27
Elle
The ritual chamber wasn’t what I expected.
After being dragged through the Heartspire’s corridors by those corrupted guards, I’d braced for something dramatic—-a throne room with an ancient altar, maybe some ominous sacrificial setup. Instead, they brought me to a circular room deep underground. The walls glowed a sickly green with pulsing light. The floor was wood, but it was warm under my bare feet and gave slightly when I stepped on it, like standing on skin.
At some point during the journey down here, they’d stripped me to a simple shift. Between that, the aching throb in my ribs, and the burn of my split lip, I felt exposed and raw.
The guards, those things with armor fused to their skin and too many joints in their fingers, didn’t speak as they positioned me in the center of the room. A platform rose from the floor, grown from the same wood. It looked like a cross between an operating table and an altar, and my stomach turned looking at it.
“On your back,” one said, its voice grinding like stone on bone.
“Fuck you,” I managed through my swollen lip, tasting copper.
But there were four of them and one of me, and my restraints were still suppressing any power I might have used. My cracked rib screamed as they forced me down, not roughly, but with steady, relentless pressure.
The moment my back touched the platform, the wood moved. Tendrilsgrew up and wrapped around my ankles, my thighs, my waist. Not tight enough to crush, but firm enough that I couldn’t budge. More wrapped around my arms, pinning them at my sides. A final one grew across my forehead, locking my head in place.
The frost burns on my arms from the guards’ earlier grip throbbed with cold pain where the wood touched them.
“Comfortable?” one guard asked. I could have sworn the thing was smiling.
I tried to spit blood at him, but it fell short thanks to the restraints.
They roared with laughter as they left me there. Alone. Waiting.
Time moves differently when you can’t move, can’t see anything but the pulsing ceiling, can’t do anything but think. I tried counting my breaths, but the Heartspire’s rhythm kept interfering, making me lose track. I tried focusing on the bond with Kaelren, but the restraints turned every attempt into static and pain.
So I thought about escape. About the serving girl with the bruise on her jaw who’d helped me dress. About Auradelle’s exhausted eyes and what fifty years of wearing a crown that burned must feel like. About seventeen iterations of this same story, playing out over and over. What was different this time? What variable had changed?
Me, obviously. But I was just another Elle in a long line of Elles, wasn’t I? Unless…
The door opened—or rather, a section of wall split apart—and Auradelle entered. He’d changed from his morning robes into something that looked almost like a surgeon’s garb. Behind him floated a tray of implements that made my stomach turn just looking at them.
“I apologize for the wait,” he said, approaching slowly, studying me like I was something pinned to a board. “I had to ensure the calculations were correct. Your markings are spreading faster than anticipated, which changes some variables.”
“Let me go.”
“Eventually.” He pulled on gloves that looked like they were woven from petal-threads, each finger lighting up with a different color as heflexed them. “But first, we need to understand exactly what we’re working with.”
He moved to stand beside the platform, looking down at me with those tired, ancient eyes. For a moment, I saw something flicker there—curiosity? Hunger? But it was gone before I could be sure.
“The first test,” he announced, as if speaking to an audience that wasn’t there, “is to see how your natural marks respond to direct Bloom exposure.”
“Test?” I yanked against the wood holding my arms, ignoring the scream from my cracked rib. “I’m not your fucking experiment.”
“No,” he agreed, his voice flat and clinical. “You’re far more valuable than that.”
He didn’t gesture, didn’t speak a word. More roots simply emerged from the floor, wrapping around my already-bound ankles, my waist, my wrists. They tightened this time, making the earlier bonds feel gentle by comparison. The restraints on my wrists hummed in harmony with them, creating a resonance that made my teeth ache and my skull feel like it was cracking open.
“Your grandmother,” Auradelle said, “managed to resist the Bloom’s call for three days when we tested her. But she had mental preparation, years of knowing what she was. You…”
He pressed his hand against my collarbone, right where my markings originated, and the world went white.
It wasn’t pain. It was worse than pain. It was like every nerve in my body suddenly remembered every sensation it had ever felt, all at once. The summer heat of home. The cold of Mirror Lake. The burn of Kaelren’s corrupted touch. The gentle warmth of my grandmother’s hugs. All of it, compressed into a single moment that stretched into eternity.
My markings responded violently, spreading across my skin like they were trying to escape my body. This wasn’t the gentle creep I’d grown used to—this was aggressive, ravenous, trying to claim every inch of me at once. Golden vines raced down my arms, across my chest, up my neck. I could feel them trying to reach my face, my eyes, trying to burrow into my brain.
