Though given how this day was deteriorating, she wasn’t counting on anything resembling normalcy ever again.
Serenya approached him like she might approach a sleeping dragon—aware that one wrong move could incinerate her. The space between them shrank to mere inches, and she could feel heat radiating from his skin like a banked forge.
“This is a little intimate,” she muttered, more to herself than anyone else.
She then placed her palm against his chest.
The contact jolted both of them—her magic recognizing his curse like oil meeting flame. His skin radiated feverish heat, the thrum of shadowfire surging beneath it like a caged animal that had been pacing the same cage for too long. Her lumen sigils ignited instinctively, white-gold light racing through her fingertips and into his flesh.
His curse responded immediately. She couldn’t see it, but she felt his violet-black shadowfire curling upward inside his body as if inhaling her light, drinking it, testing its boundaries. The sensation was invasive beyond anything she’d experienced—her magic probing through his veins, mapping the corruption that had taken root in his very soul.
Her stomach lurched. The curse crawled through him like a living thing, searching for weaknesses, for openings, for flesh it could hollow out and claim. This wasn’t just magical contamination—it was predatory. Intelligent. Hungry.
Stay disciplined. Don’t let it sense your fear.
Her lumen magic might stabilize him, but only if she remained focused, disciplined, and unyielding. Their connection wasn’t intimate, she realized with growing horror. It was violently alive inside both of them, layered with trauma they both carried.
As her lumen sigils probed deeper into the core of his curse, recognition hit her like ice water. The signature was unmistakable—echoes of the same corruption infecting the border towns. The same “thinking shadow” that had devoured entire settlements and left echo-things wearing human faces. The same hunger she’d sensed when the plague tried to break through her protective wards in the library.
Whatever had cursed Vaelrik was connected to the greater catastrophe threatening the Ashen Realms.
The moment her magic brushed the curse’s core, images flashed behind her eyes: a chasm pulsing like a wound in reality, chanting in a language older than dragons, and darkness that felt aware—watching her back with ancient, patient malevolence.
The Council didn’t tell me about this.
This was something that she might never be able to step away from willingly.
She pulled her hand back, breathing hard, pulse hammering against the fresh sigil on her wrist. She’d expected terror in this moment, the instinctive recoil from something monstrous.
Instead, what she felt in her gut was recognition. She felt the strain he lived under—a century of suppressing a curse that wanted to hollow him out. A lifetime of being used as a weapon, never acknowledged as a person. The quiet, brutal endurance of someone who’d learned that survival meant swallowing pain until it became background noise.
She knew that endurance. She’d lived it too, after Eris Hollow burned and the world decided witches were dangerous relics to be managed rather than people to be respected.
Empathy twisted like a blade in her chest. She shoved it down ruthlessly. Compassion was a dangerous luxury she couldn’t afford. Dragons used every weakness they could find, and this one already had her magically leashed.
Remember what they are. Built for dominance, power, and fire. They don’t care about you.
The binding sigil carved into her wrist pulsed mockingly. If it wasn’t for this magical chain, she would run straight out of Cinderhollow and never look back.
But where would she really go? The shadow-plague was spreading, and she was apparently the only person who could stabilize the one weapon capable of fighting it.
She was trapped—by magic, by politics, and by the growing certainty that whatever was hunting the Ashen Realms had been waiting for this moment far longer than any of them realized.
Kyr cleared his throat. “The witch will require quarters tonight.”
Serenya stiffened, but Vaelrik spoke before she could snap back.
“Show her to the west wing,” he said, his voice low but firm. “It’s the furthest from the training grounds. She needs quiet tonight.”
Kyr blinked. Serenya did too. That was not what she expected him to say.
He was cursed. He was dangerous. And yet, he’d noticed she was rattled. Vaelrik stared at her with an unreadable expression that made something unwelcome flutter in her chest.
Kyr gestured stiffly. “Follow me.”
As Serenya turned, the binding sigil pulsed once—warm, almost questioning. Or maybe that was her imagination.
Kyr escorted her to a narrow chamber in the west wing, its single window overlooking a slice of the lava-lit city. The room was small but blessedly quiet—a bed, a washbasin, and a cramped writing desk that looked older than she was.
