A Vow of Vengeance and Silk

Her knees hit the marble. The impact jarred up her spine, sharp and humiliating. The crown's command vibrated through her corrupted veins a physical pressure like iron bands tightening around her bones. Kneel. Submit. Belong. Across the shattered hall, Kaelan's head snapped up. "Seraphine!" His voice was raw agony. Brick held him fast, the big man's face grim as he kept Kaelan's weight off his ruined leg. Rook lunged, grabbing Seraphine's uncorrupted arm. "Get up Viper!" Seraphine gritted her teeth, muscles trembling with the effort of defiance. The blackened veins beneath her skin flared brighter, pulsing with the dying crown's fading heartbeat. Resistance is pain. Surrender is peace. "No," Seraphine hissed, the word tearing from her throat. She slammed her corrupted fist into the marble floor. Pain exploded through her knuckles, shattering the crown's hold for a single, vital second. She surged upward, shoving Rook back. "Move! Now!" They stumbled through the ruined archway into a narrow, spiraling stairwell choked with dust and the thick, cloying scent of roses. Not the delicate perfume of cultivated blooms, but the narcotic, rotting sweetness of the Thorn Court's gardens. The air grew heavier with each step upward, thick with pollen that glittered like black dust in the dim light filtering down from above. Kaelan groaned as Brick hauled him up the steep steps, his leg leaving a smeared trail of crimson on the stone. "The… pollen," he managed between gritted teeth. "Don't… breathe deep." Too late. Seraphine felt the familiar lethargy creeping in at the edges of her awareness, a velvet fog promising oblivion. The crown's whisper threaded through it, softer now, seductive, Rest, daughter. Let the roots take your pain. Let me make you strong. Rook cursed, ripping a strip of cloth from her tattered tunic and tying it roughly over her nose and mouth. "Cover your faces! Brick, hurry!" The stairwell opened abruptly into blinding, sickly-green light. Seraphine froze, blinking against the glare. The Garden of Knives. It spread before them in a nightmare parody of cultivated beauty. Towering hedges, sculpted into shapes of screaming faces and grasping hands, formed labyrinthine walls dripping with black sap. Paths of crushed bone wound between beds not of flowers, but of razor-sharp crystalline thorns that chimed softly in the unnatural breeze. Overhead, vines heavy with fist-sized roses the color of clotted blood choked the glass dome ceiling, filtering the sunlight into that pervasive, poisonous green.

But worst of all were the statues. Dozens of them, frozen in poses of terror or supplication, scattered throughout the garden. Not stone. Not marble. People courtiers, guards, servants encased in layers of hardened, translucent amber sap, their faces forever contorted in silent screams. Thick, thorned vines snaked through their petrified forms, emerging from mouths and eye sockets, feeding on the amber prisons.

"Gods below," Rook breathed, her voice muffled by the cloth. Welcome home, the crown sighed in Seraphine's mind. The black veins in her hand throbbed in response, a dull ache spreading toward her shoulder. A rustle came from the nearest hedge. A thorny branch, thick as Seraphine's wrist, uncoiled slowly, its tip glistening with fresh sap. It swayed towards them, sensing, probing the air. "Don't touch the plants," Kaelan whispered, his voice thready with pain and dread. "The thorns… inject the sap. It starts… fast." As if summoned by his words, movement flickered at the garden's heart. Near a grotesque fountain bubbling with viscous black liquid, a figure stirred. Not a statue. A young woman in a gardener's smock, her skin already mottled with amber patches, stumbled towards them. Her eyes were wide, unseeing, her mouth working soundlessly. Thorned tendrils snaked from her back, anchoring her to the ground even as she reached a trembling, half-petrified hand towards them. A low, guttural moan escaped her lips. Rook raised Pip's dagger, her knuckles white. "Stay back!" The gardener didn't stop. She lurched another step, the vines pulling taut. The amber spread visibly up her outstretched arm, cracking like drying mud. They yearn for the crown,the whisper slithered through Seraphine's thoughts. As you do. Join them. Become eternal. Become mine. The compulsion surged, stronger here at its source. Seraphine's corrupted hand twitched, fingers curling as if to grasp the thorned branches reaching for her. Her legs felt leaden, the urge to sink to her knees amidst the deadly beauty almost overwhelming. To let the sap take her. To end the fight. Kaelan's weak cough shattered the spell. "Seraphine… look at me."

She tore her gaze from the approaching horror. His face was deathly pale, slick with sweat, but his eyes held hers with desperate intensity. "The… fountain," he gasped, each word an effort. "The black pool… it's the source… of the sap. The crown's… lifeblood." He coughed again, blood spotting his lips. "Corrupt it… and you wound… the roots."

The gardener was ten paces away now, her amber-crusted fingers inches from Rook. Her moan rose to a desperate keen. The crown's voice sharpened, laced with panic Seraphine hadn't heard before: Ignore him! He seeks only to destroy your birthright! Come to me! Let me show you your true glory! Seraphine looked at Kaelan, bleeding and broken, held up only by Brick's immense strength. She looked at Rook, poised to strike down a victim, her mismatched eyes hard with grief. She looked at her own corrupted hand, the black veins pulsing with stolen power. Then she looked towards the heart of the garden, towards the fountain bubbling with the crown's essence. The crown offered power, eternity, an end to pain. Kaelan offered only a chance a slim, desperate chance to wound the horror at its core, even if it consumed her in the process. The gardener stumbled into Rook. The thorned vines anchoring her snapped taut. Seraphine made her choice. She turned away from the crown's siren song and sprinted down the bone-crushed path, not towards the fountain, but towards the gardener. Pip's dagger flashed. Not at the woman, but at the thick, anchoring vines erupting from her back. "Rook! Brick! Get Kaelan to the fountain!" she yelled, severing one vine with a spray of black sap. The gardener shrieked, a sound of pure agony. "Do it! NOW!" The crown's roar of betrayal and fury shook the glass dome above them. TRAITOR! Seraphine met the gardner's petrifying, terrified eyes as she raised the dagger again " I am sorry", she whispered.then she brought the blade down, not on the woman, but on the final, pulsing vine connecting her to the garden's hungry earth.