As if I’m the one being unreasonable.
Ella’s rage surged. She stepped toward him again, fists clenched, ready to do far more than shove him this time. She wanted him to feel every ounce of the betrayal burning throughher. His eyes cut to the glow kindling at her collarbone, and all the breath seemed to leave the world.
Her sigil had woken.
The ink that lay quiet and invisible flared from nothing to black and then to molten gold and crimson, the symbol of Orchid so bright it was as if it were being etched anew from the inside out. Heat raced outward as the light refused to stop at her heart. It leapt like a spark to dry tinder and crossed the fragile bridge of bone to the other side of her chest, unfurling in mirrored strokes across her collarbone, then down the angle of her right arm, where it curled toward her wrist like living fire seeking a path, as if fury itself was bleeding through her skin in streams of ink.
Ella yanked the cloak closed, but the reveal had already happened.
The ink kept moving beneath her palm, expanding, the lines multiplying into elegant constellations, a map written in black with threads of red and gold glinting through as if the stars themselves had taken root beneath her skin. In all the years she had borne the mark, she had never seen the tattoo change, had never even heard of such a thing.
“Fuck,” she breathed, staggering back. “No—no, no?—”
Jakobav took a step forward, eyes locked on the mark. “How?” he said, voice low. “That breach has been closed for hours now, Ella. Tell me what is happening. The truth this time. Your mark is changing, and you should have no magic here.”
“Don’t,” she hissed. “Don’t look at me like that. I don’t know.”
“Ellandria—” he began.
“Do not call me that.” Her voice cracked on the last syllable, like the first fracture in a dam.
But the knowledge was already in his eyes, and could not be unknown. She was not merely Orchid-born and not merely the heir who had slipped a crown for anonymity. She was moredangerous than either title accounted for, and even she did not understand it.
The thought tore her resolve loose. She turned and ran.
She didn’t pick a direction so much as fling herself into motion, vaulting onto the nearest horse with a grace born of habit and long hours in the saddle. The stirrup caught, her boot drove down, and the animal surged forward under the command of a heel and a need to be anywhere else but here.
Branches clawed at her hair and stung her cheeks. The wind dragged at her cloak and pride alike until both snapped behind her in a single dark stream. It didn’t matter where she was going, only that she was away from his stare and his questions and the strange patience in his voice that made her want to scream.
The world tilted.
A pulse ran through the air as if some invisible string had been plucked too hard and too deep, and the note it made kept ringing, shivering through her bones. The ground quivered under the horse’s hooves. The temperature dropped. The wind, which had been at her back, shifted to meet her head-on, and ahead of her, the line of trees did not sway so much as wave, bending as though reality itself were a curtain caught by a draft from a door that should not have been opened.
She blinked, and the sky darkened between one breath and the next. Clouds turned in tight spirals against the wind. Lightning crawled in the wrong direction, streaking down and then sideways, like a thought changing its mind. The leaves on the trees shuddered not with breeze but with recognition, as though something old had brushed the world and they remembered, fluttering their hello.
Her mark answered, brightening like coals. Heat coursed through her veins until the lines already carved across her chest and arm began to writhe. The ink itself undulated beneath her skin, each stroke shifting like a serpent testing its cage, blackfiligree stitched with threads of gold and ember-red that twisted and reformed as though alive. Her stomach lurched, bile rising as she realized it wasn’t just growing, it wasmoving.
“This is a godsdamned nightmare,” she rasped, the words shaking out of her as the air thickened with the taste of rain and metal and something she was never meant to see. As if she were walking the edge of a revelation.
Rain fell upward.
Droplets rose to meet her, soaking into her cloak, hot against her skin, proof that whatever she had stepped into was no illusion.
And then it hit her. This wasn’t merely her magic flaring and not any storm the sky should make. A seam had opened; a ripple in the Veil had loosened and widened like a mouth learning hunger. For a sliver of time she was between, not wholly in Dravaryn and not wholly anywhere anymore.
Her pulse thundered in her ears as she looked down, and her mind stalled. The creature beneath her still bore the outline of a horse, but the shape fractured, as though the world could not decide what it was. Too many joints bent where the legs should have ended, its eyes burned yellow, glimmering like language, and its hide was no longer hair but a shifting surface of scales that caught the dim light with a sheen suggesting depth rather than texture, as if a creature far older and more dangerous wore the skin of a steed only long enough to carry her through.
“Shit,” she whispered, the word slipping soft and low, terrified that speaking too loudly might startle the thing beneath her. The creature did not exist anywhere in the mortal realm, further proving what she already feared. She had slipped the threads and crossed into another realm entirely.
She had Threadwalked.
The word landed on her tongue as if it had been waiting for centuries to be spoken again, myth and curse and truth braidedinto a single sound. The ability had not existed since the Fae vanished, not since the realms were sealed and the Veil raised to keep creatures like her from moving between places that should remain apart.
Creatures like her.
The realization chilled her more thoroughly than the storm that wasn’t.
This was too much. She needed to return.
