And now I can’t help but wonder,when that call comes, will my blood answer it too?
Chapter 44
We’re soon gathered back in the clearing along with the other champions. Every expression is taut and watchful. Blaise lounges near Overseer Pellvorn as though he’s waiting for a personal invitation rather than an execution order.
“You’re aware of the rules,” Pellvorn says, “You may each bring one assistant—or second—depending on how you view them.”
I look toward Elara and the other woman I spoke to in the palace’s washroom. They’re too anxious to look my way, eyes fleeting between their champions and Pellvorn.
From my viewpoint, I notice Blaise is the only one standing without an assistant. I’m not sure if that’s pure arrogance or genuine confidence. Given what I now suspect him capable of, it doesn’t help my nerves.
His gaze drifts across the clearing, passing over the other champions with disinterest until it lands on Zeriel. He offers a slow smile—the kind a predator gives before he intends to kill. His lips part, though no sound comes out. It’s a silent taunt, a private promise.
A shockwave of pure, undiluted hatred slams into me. Notmine. It’s a frigid, razor-sharp torrent flooding my senses, emanating from the man standing beside me. Zeriel’s face is a wall of granite, his posture unchanged, but the fury I feel radiating from him is a force so tangible it almost has taste.Like blood and ozone.
For a heartbeat, I forget to breathe, caught in the undertow of his rage. His loathing for Blaise feels like a living, breathing entity, so powerful it threatens to choke me.
It's the kind of hatred born when someone carves out half your soul. Where their death doesn't just break but obliterates you, leaving nothing but a husk filled with poison and razor blades that cut you from the inside with every breath you take without them.
My hand presses hard against my chest, bracing as if something might rupture there too. The realization stuns me—raw, invasive, more than I ever asked to know. I’d wanted to understand him better, but this… this is too much. Tooconsuming. And worse, it’s happening now, when a storm is already flying around us.
“Time to depart,” Pellvorn commands. His voice slices through the tension, but I still feel the brush of Zeriel’s hatred clinging to me. I inhale, wipe the sweat from my brow, and try to strengthen my own boundaries. Something tells me I’ll need them.
If he truly carries threads of storm fae and lithborn—stone-singer—blood, that would explain the weight of him. At least, that’s what the fragments of their stories claim, scraps that survive in whispers and tavern songs. I barely remember details about storm fae, but I recall lithborns were never a people who felt lightly; every emotion cut deep, etched into them like chisel to stone.
I half-remember one verse about a lithborn queen who sang her rage into the mountains until an entire range collapsed into the sea.
“She sang her grief into the stone,
The cliff split wide, she wept alone.
The scribes call fault, the fae say song,
The Rift still mourns what love went wrong.”
I swallow at the memory.And then there’s Zeriel’s own verse carved into stone… What catastrophe is he waiting to unleash?
I wonder, not for the first time, what the hell I’ve gotten myself into.
I shouldn’t have stolen the barley that day. Should’ve waited, found another stall, a grocer less alert.I tell myself I could have, but hunger had already hollowed me out, and I wasn’t sure I’d have the strength to look elsewhere.
Everything looks simpler in hindsight. Living it never is.
I exhale an unsteady breath, grateful at least that Zeriel’s focus is currently fixed away from me. He stares at the transport container near the clearing’s edge.
It seems there’s to be no gloamwyrm riding this time.
We’re ushered inside the large metal box, and barely a minute later it rises, tugged by the beating wings of drakes overhead. I attempt to keep my eyes on my hands, my mind focused on my own breathing, my own space. Attempt not to think about exactly where we’re headed… about the fact this is actually happening.
An inside view of the Emperor’s Tournament.
If someone had told me a year ago I’d be sitting here alongside the imperial city’s champion… a man made of rage, ruin, and collapsing cliffs… I would’ve laughed. Or run.
We’re carried for what feels like only ten tense minutes before we’re lowered again. I keep my gaze firmly away from him as we touch down, afraid any contact will encourage another barrage of emotion. He doesn’t attempt to talk to me either, our connection simmering low in the background.
When the vessel opens, we’re in front of a deep, narrow tunnel carved into some kind of moss-covered rockface.
There’s no announcement, no ceremony. All fourteen champions are corralled as one, like livestock, through the corridor chiseled between walls of stone.
