Whispers and the faint sound of rushing water greeted her in an unknown darkness. A torch glowered in an angle, red embers illuminated a portion of the room: a low roof, dark spots where humidity had left its passage on the walls, the scurrying of rats on the creaking planks.

She didn't know where she was, but she already wanted to get as far as possible away from there.

The torch buckled, creeping closer.

"She's up." The worried face of Cleia emerged from the darkness. Footsteps came from behind her, the tall figure of Nathaniel Cox quietly settling beside her as she crouched down beside Rosalynde.

"How do you feel? I came as soon as possible," she whispered.

"I felt better this morning when I woke up. How are you here?"

"The princess. I'd gone the palace to give you my latest report on the orphanage. Pharah intercepted me in the way back, gave me this and told me to come here. You know – to see if you needed any sort of help." She took out the journal, the dark leather basking in the light of the flame.

"What about you? Why isn't your employer here with you?"

Nathaniel's eyes gleamed with amused.

"Hector is currently in a very important meeting; it won't be a couple hours before he's done with it. I on the other hand decided to offer help to the lady beside me." At that Cleia turned around, not before Rosalynde spotted a faint blush peeking on her cheeks.

Beckoning Nathaniel to help her stand, she recalled all that had happened before waking up.

"Where are we?"

"An underground cellar, never mind that, how do you feel?"

"Like I want to cut your tongue for asking something so obvious,"

The girl pursed her lips at that snarky reply, barely keeping her laughter in as she guided the group back upstairs.

Rosalynde looked around, hands hoovering over her neck, there was no guard in sight, the place looked exactly as it'd been when she and Katherine had gone there who knew how much time before-

Katherine.

"Carter?" She felt her voice quiver. Hands growing sweating as they neared the entrance to the original Verity.

Blood tricked down the alter, the marble not holding it as the red poured slow inside the cavity, deep red reflecting their faces half in the shadows. It was as if looking into the dark waters of a lake, the illusion of thinking you could have swum back up right, beating the thrill of death.

But there was no illusion, no eviscerating dream conjured by the mind.

Katherine wasn't there.

"Verity has her." Rosalynde pulled her fists. She should have known, she knew she had to stop searching, she knew they were watching her every move inside the palace.

"You can't be sure of that," Cox replied while Cleia crouched down, taking a better look at the scene.

To that Rosalynde snorted, "They were able to corrupt an Apostle, you really think they didn't know we were going to poke our fucking nose in their old layer? Wake up." she stabbed her index finger in the middle of his chest.

She knew a gamble when she saw it, she should have listened, should have prepared instead of throwing herself at bay of danger, not now that there was something she needed to figure out.

She took the first step, head spinning as if she'd been rolling down a hill.

But despite all she couldn't help the feeling that'd crept inside. Her father had been in her same exact spot many years ago. Who knew how many times he'd conversed with Bishop Ferdis as the latter opened up the passage for him and the others.

Curiosity and rage burned inside her. She felt it thrive in the back on her mind like a beast ready to pounce from the fog.

A gust of wind blew on her face, with trepid heart and blazing fire, she started her descend. Shadows merged with each other, breaking into spirited dance. After a while the doubt she'd missed the entrance popped in her mind – maybe a hidden door? Or a hollow lever where she needed to push? A hidden key? The possibilities where endless.

The end of the stairs came into view, a burned door standing by miracle.

Had she not seen the handprint on the knob she would have been sure nobody had been there in ages.

Turning around, she took a quick peek behind her, watching how Cox helped Cleia down the stairs, arm raised for any kind on inconvenience.

She barely touched the burned wood that it was already falling to the ground, even if the dead sleeping would have awoken by now.

She'd expected a room filled with traces left from the original Verity, but she couldn't have been farther from the truth.

Every room she came upon was bare, no chairs, no tables, not even a speck of life seemed to have roamed those halls except them. Until finally she stumbled in front of an iron door. It didn't bulge, not even when she asked Cox to kick it down.

