Her body sagged under its own weight, like something sacred had been spent, and her body hadn't caught up yet.
She reassured herself it was nothing, a simple wave of weakness. She hadn't eaten much that morning — maybe she'd fainted from a lack of nourishment mixed with too much exertion in the spar.
And yet the unease clung to her like smoke.
She looked in the mirror. Her reflection stared back, same jet-black hair, tangled now; same pale green eyes, though… were they brighter? Or was it just the light?
A knock sounded sharp and immediate at the chamber door.
It opened without waiting for her answer.
Valea.
The woman entered like a blade unsheathed, all precise movement and unreadable eyes. She gave Maris a once-over and crossed her arms.
“You're to rest for the remainder of the day. You're training and lessons will resume tomorrow.”
Maris blinked into the dim light, "Where's Kael?" she asked, then after a beat, "I need to ask him what happened."
“Your King decided the lesson was complete,” Valea said coolly.
That wasn’t an answer. She watched Valea’s face, noting the faintest twitch at the corner of her mouth.
A smirk?
“I can see it in your face Valea. Say it. Whatever it is you're keeping from me.” Maris said before she could stop herself.
Valea's eyes sparkled with interest as one brow crept upward, the beginnings of a wicked idea already forming.
Maris stood, pushing down the ripple of dizziness that greeted her. Fury bloomed in her chest raw and unforgiving — as the weight of every lie, every withheld truth, finally broke loose.
“Why was he gone for a week? And why did he show up like that, like he’d been waiting to pounce?” She snapped.
Valea held her silence her gaze flicked toward the mirror.
“Perhaps,” she said at last, “you should ask yourself why he has waited at all.”
She turned and left without another word.
Maris stared at the empty doorway, her heart hammering against her ribs. She paced the chamber for what felt like an hour before finally settling near the hearth, curling beneath a fur throw and pulling a book from the stack Aldwyn had left her.
The words passed through her, empty and unanchored. Her mind wandered to the memory of Kael's sculpted figure hovering over hers, heat and hunger suspended in the space between them. He now lingered in her mind like a promise — dangerous, delicious.
She clenched the book in her hand so tensely she almost snapped the spine of it. She slammed it shut willing the heat in her chest to fade, to forget how it had felt to be beneath him.
But deep in her chest, something shifted again she didn’t know what it meant. Only that she wasn’t the same.
The fire had burned low when she chose a new tome to read through. Her mind was still too fogged with her thoughts spinning but something in her hands itched to find distraction.
It was a thick tome, bound in cracked navy leather, its corners softened by age. The contents unraveled the forgotten glory of the Borderlands — once a great metropolis of art and trade reduced to its current state of waste and ruin by the vengeance of the Gods. Aldwyn had assigned it early in her studies, but she hadn’t reached the final chapters yet. She thumbed toward the back, hoping for something that might ground her.
As if summoned by fate’s listening ear — tucked between two pages like a secret meant to be forgotten.
A torn corner of parchment with a spidery line of ink, faded, no signature or date — read:
“She shall bear the sky’s mark in her gaze and the quiet God’s will in her blood. When the Veil thins, she will walk between what was and what should be.”
Maris read it once. Then twice.
