I screamed. The sound tore out of my throat raw and animal.
“Fascinating,” Auradelle murmured, taking notes in a journal thatmaterialized from nowhere. His voice was completely detached, like he was observing something mildly interesting rather than listening to me scream. “The acceleration is even faster than predicted. Your body wants this, Elle. It’s been waiting your whole life for this moment.”
“Stop,” I gasped, but the word came out wrong, harmonizing with itself like I was speaking in multiple voices. “Please—”
“Not yet. We need to see your threshold.”
He increased the pressure, and the sensation intensified until I couldn’t tell where I ended and the pain began. I wasn’t just feeling my memories now. I was being forced into other people’s minds. My grandmother as a young woman, standing in this very room, screaming just like I was. My mother, whom I barely remembered, dying when I was just a toddler. Kaelren, carving marks into his own skin with desperate precision, blood running down his arms. Even Auradelle himself, younger, hopeful, before decades of holding a realm together had turned him into this monster.
“Please,” I sobbed, hating myself for begging, unable to stop. “Please stop—”
“There we are,” he said, like I’d passed some kind of test. He removed his hand, and the sensations stopped so abruptly I would have collapsed if the roots weren’t holding me. I gasped for air, tasting blood and bile. “Two minutes, thirty-seven seconds. Your grandmother lasted forty-three seconds on her first exposure.”
“Fuck you,” I spat through the blood in my mouth. My split lip had opened wider. “Fuck you—”
“This isn’t torture, child. This is calibration.” He walked to a table I hadn’t noticed before, covered in implements that looked medical and mystical in equal measure. His tone was so matter-of-fact it was worse than if he’d been cruel. “We need to understand exactly what you’re capable of before the Convergence. How much power you can channel. How much transformation you can endure before you break.”
“Why?” My voice was hoarse from screaming, and I could feel my markings still spreading, though slower now. They pulsed with heat under my skin. “Why not just throw me at the Bloom and see what happens?”
“Because I’ve spent fifty years preparing for this moment, and I don’t intend to waste it on chance.” He selected something that looked like a tuning fork made of petrified wood. “Your bloodline is the key to saving both worlds. But keys can be turned different ways. I need to ensure you turn the right way. My way.”
He struck the tuning fork against the table, and it rang with an impossible sounding note—too pure, too complex, like an entire orchestra compressed into a single tone. My markings responded immediately, resonating with the sound, and I felt something deep in my bones shift and crack.
“What are you doing to me?”
“Attuning you. The Bloom operates on specific frequencies, specific patterns. Your natural marks are close, but not quite right. Like an instrument that needs tuning.” He struck the fork again, and this time the note was different, darker. The sound made my teeth vibrate and my vision blur. “This will help them align properly when the time comes.”
The session continued for what felt like hours. Different tools, different tests, each one pushing my markings in new directions, each one making me scream until my throat was raw. He never paused, never showed mercy, never acknowledged my pain except to make clinical observations in that damned journal.
By the time he finally called for the guards to take me back to my quarters, I could barely stay conscious. My marks had spread to cover most of my torso, creeping down my thighs. Every breath felt like swallowing fire, every movement sent lightning through my nerves. My cracked rib was agony with each shallow breath.
“Tomorrow,” Auradelle said as they peeled me off the platform—the wood releasing me reluctantly, leaving red welts and deep bruises where it had held me. “We’ll test your capacity for holding Root-energy while channeling Bloom-force. It should be… illuminating.”
I tried to respond, but all that came out was a broken sound that might have been a sob. My vision was going dark at the edges, and I could taste blood from where I’d bitten through my tongue.
“Careful with her,” Auradelle instructed the guards as they hauled meupright. My legs wouldn’t hold me—they buckled immediately. “I need her functional for tomorrow’s session. Damaged is acceptable. Dead is not.”
The journey back to my quarters was a blur of pain and half-consciousness. I was vaguely aware of the guards’ cruel laughter, of passing through a maze of corridors, of my markings flickering under my skin like dying embers. When they finally dumped me on my bed, I couldn’t move, couldn’t think, could barely breathe around the pain in my ribs.
The serving girl—the same one from before—appeared with a basin of water and clean cloths. She worked in silence, gently cleaning the sweat and blood from my skin. Her touch was careful around my markings, which were still spreading, still burning, still trying to consume me.
“It gets easier,” she whispered, so quiet I almost missed it.
“What?”
“The tests. The pain. After a while, you learn to… go somewhere else. In your mind.” She wrung out the cloth, and I saw her own marks—faint, wrong, creeping up her arms like disease. “I was tested too. Before. When he thought I might be the one.”
“You have marks?”
“Failed ones. Forced ones. He tried to make me into what you naturally are.” She pulled her sleeves down, hiding them. “It didn’t work. But I survived. You will too.”
“How do you know?”
“Because you have something I didn’t.” She glanced at my restraints, which were still humming, still suppressing my connection to Kaelren. “Someone waiting for you. Someone coming for you. Hold onto that.”
She left before I could respond, taking the basin with her. I lay there on the silk sheets, my body feeling like it had been taken apart and reassembled wrong.
“Kaelren,”I thought desperately into the muffled bond.“Please. I don’t know how much more of this I can take.”
