High Queen Elandra's Arc

Chapter 9 of 15

Elandra wakes to light flooding the crypt. The orchid she tucked back into the grimoire is no longer pressed between the pages. It sits on the stone slab, fully bloomed, petals glowing brighter than any flame she has ever kindled. The flower should not be alive. She dried it two thousand years ago. A sound draws her attention to the crypt entrance. A woman stands beneath the archway, dark hair falling past her shoulders, eyes the same pale blue as the white fox that guided Elandra here. She carries a painting under one arm—a portrait of Elandra herself in a silver gown, holding a child with glowing blue eyes. Both figures wear crowns. The woman tilts the portrait forward. "I am what remains of Princess Aria's blood," she says. "The orchid called me here." Elandra crosses the distance between them in three strides. She stops close enough to see the woman's face clearly. The resemblance is there—something in the shape of the jaw, the angle of the cheekbones. But Aria had no children. Elandra buried her beneath the pale tree herself. The stranger gestures past Elandra to where black vines now grow from the stone slab, thorned and sparking with magic where the orchid bloomed. "The spell you wrote was never meant to be finished alone," the woman says. "It required blood willing to trust you. Mine or another's—that was always your choice." Elandra takes the portrait from the woman's hands and studies it. She painted this herself, centuries ago, before she hid it away with everything else she could not bear to look at. The grimoire, the orchid, the unfinished spell—she buried them all because finishing meant asking for help. The woman meets her gaze without flinching. "I came because the orchid bloomed," she says. "But I will leave if you tell me to." Elandra looks at the vines spreading across the slab, at the grimoire still open to the incomplete spell, at the stranger she turned immortal who stands silent in the shadows. Three people now stand in a crypt she entered alone. She hands the portrait back to the woman. "Stay," Elandra says. "I need to know what you are."