathing to slow, her expression into one of bored patience. The hunger was a frantic drumbeat against her ribs, drawn to the secret poison below.
When Kaelen re-entered, his expression was dark, preoccupied. "Courtly nonsense," he muttered, more to himself than to her. "Lord Theron demanding an audience about border patrols. He grows bold." He seemed to remember her presence and shook off his irritation. "We will continue tomorrow. Your progress on discernment is adequate."
Adequate. She bit back a retort, the stolen aggression from the dagger still a faint echo in her blood. She stood. "As you wish, Your Majesty."
He waved a dismissive hand, already turning toward a pile of scrolls on his desk. She was dismissed.
Lysandra was waiting for her in her chambers, laying out a gown of deep emerald for the evening. "The King has requested your presence at a small gathering in the Starfall Salon tonight," the handmaiden said, her voice neutral. "It is an… intimate gathering of the Inner Circle."
A test. Not of her power, but of her poise. To be thrown to the wolves of his closest advisors.
"Thank you, Lysandra," Elara said, her mind still churning with the discovery of the hidden blight. As the handmaiden helped her into the emerald gown, a dangerous plan began to form.
The gathering was a gauntlet she had to run. But afterwards… when the keep was quiet…
She needed to see what was in that auxiliary chamber. She needed to know if the king who was teaching her control was hiding a greater loss of it beneath his feet.
That night, the Starfall Salon was a deceptively beautiful pit of vipers. The ceiling was a living nebula, and soft music played from crystals. Lord Theron was there, his yellow eyes gleaming with malicious delight as he toasted "the human queen's… remarkable adjustment." Lady Sylvyre stood like a statue of moonlit marble, her gaze avoiding Elara entirely, fixed on Kaelen with wounded devotion. Others of the Inner Circle watched, their conversations a low, poisonous hum.
Elara played her part. She was quiet, observant, a still pool in a stream of sharp words. She sipped the starry wine, feeling its gentle magic fizz and die against the void within her. She listened as Theron needled Kaelen about "human fragility" and the "cost of curiosity."
Kaelen's responses were clipped, his attention divided. He watched his courtiers, but his gaze kept flicking to her, as if checking to see if she was unraveling.
She wasn't unraveling. She was plotting.
Later, in the dead hours of the eternal night, when even the Fae court slept or schemed in their private chambers, Elara slipped from her bed. She wore the dark, simple shift she'd arrived in, now cleaned by Lysandra's silent magic. She padded barefoot to her chamber door.
The lock shimmered, a soft silver. Kaelen's magic. But it was a containment ward, designed to keep things in or out. It wasn't designed to stop a Siphon from gently, carefully, unmaking the tiny, constant flow of energy that sustained it.
She placed her palm against the cold wood. Be the empty cup. A needle's eye. She focused not on breaking the ward, but on creating a tiny, sustained vacuum at its core. A silent, invisible sip.
After a minute of agonizing concentration, the silver shimmer flickered and died. The lock gave a soft, mechanical click.
Her heart hammered against her ribs. She was out.
Moving like a ghost, she retraced the path to Kaelen's tower, sticking to the deepest shadows. The auxiliary chamber was not accessed through the study. According to the map, it had a separate entrance from a lower service corridor.
She found it—a plain, iron-bound door in a neglected hallway near the kitchens. It was also warded, but this magic was different. Colder, more clinical. And underneath it, pulsing like a sick heart, was the blight-signature.
Using the same painstaking technique, she dissolved the ward. The door was locked physically as well. But here, her hunger proved useful. She placed her fingers on the old iron lock and drew out the minuscule trace of reinforcing magic within the metal. It grew brittle, and with a focused push, the mechanism inside snapped.
She slipped inside, closing the door behind her.
The chamber was small, cold, and lit by the same cold, green brazier-fire as the main containment room. But here, there were no silver circles. Instead, in the center of the room, on a stone pedestal, sat a complex apparatus of crystal and silver wire. And within it, suspended in a viscous fluid, was a throbbing, fist-sized core of the blight. It was denser, darker, more organized than the sample. It looked less like a corrupted root and more like a crafted… engine.
On a table beside it lay notes. She approached, her breath fogging in the cold air. The script was a sharp, angular Fae script she couldn't read. But next to the notes was a map. A detailed, local map of the borderlands. And on it, marked in the same sickly silver-blue as the blight, were three points: her village, and two other human settlements along the Veil. Arrows pointed from the Fae side to these villages. Not arrows of invasion. Arrows of… targeting.
This was no naturally occurring plague. This was a calibrated attack. And the evidence was here, in the King's own keep.
A soft sound behind her—the scuff of a boot on stone.
Elara's blood turned to ice. She slowly turned.
In the doorway, not looking surprised at all, stood Kaelen. He was dressed not in sleeping robes, but in his dark, practical gear. His storm-silver eyes glinted in the green light, fixed on the blight-core, then sliding to her face.
"I see," he said, his voice dangerously soft, "that your lessons in discernment have progressed further than I anticipated."
He stepped into the room, letting the door swing shut behind him, sealing them in together with the terrible, pulsing truth.