"Has Draven arrived?"

Aurelia asked it the way she'd asked it eleven times already, very quiet, even, like saying it calmly enough might drag him through the door by will alone.

Nima, the healer's apprentice, did not look at her eyes. "He's on his way, my Luna."

"You said that an hour ago."

"He is on his way," Nima said again, and this time her hands shake so much around the bowl she carried, water spilled over the edge and onto the stone floor.

Aurelia watched the water spread into a dark stain and thought, distantly, that it was the calmest thing in the room.

Another contraction hit her spine and she bit down on the inside of her cheek to stop herself from screaming. Screaming felt like handing something away for free, and she'd already given this family enough for free.

"Where is he," she said. Not a question this time.

Old Rensa, the midwife, didn't look up from the linens she was folding into a shape that kept coming undone in her hands. "He's—"

"Don't," Aurelia said. "Don't say it again unless it's true."

Rensa's hands went still.

Outside the palace walls, the kingdom was screaming with joy.

She could hear them even through the thick stone walls, thousands of wolves were howling their approval for a baby that was not even born yet, celebrating an heir like the future was already decided. Someone had lit the bonfires early. The smoke curled in under the door, it was sweet and wrong, like the whole world was celebrating a party she had not been invited to.

"They're not waiting for the baby," Aurelia said, quietly to herself. "They're waiting for a fairy tale. An Alpha King. A newborn baby to take his place. A happy ending." She let out a breath that sounded like a sad laugh, and it hurt more than the contraction had.

"Nobody writes the part where the mother's alone."

"My Luna, don't speak like that," Nima said, too fast, too young to know how to argue with a woman twice her rank. "You're not alone. We're here."

"You're a healer's apprentice with four months of training," Aurelia said, not unkindly. "How many healers are in this palace tonight?"

Nima jumped back as if she had been hit. "My Luna, I don't think—"

"How many."

"Six," Nima whispered. "Including me."

"And how many are in this room?"

Nima did not answer. She did not need to. Aurelia already understood what the silence meant. The other five healers were somewhere else in this palace, tending to someone who wasn't her, while she labored with a girl barely out of her apprenticeship and a midwife who'd stopped meeting her eyes an hour ago.

"Bring me Draven," Aurelia said. "Not a message. Him."

No one moved.

"I am your Luna." Her voice cracked exactly down the center of the word Luna, and she hated the sound of it splitting. "Bring me my husband."

"My Luna, please," Nima said, setting the bowl down with hands that still hadn't stopped shaking. "You need to save your strength. Shouting won't bring him faster."

"Then what will?" Aurelia snapped, and immediately regretted the sharpness in it, not because Nima didn't deserve better, but because regret cost energy she didn't have to spare. "I'm sorry. That wasn't for you."

"I know," Nima said quietly.

Rensa stayed busy with the bowl, refusing to look up. "Rest, my Luna. Fighting the pain only makes it worse."

"You've known me since I was a girl, Rensa," Aurelia said. "You braided my hair before my first official meeting. Do not start lying to me now, especially tonight."

Rensa's stopped moving her hands again, the way they kept doing every time Aurelia got too close to something true. "I would never lie to you."

"Then tell me why the man who begged my father for this marriage can't be bothered to sit with me while I labor for his heir."

Rensa said nothing. The silence answered louder than words would have.

"That's what I thought," Aurelia said, and closed her eyes against the next wave of pain, because there was nothing left in the room worth looking at.

Rensa finally spoke, low, like she was confessing to a crime. "My Luna, the Alpha King was called away."

"Called away." Aurelia felt the words land somewhere under her ribs, sharper than the next contraction, which was saying something. "Called away from his wife's labor. By what. A border dispute? A council vote?"

Rensa said nothing.

"Say it," Aurelia said. "Whatever you're not saying, say it now, because I promise you I will survive hearing it and I will not survive wondering."

