Endsong Vigil

(Book 2 of The Keystone Saga Book Series)

When endings ask for a witness, Nyx keeps the night.

The vow that saved her still holds. Bone-bells make consent audible; candlelit courts and snow-quiet streets listen for her step. Nyx begins learning the disciplines of seeing: how to read a hush, how to measure truth by breath and spine, how to speak when silence would be easier.

Grief has a name and it does not come back. The space it leaves changes a room, a march, a morning. Yet where absence carves, steadiness stands: her Singer's Bond, Daxen, refuses to yield the ground he keeps at her side. Around them, a circle begins to form-fierce hands and patient hearts choosing the same watch until the choosing itself becomes a banner. They call it Endsong Vigil. What it is-beyond loyalty, beyond law-will take the whole winter to learn.

Names, however, are their own weather. "Nyx" is a shelter that saved her, but the fit grows strange as thresholds multiply. The city asks who she is when no one is watching. In the mountain court of Vothia, some begin to weigh crowns that were never promised to her; far off, another city whispers not "queen" but something older, a word that means heir and sounds like tide against stone. Doors she did not open start to remember her anyway.

Pressure gathers. A market rises in the dark where threne-the Death-Singers' sacred song-is bartered like contraband. Rogue Singers break the very laws that kept them safe; voices are stolen; debts are written in songs that were never theirs to sell. At the edge of sleep, a patient adversary smiles: Dreamer, who prefers a world that lies down and does not rise.

The vigil will not ask Nyx to win. It will ask her to be true-about the name she wears, the sight she learns, the family she leads, and the city that might yet claim her by right. Some endings are doors. Some doors insist.

Not every crown sits where you were told.
Not every name is the truth you keep.
And not every witness remains only a witness.