“The bone-song,” she clarifies. “Your blood answered it. Not many outsiders can.”
I swallow hard. “I didn’t know I had — I mean, I didn’t… I’m human.”
“You are human,” she says. “But you carry theecho.That tells us something.”
I open my mouth to ask what thatsomethingis, but the world tilts inside my senses — warmth blooming low in my belly, like a seed unfurling ancient roots. It’s not hurt. Not exactly shock.
Something else.
My fingertips drift down to my stomach, as if the tiniest touch could unlock every question swirling in my mind.
“Late,” I murmur to myself.
Late?
My cycles are always been regular. I would know.
Dread and wonder twist together into an impossible knot — a tangle of fear and hope that broils my stomach and sends my pulse into rapid, irrational flight.
The silver-daggered Reaper watches me, expression unreadable. “Do not mistake this for weakness,” she warns. “If you are unready for what the bond carries — if you do not stand strong — he could lose himself. Strength is not just muscle and steel. It’s spirit.”
Her words hit deeper than any blade.
I glance at Kallus.
He’s watching — not with that same hardened intensity he shows outsiders, but with something quieter. Something moreprofound. Something that makes the hair at the back of my neck stand up like static.
I take a breath. And another.
Because the truth of what Ifeelis larger than logic, larger than fear, larger than anything I’ve ever known about myself before.
“What does it mean?” I finally ask the female Reaper.
She studies me for a moment — eyes bright with some ancient fire I can’t name.
“It means you are more than you think,” she says. “And that the bones… remember things the flesh forgets.”
I blink at her, my fingers still resting on my belly. A tremor rises through me — not pain. Not pleasure. Just…awareness.Something ancient and insistent like wind through hollow reeds.
Kallus steps closer to me, his presence wrapping around me like shadowed warmth. He doesn’t touch — not yet — but I can feel him like skin against skin.
“You’re not alone,” he murmurs.
“I know,” I whisper, voice thin and trembling between wonder and fear.
He turns toward the elder female. “Will she be tested?”
She nods. “If the song answered her blood, then she walks an unheard path. That must be honored — and understood.”
I glance between them, unsure.
“It means,” Kallus says softly, “that her bond to me — and whatever lives within her — is real.”
I feel the world tighten around those words — not as weight, but as a promise sinking into the marrow of me.
The chamber is silent — bone-silent, ancient-silent — but inside my belly, something ripples, alive and profound.
I think of Kallus’s touch — not just his body, but the way he looked at me when I became tribe, when we were accepted, whenthe bone-song called me. I think of the way he spoke my name — slow, reverent — like it was a discovery and a vow all at once.