"I don't know the details," Rensa said, which was, Aurelia understood immediately, its own kind of lie, the lie of a woman who knew exactly enough and had decided how much of it she was willing to hand over. "Only that he left an hour before your labor began. Kallum will explain when he comes."

"When he comes," Aurelia repeated. "Not Draven. Kallum."

Rensa's silence answered for her.

Something in Aurelia's chest folded quietly in on itself, the way paper folds, not loud, not dramatic, just a clean crease where something used to be flat. She pressed her palm against her stomach and made herself breathe through the next wave of pain instead of the shape of what she was starting to understand.

Two hours crawled by like they had claws.

Aurelia watched the candle by the window burn down to a stub. She watched Nima glance at the door every few minutes, counting something, footsteps, maybe, or excuses. She watched Rensa refuse, again and again, to meet her eyes, and somewhere in that refusal Aurelia found the shape of the thing she'd been afraid of since the wedding: that she had married a man who would let her drown quietly rather than tell her, out loud, that he'd already chosen someone else's shore.

"My Luna," Nima said suddenly, glancing toward the window like she could see through stone if she tried hard enough. "Do you hear that?"

Aurelia listened. Beneath the distant cheering, closer now, was the sound of boots, many of them, moving fast, somewhere in the east corridor. Toward the Eastern Tower, if she still remembered this palace's bones correctly.

"Something's happening," Aurelia said.

"It's probably nothing," Rensa said quickly. Too quickly. "Guards change shifts at this hour."

"That many boots don't change a shift, Rensa. They answer an alarm."

Nobody argued with that, because nobody could.

"Tell me about Lady Mireth," Aurelia said, into the candlelight.

Nima's basin rattled against the table. "My Luna—"

"You heard me."

"I don't know anything about—"

"You're a terrible liar," Aurelia said, and it wasn't cruel, just tired, the way you tell a child their shoes are untied. "It's alright. I already know the shape of it. I just want to see if anyone in this room has the courage to say her name to my face."

Nobody did.

The doors opened two hours later, and for one stupid, loyal second, Aurelia smiled, some foolish, undying part of her still expecting him, still believing he'd walk through that door with his sleeves rolled up and his jaw tight with worry, the way he used to look at her before the crown got heavier than either of them had planned for.

It wasn't Draven.

It was Kallum, his Beta, crossing the room fast and dropping to one knee beside the bed like the posture itself might apologize on someone else's behalf.

"My Luna."

"Where is he."

Kallum's swallowed hard once before any sound came out. "The Alpha King ordered every royal healer to the Eastern Tower."

Something inside Aurelia went very still, it felt colder than the pain, and colder than the sweat drying on her skin. "Why."

Kallum couldn't say it to her face. She would give him that much later, in the small, useless mercy of memory, he said it to the floor instead.

"Lady Mireth was attacked."

Nima made a small, strangled sound. Rensa's folding hands finally stopped moving entirely.

"Attacked," Aurelia said, very quietly. "By whom."

"We don't know yet."

"And he took every healer in this palace to save her, before he came to see whether his wife or his child survived the night."

Kallum didn't answer that. He didn't need to.

Aurelia understood, in the space of a single breath, everything she needed to understand.

Not that Draven loved someone else, she'd suspected that for months, the way you suspect weather, a pressure in the air, a color to the sky, nothing you could point to until the storm actually broke over your head. What she understood now was simpler, and worse: when it came down to a choice between his wife bleeding in a birthing bed and his mistress bleeding somewhere else, he hadn't needed a second to decide. He hadn't even needed to be told the details first. He had simply gone.

"I see," Aurelia said.

She did not cry. She would think about that later, too, how there hadn't been room in her body for tears, because the blood was already taking up all of it, and grief, it turned out, was the first thing your body stopped affording once it started dying in earnest.

"My Luna, you're losing too much blood," Nima said, voice climbing toward panic. "Rensa—"

"I know," Rensa said, and for the first time that night she sounded frightened instead of evasive, which told Aurelia everything about how bad it had actually gotten.

