I came apart.
The orgasm hit me like a wave—no, like a storm, like the kind of weather that reshapes coastlines. My whole body seized with pleasure so intense it bordered on pain, every nerve I possessed firing at once, shadows swirling around me in response to the magic I couldn't control. The room darkened and brightened in turns, starlight pulsing in time with my release. I cried out—his name, maybe, or just sound, meaningless syllables torn from a throat that had forgotten how to form words.
And through the bond, I felt his satisfaction.
Deep. Primal. The pleasure of a man who has claimed something precious, even from hundreds of miles away. His release echoed against mine—a shadow of sensation, a whisper of his own completion.
Then his voice, soft as darkness, threading through my mind:
Good girl. Now sleep.
And I did.
The shadows settled around me like a blanket, warm and protective, his presence wrapped around my consciousness even in absence. The pleasure faded slowly, leaving behind a sweetness that almost covered the ache.
Almost.
Because when I woke hours later, still trembling with aftershocks, still marked by what we'd shared across all that impossible distance, the wanting was worse than before. Notless. Worse. I'd tasted something now. Felt what it would be like when he finally claimed me for real.
And nothing—not my own hands, not the bond's echo, not any of the comfort this place could offer—would ever be enough again.
I needed him.
I needed him to come home.
Therestlessnessdrovemedeeper than I should have gone.
By the second afternoon, I'd worn a path through the nursery floor. Paced the length of the dining chamber until the shadows started giving me looks—or what felt like looks, anyway, that patient disapproval of creatures who had never needed to move to feel alive. I'd read three books of shadow-script I could barely understand, rearranged the shelves in my room twice, and nearly screamed at the star-veins in the walls for pulsing so slowly.
The transformation energy had nowhere to go.
Without Morgrith here to ground it, without his hands on my hair or his voice in my ears, the power building in my blood had become a living thing. Restless. Hungry. Demanding outlet.
The archives called to me.
I told myself I was just exploring. Just stretching my legs, learning the Sanctuary the way he'd wanted me to. I could feel the way back through the bond—his heartbeat distant but present, a compass pointing toward wherever he was. I wouldn't get lost. I was being careful.
The lies sounded hollow even in my own head.
But I followed the pull anyway.
The corridors narrowed the deeper I went. The ceiling lowered. The star-veins grew sparse, then disappeared entirely, leaving only the faint luminescence of my own shadow-marks to light the way. Ancient air pressed against my skin, heavy with the weight of millennia.
The shadow paths. That’s how I’d get to the archives. I had to shadow step, find my way through the danger.
It wasn’t easy. To find my way in, I had to find the space between the shadows. I held out a hand, touched the darkness. I felt it pull to me, try to take me. I followed into a dark space, a black pathway that led me far.
Eventually the shadow corridor forked. Right was a slow corkscrew downward, the air thick with quiet that bordered on liquid. Left was a sharper turn through a low arch, the stone beneath my feet smooth as glass and cold enough that I felt it through the soles of my shoes. I hesitated, searching for resonance, for a clue to which path would lead me where I wanted.
Where I needed. I went left. The walls closed in almost immediately—not a true narrowing, but the illusion of it, the way darkness makes space shrink to a pinhole. The corridor ended abruptly in a round vault lit by nothing at all, and I barely saw the seam of a door before it shivered open under my hand. The archives of the Umbral Sanctuary were nothing like any library I'd seen. No shelves, no books. Just rows and rows of shadows, each a perfect vertical slit stretching from floor to ceiling, quivering faintly, as though expecting to be chosen.
And then the archives opened before me like a secret finally surrendered.
The chamber was vast, the way everything in this place seemed to be, as if the Sanctuary had simply decided that physical space was a suggestion rather than a law. Shelves climbed toward a ceiling I couldn't see, each one groaning under the weightof shadow-script texts bound in materials I didn't recognize. Leather that moved slightly when I looked at it. Metal that hummed with contained power. Something that might have been dragon-scale, iridescent in the dim light.
The books were organized by subject, I realized as I walked between the towering stacks. Sections in languages I couldn't read, arranged in patterns I couldn't parse. But one word kept appearing, again and again, in scripts both ancient and recent.
Valdris.
