Main:
Gwynviène Avenloré, Lord Thamior Avenloré (through letters), Serenne Illistar
Other:
Lord Elovain Avenloré, Lord Caladien Avenloré, Naerira Aelestine Celeste, Lady Velarienne Avenloré
Where:
The Library, Astravayne
When:
Present-day Evergild Era,
Theme:
Legacy, secrecy, family, love, betrayal, identity, unearthing the past
Summary:
When Gwynviène Avenloré is tasked with sorting an old box of misfiled documents, she uncovers a hidden thread of her family’s past — letters from her late grandfather, Lord Thamior Avenloré, hinting at secrets long buried. As her search deepens, she discovers whispers of a hidden child and travels to Astravayne with her father under the guise of diplomacy. There, alongside her closest friend — and unexpected relation — Serenne Illistar, Gwyn begins to piece together a truth that rewrites both their bloodlines. But the real betrayal, she suspects, is still waiting in the shadows.
Part I: Whispers in the Alcove
“You’re the one with time on your hands,” Elovain said, sweeping a bundle of yellowed papers onto the table with a dramatic huff, as if personally offended by their continued existence. “They don’t belong to the Lexiconum. Someone’s misfiled them — or perhaps hidden them. Either way, they’re clutter and they’re not my problem.”
Gwynviène raised an eyebrow. “You want me to sort them?”
“I want them out of my sight,” Elovain replied, already turning back toward his wall of glossaries. “Whether by fire, filing, or fascination is entirely up to you.”
Gwyn was used to her great-uncle’s manner — all sharp edges and exasperated brilliance — and didn’t take it personally. She knew he was more curious than he let on. He just refused to admit it.
She carried the box to a reading alcove and pried it open, expecting little.
The lid creaked as she lifted it, releasing a breath of stale dust. The scent was dry and sharp — a dense blend of ink, parchment, and something faintly floral, like brittle violets. Inside was a jumbled collection of scraps and scrolls tied in old twine, letters folded into soft corners, diagrams annotated with faded ink. Not a collection — a box of “to be sorted someday,” as familiar as anything in the Library.
She set the first few aside with gentle care. Notes on abandoned dialects. Half-finished enchantment schematics. The voices of forgotten minds, speaking in half-thoughts and margin scribbles. One letter caught her eye — written in a language she didn’t recognise. The glyphs curved like delicate branches, elegant but utterly foreign.
She glanced toward her great-uncle. From across the room, she could still see the faint glimmer of the inked glyphs that marked his skin — ancient scripts bound to memory and flesh. But he was already back to work, and she knew better than to disturb him mid-thought.
So she tucked the letter aside.
It was quiet work. Familiar. Comforting.
And then her hand paused.
One bundle lay deeper in the box, tied more carefully than the rest. The parchment within was rough, older. Some sheets written in a slanted hand she recognised — her grandfather’s. Others more fluid, more confident — letters from a younger Thamior, before age had caused his hand to shake.
She hesitated.
Lord Thamior had been a private man. Even when he was alive, few ever claimed to know him. All she’d ever really known was the story: his great victory at Eredran Fields, the title Ink-Stained Knight, the way people’s voices grew hushed and reverent when they spoke of him.
But she had so few memories of the man himself. The occasional warm hand. A brief moment by a window. Nothing that explained who he’d been beyond a blade and a legacy.
Surely these were just old receipts. Logistics. Plans. If they’d mattered, they wouldn’t have ended up here, in a dusty box beneath the Lexiconum shelves.
So she read.
The first letter was short. A thought scrawled like a wound.
I buried it because I was praised for it.
They carved my name where the names of the dead should have been.
And now the silence echoes louder than any truth I could offer.
I am not proud of what I bought. I paid in blood, and paid poorly.
She blinked.
Other pages followed, written in his older hand — more open, but scattered, as though he had too much to say and no clear way to say it. Then came the letters from his youth — eloquent, structured, intense. They spoke of duty and command, yes, but also of love. Of someone he had cared for deeply.
Gwyn paused.
She knew her grandfather and grandmother had not married for love. Their union had been a match of legacy and expectation. Had she been wrong about him? About them?
Later letters mentioned a child — my child, he wrote more than once — and she assumed he meant her mother, Syraëlle. Or her aunt Celarienne. Perhaps her uncle Theridian.
But something was off. He spoke of secrecy. Of never writing down a name. Of protection, not parenting.
It didn’t add up.
She folded the pages into her satchel and made her way back across the Lexiconum. Elovain didn’t look up.
“I found something,” she said. “Something from Thamior. It… It seems important.”
Elovain didn’t even turn.