"Tell him I understand," Aurelia said to Kallum, though she wasn't sure anymore if she meant it, or if the words were simply the last shape her pride had left to hide behind.

"My Luna, don't speak like that, you're going to—"

"Tell him," Aurelia said again, softer, "that I understand exactly what he chose. And exactly what it cost."

"Rensa, she's not stopping," Nima said, and the fear in her voice had stopped being professional and become something rawer, something closer to grief. "Rensa, I don't know what to do, you have to—"

"Get more linens," Rensa snapped, and for the first time all night she sounded like she was fighting for something instead of hiding from it. "Kallum, out, now, you're in the way."

Kallum didn't move. His hand was still around Aurelia's, and his face had gone the particular gray of a soldier watching a battle he already knew the ending to. "My Luna, stay with us."

"Tell him I forgive him," Aurelia heard herself say, though she wasn't sure it was true, wasn't sure it would still be true if she lived long enough to take it back. "No. Don't. Tell him I said nothing at all. Let him wonder."

Her head started spinning. The candlelight blurred into long gold threads that did not look like real shapes anymore. Rensa was shouting something at Nima. Kallum's hand was squeezing her hands, too tight, the way you hold onto something you already know you're about to lose.

Somewhere very far away, past the stone and the smoke and the bonfires, the kingdom was still cheering.

Before she passed out completely, Aurelia heard one last thing. It was not Kallum, Rensa, or Nima crying. It was a voice that did not belong to anyone in the room. The voice was deep and very old, coming from somewhere far underground. It sounded almost gentle when it said the one thing that no living person had said to her all night.

It said her name.

There was no ground under her feet, and yet she was still standing.

There was no light, and yet she could see. Her hands were pale and clean now, as if the blood from the last few hours had been washed away completely. In front of her stood a woman that is made of moonlight and silence. The woman's face changed slightly whenever Aurelia tried to look closely at her, as if the face did not want to be remembered.

"You know who I am," the woman said. It wasn't a question.

"The Moon Goddess." Aurelia's voice came out steadier than she expected, for someone fairly certain she'd just died. "Am I dead?"

"Yes."

There was no apology in the voice. There was no softness either, which was a mercy, in its own strange way, it was better than a night of people hiding the truth until it broke apart in her hands anyway.

"Then why am I here instead of gone," Aurelia said.

"Because gone is a door," the Goddess said. "And I haven't decided yet whether you're meant to walk through the door."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only honest one I have." The Goddess looked at her the way a doctor looked at a wound, deciding whether it was worth fixing with stitches. "Tell me what you felt, in your last moment. Not what you thought. What you felt."

Aurelia did not want to answer that. She answered it anyway, because there was nothing left in her to protect. "Relief," she said. "I was glad it was almost over. And then, anger. That I'd spent my last moment loving a man who left before I even finished dying."

"Not grief?"

"Grief takes time I didn't have."

Something crossed the Moon Goddess's face that might have been approval, or it might have been sorrow, with a face that refused to hold still, Aurelia couldn't be certain which is it exactly.

"If I returned everything you lost," the Goddess said. "The crown. The years. The husband who chose someone else in the room beside yours. Would you make the same choices?"

Aurelia didn't have to think about it. "No."

"Good," the Goddess said. "Because that is not why I am sending you back."

"Sending me—" the word back caught in Aurelia's chest like a hook mid-swallow. "Back where."

"Five years into the past," the Goddess said. "To the morning your father accepted House Nocthar's proposal on your behalf."

"To stop the marriage."

"To stop nothing." For the first time, the Goddess sounded urgent, like a hidden current under calm water. "You are not going back to save yourself, Aurelia.

You are going back to save everyone of us, and if you waste your second chance trying to avoid your own wedding, you will just die in that bed again. And there will be no one left to send back after you."

