Page 47 of The Syndicate’s Shadow Heiress (Branche de Lune Syndicate #1)

THE STITCHER’S PRICE

Kali’s Emotional State: Controlled detonation. The fury has settled. The fear has fled. What’s left is something older—command bred from bloodlines that refused to die.

T

he Stitcher didn’t move. Kneeling in the field, it looked almost… reverent. Like a forgotten god praying to a relic, only it remembered. But Kali felt it, the storm coiling beneath its broken bones. A power stitched from sorrow, bound to something far older than even the Gate.

Bentley stood like stone between them, but didn’t charge. Because the horses knew, this wasn’t prey. This was penance.

The Stitcher raised its head. Eyes glowed like dying embers. Voice cracked like ancient thread:

“You carry her blood. The First Keeper. The one who left me.”

Kali didn’t flinch. “I’m not her.”

“No,” it rasped. “You are what she should have been.”

Irina’s blade didn’t lower.

Thorne’s threads hummed tighter.

Astraeus loomed above in dragon form, wings spread like a warning .

But Kali stepped forward.

“You remember her?”

The Stitcher bowed its head. “I remember when she sealed the Gate. I remember being left outside it. Screaming. Guarding nothing but silence.”

Something inside Kali’s ribcage twisted. Her shadow stirred behind her, curious. Listening.

“What are you now?” she asked softly.

“Forgotten,” it said. “Failed. Flawed.”

Then its head rose.

“But you... You can fix what broke. You can bind me again if you wear the Hollow Crown fully. If you accept what she could not.”

Kali’s throat burned.

The shadows moved.

Bentley didn’t budge.

And then, the Gate pulsed.

Violet sigils spiraled through the air like fireflies stitched with fate.

Kali stepped forward, lifting her palm. “Show me,” she whispered, her hand lowering to the Stitcher’s chest.

The moment they touched, the Oracle Sigil ignited .

A flash of Zarokian glyphs flared in the space between them, suspended midair like a holographic veil woven from flame and thread.

Everyone stopped breathing.

Inside the arc of violet fire, a memory projected, an echo of the past stitched into the world’s bones.

A battlefield.

The old Gate.

A woman, powerful, radiant, wounded, standing in front of the Spiral Mouth’s earliest form.

She raised her hands, and her shadows obeyed.

The Stitcher stood behind her… whole.

But one detail made the others stop.

Kali didn’t breathe.

Because in that flicker of violet memory, as the face of the First Keeper turned, It was her.

Not a resemblance, not a hint - it was her face, her scars, her eyes, not like a descendant.

Like a mirror.

Something cracked open inside her chest, soft and sharp all at once. A realization blooming like a wound.

“I’m not just her echo. I am her recurrence. Rewritten.”

She felt the Gate shift behind her—listening .

Thorne stepped forward, breath caught. Lev swore aloud.

The memory faded.

And the Stitcher knelt again, head lowered, hands outstretched like a knight awaiting a crown.

“My Hollow Crown,” it whispered. “My Final Thread.”

Kali didn’t know if it was loyalty or madness.

But she lifted her hand, and her shadows wrapped around his broken limbs like a leash made of pain and promise.

“If you serve me,” she said, voice trembling, “we start with the ones who thought I’d stay buried.” The wind howled.

“And then we burn the heavens until I get him back.”

The Stitcher didn’t smile.

But the Gate did.

And far beyond the veil…..Azareal felt it.

The reckoning had begun.

Solen moved to her side.

Quiet. Controlled.

He touched her wrist, eyes glowing with too much knowing.

“There’s more you didn’t see,” he said. “The Gate hides the deepest threads for last. ”

Kali looked up. “Then tell me.”

But he shook his head.

“I will when it’s safe. When you’re ready.”

She opened her mouth to argue, but he was already fading.

No spell. No light. Just absence.

Kali stood alone for half a breath longer, the air still crackling with the afterglow of memory.

And in that stillness…

She whispered to herself, not even sure if it was a fear or a truth:

“What if I wasn’t born at all? What if I was stitched?”

The Gate didn’t answer.

It hummed.

That was worse.