The Room Beneath the Throne

It wasn’t a command—it was a whisper.

“The Queen will see you in the chamber below,” said the maid, barely meeting her eyes.

“Below?”

The girl nodded once. “Past the Eastern Hall. Beneath the old tapestry. Do not speak. Do not look back. She said… only you.”

Seraphine had heard of secret rooms in the palace—everyone had—but those were bedtime stories told by people who’d never been invited past the gates.

Now she was the story.

---

The corridor grew colder with every step.

Past the Eastern Hall, the walls changed. Older stone. Airless and close. Then the tapestry: a woven thing, gold-stitched and heavy with dust, depicting an ancient queen with her hand outstretched toward a dark mountain.

Seraphine pushed it aside.

The door behind it was nothing but a slab of rock with no handle. Still, it creaked open at her touch.

Someone wants me to see this, she thought. Or someone wants me dead.

She descended the stairs.

One by one.

Fifty-six of them, counting under her breath, until her boots touched frozen marble.

The chamber was round. The ceiling lost in shadow. A single throne—older than the current Queen’s—stood in the center of the room, cracked down the middle like it had been struck by lightning.

Queen Isolde stood beside it.

No guards. No candles. Just the two of them in the dim light of a stained glass window high above.

Seraphine approached slowly. “You sent for me.”

“I didn’t,” the Queen said. “The past did.”

---

She circled the throne like it might attack her. Her voice sounded worn.

“This was my mother’s throne,” she said. “Before she vanished in the winter of my fourteenth year. They said she drowned herself in grief. But I know she was taken.”

“By whom?”

Isolde looked at her, eyes pale and strange in the dimness. “By the same people who sent you that mirror when you turned nine.”

Seraphine froze.

No one had ever spoken of the mirror.

A gift that had arrived in secret—a blackened glass oval with a silver frame shaped like vines and thorns. She had hidden it after the night she looked into it and saw someone else staring back.

It had followed her from manor to manor.

She had burned it once.

It reappeared two weeks later.

“How do you—”

“You have her blood,” the Queen interrupted. “My mother’s. You were born from a lie woven too well to unravel now.”

Seraphine’s breath caught. “Whose lie?”

The Queen stepped closer.

“Yours.”

---

The words hit her like stones. Seraphine didn’t understand them, not completely—but something in her skin did. A memory pressed against her ribs. Snow. A hand yanking her back from a frozen lake. A voice she had forgotten.

“Eron,” she whispered.

The Queen blinked. “What did you say?”

But before Seraphine could answer, the chamber door opened.

Footsteps.

Caelum.

He looked out of breath. Eyes scanning the scene like he had expected blood.

“What is this?” he barked. “Why is she down here?”

“She asked,” the Queen said with a small smile.

“I was summoned,” Seraphine snapped.

Isolde raised a hand. “Enough.”

Then she looked at Caelum and, for the first time, there was something like fear in her voice.

“They know she’s alive.”