The Hollow lay ahead, but Seraphina wasn't thinking about the road anymore.
The Vault had given her more than scrolls and relics. Before she left, she found something tucked deep in the chest's lower compartment, a journal. It looked untouched, preserved like it had been waiting for her. Alaric hadn't found it, maybe because he never thought to look deeper, or maybe because the chest only opened for her. The blood-bound wards would've kept him out. This part of her mother's legacy had been meant for her, and her alone.
She wasn't even sure why her hands had gone searching again. The scrolls were already enough, proof of her lineage, her claim, her mother's plan. But something had pulled at her. A sense that there was more. Not more evidence. Not more strategy. More heart. More truth.
When she felt the worn leather against her fingers, she'd known.
She didn't know what she expected. A letter? Instructions? Apology?
What she found was far heavier than that. Worn, leather-bound, wrapped in a dark cloth, its surface pressed with a single Warden sigil. Familiar. Heavy.
She didn't wait. The moment she climbed into the carriage, she unwrapped it and opened the cover. Her mother's handwriting stared back at her.
Rain tapped steadily on the roof as she flipped through the brittle pages, the sound a steady rhythm that seemed to keep pace with her heartbeat. The ink was faded in places. Some lines were smudged, others dark and sharp, written in haste. Her throat tightened as she read.
This wasn't a diary. It wasn't full of daily events or personal memories. It was a record of the final days of her mother's life.
It began with a vision.
Her mother had been reviewing estate ledgers when it hit, a flash of heat behind her eyes, a wave of pressure in her chest, and then fire.
Seraphina.
Older. Worn. Screaming. Held down in the center of a plaza, surrounded by stone-faced nobles and a silent, watching crowd. Alaric stood above it all, expression unreadable. Evelyne beside him, calm and composed.
The sentence given.
The flames ignited.
Her mother had collapsed to the study floor, bleeding from the nose, shaking so violently she could barely breathe. Warden blood didn't allow for controlled visions. They came uninvited. Unwanted. They only came when something had to be changed.
But it was already too late to stop Seraphina's engagement. The arrangements had been made. The court had already celebrated. Her mother had tried to speak with the advisors, to stall, to protest, but she held no power anymore. Her husband had died not long before, and her voice no longer carried the same weight in the capital. She was a widow. An unrealized Warden. And in the court's eyes, a relic of the old world.
She had written it down clearly: she felt powerless. Watching the pieces fall into place and knowing what the outcome would be. Knowing she couldn't stop it. Not directly.
She had even considered taking Seraphina and fleeing. Disappearing into the borderlands, changing their names, living quietly as commoners. But that would've meant hiding forever. Seraphina would lose her birthright. Her future would be spent running, always looking over her shoulder. And her mother knew, deep down, that Seraphina was meant for more than survival in the shadows. She was meant to lead, to restore what had been stolen from their bloodline. Hiding would have saved her life, but it would've cost her everything else.
The next pages were panicked. Her mother's script became harder to follow, words overlapping, written with the kind of urgency that only came from dread.
She had gone straight to the restricted archives hidden behind the western wing. Tore through records. Books. Dust-covered scrolls. Looking for something, anything, that could prevent what she'd seen.
She wasn't trying to stop the vision. That wasn't possible. The future shown to a Warden came locked in place, unchangeable, irreversible. It wasn't a warning meant to be avoided. It was a fixed point, a moment anchored too deeply to undo by normal means. She had already tried reaching out, already tried to delay the engagement, to shift Seraphina's course. Nothing moved. Nothing listened. The path had already been set. All she could do was plan for what came next. For what happened after the fire.
She found it. The Regression Rite.
Old magic. Forbidden. Not because of what it required, but because of what it rewrote. A single person's fate could be unraveled and rewoven, but only at the cost of someone else's life. One breath traded for another. It wasn't clean. It wasn't safe.
It was a spell designed to undo time.
Her mother had filled pages arguing with herself. She listed warnings in the margins. Named the dangers. Wrote down every risk.
But the entries always circled back to one name.
Seraphina.
She wrote of the ritual's ingredients. How she had broken open the D'Lorien crypt to take bone ash from an ancestor who had once cast the rite for another. She used her own blood to bind the spell. How she hid every trace of her preparations from the court, from the servants, from Seraphina herself.
Then came the hardest part.
The anchor.
To make the regression work, the spell had to tie to a memory. One that was deep, painful, impossible to forget. The kind that would root itself in the soul and hold the magic steady as it moved through time.
She chose the fire.
Her daughter's death.
Seraphina's hands trembled as she read. The journal sat open in her lap, and she had to blink hard to clear her vision. The rain outside blurred the windows.
Her mother had known she wouldn't survive the spell. There was no way to share the cost. There were no alternatives. She had made the choice willingly.
She had watched her only child burn, and then rewrote fate with the last breath she had.
The final pages of the journal were steadier. As if her mother had come to terms with it. The writing was clearer. Focused.
She left behind instructions. The scrolls were sealed in the Vault. A servant was told to misfile estate records, knowing Alaric's curiosity would pull him toward them. Her mother had baited the trap herself. She let him find just enough to poison the court's trust in Seraphina. Because the burning at the pyre was the anchor, the exact memory needed for the Regression Rite to work. That specific death, that public betrayal, was what allowed the magic to lock and rewind. If Seraphina had died another way, if the betrayal had come in a different form, the spell wouldn't have triggered. She would have stayed dead. So her mother made sure the pieces fell exactly where they had to.
And she sealed the truth away, untouched, uncorrupted, waiting for Seraphina to come back and claim it.
She had played both sides.
And she had done it knowing she wouldn't be there to see the result.
Seraphina closed the journal. Her palms were damp. She wiped her face and exhaled slowly.
This wasn't about revenge anymore.
It was about finishing what her mother started.
Living the life her mother had bought with her own.
She rested the journal over her chest for a moment, feeling its weight. Then slid it into her coat and looked out the window.
The trees ahead were changing. Taller. Older. The path narrowed, winding into darker woods.
The Hollow was close.
And for the first time in weeks, Seraphina didn't feel the weight of doubt in her chest.
She felt steady. She felt ready.
She thought of the fire, of the heat on her skin, the sound of the crowd, the taste of smoke in her throat. And she thought of her mother, bleeding on the floor, writing words with shaking hands so her daughter could live again.
The road curved. The woods thickened.
Seraphina straightened in her seat and reached for her satchel. She checked the scrolls, tucked between layers of parchment and false estate notes. The journal was pressed flat beneath a worn map of the region, and the Warden ring still pulsed faintly on her finger.
She was no longer just Seraphina D'Lorien.
She was the daughter of a Warden who rewrote fate.
And she would not waste the gift.
Not for Alaric. Not for vengeance.
For legacy. For truth.
The Hollow would test her.
She welcomed it.