The road to Larkedge cut through the trees like a scar that hadn’t healed right. Jerome sat in the back seat, head tilted against the window, watching the forest blur past. The rain hadn’t returned, but the storm hadn’t left either. Thunder still rolled in distant waves, too far to be seen, but too close to ignore. The sky hadn’t cleared since the vision. Every breath Jerome took felt thick with pressure, like the air was trying to warn him of something it couldn’t say out loud.Margareth drove. Selene sat beside her, map in her lap, folded to reveal a handwritten sketch from decades ago — notes from a Watcher vault detailing the rumored location of a “burial enclave” tied to the early Crown cult. The ink was faded, but Selene’s fingers moved over it with confidence, like she’d memorized it long ago and was only pretending to read.They hadn’t spoken much since Jerome showed them the dirt.The silence was practical at first — focused. But by the second hour of driving, it had curdled

Jerome had always believed the worst pain came from wounds that didn’t bleed. The kind you couldn’t name — a memory half-lost, a dream you couldn’t quite hold onto. But now, kneeling in that chamber beneath the world, watching the woman stir beneath the skin of the earth, he realized he’d been wrong.The worst pain came from recognition.Because when she looked at him — truly looked — it was like he was being seen for the first time. Not as Jerome, not as the heir, not even as the bearer of the Crown. But as someone he didn’t yet remember being. Someone older. Someone capable of the kind of betrayal no one survived.“You knew me,” he said at last, his voice thin with awe, not denial.She nodded, her movements slow, her expression unreadable. “You were the only one who ever did.”Margareth stood behind them, arms crossed, weight shifting from one foot to the other as her eyes darted between the two. “Jerome,” she said softly, “what is this?”He didn’t answer. He couldn’t.The woman — s

The walk back to the edge of the forest was slow, and not because of the terrain. None of them spoke. Selene moved with trained purpose, her gaze cutting between trees, one hand always on the hilt of her blade. Margareth kept near Jerome but didn’t reach for him, not even once. There was something between them now — not resentment, not fear, but distance. A separation that hadn’t been there before.And Jerome?He didn’t walk so much as drift.His body was present, but his mind was elsewhere — sliding between moments that didn’t belong to the world aboveground. Memory had become fluid. He could no longer tell whether the visions came from the woman’s presence, the seal on his arm, or something older, crawling up from the buried places where roots and broken oaths had twisted together.The forest had changed.The branches leaned subtly inward, as though trying to listen. The wind didn’t blow — it circled, brushing past their ears like whispers in a language none of them remembered learn

He didn’t speak as he stepped out of the forest. The wind caught the edge of his coat and curled it around his legs, but he didn’t notice. The trees at his back were silent, no longer whispering. Even the sky had shifted slightly — still overcast, but heavier somehow, like it hung lower than before. The light filtering through the clouds felt wrong, bleached and watery, as if the sun was afraid to show its face.Jerome’s footsteps were quiet, deliberate. His body moved the same way it always had, but something in his posture had changed — his shoulders squared, not in pride, but readiness. His eyes had lost their flicker. The chain no longer peeked from his collar, but its presence was unmistakable. It clung to him now, not as a relic or burden — but as a choice.He saw them before they saw him.Margareth sat on a moss-covered rock near the trail, arms wrapped around herself, lips tight, her eyes on the dirt. Selene stood a few paces away, blade unsheathed, but not drawn — simply rest

Jerome had spent enough time in the woods — escaping, returning, burying, remembering — to know its silence intimately. But now the quiet was hollow in a different way, like a house where someone had just whispered your name through the walls. The wind rustled the trees without moving the leaves. The birds weren’t gone. They were hiding.The descent from Rhydan’s ruin was steep and unspoken. The four of them — Jerome, Rhydan, Margareth, Selene — and the woman who never offered a name, moved together but not united. Each one was listening for something else. Rhydan stayed close to the rear, quiet but coiled, like a flame pressed into a human form. Selene kept her blade drawn now, no longer a warning — just a reflex. And Margareth? She kept glancing at Jerome with that look — the one that asked, Are you still in there?He was. But it was getting crowded.They made it back to the ridge where the trees thinned and the land bowed toward Elden Reach. That’s when they saw it.Smoke.Not colu