Chapter 101: Warnings

Ilaria crossed the threshold and the room seemed to inhale with her.

At first glance the Dawn Gallery looked immaculate. Where she remembered cluttered rugs, stray blossoms and the scattered tokens of a hurried vigil, now every cushion lay flat, every brazier polished, the small table wiped bare as if someone had swept memory itself into a corner.

The hush in the air had the precision of a hand that had scrubbed and smoothed away any hint of chaos. Her feet made no sound on the stone as she moved deeper, the gallery swallowing her steps like water. The painted light over the frieze, which once looked like dawn breaking across a careless sea was muted, as if someone had drawn a veil over the colours.

The place looked tidy, respectable. But tidy places could hide things, and the neatness only sharpened the sense that everything of consequence had been deliberately removed. The immense glass wall loomed in shadow, holding the night’s darkness like a mirror filled with ink.

Ilaria went straight to the low table where she had knelt before.

Her fingers hovered an inch above the wood; it was cool, solid, and ordinary. Yet under that ordinary surface, the faint, persistent warmth she had felt the moment the shadows first flared in her veins thrummed. The skin over it tingled now, aware and answering some quiet call from the room.

The mark pulsed, a small ember in the dark, and for a sliver of a moment the gallery stopped feeling like a room and felt like a throat. As if the walls remembered the shape of her voice. As if the floor still knew the weight of a footprint she had not meant to leave.

She breathed in Hallowbloom and something else, salt or iron, and the hairs along her forearm rose. It should have been impossible. everything was supposedly cleared after the sealing. Yet the place reached toward her anyway, patient and precise, like an old map unfurling a route only it could see.

Ilaria wrapped her sleeve tighter over the mark, not to hide it so much as to steady the small, frantic beat beneath her palm. The Blithe wanted her attention. She was not sure whether that thought frightened her or relieved her, but it hooked her like a tide.

Her gaze drifted across the gallery, tracing the bare table where her offerings once stood, the empty sconces where prayer-candles used to flicker. She remembered kneeling here, veiled, breath slow, fingers trembling over a white bowl filled with still water whilst murmuring the old invocations her mother taught her.

A pathway of light. A way to be heard.

But now the room was stripped clean. There were no candles, no bowl, no veil to shield her sight. There was nothing to anchor the ritual nor to separate her voice from whatever listened below.

She swallowed hard.

How did I do it? she thought, sudden panic prickling at her spine. How did I reach it?

She tried to summon the memory. Her palms had been pressed together, her head bowed, the warmth that rose from the floor like breath, the whisper that curled into her mind as gently as smoke. She had been guided then, supported and protected as she prayed only for The Blithe to slip in.

Tonight there was no such barrier. Only the mark pulsing beneath her skin, hungry and aware as if the Blithe no longer needed her rituals to speak at all. She pressed her palm harder over the spot.

Her thoughts spun outward, snagging on memories of the way her father had taught her to bend light with salt and song, how Serenya had stood steady beside her while the temple women lit matches and whispered names into steam.

The court at Caelwyn had never been naive about the dark. They kept altars in halls and shut doors against old things; they spoke to the unknown with a blunt, practiced bravery because their coastlines held more stories of lost tides and unmoored souls than most kingdoms would admit.

Her family and the Order of The Temple had not simply feared the ghosts, they learned their edges. They learned how to coax a grief into leaving or how to stitch a memory back into the right grave so it would stop wandering. That was what made Caelwyn odd and dangerous.

They treated spirits like weather to be read, not monsters to be slain. They had names for the drifting dead and songs to return them. They were good at this. They had been good at it for generations. And she…

…Ilaria thought she should have been able to do it too.

But she was not her father, who could look at a trembling candle flame and tell which ancestor had brushed past. She was not Serenya, who could speak to the forlorn shadows by the cliff shrines and coax them back across the veil with nothing more than a whispered lullaby.