"No one left," Aurelia repeated. "What does that mean? Left of what?"

"The world you woke into tonight has an ending that is already written," the Goddess said. "I have seen it. Fire will burn over five kingdoms. A crown with no head left willing to wear it. I am not offering you a better wedding night, child. I am offering you the only chance left to erase that ending before it re-writes itself again."

"I still don't understand," Aurelia said. "My husband let me die so he could save his mistress. What does that have to do with five kingdoms burning?"

"His mistress is not the reason your world ends," the Goddess said. "She is barely a reason at all. What happened to you tonight was the first domino, Aurelia. Not the hand that pushed it."

"Then whose hand was it?"

The Goddess didn't answer, and Aurelia had the sudden, sharp sense, like stepping on glass in the dark, that this wasn't cruelty. The Goddess genuinely could not say the name. Not here. Not now. Not in whatever place this was, suspended between one life and the next.

"Why can't you tell me?"

"Because the moment I name her," the Goddess said, "she will feel it. And she has been waiting far longer than you have been alive for someone to finally see her clearly."

"Her," Aurelia repeated. A woman, then. That narrowed a world she didn't yet know how to search.

"Is she in the palace?" Aurelia pressed. "Is she someone I've already met? Someone I'll trust?"

"Yes," the Goddess said simply, and let the single word sit there, heavier than any longer answer could have been.

"That's worse than not knowing at all."

"No," the Goddess said. "It isn't. Not knowing at all is what killed you the first time."

"Then tell me how to fight someone that everyone trusts," Aurelia said. "If I accuse her too soon or if I am wrong, I will lose everything even before I've even started. If I wait too long, the five kingdoms burn."

"That," the Goddess said, "is the entire shape of the next five years of your life. I cannot solve it for you while standing here. I can only give you the tools and the time. What you build with the tools and time I give you is yours."

"That's not fair."

"No," the Goddess agreed. "It isn't. Fair died with the first domino, same as you did. What you have now isn't fairness. It's a second chance. Don't confuse the two, or you'll waste it grieving what you were owed instead of using what you were given."

Aurelia swallowed hard, that she felt like crying, which was strange because her spirit body had no real tears. "And if I fail again?"

"Then I will not be able to send you back the third time," the Goddess said, quiet now, almost gentle. "This is not a door that opens twice for the same soul. It only opens once for a soul. Whatever you do with these five years, Aurelia, do it like you mean it, make it count. You will not get to do it over again." There will be no second chance.

"You will find her yourself," the Goddess said. "You have a gift now that you didn't have before. Use it carefully. The dead don't usually get to see what's coming, you will, but only in pieces, and pieces can lie just as easily as people do, if you let them."

"What gift?"

"It is a way to touch an object, a relic, or a place and see its memories," the Goddess explained. "Places that held deep sadness or great love leave a mark." Her voice grew sharp and urgent again. "But listen carefully, because I can only say this once. Not everything you see has already happened. If nothing changes, some visions will show what is still to come. You must learn to tell the past from the future. Otherwise, you will waste your second chance chasing a future that hasn't happened yet, instead of stopping it."

"How am I supposed to tell them apart?"

"You won't always be able to," the Goddess admitted, and for the first time she sounded almost human in her uncertainty. "That is the cruelty of the gift I'm giving you. Trust the feeling more than the image. The past aches. The future warns."

"That's not much to go on."

"It's more than anyone else in the five realms will have," the Goddess said. "Use it well."

"Wait, five realms. You keep saying that like I already understand it. I know House Veyrune. I know House Nocthar. What are the others to me?"

"They will not stay strangers for long," the Goddess said. "Korvath. Frostveil. Emberclaw. Learn their names now, because before this ends, you will owe one of them your life, and another will nearly cost you it."

"That's hardly comforting."

"I am not here to comfort you," the Goddess said, not unkindly. "I am here to make sure you survive long enough to matter."

