He set his knife down. The sound of steel against stone was deliberate. Final. “Yes,” he said at last, his voice low. “There are nights I wish the gods had left me to the frost. That I had lived and died like any other man.”
His eyes flickered—storm breaking, just for a heartbeat—and I saw something jagged there. “But wishing doesn’t change what was carved into us. And pretending otherwise makes us weak.”
I swallowed hard, the words scraping against the hollow in my chest. “So you just… live with it?”
A corner of his mouth twitched, but it wasn’t a smile. “No. I wield it. And if the gods hate me for it, let them choke on their own curses.”
The fire snapped, sparks spiraling up the chimney like stars that burned out too quickly. Veyrion leaned back in his chair, his expression steady, his voice dropping to something quiet but unyielding.
“I won’t lie to you. The weight never leaves. It burrows deeper, until it’s part of your marrow. You learn to carry it—or it consumes you.”
Yet beneath that grim comfort lingered a shadow: the unspoken warning that if I failed to master the weight, it would master me. But fury and anger clawed back up. “Why are you helping me?” I demanded. “Why let me stay here?”
There was a silence before he answered. Not hesitation—calculation.
“Because I know what it means to be betrayed by the ones you trusted most. Because I know what it feels like to have your purpose stolen before you ever understood what it was. And because”—his voice dropped lower now, weighted like stone sinking into water—“I know the fury that comes after.”
My heart tight in my chest. “What do you want from me?”
“I want you to become unstoppable,” he said—not with fire, but with something heavier, forged from memory and regret shaped into a blade. “Not for vengeance. Not for me. Foryou. So no one can ever take from you again what they stole. So that when you rise, it’s not because they allowed it, but becauseyoudecided it.”
I looked back at Veyrion, the firelight catching in the glacier-blue edges of his irises. My voice was quieter now, but anger coiled beneath it. “What changed? Because I haven’t forgotten. You threatened Alaric’s life to make me bend. You told me I had no choice but to stand at your side—or lose him. And when I still didn’t bow, you said you’d give me time. Time toconsider.”
My mark flared.
“And then you dragged me into the Elders’ chamber, ready to bind me to Ymirskald like I was already yours. You never asked what I wanted. Not once. You took my love for him, my fear, my desperation, and you made it a leash.”
A shadow flickered across his expression, something caught between guilt and enjoyment.
“And now?” My hands curled into fists. “Now you sit across from me as though you didn’t back me into a corner. You act like this—” I gestured at the table, the wine, the warmth of the fire, “—is some kindness. Some gift.”
My voice cracked, thick with venom. “You only want what youthinkI can give you.”
The words tore out of me, raw and jagged, and once they started, I couldn’t stop. “And the worst part?” I laughed, brittle and broken. “I don’t even know what my power can do. I can barely touch it without destroying everything around me.”
My fury burned so hot it felt like it might split me apart. And then—I felt it. A pulse. Heat flared across my forehead, sudden and insistent, like fire pressing through bone. Veyrion’s expression hardened, and I knew without even touching it that my crescent mark was glowing. I knew I was pushing too hard. I just couldn't stop. The light caught in the rim of my goblet—silver-white, pulsing with my heartbeat.
My throat tightened, heat burning behind my eyes. “So whatever your grand plan is—whatever you think I am—it won’t work. You can’t shape me into some unstoppable queen when I can’t even hold myself together. You can’t use me when I don’t even know how to use myself.”
My hands shook as I pressed them into my lap, trying to steady myself, but the tremor ran too deep.
For a moment, Veyrion didn’t move. He only watched me, the weight of my words hanging in the air like smoke. Then, slowly, he leaned back, his hands open on the table.
“You think I don’t see that?” His voice was quieter than I’d ever heard it, stripped of the storm that usually edged every word. “I know your power is raw. Fractured.”
The firelight caught in his eyes, softening them in a way that unsettled me.
“You call yourself incomplete, but I see you. I see what you are even without the crescent.”
He held my eyes, steady and unflinching. “You are already more than enough to frighten those who tried to keep you small.”
The edge in his voice gentled, almost reverent. “I don’t want what’s in those fragments. I want the warrior who refuses to break, even when the world has done everything it can to hollow her out. That is what the crescent will answer to. That is why I believe in you—even when you don’t.”
The words pressed against me, dangerous in their gentleness, brutal in their honesty. They steadied me and cut me all at once, leaving me raw and trembling with a truth I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear. But then the fury came rushing back.
His expression didn’t waver, but I pressed harder, the words tumbling out faster, rougher. “You don’t know what it feels like. To be hollow. To lose pieces of yourself you can’t even name. To have all of you reduced to a mark on your skin and a power you can't control..”
My throat burned, and I hated the way my voice cracked. “You say you believe in me, but you don’t even know what I am. I don’t know what I am.” The crescent on my forehead throbbed hot, pulsing in rhythm with my rage. Light shimmered against the stone walls, betraying the rawness in me I couldn’t hide.
