The bells tolled as the sun slowly sunk over the western ridges of Astochia: long, wailing tones that sent the servants scattering like mice before the shadow of a hawk.
The sound rolled through the marble halls, piercing heavy doors and thick curtains, until the entire palace froze in anticipation.
Lily felt it in her teeth, in her chest, in the very core of her being.
Down in the harbor, sleek black ship adorned with Fifth House sigil – two crossed arrows burning in red, elegantly docked.
Keth appeared at Lily’s door, face pale, eyes stern.
“The prince requests you keep to your room for the night.” He informed her.
The bottom of Lily’s lower lip trembled for a moment before she set her jaw firm, and rose, squaring her shoulders.
“She’s here, isn’t she?”
Keth hesitated, then nodded.
“And neither of you knows how long is she going to stay?”
Keth sighed, closing his eyes for a heartbeat.
“Then no. I don’t care. I’m not hiding. I want to see what I’m facing.”
Outside, the bell tolled again, like an omen. Footsteps clamored in the corridors.
He tried again, “The prince explicitly stated…”
“I don’t care what he stated.” She snapped, hiding her shaking hands. “This is my home now, and I’m not a frightened mouse.” Except that she was. Terribly. But, sometimes, the only way to overcome fear was to face it, head on. She learned that from Evan. Even though he usually said it to justify his silly antics, it was true, nonetheless.
“Lily.” Keth pleaded softly, voice deep and warm. “He didn’t say forever. Only for tonight.”
That somehow made it worse. Slight layer of moisture settled over her palms. Using the fabric of her dress she wiped them as if she was wiping away an insult.
“I’m going to meet her. And he can’t stop me.”
Keth opened his mouth, then closed them and turned aside to let her pass.
Lily ran up the serpentine staircase all the way to the great roof terrace that was the palace’s main entrance.
Outside, stripped of its warmth by the sharp northern breeze, the dying sunlight bled on stone in dark hues of copper.
Eirran stood in the centre of the terrace, in formal House indigo embroidered with silver in feather motifs. Behind him, in the corners, rows of servants neatly lined up, heads bowed.
Meren was there, lifting her head in confusion as Lily stormed onto the roof, her feet ringing on the stone.
Eirran turned at the sound, eyes going impossibly wide. His wings twitched, almost spreading wide before he pulled them in in sharp, controlled motion.
Behind him, winged shadows were slowly approaching beneath the gathering clouds.
“What are you doing up here?” He almost hissed. “I told you to stay in your room! Didn’t Keth…”
“He did.” She swallowed, not leaving his gaze. “I’m not hiding in my own home.” She grasped at his hand. “Through fire, unbroken?” A small, nervous smile twitched the corner of her lips.
Eirran opened his mouth to speak when a shadow fell upon them.
A moment later, Fariah landed without a sound.
Her silver shoe touched the marble with impossible lightness, and the skirt of her lliath set above it like a curtain.
Eirran’s arm went around Lily’s back, clasped her shoulder and pulled her close, his wing shooting out on its own volition behind her back and over her side – not touching, but protecting.
Fariah V’Asanii stepped towards them, but she did not walk.
Not as a human, nor even as an Ilari. She glided in sharp, striding motion – each step deliberate. Her wings, dulled by age to that precise shade of storm-grey that clouds take a second before they break into thunder, spread a little wider than propriety allowed, defiant, dominating without a single spoken word.
The servants bowed like reeds under a gust of strong wind, faces lowered, hands clasped, but her gaze ignored them all, focusing with narrow precision on her son, before sliding to the small, wingless figure beside him.
Lily’s lungs collapsed; the air turned too thick to breathe.
Up close, Fariah was both more and less than the stories said – taller than expected, her Ilari-perfect face unlined by age, yet carved by something older than time, something deep and long unhealed.
Her eyes, black as Eirran’s but stripped of his warmth, swept over Lily with the cold detachment of a butcher assessing livestock, as if her fate had already been measured and weighed.
“Creature.”
The word was not shouted. It wasn’t even loud. But it cut straight into the marrow of Lily’s being.
Someone gasped, then was quickly shushed.
Her fingers twitched at her sides, nails biting into her palms as she fought to keep the rising fury from breaking free. She felt her father’s hand on her shoulder – warm, heavy, anchoring – and she straightened, lifting her chin, meeting Fariah’s eyes head-on.
Fariah’s nostrils flared. A flicker of something dark crossed her face – not surprise, not even anger, but the barely contained wrath of a woman who, in two hundred and seventy eight years, had never once been defied.
“It has your eyes,” Fariah said at last, each word deliberately disinterested. “The rest is mud.”
A crow screeched from the nearby cypress, like an echo from a graveyard.
Eirran’s hand stayed firm on Lily’s shoulder.
“Mother…”
“Silence.” Fariah didn’t even look at him. Her attention stayed locked on Lily, her voice dropping to a venomous whisper meant only for her. “Get that thing out of my sight. We will speak privately.”
The dismissal was final.
Lily trembled from pain and from fury so fierce it threatened to consume her, to turn her to ash. She opened her mouth, ready to fight back, but Eirran’s fingers twitched around her shoulder.
“Lily.” His voice was quiet but firm. “Go to your room. Wait for me there.” A brief pause. “Please.” He added in a whisper.
Fariah’s lips thinned to a bloodless line as Lily turned and fled, but she said nothing.
The doors of the hall had barely closed before Fariah turned on her son, her wings unfurled like thunderclouds, her presence filling the room like death itself.
“Have you completely lost your mind?!”
Her voice cracked like a whip. “You keep that unclean thing at your side? Under your very wings?” Her lips curled in barely controlled disgust.
