Elara set the candle down and leaned back, her eyes heavy with truth and dust. The book lay open before her, the name Order of Veilkeepers glowing faintly in her mind like an echo from another lifetime. Everything was unraveling faster than she could catch it.
She had shimmered, Nira had shimmered, and her mother had shimmered and disappeared. And Kaelin… Kaelin had smiled through a friendship she would later ruin with betrayal sharp enough to kill.
Elara's pulse quickened as she stared at the book. Her hands were still trembling, not from fear but from urgency. A need to uncover the truth that everyone else had buried beneath polite smiles and closed doors.
She had questions no one wanted to answer.
Like why her powers had never awakened in her first life. Why they had waited, silent, sleeping, until now.
Or why Kaelin and her husband, the people she had trusted most, had turned on her.
And why her mother, had left without a trace.
Elara rubbed her hands over her face. She couldn't keep doing this alone.
She needed information.
She needed someone who wasn't tangled in the Aerlyn lies.
She left her room just before dawn, slipping through the quiet hallways as the estate still slept. The book was wrapped in cloth and tucked under her arm. She didn't dare hide it in her chambers. Not anymore.
She headed straight to the library and made her way past the front reading room and into the restricted section. Her grandmother thought locking away knowledge kept it safe. But Elara knew better. Secrets didn't sleep, they waited.
She moved to the farthest shelf, the one built into the stone wall itself. It was always slightly crooked. Even as a child, she'd noticed.
Now, she pushed against the corner just as she'd done a dozen times before when she was young but this time, the shelf clicked and shifted.
Behind it, a narrow passage revealed itself.
She hadn't been wrong.
The Aerlyn had always built their lies into the very bones of their house.
Elara stepped through, her fingers brushing the damp walls as she descended the steps. The air was heavier here. Older.
She then arrived at a door with her family's symbol of the open eye but half closed by a crescent moon. But the symbol looked more like a hidden lock. She immediately placed her hand on it and pressed it inward.
The door responded to her touch with a quiet groan, unlocking itself with a pulse that resonated in her bones. The shimmering inside her stirred, warm and restless.
She stepped inside.
The chamber smelled of old parchment, stone, and something metallic, blood memory, maybe.
Her fingers brushed over shelves of ancient scrolls and crumbling tomes, almost too fragile to touch. But one symbol kept appearing, burned into the corners of parchment and stitched into leather bindings:
A veil pierced by a blade.
The mark of the Order.
She flipped through a loose stack of notes written in a hand she didn't recognize. Scattered across the parchment were names and diagrams. A tree, bloodline. Hers. One branch was violently scratched out. Serah Aerlyn.
Her breath caught.
There it was. Her mother's name.
Not just a whisper in passing, not a forbidden topic dropped at dinner tables.
A record.
A fact.
But there was more.
The line connecting Serah to her father ended abruptly. There were no marriage records. No death. No location. Only a word in the margin:
"Gone."
Elara's throat burned.
They had erased her.
Not just hidden her—erased her.
Her father. Her grandmother. Maybe even the Council.
No wonder they never let her see a portrait. No wonder they stiffened every time she asked.
She flipped to the next page. The entries were older and worn at the edges. There, she found a list of shimmerers.
Nira Aerlyn. Exiled.
Soren Vell. Deceased.
Serah Aerlyn. Vanished.
And at the bottom, in smudged ink:
Elara Aerlyn – dormant.
Her hands went still.
Dormant.
So her powers had always been inside her. Locked. Waiting.
But something had kept them asleep in her first life.
Why?
And what had awakened them now?
A sound from the hallway snapped her back.
Footsteps. Close.
She snatched the book and blew out the candle, ducking into a dark alcove behind a pillar just as the door creaked open.
A figure entered—hooded. Moving with purpose. Not a servant.
Not an Aerlyn.
Elara held her breath as the figure knelt before a stack of scrolls and slipped something into the folds of a book, then turned and left.
When the door shut behind them, Elara crept forward.
She reached for the book they had touched.
Inside was a folded parchment, sealed with black wax.
She broke it open.
Inside, the words were scrawled:
"You are not the only one who remembers. Trust no one in the House. We are watching. – V.K."
Elara's heart thundered.
V.K.
The Veilkeepers?
They knew. They remembered.
And they were watching her.
She returned to her room before sunrise, bolting the door behind her.
The note trembled in her hands.
She wasn't alone.
But that didn't mean she was safe.
She tried to run her mind through everyone she knew trying to figure out who could be the enemy among them. For sure she knew Kaelin was one of them even though she was still pretending around her.
"Who could they be?" she muttered to herself.
She continued, lost in her thoughts only to be brought back to life by a know on the door.
"Who's there?" she asked
"Your bro your majesty " it was her brother Aven.
She wasn't in the mood to talk to anyone not even him. She needed some space to digest and take in all she'd seen and heard for the day.
"I need some time alone, I'll come join you at dinner," she said.
"Are you alright?" Aven asked.
"Yes, I just need a little time alone" Elara replied.
Aven took her word and left. Elara, finding it hard to process everything decided to take a nap, at least to ease herself of the confusion.