4345.100 · April 10, 2025 AD
Where Ashes Gather
The estate is gone. The greenhouse, the storehouse, the hybrid plants—all of it reduced to ash. Daniel returns to Edinburgh carrying nothing but dust on his boots and questions without answers. In a bookshop that holds more than books, old alliances converge and ancient artefacts emerge from hiding. Five Portal Keys. Five legacies waiting to be claimed. The Campbell sisters stand at a threshold centuries in the making.
They burned everything.
Daniel Campbell walks into the Emporium with ash still clinging to his coat, the scent of smoke and ruin woven into every fibre. His parents have vanished. The hybrid plants his family cultivated for generations—gone. The White Rose Society didn't just raid the estate; they wanted to erase it entirely.
But destruction has a way of revealing what was hidden.
In a room filled with maps and red string, with whisky poured and truths finally spoken, Luke Smith unveils what he has carried across worlds: five Portal Keys, dormant but not dead, each one bound to the original Guardians of New Edinburgh. The Stewart sisters. Elspeth. Katrina. Violet. Effie. And one that belonged to a man who walked between shadows—Deacon William Brodie himself.
Three keys for three sisters. One for a father who built something worth protecting. And a fifth, held back, waiting for a future not yet written.
The choice isn't whether to accept the weight of legacy.
It's whether they're ready to carry it.
The old paths still wait beneath the soil. Hidden. Twisting. Ready to be walked once more.