“We all have our secrets,” he muttered, reaching for a volume of phonetic transmutations. “Yours. Mine. His.”
Gwyn didn’t press. He wouldn’t say more.
And truthfully — she understood. After all, one of her closest friends was Serenne Illistar. Scholars and Spires weren’t supposed to mix. Certainly not to share laughter or longing in quiet corners of the Library. But still — Gwyn knew her own secrets.
What her grandfather had buried felt heavier than a friendship.
His letters spoke of blood and ink-stained hands, of choosing legacy over what was right. But they also spoke of names. Of money sent. Of places visited in secrecy.
She gathered the pages once more, wrapping the more delicate ones with a ribbon pulled from her hair, and slipped them into her satchel to read later in the quiet of her room.
And then she noticed something.
Beneath the box’s inner flap, a second bundle had been wedged — thinner, more delicate, bound in dark twine. It had nearly escaped her notice.
Inside, she found more letters — but these were different.
The handwriting was his, yes, but not quite. More fluid. Younger. As if these words had been written in a rare moment of clarity or conviction.
One letter bore no seal, no date. Just a salutation:
To my daughter.
I do not write to ask forgiveness — only to tell you I remembered.
That I watched from afar. That I saw you once — a child with her mother’s laugh, and her own fire.
You do not carry my name, and for that, I thank the stars. You deserved better than to be tied to me.
Gwyn’s heart thudded. It wasn’t Syraëlle. It couldn’t be. The dates. The wording. This was someone else.
A secret child.
She stared at the page, questions pressing into her ribs like thorns.
But even as that truth began to settle, it didn’t explain the rest. The talk of betrayal. Of red-stained fields and unspoken horrors.
This couldn’t be it. Could it?
No. This was only part of it.
And Gwyn had the terrible, thrilling sense that the real story was just beginning to rise.
Part II: A Line in the Light
Gwyn couldn’t sleep that night.
The letter to my daughter had lodged in her thoughts like a splinter — delicate, painful, impossible to ignore. A secret child. Someone, somewhere in the world who bore her blood. Who might not even know.
Who had been kept apart.
But what gnawed at her most wasn’t the affair, or even the hidden family. It was the why. Her grandfather’s words still echoed: betrayal, blood, choices made in silence. The child couldn’t be the whole of it.
She needed more. But she couldn’t ask her mother — not yet. Syraëlle was one of the few who remembered Thamior with warmth. To go to her now, half-formed questions in hand, would be cruel. And as for her aunt Celarienne and uncle Theridian — no. She needed clearer lines before risking what little family grace remained.
Instead, she returned to the box.
In the soft hush of early morning, before the Library stirred, she lifted each bundle with newfound urgency. She followed mentions of names, of places, of monetary transfers. She cross-referenced old ledgers from the Archivum. Some entries were altered. Others, redacted. But one thing kept repeating — Astravayne.
And one name.
Naerira Celeste.
It was unfamiliar. But the title was unmistakable — she had once belonged to the House of Spires. A lesser branch, perhaps — but unmistakably Spire-born.
Which meant one thing.
Gwyn would need to go there — to Astravayne.
Officially, such a journey was near-impossible. The House of Scholars and the House of Spires had long abided by an uneasy division. Inter-House travel was discouraged, especially for reasons as vague as hers. But perhaps…
Her father.
Lord Caladien Avenloré — scholar-consort from the Spires, and no stranger to diplomatic pretexts. If anyone could help navigate a careful excuse, it was him. She approached him over tea that evening, the notes folded discreetly beneath a ledger of regional trade.
“There’s a matter I’d like to look into,” she said gently. “Something regarding cross-House preservation policy. Perhaps a goodwill visit to the Spires… a chance to refresh ties.”
Her father, always thoughtful, watched her. “The Spires don’t often extend invitations.”
“Then perhaps we extend one first,” she said. “I’d like to go. And you’ve not returned in years — surely there are contacts, tasks, friends left waiting?”
He didn’t press her. He never did. But he agreed.
Two weeks later, they arrived in Astravayne.
It shimmered like a dream — crystalline towers, twilight-coloured glass, bridges that caught the stars. At night, music drifted from hidden cafés. Enchanters etched light onto silk in shopfronts. It was as far from the cold silence of the Avenloré estate as the moon was from bone.
Gwyn, despite herself, was distracted. Rarely had she visited her father’s home city, despite it being just a day’s ride from Lindral. Sometimes she sat with him in the tallest tower of The Library, gazing toward the glow on the horizon, listening as he told her stories of his youth. Now, walking those same streets, she could almost hear his laughter from years ago echo off the stone.
And here, in this city of light, waited her oldest friend.
