“Almost took your head off,” Sarnyx corrected. “Would have, too, if you weren’t so damn fast. We fought for twenty minutes before he finally pinned me. I was waiting for the killing blow—figured I’d die trying to save my village. Instead, he explained who he was. A rebel. Someone fighting against the Crown that had been stealing from us for years.”
“She’s been my second ever since,” Kaelren finished. “Best decision I ever made, even if she did nearly cave in my skull.”
“Your turn,” Bryx said, looking at me after the laughter died down. “Tell us about your grandmother. The one who started all this.”
I hadn’t planned to. I sat there trying to control my breathing, willing the tears to not break through at the thought of how much I missed her. But surrounded by their stories, by their trust, the words came anyway.
“She used to garden in the moonlight,” I began. “My grandmother. She’d wait until after midnight, when the neighbors were asleep, and she’d go out in her nightgown with this old trowel and just… talk to the plants. Like they were people.”
“Did they talk back?” Bryx asked, genuinely curious for once.
“I thought she was losing it,” I admitted. “Grief does that, right? Makes you a little unhinged. But now…” I gestured at my glowing marks. “Now I wonder if she heard them the same way I do. If she knew what I’d become.”
“She knew,” the Sage said softly. “Josephine knew exactly what you’d inherit. Why do you think she ran away from this world?”
“And yet you’re here anyway,” Kaelren observed. “Destiny, or just bad luck?”
“Maybe both,” Peeble chimed in from my shoulder. “Though if we’re ranking bad luck, Elle’s really cornered the market. Falls into murder realm, immediately gets marked for cosmic doom, finds the one guy in Wynmire who’s emotionally constipated—”
“I’m not emotionally constipated,” Kaelren said flatly.
“You’re seventy percent repression and thirty percent murder instinct wrapped in a very attractive package of doom.”
“That’s not—” He paused. “Actually, that’s depressingly accurate.”
Everyone laughed, even Sarnyx, and the sound echoedwarmly off the breathing walls.
“Your turn, murder prince,” Bryx said, gesturing at Kaelren. “Tell us something we don’t know. Something that doesn’t involve you being terrifying.”
“I’m always terrifying.”
“Try anyway.”
Kaelren was quiet for a long moment, his hand still wrapped around mine. Through our bond, I felt him weighing what to share, testing the words before speaking them.
“I had a brother,” he finally said, his voice colder than before—distance as armor. “Before the marks. Before everything went to hell.”
The room went silent. Even Peeble stopped buzzing.
“Older or younger?” I asked gently.
“Younger. By two years.” Kaelren’s jaw tightened, but his voice remained flat, emotionless. “Therin. He was everything I wasn’t. Warm. Easy to love. The kind of person who made things better just by existing in the same room.”
“What happened to him?” Nimor asked, though his tone suggested he already knew the answer wouldn’t be good.
“The marks happened,” Kaelren said simply. “When I tried to take the power, when I carved these into my skin, the corruption didn’t just affect me. It spread. Therin tried to stop me, grabbed my arm right as I completed the final mark.” His free hand moved to his carved marks, tracing them without expression. “The corruption jumped to him. Instantly. Ate through him in seconds—not slowly like it’s doing to me, but fast. Violent. He screamed once. Then he was gone.”
Through the bond I felt the chasm of grief beneath the words, but his face revealed nothing.
“That’s why you’re so desperate to fix this,” Eltrien said quietly. “Not just for yourself. For him.”
“I made him a promise,” Kaelren replied. “That I’d make the marks work. That his death wouldn’t be meaningless. Every day I fail is another day I’ve broken that promise. Another day he stays dead for nothing.”
I squeezed his hand, not knowing what else to offer.
“Well this took a dark turn,” Peeble said after a moment, their voice uncharacteristically subdued. “Anyone want to hear about the time I accidentally started a war between two hives by insulting both queens’ honey-making techniques?”
There was a collective groan from the group, but that didn’t deter the overly eccentric beetle.
