Page 71 of Unravelled

The stone corridors blurred as she moved, her boots striking hard against the marble floors.

She took the winding staircase two steps at a time, gripping the railing to propel herself faster.

The great hall loomed ahead, its towering pillars casting long, shifting shadows in the dim torchlight.

Mira rounded a corner, and her stomach dropped.

Pouring out from the narrow passageways of the attendants’ tunnels, their armor mismatches, their weapons gleaming. The Resistance, around seventy warriors. She didn’t recognize a single face. Mira pressed herself into the shadows of a carved alcove, her breath shallow, her body coiled tight.

Her mind raced as she watched them move, swift, efficient, like a tide sweeping through the palace.

They weren’t breaking in. They weren’t forcing their way through the defenses.

Their steps were sure, their formation tight, too disciplined, too coordinated.

No hesitation, no uncertainty. These weren’t desperate rebels fighting for survival. A pit formed in her stomach.

A voice, cutting through the quiet, carrying that same arrogant lilt it had the last time she heard him talk. That smug, boasting edge.

“I swear to the Navigators above, easiest thing I’ve ever done,” Dren’s voice carried through the stone halls, casual, amused. “Some little whore I met in Seacliffe, just desperate to be fucked properly.”

Mira’s blood ran cold. He was talking about her. A few of the soldiers near him chuckled. Mira’s pulse hammered against her ribs. This wasn’t the resistance, these were Kharadors. Dren laughed, dark and cruel.

“Didn’t even have to try. She practically begged for it, and in the end?” A pause. A smirk in his voice. “Told me everything I needed to know. Troop movements, patrol schedules, just spread her legs and handed it over.”

More muffled laughter. A few muttered curses about the stupidity of some women.

“Poor thing didn’t even realize what she’d done.” He chuckled, shaking his head. “Just lay there, looking so damn grateful afterward. I almost felt bad for her.” Another pause. Mira heard the grin in his voice. “Almost. ”

Her fingers curled slowly around the hilt of the knife tucked at her hip, her pulse thundering in her ears.

Mira forced herself to stay still. Forced herself to breathe.

She had to be smart. She had to be calm.

Not because she didn’t want to bury this dagger into his lying throat right then and there.

But because if she made a single mistake, if she gave herself away, she wouldn’t be able to get the doors open.

If she didn’t get the doors open, Ren and the palace guard would be trapped and continue to be slaughtered. She swallowed the rage clawing up her throat and forced herself to focus. Her fingers itched toward the blade, but she tightened them into a fist.

???

She kept close to the walls, pressing herself into alcoves and blind corners whenever soldiers passed.

The air inside the palace had changed, filled with a new kind of tension, shifting beneath the surface, as if the bricks themselves knew they had been betrayed.

Who was commanding this army? This wasn’t a skirmish.

It wasn’t even an ambush. This was a coordinated strike. Someone had been waiting for it.

She moved silently, slipping past the great hall’s entrance.

The doors stood wide open, spilling golden light across the marble floors.

She hesitated only a moment before pressing herself against the outer arch, peering inside.

The hall was crawling with soldiers. They stood not in disarray, but in orderly lines.

Waiting. And there, on the dais, standing above them, was their commander.

Mira’s breath turned to ice in her lungs. His voice rang through the hall, thick with conviction, with purpose.

“And you, our Kharador cousins, you are free.”

Torvyn's voice carried, reverberating off the towering stone walls, filling every corner of the chamber. Mira gritted her teeth, bile rising in her throat as she listened.

“Free to choose your own path,” Torvyn continued, pacing along the dais like a man delivering fate itself.

“You have a crown that sees you as more than a means to an end.” He spread his arms wide.

“You serve a ruler who will never silence you, never turn his back on you. A king who will provide for you, fight beside you, bleed beside you.”

A roar of approval and stamping feet thundered through the hall, shaking the floors beneath her like the pulse of something ancient and irreversible.

Mira’s breath caught, her heart hammering in her chest. She had expected a betrayal, had braced for it, but not this. Not him, standing tall beneath the carved sigils of their ancestors.Her brother. Torvyn.

Her pulse surged, nausea twisting in her gut.

How had she not seen it? How had she spent her life believing they had been fighting together, believing he was beside her, not quietly laying the stones of this path beneath her feet?

She had told herself he was being manipulated, controlled, caught in Brahn’s web.

But this wasn’t coercion.Torvyn hadn’t been pulled into someone else’s plan. He had crafted it. Led it.

With every quiet meeting, every veiled word, every sidelong glance, he had chosen this. And the worst part was the way he stood there now, face calm, eyes bright with conviction. Not shame. Not hesitation. As if this had always been the only future he could see.

Mira stood frozen in the shadowed corridor, the cheers still echoing like thunder.

“You all know the story of the Navigators,” Torvyn began, his voice smooth and resonant, rolling through the vaulted hall like smoke. “Their rebellion. Their sacrifices.”

Mira stayed hidden. Something in his tone set her on edge. It had shifted, softened. Almost reverent.

