The fire cracked.
“And when the people braced for vengeance,” he continued, “he gave them mercy instead.”
A pause.
“He showed them whattoo muchcould build when it chose not to destroy.” His eyes lifted then, bright as ice. “He made Ymirskald stronger. Safer. Better—because he refused to become small for anyone.”
The silence that followed felt heavy with listening—like the land itself remembered.
His voice was so close to mine. And suddenly, I didn’t feel so alone in the cold. Not because he understood me—but because maybe, he carried the same kind of brokenness. For the first time, I saw not just the warrior beside me. I saw the fracture beneath his armor—worn but unbroken. A quiet wound, still bleeding beneath the frost. And I wondered if, like me, he had been betrayed by those who once claimed to protect him. To love him.
The thought lingered, unsettling and tender all at once. Because the story felt uncomfortably close.
38
Nerina
Skeldrhall, Ymirskald
The cold of the hall doesn’t bite the way it once did. I can’t tell if I’ve grown numb to it… or if something inside me has changed. There is fire now—coiled deep in the hollow of my chest. Not warmth. Not comfort. A living thing. Fed by anger. By grief. By the slow, merciless return of power that was always mine. It moves beneath my skin like something waking from a long, starved sleep.
I chose to stay.I repeat that to myself every morning when I wake beneath furs heavy enough to crush the sea from my lungs. When the air feels too thin. When the quiet feels too loud. I would remain only until I had a plan. Until I understood what they stole from me. Until I could stitch together the shape of the lie I had been living inside.
I’ve been here five days. Maybe six. Time fractures in the cold. The nights stretch long and breathless. The days blur into white silence. I measure them not by the sun, but by the way my fury grows.
The nights… the nights are worse. Sleep comes hard, and when it does, it drags me under. My dreams are jagged things—half-memories, half-nightmares. Hands pressing against my skin, chants threading into my veins like chains. My mother’s voice calling me daughter in tones that no longer sound like hers. I wake choking on the fear that if I return to Thalassia, they will drag me back into their circle, bind me, lock me away for good.
That’s my worst fear: not dying, but returning to the girl I was before I knew the truth.
I wish I had been born without it. That I was ordinary. That I could live without every choice, every breath weighed down by someone else’s expectation. There are nights I wish they would take it all from me—scrape the magic out until nothing burned, nothing whispered, nothing remained. So I would never have to feel like this again.
Without it, I am nothing. That’s the echo that keeps me awake at night. That’s the lie that creeps into my chest when the silence grows too heavy: without my power, I have no worth.
I’d never seen cooks in the hall. No servants. No clatter of trays or murmured orders. And yet, without fail, the long table was always set—steam curling from fresh bread, bowls of fruit glazed with frost-sweet syrup, roasted meats and spiced grains arranged with quiet care.
Veyrion insisted we eat together—every morning, every evening. Not as a demand, exactly. More like an inevitability.
I tried to skip a meal once in the morning, claiming I wasn’t hungry. Another time at dusk, pretending I’d lost track of the hour.
Veyrion didn’t argue. He simply lifted me and carried me to the table, resistance had never been an option. He set me in my chair, poured me tea, and carried on. After that, I stopped trying to avoid the meals. Infuriatingly, he was persuasive like that.
Now, he’s sitting across from me, steady and silent. A snake in the grass, coiled and patient. He already tried to lead me into a marriage I didn’t want, into binding myself to him without knowing the cost. What else hid behind his patience, his careful words, the flicker of storm I sometimes caught in his eyes?
I don't trust him. But trust or not, I can’t ignore him.
The silence stretched too long. Too heavy. It pressed against my ribs until I couldn’t stand it anymore. My fork scraped hard against the plate, the sound grating through the silence.
“Do you ever wonder,” I blurted, my voice rough, “if you’d be better off without it?”
Veyrion’s head lifted slightly.
I stared down at the half-eaten food, my fingers white-knuckled around the goblet. The words tumbled before I could stop them. “The power. The hunger. Curse, gift, or whatever they want tocall it. Do you ever wish you were just… normal? Unremarkable. That you could’ve lived your life without all of it.” The admission left me raw, trembling. My chest ached with how much I wanted to take the words back and how much I needed them to be heard.
Veyrion didn’t answer right away. The only sound was the fire popping in the hearth, the storm whispering beyond the stone walls. His silence was unbearable. So I kept going, unable to stop myself. “Because sometimes I think it would be easier. That if they stripped it all away—if they took all of it, this magic, and left nothing, at least then I wouldn’t have to carry it anymore.”
My voice cracked on the last word. I hated the sound of it. Weak. Small. But it was the truth, and it was out now, bleeding into the air between us like smoke. My crescent mark flickered.
He only watched me, firelight catching on the hard planes of his face, the weight of his silence pressing heavy against my skin. I almost wished he would laugh, or dismiss me, or turn the knife the way Alaric always did with his words. Anything would be easier than that stillness.