"Maybe I can be of help?" Cleia took out from her braided hair a pin, fumbling to find the lock a few times before started working on it.

"You know how to open locks?" Cox questioned amazed.

"Why do you think Rosalynde decided to sponsor me in first place? Because I knew how to put children to bed?" Cleia replied, grunting as the metal started giving in, before making the lock clicked into place.

It took less than a couple of seconds before they regretted their decision.

A rancid smell hit them before their eyes could settle on the source. There wasn't an inch of wall that hadn't been stained with blood. On the walls on the side were amassed corpses, scattered bones covered the rotten planks. It felt as if they'd stepped in a mortuary of an executioner.

It was then she realised she was still playing their game. Like a rat used for discoveries she was being kept alive only for their mere entertainment. In the middle of the room was a piece of paper. She tried calming her raging heart before picking it up.

It wasn't mere paper – it was a photograph, covered in soot, with the edges mattered with blood. And yet – it seemed as it been kept inside a safe all this time, the paper hadn't yellowed, and many faces where still recognizable.

She turned it.

May the Heaves guide us through the ocean of secrets of the Crown.

-La Revon

Bile crept up her throat, a deafening noise shattered her train of thoughts as she dropped to her knees. She hadn't even realized she'd crumbled the photo before a pair of hands gently shook her shoulders from behind.

"Rosalynde? We found something else," Cleia whispered as the latter regained an apparent form of composure.

She'd read of that name, just once, and by pure chance. But it couldn't be possible, she couldn't base everything on that photo only.

"What did you find?" She managed to say as Cox motioned her on the left. By the looks of it, a hidden door. Yet this time she didn't wait for Cleia to pick it open; she made every pent-up emotion flow into a kick that made the hidden passage reveal itself.

This time she knew where they were.

The Fendrian Catacombs, where over one million souls laid to rest in peace up until that moment.

"Had I known we would have played police, I would have remained in bed," Cox muttered under his breath.

But there was something lurking in the Catacombs beyond, she felt it in her bones. The skulls leaving silently beckoning her further.

It was then she saw it, a sudden movement, there - cloaked in the darkness of the deceased. She didn't tear her eyes off it. It could have been a rat, but there had been something itching in the back of her mind. They knew that taking Katherine would have unsettled her, along with the fact that she would have tried getting her back. And the only other way out was staring right back at her.

Whoever was looking at her knew where Katherine had been taken too.

"Go back," Rosalynde said to the other two. Without bothering to hear their reply, she took a bone laying around before tearing a piece of her mantle. And igniting the new torch, she took off.

She was going to kill the bastard the second she got a hold of him. It was a man, no doubt about that, she could see the muddy prints as he broke bones ahead of her, at least a five sizes more than her own.

Skulls crowned each narrow corridor they passed through, with rats and skeletons their only companions.

It was folly, where she too loose him meant losing the only ticket to the actual truth, but even her way out of there.

She could heart her heart in a frenzy, a growing ache in her muscles as she pushed her legs further, faster. He suddenly changed course, throwing himself on the right before she even had the time to register the sudden action.

A peek of blonde hair escaped from under the hood as she finally saw man's shape try evading her. But she wasn't going to give up, not now she was so close into uncovering the truth.

But she knew there was no way she could keep on going, the adrenaline was soon going to evaporate, leaving space to the earlier fatigue.

She grabbed a skull from the eyes socket with her free hand and waited for something she didn't know herself. Her grip faltered for a split second as they entered a room bigger than others. She aimed for his head, but missed it as the skull landed on a small pile of bones, rats scurried out of it.

Fear kept her from leading astray, while the Catacombs slowly give way to mossy underground clearings, the sound of rushing water now behind them. Rosalynde guessed they'd passed under the Searis, meaning they were going northwest, right under the imponent houses of the Hight Strands.