Ilaria had grown up surrounded by people who walked the edge between the living and the lost with steady hearts, people who treated the unknown with reverence and understanding instead of fear. And yet here she was, hands cold, breath unsteady, sleeves pulled tight around a mark she did not understand and did not want.

The truth sat bitter in her chest because she was not like them. She had never been good at this. She was never been calm enough, never been sure enough. She had memorized the prayers because she was expected to, not because she wanted to speak to the unknown.

She knew this was wrong. Walking here alone in the dead of night, coming back to the place where the Blithe had touched her. If he was still alive, her father would have scolded her for recklessness, Serenya would have dragged her back by the wrist.

None of the Caelwyn rites ever encouraged seeking out what had already sought you.

And her husband…

Ilaria’s breath slowed.

…Oh, he would probably be mad.

But the questions in her head were loud and restless, refusing to be pressed down anymore. Why did the Blithe keep showing her those flashes whispers as if warning her that someone would… die?

“Do not listen,”

they said.

“It deceives. It corrodes.”

“The Blithe twists your thoughts until you lose yourself entirely.”

Everyone had believed that The Blithe existed only to ruin a mortal mind, to lead it in circles until reason snapped and madness filled the cracks. She believed it too, wholeheartedly. But the more she thought about it, the more she doubted.

Because what she heard back then, what she dreamed of in the Expanse, and what brushed against her thoughts now, had not sounded like the hungry, mindless corruption from the stories. It did not sound like a lie nor a tempting persuasion. It had sounded like a warning.

The Blithe felt wrong in the way a broken mirror felt wrong, familiar faces but all angles skewed. But ever since the first night she encountered the voices, restlessness had become the axis of her sleep. About how she did not belonged here, about how the sky would tear open and mourned for someone.

And now the dream of the Expanse had lodged like a stone in her mouth. The sea turning red and her sister’s voice undercut by a distant tear was still vivid in her mind.

She had woken convinced it was a warning despite the fear, and yet warnings needed names and maps and proof. She had no map. She had only a pulse beneath her sleeve and a voice that continued to whisper in a language that felt like destiny and cruelty all at once.

She feared the Blithe, that was simple enough. It wanted to be heard or perhaps to be made whole, and things that wanted tended toward ruin. But she feared the future more. If the voice were true, if the dream was anything more than fever, then someone she loved would die, and she could not bear the thought of waking to find it was Serenya or some small, unimportant face she had failed to name.

For a long moment she simply remained in the gallery’s hush and let the history of Caelwyn and the ache in her chest sit together. She had come to the Dawn Gallery because she wanted answers. Now that the silence pressed close, she could feel the old, polite defences of ritual slipping away as if they had never mattered.

She told herself she would step forward only long enough to listen. But even then, the question lived at the back of her throat: if The Blithe really spoke of death, could she change what it promised?

Ilaria sank to her knees on the cold stone floor, the vast darkness of the gallery pressing in around her. She closed her eyes, drawing in a slow, shuddering breath, and reached for the prayer she had never spoken aloud.

She had only heard it once before, whispered through the halls of her family, carried in the careful tones of those who had always known how to speak to the unknown. Words she had memorized without knowing fully what they meant, a chant of calling and protection, meant to beckon the unseen without fear.

Her lips moved, trembling at first, forming syllables that felt foreign yet familiar. Each word was a thread, attempting to stitch together the fragile bridge between herself and whatever waited in the shadows. The sound of her voice echoed, soft but determined, bouncing off the high ceilings and glass walls and mingling with the thrum of her own heartbeat.

She imagined the spirits her family had named, imagined the lost souls drifting in the dark and tried to remember the way her father’s voice had guided them, the rhythm her sister had kept steady. She had no tools, no protection beyond the words themselves, and that made her feel raw and exposed and alive in a way she had never known.

And as she continued, each word slowly finding strength, she realized she was not simply calling out to the unknown, she was trying to confront it.

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