Serenne Illistar.
Her father nodded at them both upon arrival, complicit in their reunion. He and her mother had never enforced the Scholar-Spires divide too harshly — protective, perhaps, but never cruel. After all, he was Spires-born himself.
Still, Serenne and Gwyn couldn’t be seen searching together. During the day, they worked separately — one in hexward archives, the other in public records — only coming together at night, slipping through back streets and over quiet bridges, sharing findings in half-whispers beneath the noise of city life.
Then one night — Serenne didn’t appear.
The next night was their last in Astravayne, and Gwyn was unsettled. She could hardly go asking after Serenne in a city like this, bound by formality and caution. But worry gnawed at her. Was Serenne in danger? Had something gone wrong? Or — and this thought struck her hardest — had she simply chosen to stop searching?
She stood on a quiet bridge beneath the spire-lit sky, cloak pulled tight, unsure whether to wait or return to the guesthouse.
Then — at last — footsteps.
Serenne appeared.
Dishevelled. Distraught. Her coat askew, eyes rimmed in exhaustion. But she came.
She didn’t speak at first.
When she did, it was only this:
“Naerira was never her real name. Or… not all of it.”
She looked at Gwyn then, something breaking open behind her storm-grey gaze.
“She was my grandmother.”
The silence between them trembled.
“Thamior was my grandfather.”
Part III: The Weight of Her Name
The road to Lindral was quiet.
Gwynviène rode beneath a pale morning sky, the breath of her horse rising in soft clouds. The fields rolled out around them in drowsy gold and frost-washed green, but her gaze wasn’t on the landscape. She barely registered the conversation between her father and one of the city escorts, trailing just ahead.
Instead, she turned inward.
The memory was still fresh — Serenne’s voice, tired but steady, breaking through the hush of a candlelit café exterior. Their table had sat at the threshold between warmth and cold: behind them, the golden glow of laughter and cups of steaming herbs; before them, the blue-lit city, its spires catching starlight like blades drawn from velvet.
Serenne had taken a long moment before speaking. Gwyn remembered the way her friend’s hands had curled around her cup — not for warmth, but as though to anchor herself. Then, in a low voice, she’d begun to explain.
“I pieced it together from the letters,” Serenne had said, voice soft and ragged with disbelief. “Naerira Aelestine Celeste — she wasn’t who I thought. She came back from Lindral with a child and dropped her first name entirely. After that, she was only Aelestine.”
Serenne had grabbed a napkin from the counter — a plain scrap of parchment — and began scribbling a rough family tree between them. Names tangled together in her careful hand: Naerira Aelestine Celeste, Thamior Avenloré. Below them: Serelienne. Then the line curved — Serelienne, married to Calvaren Illistar. Their daughter: Serenne.
Gwyn had stared at the sketch in silence. That napkin now sat folded deep in her satchel. It weighed more than any tome in the Library.
Orion Star, Serenne had said. He was the one her grandmother married — a kind man from another minor Spires line. He raised Serelienne as his own. No one asked questions. No one doubted.
“Because Orion was a good father. Grandfather. He was enough.”
The realisation had unfurled slowly — not a blow, but a tide. Gwyn hadn’t known how to respond, only that something in her had shifted. That an old ache — the one of never really knowing her grandfather — had deepened, not eased.
The weight of it settled now as she rode, pressing against her ribs. What did it mean? This new tie, this secret lineage? Did it even matter?
It mattered.
She thought of Serenne, her stillness, her strength. Their time in Astravayne had been brief, cut short by duty and watching eyes. By unspoken dangers. But they had promised, there at the edge of the café’s light, that the secret would be theirs for now. Something to protect, until they could speak freely.
Gwyn’s gaze shifted to her father ahead. She hadn’t told him. Not yet. She wasn’t even sure she would. He had grown up in Astravayne — knew the weight that names carried. And he had always taught her that knowledge came with responsibility.
And her grandmother…
Lady Velarienne Avenloré was not a woman easily fooled. Had she known of Thamior’s affair? Had she felt it in some quiet, cold part of her soul and chosen silence? Gwyn couldn’t imagine anything slipping past her — and yet, she had no proof. No certainty.
Thamior’s notes had spoken of betrayal. Of blood. Of hands stained with ink and silence. Gwyn had thought, for a moment, that he meant this — this affair, this child. But it didn’t add up. There was more. Something deeper. Something darker.
But this piece — Serenne — was now part of her.
Friend, and family.
And for now, that would be enough.
She pulled her cloak tighter, the wind cool against her cheeks, and let the horse guide her forward. Whatever truths remained buried, she would find them.
Not for legacy.
For understanding
