Evie
Reality reshaped itself, and I opened my eyes. Kael held me close, his fingers threading through my hair with unusual care.
“There she is,” he murmured against my ear. “You are breathtaking when you faint on my cock.”
Heat rose to my cheeks. Had I just fainted?
I didn’t know it was possible to be undone so utterly that breath and soul both fled me. Kael could channel the deepest echoes, the purest release, and take my breath away until the world collapsed into stars and shadow all at once.
I found solace in that surrender, in the fragile balance between life and oblivion. It was both thrilling and terrifying. My body had learned a secret language, one only Kael could speak, and only I could understand.
His eyes—dark, fathomless, and unguarded—held a knowing that sent a shiver down my spine. He understood the confession I had just bared to him, and for the first time since I had known him, the storm within him had stilled. He was quiet. At a semblance of peace, though the world outside remained in chaos.
“Kael,” I whispered, my voice trembling with all I could not say. “I… I never knew it could be like this.”
He smiled, a slow, knowing curve that promised both danger and delight. “There is far more I can make you feel, beautiful,” he said, his voice a low, soothing rumble. “I will explore every shadow you crave, and listen to every whisper of pleasure and pain your body makes.”
It was fortunate that my fertile days lay weeks ahead. We had ample time to test his words, to learn all he meant by them.
He took me again that night, gentler this time. He let me ride him while his hands, lips, tongue, and teeth mapped every inch of me. I let him pour his power into me, impossibly, wondrously so, and each time the lightning struck him back, I felt the broken pieces of him knit closer together.
I fell asleep in his arms, lulled by the slow rhythm of his breathing, and for once, everything felt right. Because for once, my power had gone quiet, too.
We left Stenhalla before dawn,when the air was still bruised with night and the peaks above us wore thin crowns of cloud. Grison stayed behind in the stables. The trail to the summit was too steep and broken for hooves, and we would make better time on foot.
We ascended the narrow path that clung to the valley’s cliffs, each step bringing colder air from the heights. My breath steamed in pale plumes, curling and fading like ghosts in the wind. The wood elves had mended my torn clothes and left me a wool jacket, thick as a pelt. Now, high on the trail where the wind cut like glass, I was glad for their kindness.
The mountain loomed above us, quiet and listening, its bones jutting through the soil like the ribs of a buried god. Soon we rejoined the trail winding toward the summit, its curves carved by centuries of wind and rain.
We circled the tainted ruins of Vallûne without a glance. A blackness seeped through the grass, spreading like rot beneath the morning dew. We climbed among scattered boulders, victims of some ancient rockslide, and marked every place where coils of tar pulsed faintly between the stones, the mountain itself bleeding slow poison.
Kael said nothing. He moved with a hunter’s precision, silent and sure, an elven sword strapped across his back catching the pale light. He led without looking back, though I knew he counted every one of my steps. I paused often, feigning interest in the terrain while my legs trembled from the climb and from what they remembered of last night. I told myself it was only fatigue. He simply had greater endurance. For a mage, he was stronger, steadier, than any Befest guard I’d ever met.
By the time the sun reached its zenith, the path ahead was drowned in blackness. We’d gone beyond the tree line, where the last stunted pines clung to the stone like beggars to warmth. The rocks were veined with tar, and the air hung heavy with the scent of damp earth and rot. Even the sky seemed dimmed, thin flakes of ash drifting through the air like pale insects.
Before us, the trail climbed steeply among boulders and patches of melting snow. The summit loomed close now, half-hidden behind a colossal rock chipped and weathered by centuries of ice and snow.
When I turned, the world below looked impossibly small. The forest stretched like a dark sea, the tainted village no more than a blemish among the trees. Farther still, Befest melted into the horizon, devoured by haze and the shimmer of the distant ocean.
I stopped, breath uneven, watching the valley below. An itch crawled between my shoulder blades, the sense of being seen. Kael stood beside me, silent as ever, so it wasn’t him. Maybe it was whatever waited at the summit. Whatever root of corruption had taken hold of the mountain’s heart.
I thought of the visions I’d had so far. The tower at the summit.The magi. Kael. I hadn’t gathered the courage to tell him, partly because I feared what I’d learn, how deep his part in it ran. Yet the time was coming when I would have to ask, and his silence pressed on me like a weight I couldn’t shake.
“What’s up there?” I asked, voice thin and uneven, still catching my breath.
He frowned, caught off guard, but the expression eased quickly. “Drachenfels Keep.”
The name meant nothing to me, but the way he said it told me everything. He knew that place. He’d been there.
“What is that?” I pressed.
“An old mage spire,” he said after a moment. “Built centuries ago by an archmage obsessed with weather magic.”
I hesitated, words caught behind my teeth. I could feel the question forming like a bruise in my throat, but I wasn’t sure I wanted his answer.
Something terrible had happened up there, something foul enough to stain the mountain black. I could feel it in the stones, in the vines, in the silence between us. And somehow Kael, and maybe the other magisters, had been part of it.
It had to be tied to the Breath of Death.
