My body stills as I listen to her climb closer, every instinct sharpening to a razor’s edge. Snow settles across my fur weightlessly, but beneath it, my blood roars like a winter storm clawing its way out of my chest. Her voice burns through me, not like fire, but like recognition. Like something ancient and forgotten has finally shaken itself awake inside me after sleeping for millennia.
She can't see me yet; I haven’t allowed it.But gods, I want her to.
There's a tightness in my throat I don't understand. It tastes of salt and iron, and a longing so fierce it threatens to bring me to my knees. My paws are still pressed firmly to the ground, my claws driven deep into the roots beneath his corpse. They anchor me before I do something foolish...like run to her.
She's so close now. I can feel her presence like a thread pulled tight between her chest and mine. It vibrates with every breath she takes, humming beneath my ribs.
Saelûn.
The word licks through me like fire through frost.Sael’thra ves’kael Kaemorin. (You are carved into my ribs and written in my bones. Mine.)
After thousands of years of silence, and snow, and souls that meant nothing. She’s here, screaming in my forest. Furious and broken andkaemorin.
The dead manlies beneath me. His face is frozen in perpetual agony, his eyes empty and staring at nothing.But her scent still clings to him, woven into the fabric of his coat… and that I cannot allow.
That scent belongsto me now.
Lumi-
I stumble into the grove, and that's when I smell it.Blood. The fresh smell of copper floods my nose. My fingers snap to the knife strapped to my thigh as I step forward, my boots suddenly too loud in the silence. My eyes scan the area, settling on a patch of disturbed snow. There are drag marks, there’s a body?—
Mark.
He’s dead.
His body lies crumpled in the center of the clearing like a discarded puppet. His face is frozen in a rictus of terror, his mouth open in a scream that never made it out. There’s blood.So much blood, staining the crisp white snow around him, but it’s his eyes that stop me cold. I didn’t think they could look emptier than they already did—I was wrong.
“No.”The word falls from my lips, barely a whisper.
“No, no, no?—”
The scream rips straight from my throat before I can stop it, raw enough to tear something vital on its way out.
“He was mine!”
I stumble forward, my knife forgotten as my knees hit the frozen ground beside his body.He was mine to kill. Mine to take. Mine to watch crumble the way Anna did—the way I did when I found her still warm in my bed.
It was supposed to be my eyes he looked into as he took his last breath. My hands around his throat. My voice the last thing he heard.For Anna.
Two years.
Two goddamn yearsof planning, training, and surviving on nothing but rage and the promise of this moment.
For what?
What do I have to show for it?
A corpse I didn’t make? Closure I’ll never receive? A sister I didn’t get to avenge?
“Fuck!” I scream into the trees, voice cracking in the cold. “Fuckk!” It echoes through the clearing like thunder, bouncing off the trees and dissolving into nothing.
I could've died two years ago.Maybe I should have.
The only thing that kept me tethered to this world was the need to watch the light bleed from Mark O’Reilly’s eyes. And I didn't even get that.
My body shakes so hard I collapse, falling forward into the snow beside him, not caring that it’s drenched and sticky with his blood.
And just like that—I have nothing left.
