And Kael would not stop until he had Maris back.
Until she was safe.
Until his enemies bled for daring to touch what was his.
Chapter thirty-five
Promise of Power
-Alarik-
The sea assaulted the cliffs below Nerium like it meant to break them, every eave a blow struck in warning. The wind howled with ancient fury, laced with the bitter sting of the gods' curse — reminding him of why he'd gone to such lengths to steal Maris from Nythra's grasp.
Alarik stood at the windows edge of his private chambers, the sea mist spray clawing through the open window, dampening the pale strands of his unkept hair and soaking the fabric at his collar. Below, Nerium unfurled in a labyrith of elegant spires and shadow-drenched terraces, sea-blooms clinging to its ledges like forgot offerings. The city had been carved of stone and salt, its foundation built on whispered bargains and secrets traded as commonly as coin. Narrow streets twisted through it like veins, laced with glimmers of silver and gold ore. It was beautiful, but Alarik wondered what it once offered its beholder before the curse darkened its shores.
Behind him, the sea-glass doors of his chamber opened with a hush.
Zairon’s voice followed. “The scribes await you in the scriptorium.”
Alarik turned to face him, thoughts still lost in the depths of his kingdom's past — what soon could return if he was successful. He moved past Zairon with the quiet elegance of a rising tide, offering a brief pat to his shoulder as he passed.
The ancient scriptorium of Calanthe had once been another temple, long before the gods cursed the land and turned their faces from their creations. Now it offered sanctuary to Nerium’s oldest scholars, their skin inked with glyphs of forbidden knowledge that predated kings.
Alarik strode between towering tomes and glimmering scroll walls, nodding once to the Master Archivist, whose white robes trailed like ghosts.
“She’s begun to awaken,” Alarik said without preamble. “The goddess stirs in her. But we don’t have time to wait for fate.”
The Archivist bowed his head, voice papery with age. “Then we will guide her.”
“I want everything written on the Veil. On the Breaker. On bloodlines of divine thread. Fae, human, nightbound… anything that survived the cullings.”
A second voice emerged quiet, feminine, from deeper in the archive. “And what will you do when she becomes something you cannot control?”
Alarik didn’t hesitate.
“I will give her a choice,” he said, “and hope she chooses us.”
Hope.
A dangerous word on a continent born of curses.
The Master Archivist slid a brittle scroll across the obsidian reading table, the ink dark as dried blood and veined in ancient runes no tongue had spoken aloud in a thousand years.
Alarik’s fingers hovered just above the parchment, reverent. Hungry.
“It was written,” the Archivist murmured, “before kingdoms had names. Before the gods fractured the world and cursed their own children. The Veil was meant to protect. But also to imprison. Behind it were cast all things too powerful, too mad, or too sacred to walk the waking world.”
“But when the gods grew weary of mercy, they corrupted the Veil, a divine barrier once for protection, turned a new, seeping horrors into the land that they themselves had birthed.”
“Five gods wove it, each leaving their mark: dream, flame, war, waters, and shadow. But one disagreed.”
“Eiren, goddess of mercy, wove light into the darkness. A flaw. A thread. A way back.”
Alarik leaned in. “A way back for who?”
The Archivist’s head bowed, the cloth of his robe brushing the text. “For her. The one born to awaken the sleeping balance. The one made of all things forbidden.”
“Blood of the mortal, the divine, and the nightbound.”