“She is my daughter.”
Eirran did not raise his voice. He didn’t need to. The quiet certainty of those four words hung between them like a drawn sword.
Fariah went very still, the chill in her tone more dangerous than any shout.
“No,” she said softly, voice like a whisper from a tomb. “She is a half-blooded mudborn bastard you dragged from some fishing village. Proof of your lust and your cardinal sin. By law, she cannot be acknowledged. By custom, she should have been strangled at birth. And you; instead of casting her back into the dirt where she belongs and begging Ellevath’s forgiveness… You flaunt her through this palace, through the sky itself, like some profane trophy. Look at her, Eirran! That thing is a living blasphemy! And you disgrace the Temple, God, every drop of blood your ancestors shed, every…” Her voice cracked.
Eirran’s fists tightened at his sides, his wings taut as bowstrings. “You call my daughter an offense to God?”
“I call you mad!” She gasped. “Parading your sin like a banner!” Fariah’s composure shattered, rage pouring through the cracks. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done? What you’re doing? The Houses whisper. The Temple burns.”
“Let them whisper.” Eirran stepped forward, his wings catching the light like a halo. “I am beyond their venomous tongues.”
Air escaped Fariah’s mouth in a hiss. “You would throw away fifteen centuries of V’Asanii legacy for what?”
“For my child.” The words tore from him raw as an open wound. “For the last piece of the woman I loved.”
Silence that followed was vast and absolute, like the moment before a storm.
A log broke in the hearth, sparks flaring, shadows dancing. The sudden light caught the remnants of pearlescence in Fariah’s wings, turning them into liquid silver. When she spoke again, her voice had changed, becoming not softer, but older, burdened by something that might once have been sorrow.
“I lost you once to that Selavetian witch,” she whispered, her voice trembling with fury. “Must I lose you again to her shadow?”
The words hit him like a blow, cutting through all his armor. For a moment, something wavered in his face as he looked at her eyes – the same eyes that once looked at him with love and pride. The hands that steadied him as he learned to fly, wings that sheltered him from storms.
The memory burned brief and white hot, then it was gone.
“Her name was Noemi,” he said quietly, each word a hammer striking an anvil. “Not ‘witch.’ Not ‘whore’, or whichever other insult you might concieve. Noemi.”
Fariah flinched as if struck, eyes widening, her face twisting with fury.
“Do not speak,” she said, every word dripping venom, “that traitorous rat’s name in my presence again.”
Eirran moved before he could stop himself, a step forward, wings snapping open like banners before battle.
“Never call her that again!” All five tones of his Ilari harmony thundered through the palace. The fire in the hearth surged, then trembled; windows shook, glass breath away from bursting.
The air between them crackled like charged air before lightning.
“She was a spy,” Fariah hissed, her words sharp as glass. “A lying, scheming serpent who played at love while plotting your death. And this!” she flung a hand toward the way where Lily had fled. “This is what you’d sacrifice your House for? Her bastard?”
“Yes.”
The simplicity of it stunned her.
Fariah stepped back, face contorting as though she had tasted something foul.
“What have you become? You are not the son I raised.”
“No,” Eirran agreed, voice hollow but unyielding. “He died in Selavetia, with the mother of his child. What’s left is a man who will not lose them both.”
For a heartbeat Fariah’s rigid posture faltered, her hands trembling, her eyes narrowing. Then her spine straightened again; the mask returned.
“Very well. Keep your unclean, mudborn whelp. For now. Play with fire. But remember my words: the sins that are not cleansed are paid in blood.”
The doors slammed behind her hard enough to shake the portraits on the walls, leaving Eirran alone with the ghosts of his choices.
Lily waited where he had told her, curled in a chair by the window of her room like a wounded animal, eyes fixed on her trembling hands.
Outside, the storm had finally broken. Rain thudded against the glass. She didn’t look up when Eirran entered, but he saw the way her fists clenched, the way her shoulders hunched as if bracing for a blow.
“She doesn’t just hate me. She despises me.”
The words were barely audible over the rain, almost swallowed.
Eirran crossed the room, his shadow falling over her, as he lowered himself to kneel before her, his warm and steady hands closing over hers.
“She doesn’t know you.”
Lily’s fingers fidgeted with the folds of her skirt, picking on a loose thread, trying to hold on to something she could control.
“She called me a creature.”
His jaw tightened. He reached up, cupping her face.
“Lily… She’s like those priests in the Temple – worse, even. Because she truly believes what she says. She won’t listen to anything else. Don’t listen to her. Not her, not anyone who speaks to you that way. Ever.”
He paused.
“Tell me who you are.”
She blinked, confused. “I’m Lily. Eilleah…” She corrected herself, using her full name.
“And what else?” Eirran’s gaze did not waver. She looked away.
“Hamad,” she murmured.
“And what else?” He was relentless. Her eyes flashed. She knew what he was asking… And knew it was forbidden.
“I’m not asking what name the law permits,” he said softly. “I’m asking the name you bear by blood. By this.” He placed a hand over his chest.
She blinked.
“V’Asanii,” she whispered at last; and only then did she realize how much she had yearned to say it aloud.
Eirran smiled then, firelight tracing ribbons of gold across his face; for an instant, he looked ethereal.
“And, remind me, what is the Fifth House’s creed, again?”
The words made him real again, coaxing a small smile from his daughter. “Through fire, unbroken.” She said softly.
His hands tightened around hers.
“I swear, no one will ever take you from me again. Not V’Loraths, not the Temple, and not my mother.”
Outside, the storm raged: lightning blazed, thunder roared; but in this quiet corner of the world, Lily allowed herself to believe that it might be true.
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