He’d sent a letter.
“I’ll call you back, Mother.” My knees weakened, so I dropped onto the stool, eyes locked on the page.
Something shuffled in her background. “Yeah, I have to go too. Take care. Love you. Bye.”
She didn’t give me a chance to respond before the line went dead.
Swallowing, I forced myself to steady the thudding in my chest before I began reading his words.
I’ve endured centuries of silence, of emptiness, of just living. And still, nothing terrified me...until you. Until Irealised the only thing that could truly come close to killing me...is losing you.
I looked up from the letter to suck in a deep breath to calm my racing heart before continuing.
Long before I was born, Selvanyra began blessing humans. She gave them fragments of her power — strength, healing, longevity and so on — weaving pieces of herself into their blood. But my family was different. She poured too much of herself into us. Our veins held more of her essence than any mortal body could bear, and our bodies couldn’t sustain the divine spark. What was meant to be a blessing turned into something else entirely: a sickness woven into our blood.
For centuries, we carried more of her power than we were ever meant to. At twenty-two, without fail, the blood flowing in our veins would grow thick, and every son and daughter of our house would weaken.
Generations passed, and with each one, the pattern repeated. The sickness was called Silvering of the Blood. It slowed the heart, clouded the mind, and then hardened inside us until nothing could pass through. Our lungs would strain, our hearts would stop, and our bodies would turn lifeless.
Generations of mine begged Selvanyra to cleanse it, but to strip the sickness away would mean stripping the magic too, leaving my bloodline powerless.
And she would not undo her own precious gift.
Her silence sealed our fate, and for years, every child of my house lived with the knowledge that their last breath would come on the cusp of twenty-two. No matter how much strength, no matter how much healing we carried, death was the one thing we could not escape.
I turned the piece of paper around, searching for more, desperate to know what came next. But the back was blank.
With my chest thudding, I shot to my feet and rushed to the door, half-certain I’d find him there waiting.
He wasn’t.
How could he begin his story and stop halfway?
I went back inside, shutting the door with more force than I intended. Every step across the kitchen floor carried the urgent need to storm out, to find him and demand the rest. But I didn’t. Something inside told me that he would send another letter, just like he’d sent this one.
Maybe he couldn’t say it to my face. Maybe this ink on paper was the only way he knew how to talk about himself. And as badly as I wanted to run to him, I knew it wasn’t for the best.
If by chance the next meal didn’t come with another letter, I was bolting straight to him.
Silvering of the Blood.
Again, something I’d never read about because it wasn’t recorded anywhere. Understandable. Thrax was the only one who knew; it belonged to his bloodline.
The sickness killed them at twenty-two.
The words screamed through my head, rattling every part of me.
Did that mean he’d been lying on the cave floor, dead, when he was twenty-two?
Wait.
I froze mid-step, puzzle pieces tumbling into place.
The five stone monuments I’d seen in the dream the other day.
They were his family. They had all died at twenty-two.
And he had buried them.