"And Draven?" Aurelia asked, hating how small her voice went around his name. "Do I marry him again knowing what he'll do? Knowing he'll choose her over me?"

"You already agreed you wouldn't make the same choices," the Goddess said. "That doesn't mean the marriage was your mistake to undo. Some doors have to be walked through a second time before you understand why they were locked in the first place."

"That's a very generous way of telling me I still have to marry a man who let me die."

"He didn't let you die," the Goddess said, and something in her tone made Aurelia go still. "Not the way you believe. But that is not mine to explain. It is yours to uncover, and you will not understand the shape of that truth until you've seen enough of the lie around it."

Aurelia's pulse, if she still had one in whatever place this was, seemed to stumble. "What does that mean?"

"It means the version of that night you carry in your memory is true," the Goddess said, "and also incomplete. Both things, at once. You will want to choose one or the other, because incomplete truths are harder to hate cleanly. Resist that want. It will get you killed a second time."

"You're not making this easier."

"I'm not meant to," the Goddess said. "Easier belongs to stories that already ended well. Yours hasn't ended at all yet, that's the entire point of this conversation."

Aurelia pressed her palms against her eyes, as if she still had eyes here, as if pressure could do anything against a headache that lived somewhere outside her body now. "How long do I have? Before it happens again, the fire, the five kingdoms, whatever you're not fully telling me?"

"Less time than you'll want," the Goddess said, "and more than you will believe, on most days. The clock does not move the same for you as it does for her. That is the only advantage I can give you, she thinks she has hundreds of years left to finish what she started. You have five years to make sure she's wrong."

"Hundreds ," Aurelia repeated, and something cold moved through the strange non-space around her. "What is she?"

"Someone everyone trusts," the Goddess said. "That is the only shape of an answer I can safely give you here. Trust is the exact thing she has spent her whole existence learning how to wear."

"Wait—"

"You were not chosen for this because you were hurt," the Goddess said. her voice following Aurelia down even as the dark rushed up to meet her. "You were chosen because in your final year, even in the middle of losing everything, you still made one choice that cost you and saved someone else. That choice is the only reason there is still a thread left to pull."

"What choice," Aurelia said, or tried to, the words were already scattering, the light already gone, and the question falling into a silence that did not get an answer.

"Everyone who is still allowed to live," the Goddess said, and it followed Aurelia all the way down, through the dark, through the five stolen years, into a body that hadn't bled yet, hadn't been abandoned yet, didn't know yet what it was going to survive, or what it was going to have to become to make sure it survived it well.

Then there was only sunlight, and the sound of someone breathing that wasn't her, and Aurelia realized, with a jolt like falling, that the breathing belonged to a girl who'd been dead for three years in the life she'd just lost.

Aurelia woke up to sunlight, and the bright light almost made her cry..

For five years, she remembered believing the last light she would ever see was a dying candle placed by her childbirth bed. Here instead was morning, ordinary and gold, that is pouring through a window she recognized with a jolt that felt like falling. It was her childhood room in the east wing of House Veyrune's. She saw the carved wolf on her bedpost that her brother had broken the ear off of when she was nine.

She sat up too fast. Her body moved perfectly without any pain, there was no ache in her spine, no blood between her thighs, and there was no marks from the five years of marriage carved into her body. She just had two unbroken hands and a healthy heartbeat that hadn't earned the right to be that calm.

"You're finally up."

Aurelia's head snapped toward the door. Her handmaid, Sela, stood there with a tray, exactly as young and exactly as alive as she'd been before a fever took her in Aurelia's second year as Luna, a death Aurelia had already grieved once, and now had to swallow whole, silently, in front of an audience of one.

"Sela," Aurelia said, and heard her own voice shake around the name.

"Who else would it be?" Sela put the tray down, she was not bothered at all by the way Aurelia was staring at her like she'd seen a ghost, when in fact it was very much the other way around in reality. Aurelia was the one who had died and come back. "You look like you saw something in your sleep. She said"

"Bad dreams?"

