But this dream, the one that clung to her skin now like a second soul, had been different.
He had stood before her, cloaked in white light, moonlight dripping from his hair like water. His eyes, that uncanny violet-blue, had locked to hers as if he’d known her always, and when he touched her cheek, her body had flared with heat and fear all at once.
“You are not what they think you are,” he had whispered, voice thick with sorrow and something that felt like fate.
“They bound you in silk and shadow. But you were made to shatter the sky.”
She had reached for him and woken with her hand outstretched into nothing.
Now, in the light of morning, Maris sat up slowly, pushing her hair from her face. Her heart thundered against her ribs like a war drum.
It wasn’t just a dream. She could feel it. She could still smell him strange, like salt and cold smoke — the words he’d spoken echoed like prophecy through her blood.
Gods, was she losing her mind?
She stood, wrapping one of Kael’s silken robes around herself, the fabric far too large but comforting in its weight. Padding barefoot across the cool stone floor, she moved to the desk tucked in the corner of Kael’s private chambers. She reached for her journal — pages half-filled with ink-smeared dreams, fragmented memories she couldn’t quite trust.
She sat and wrote:
He came again. The dream-man. The violet-eyed ghost. Not Kael. Never Kael. He speaks to something inside me that shouldn’t be awake. Something old. Something not entirely human. What is wrong with me? Why do I crave both warmth and ruin in equal measure?
A quiet knock broke her haze. She rose abandoning her writing.
The wraiths entered without words, and set her training leathers for the day across the dressing stand, obsidian with silver stitching. Regal. Commanding. Kael must’ve picked them. As she moved to change, she caught her reflection in the glass. Her eyes, seemed brighter somehow. Almost… unnatural.
“Who are you becoming?” she whispered to her reflection.
But it offered no answers only the dream’s echo:
“You were made to shatter the sky.”
Chapter twenty-four
Words Unspoken
-Kael-
The crack of steel rang through the courtyard as Maris twisted on nimble feet, ducking beneath Corin’s broad sweep of a blade. She was faster now. Not just nimble, but precise, fluid. Each motion like water —she moved as if born to this, no longer a seamstress dodging shadows, but something sharper. Something meant for battle.
“Again.” Riven called out.
Maris whirled, catching Corin’s next strike on the edge of her blade, the clash reverberating up her arms. Sweat glistened at her temple, but her breathing was steady. Controlled. Inhumanly so.
Even the twin generals stilled. For the first time, they did not see a human pet on the training floor. They saw something else entirely.
Above, in the private overlook that cast long shadows across the sparring ring, Kael stood in silence.
The balcony windows of their shared quarters had been thrown open to the fresh air, the scent of damp stone and crushed herbs drifting in on the breeze. He had been watching her, not just today, but every day this week — quietly marveling at how she bloomed.
But today, as the wind blew threw the windows he turned at the sound of pages turning.
Maris had left her journal unattended and open.
Kael wasn’t proud of what he did. But he had spent too long trying to silence the storm inside him, trying to trust that Maris had given herself to him fully.
He read the first open page. Then another. And by the third, his heart had all but stopped.
Words describing a male he knew well.