“But let me tell you another story.” Her pulse stumbled. “The Throne’s Wrath.” The words cracked like thunder across the marble.

Torvyn paced the edge of the dais, his hands open as if in offering, but his words were sharpened glass wrapped in velvet. There was no warmth in his voice. Only a careful performance of it.

“A family torn apart,” he said, letting just enough grief bleed into his words to draw the crowd close. “A father exiled, not for treason, not for crime, but because a queen willed it so.”

Mira’s blood froze. A cold dread coiled low in her belly.

“The Queen sought to punish not just him,” Torvyn continued, “but all of us. Because of her insatiable hunger for control, an entire family was scandalized. Not because of betrayal. But because one of them chose to love.”

Mira’s heart slammed against her ribs. This wasn’t just any fable.

She gripped the edge of the arch beside her, knuckles pale, the stone cool against her clammy skin.

Her thoughts spun, bile rising in her throat.

He was telling her story, twisted, reframed, and held up for judgment like a bloodied relic .

But he wasn’t finished. “Here in Bharalyn, we lose fathers. We lose brothers,” Torvyn said, his voice growing louder, more forceful. “We watch as a crown, distant and indifferent, dictates our lives. Our grief.”

The crowd murmured, stirred like wind moving through dry grass.

“And while this queen ruled,” he went on, “while she sat high in her throne, she did more than exile.”

Mira braced herself.

“She erased. She rewrote history to fit her whims. To protect her power.”

The room shifted. The air became heavy. Mira could feel the change like a stormfront rolling in, tension swelling to the point of rupture.

“And when someone challenged her,” Torvyn said, his voice dropping low, dangerous, “when a young girl dared to love beyond the boundaries she dictated…”

His eyes flicked toward the edge of the hall. Mira ducked further into the shadows, but her breath seized in her throat. He meant her. Mira’s heart cracked open.

Rage and grief warred in her chest. Every memory, every piece of herself she had reclaimed from her lost memories, was now being paraded as propaganda.

“She made this young girl and her love forget,” Torvyn said, voice heavy with accusation.

Mira’s vision blurred. Her stolen memories, the nights she woke gasping with something just beyond her reach, twisted into a spectacle for the masses.

She glanced back to Torvyn. The curve of his shoulders.

The stiffness of his jaw. His hands, fisted tightly at his sides now, no longer open and easy.

This was his wound too. His father, exiled.

His name, tarnished. His family, shattered.

He had carried that burden in silence, just as she had.

She had been too busy surviving her own fracture to see how deeply it had cut him too.

His words rose, sharp and searing. “Tell me, does that sound like a ruling class fit to lead?”

The crowd roared, a wildfire of fury.

“And that,” he finished, stepping to the edge of the dais, his voice a dagger now, “is why we poisoned Queen Sarelle.”

Mira gasped. The crowd exploded. Cheering, chanting, feet pounding.

And still, Torvyn stood tall, letting the echo of his words settle like dust over a battlefield.

His gaze swept the crowd, jaw set, shoulders squared beneath the weight of his confession.

A declaration. He believed every twisted word of it.

Mira pressed back into the stone, her whole body trembling.

Torvyn’s voice carried through the vaulted chamber, clear and resolute. "But tonight, we give Bharalyn a leader with purpose, a ruler who will care for this kingdom, who will work with the King of Kharador, but as an equal."

He lifted his chin, his eyes sweeping the hall, daring anyone to meet them. “A ruler born not only of the blood of the people.”

He stepped aside with the gravity of a herald making a proclamation.

And through the haze of golden torchlight, Brahn emerged onto the dais.

Draped in deep blue robes trimmed in gold.

The fabric whispered behind him, echoing the colors of Bharalyn’s banners, but twisted, made new, a mockery of royal legacy recast in his image.

A crown rested on his brow, dark iron, heavy and bare.

Not delicate, not regal, but brutal. A crown made for conquest.

The vision she saw struck Mira in a flash, vivid, undeniable. The shattered throne room. The torn banners. Smoke curling through cracked marble. And now here Brahn was, in the shape of that nightmare.

Brahn stood tall, his shoulders squared, his chin lifted. His expression was proud, until his gaze swept the crowd and landed on her. He smiled. A slow, deliberate. Not joy. Not triumph. Certainty.

The crowd's cheer increased. Stomping feet and raised fists thundered through the chamber. They chanted Brahn's name, echoing around the stone pillars. Mira’s stomach twisted.

This was never about justice. Never about liberation. It had always been a coup, careful and precise, engineered to place Brahn on the throne of Bharalyn. Not to raise the people up from poverty. But to rule them.

Mira didn't bother being quiet, she just ran. The roar of the crowd in the great hall rang in her ears, but it was drowned out by a deeper, more urgent sound, the pounding against the wooden door.

The great doors swung open with a resounding boom, the force rattling through the marble floors. Soldiers and townsmen stormed inside, their banners whipping in the chaos, their armour already wet with the blood of those who had fallen outside.

And in an instant, the hall was in battle.