"In name of the Crown, stop!" she shouted, hoping to get a kind of reaction from him, but the man continued his run for freedom.

Until she remembered there was something else she could throw at him, the journal of Bishop Ferdis suddenly moulded iron, scorching her skin. She pushed her legs one last time, closing the gap as she opted for a change of plans, and threw the journal over his head, missing him once more by great distance.

The fugitive seemed to laugh at her, before tripping on the floor like a sack of cooked radishes.

She hadn't gone for him this time, but for the path he was going for.

He tried scrambling away, but she was on him before he had time to get back on her feet. With her knee pressing his stomach on the ground she took his hood, ripping it away before a cascade of marvellous blonde hair fell from under it.

"Mind telling what made you take a stroll through the Catacombs so late at night, your Highness?"

Pheron Des Reslow spat on the ground.

꧁꧂

Rosalynde lost the sense of time as she laid there on top of him, debilitating his movements as the prince slowly stopped struggling. The air had gone warm, and yet every part of her body felt cold to the touch, without taking into consideration that her legs burned like hell.

"I'll have you hanged for this," he said, gasping for air.

She pushed his face in the mud before grabbing his hair, quick enough to wrap her arm around his neck. Slow and steady, she started squeezing it.

"Do you know how horrible it is to die strangulated? No, of course you don't."

She made her nail hoover over his neck before pressing lightly.

"I'll press here, applying one fucking hell of pressure on your carotid. You'll start begging for air as the blood flow to your brain will be interrupted. In that moment everything you'll attempt will result futile. You'll lose your mind, your will to fight me, You'll be like an animal ready to be slaughtered at my command. Just like the pig you so love to have dinner with."

She shove him away, rage controlling her moves as she got up and secured a boot over his neck. "And when you're completely gone, I'll snap your head with my fucking boot. Can you hear it? The sound your neck will make when I crush your windpipe? Because I'm already imagining it.

Pheron said nothing as he started into her eyes, and for a split second, Rosalynde thought it'd been Pharah whom she was going to massacre.

She removed her foot, kicking him once more motioning him to get up.

With visible effort, he managed to get on his ass, long legs sprayed on the damp dirt. But Rosalynde spared no glance as she took out the photo she'd found on earlier, waving it like candy hanging on a thread.

"What do you know about this?" she asked.

He eyed it once, running his tongue over a fresh cut on his lower lip.

"What does it look like to you?"

"Why is the name of La Revon here?" She struggled to say those words. Because deep down, she didn't want to be right. In that moment, for a split second, she didn't want to know the truth.

"Oh, you know why. You've been poking your business the second that Aterian entered our ranks. I'm sure you know enough to piece things together."

his sneer made her bile creep up her throat.

"But how?"

"It isn't me who you should be asking that."

"What did they offer you? The crown? Was that all it took to sell your own sister to Verity?" She was shouting at that point.

"It was more than that," he managed to say before she delt him another blow, fist finding his face.

"How so?"

"Do you know who it feels to always be second place? No, of course not. After father got sick there was no one at my side, no one I could confide in. My sister basked in that centered attention, while I was left caged in her shadows. Nobody bothered asking where I went out so late at night, and nobody questioned things when I told the guards I was in the company of a whore all night. Because that was everyone expected me to do." 

 "So you became an informer," she finished for him

"That, and other things which again I won't bother explain to you."

"Did you know about La Revon?"

To that, he burst out laughing so hard he fell back on the ground.

"You're asking me if I knew that my own mother was the one that founded the original Verity over twenty-five years ago?" he managed to say before taking a quick peek at her face, laughter rolled out of him again. "No, I didn't."

He raised his hand, pointing it towards a door on the other far end of the cave.

"But it isn't I who has the right to explain things to you. But be assured. The pleasure I'll feel when you finally fall from your little power pedestal will make up for all the shit you've put me through."

It was in that obscure silence that something else emerged from the depts of the earth, something arcane, something she'd heard all her life.

The sound of music.