"You could say that."

"Well, save the details for later, because your father wants you in the hall within the hour." Sela was already pulling dresses out from the closet, She was humming under her breath like this were any other morning, which, Aurelia had to keep reminding herself, it was like that, for everyone except her. "House Nocthar's envoy arrived at dawn." Sela added.

Aurelia sat very still, watching She watched Sela move around the room like nothing in the world had ever gone wrong in it, She felt something break quietly behind her ribs. Three years. If she did nothing to change the future, she only had three more years with this girl. In three years, a terrible fever would kill Sela because no doctor in the castle would catch it in time.

"Sela," Aurelia said, before she could stop herself. "Are you eating enough? Sleeping enough?"

Sela turned, with the gown in hand, eyebrows raised. "That's a strange question before breakfast."

"Humor me."

"I sleep like the dead and I eat like a giant wolf twice my size, thank you." Sela grinned. She had no idea how much the word dead had just landed in the room like a stone in still water. "Now stop wasting time and get dressed. Your father doesn't like to be kept waiting, and neither, apparently, does an Alpha King."

Aurelia went completely cold. "The envoy."

"Mm. Word is they've brought an official marriage proposal." Sela said. She held up a deep blue gown, and looked at it closely, entirely unaware she'd just said the sentence that had ended Aurelia's life once already in the past. "Exciting, isn't it? An Alpha King asking for you by name."

"That is one word for it."

"What is wrong with you this morning?" Sela laughed, but there was a thread of real concern underneath the laugh. Sela had always been sharper and more observant than she let on, which was, Aurelia remembered too late, that this was exactly why she'd loved her. "You look like someone told you your own future." Sela said.

Aurelia almost laughed too. The sound came out wrong, it was cracked at the edges. "Something like that."

The hall looked exactly the same way as she remembered it and nothing like she remembered it, the way a room from childhood always is, it looks smaller than the version that had lived in her head for five years she technically hadn't lived yet.

Her father sat at the head of the table, he looked much younger than she'd seen him in longer than she wanted to think about, his beard not yet gone fully gray. Across from him, an envoy in Nocthar colors was already unrolling a scroll heavy with wax seals.

"Ah," her father said, catching sight of her in the doorway. "Aurelia. Come. This concerns you."

"I know what it concerns," she said, and something in her voice made him look at her twice.

"You do?" His brow lifted. "I wasn't aware the ravens flew that fast these days."

"Call it instinct," Aurelia said, and took the seat he gestured to before he could press her further.

The envoy cleared his throat, clearly eager to get through the formalities before anyone else could interrupt him again. "House Nocthar officially proposes a marriage alliance between Alpha King Draven Nocthar and Lady Aurelia of House Veyrune. The wedding must happen before the next full moon."

The next full moon.

Aurelia remembered that wedding the way you remember a wound, every detail sharpened by exactly how much it had ended up costing her life. She remembered saying yes with her whole chest full of hope. She remembered exactly where that yes had led. A bed. A door that opened two hours too late. A voice from underneath the world, saying her name like it was the only thing left worth saying.

She also remembered what the Goddess had told her. That undoing this wasn't salvation. That the enemy waiting for her wasn't even in this room, wasn't even wearing this face.

"Aurelia?" her father said. "You've gone pale."

"I accept," she said.

Her father blinked. Even the envoy looked faintly startled at how fast it came, no hesitation, no request for time to consider it, none of the careful reluctance a proper Alpha's daughter was expected to perform before agreeing to marry a man she'd supposedly never met.

"You're certain?" her father asked, quieter now, just for her. "Aurelia, I would never force this on you. If you have doubts—"

"I've never been more certain of anything," Aurelia said, and that, at least, was not a lie.

