“Alora!”Salvia caught her wrist, and she was a child again, standing in her mother’s workroom. “How many times have I told you, never touch the spindle!”
Her eyes welled. “Why, mommy?”
Sighing, her mother kneeled and gently cradled her hands. “Your essence is precious, my sweet bloom. And the darkness is eager to drink it.”
Alora woke with a soft start to find Rune’s shadowed form beside her bed, so close she could feel the warmth of his breath brush her neck. Her gasp caught in her throat, heart pounding.She reached for him, whispering his name, but he dissolved like smoke in the dawn.
And she was half convinced it was only a dream.
The days that followed bled into each other. And routine replaced rest.
From dawn to dusk Alora trained.
Moonlight filtered weakly through the canopy, swallowed by shadows that lingered in the corners of the cottage. Her small garden rang with the clash of metal and the thrum of magic. Her muscles ached. Her body stiff in leather armor, stained with sweat, dirt, and blood.
Calla was ruthless. Her voice like a whip and a stare sharp enough to cut. On the seventh morning, Alora was so exhausted, she collapsed into the moss and wept.
The female Harbinger stood against the sun, looking down at her stoically. “Stand, my lady.”
“I can’t.”
“Even when you falter, when all seems lost, you must never stay down.”
Alora looked past her toward the woods. Sometimes, in the hush between breaths, she sensed Rune. Like a wisp of shadow in the branches or a tendril of smoke in the heart, but he was never truly there. Her chest ached every time it hoped he was.
“Why does he push me away?” Alora asked, her voice breaking.
“Because he mistakes distance for protection,” Calla said, kneeling beside her. She wiped Alora’s face with a damp cloth, gentler than her voice had ever been. “Males occasionally forgethow enduring we are and it falls to us to remind them. Now stand. To wallow is beneath you.”
Even if she was right, Alora was too exhausted to do anything else.
So Calla sent her off to eat and bathe before she collapsed into bed with her hands still aching and her heart sore.
And dreams came swiftly for her again.
Sometimes they were wisps of images, a voice in the dark, a song on the wind, her mother dancing, then Alora dancing with a shadow in the moonlight.
This time it was different.
Rune stood in the center of a stone tower at the top of Karag Dûr, wind howling, with a view of the land in the dawn. His shoulders were bare, cloak gone, his eyes molten red. His gaze was fixed on the horizon like it was everything he couldn’t touch.
And then she saw it, the sun rising.
Alora gasped softly.Rune?
The first rays spilled across the land like beams of gold—and Rune did not flee. He stood there, calmly watching them rise up the mountain and land on his face.
And he burned.
Angry red streaks scorched his chest and face, skin blistering and charred.
She screamed his name.
He flinched away and vanished into the shadows.
Alora woke with a start, breath caught in her throat. The scent of smoke lingered in the air, but the fire in the hearth was cold.
Later, that morning, she sat at the table, staring at her cold porridge, the dream still clinging to her skin.
