Crimson Under Glass
455 Views · Ongoing · Elon Joshua
Isolde Crane knows the rules of Ashenmere the way she knows how to breathe: without thinking, because stopping means dying.
She is a blood-scribe, a mortal employed by House Vaelthar to maintain records no living person is supposed to read twice. She does not ask questions. She does not linger. She keeps her head down and her ink dry and sends every spare coin back to her younger sister in the outer ward.
Then she reads the wrong document.
Sorin Vaelthar has governed his house for three centuries by being the kind of man no one wishes to negotiate against. Cold, precise, and entirely without sentiment, he has outlasted every political threat the Conclave has thrown at him. Until a mortal scribe with ink-stained fingers and no talent for self-preservation stumbles into the center of a conspiracy that could unravel everything he has spent centuries building.
The law gives him one option: claim her, or lose her to the houses that will silence her first.
He tells himself it is politics. She tells herself it is survival. Ashenmere does not care what either of them tells themselves.
She is a blood-scribe, a mortal employed by House Vaelthar to maintain records no living person is supposed to read twice. She does not ask questions. She does not linger. She keeps her head down and her ink dry and sends every spare coin back to her younger sister in the outer ward.
Then she reads the wrong document.
Sorin Vaelthar has governed his house for three centuries by being the kind of man no one wishes to negotiate against. Cold, precise, and entirely without sentiment, he has outlasted every political threat the Conclave has thrown at him. Until a mortal scribe with ink-stained fingers and no talent for self-preservation stumbles into the center of a conspiracy that could unravel everything he has spent centuries building.
The law gives him one option: claim her, or lose her to the houses that will silence her first.
He tells himself it is politics. She tells herself it is survival. Ashenmere does not care what either of them tells themselves.