Her father studied her a moment longer, some old fatherly instinct clearly picking up on the fact that something about his daughter had shifted overnight, though he couldn't have said what. Then he nodded, and turned back to the envoy to finish the arrangements.

Later, after the scroll was signed and the wax cooled and the envoy dismissed to rest before his ride home, her father found her alone on the balcony overlooking the training yard.

"You didn't even ask about him," he said, coming to stand beside her. "Not his temperament. Not his reputation. Most daughters ask something, even if they intend to say yes regardless."

"Would it have changed anything if I had?"

"No," he admitted. "House Nocthar is the strongest alliance this family has been offered in a generation. But I would have liked to think you cared enough to ask."

Aurelia looked out over the training yard, where young wolves were sparring in the afternoon light, none of them yet old enough to understand what any of this would eventually cost. "I care more than you know," she said. "I just already know the answer."

Her father frowned, the particular frown of a man who suspected he was missing something and had learned, over the years, not to chase every one of his daughter's riddles. "You're a strange girl this morning, Aurelia."

"I had a strange dream," she said, which was, in its own way, the truest thing she'd said to anyone all day.

She walked the envoy out herself when the meeting ended. Her old habit of being a good host moved her body, but her mind stayed far behind. She kept turning the Goddess's words over in her head like a coin that would not land on either side. Save what, if not yourself? Everyone who is still allowed to live. It did not feel like a comfort. It felt like a countdown, and she still did not know what it was counting down to.

"Lady Aurelia." The envoy paused at the outer gate, something almost sympathetic crossing his face. "May I offer a word of advice, unofficially?"

"You may."

"The Alpha King is not an easy man to love," he said. "But he is not a cruel one either. Whatever you've heard—"

"I haven't heard anything," Aurelia said. "I don't need to."

The envoy frowned slightly, clearly unsure what to make of that, and bowed his way out before he had to try.

"One more thing," Aurelia called after him, before she could talk herself out of it. "Lady Mireth. Does she still serve in the Alpha King's household?"

The envoy paused, visibly surprised by the name. "You know of her?"

"Should I not?"

"She is a minor lady in his court, nothing more," he said, a little too carefully, the way people spoke about things they'd been told not to elaborate on. "I wouldn't trouble yourself over her, my Lady."

"I won't," Aurelia said, and watched something in his shoulders ease, and understood, with grim satisfaction, that she'd just learned exactly as much from what he refused to say as she would have from an honest answer.

That night, Aurelia was unable to sleep in a bed that felt too much like a distant memory of a memory, Aurelia went down to her father's vault, a room she had not set foot in since she was a girl sneaking down to look at old relics for the thrill of being somewhere forbidden.

The guard at the door hesitated. "My Lady, it is late. Does your father know that you're here"

"He knows," Aurelia lied smoothly, and the guard, unused to being questioned by a girl who'd spent her whole life following rules, stepped aside anyway.

"Ten minutes," he said, mostly to himself. It seemed like he hoped naming a time limit would make him feel less guilty about breaking the rules. "If the castle manager asks, I never saw you."

"You never do," Aurelia said, and meant it as a kindness, though it came out more like a promise she might not be able to keep. In this new life, she already knew too much about which promises would be broken and exactly who would break those promises.

The heavy vault door groaned as it closed behind her, and the torchlight inside caught on rows of things that nobody in the family had looked at in a generation, ceremonial armor gone dull with age, a cracked hunting horn, letters that was sealed in wax that had never once been opened. When she was a young girl, she used to think this room was full of some exciting secrets. Now she understood the truth: it was simply full of things people had not yet found a reason to fear.

She did not know what drew her to the back shelf, she walked right past the ceremonial blades and the sealed letters and the old crowns no one wore anymore. She reached for a dull, dirty necklace that was sitting alone on a piece of faded cloth. She had no idea that touching it was about to change her life completely, making her a new person for the second time in just two days.

The moment her fingers closed around it, the vault disappeared.

And something ancient looked back at her through the dark.