Something about that phrase . . .Blood Vow. . . tugs at a memory I’d almost forgotten. I was six, maybe seven. Sneaking toward the kitchen, half-asleep and barefoot. I’d passed Father’s office on instinct, only to pause.
The door was ajar. It hadneverbeen ajar. Especially not when he was meeting with Alexander.
Through the crack, I heard Father’s voice, animated in a way I rarely witnessed. “The Blood Vow predates our modern binding contracts. Where our spells merely restrict the sharing of classified data, the Vow made lies themselves impossible. Imagine the implications, Alex. The pure utility of absolute truth . . .”
Alexander’s reply came softer, too low to catch. Something about the other Founding Families dismissing such magic as archaic, even barbaric. But Father didn’t care.
“The potential—”he insisted, voice tightening with conviction.
I’d edged closer, trying to decipher whether this was theoretical speculation, or something more dangerous. I never got the chance to find out. Mom appeared in the hallway like a shadow cut from silence.
I’d expected punishment—eavesdropping was a cardinal sin in our household—but she didn’t yell. Didn’t drag me tomy room or scold me for disobedience. She simply took my hand, her fingers trembling almost imperceptibly against mine. When she tucked me in my bed, her movements were unusually gentle.
That memory threads into another: my eighth birthday.
No cake. No party. No chaos of children tripping over gift wrap or shrieking with sugar highs. Just Luna, and Rowe—two fixtures in a world I was never really a child in. While other kids swung from jungle gyms and swapped friendship charms, I spent my days logging blood samples and building tolerance to the scent of scorched flesh. I knew the weight of a scalpel before I ever learned to ride a bike.
That night, curled beneath my covers, I finally broke. The tears came silently, and even alone I couldn’t escape the discipline they had forged into my bones. But Mom must have heard—or simply known—because she appeared again. Not as the precise, severe woman who corrected my posture mid-incision, but as something softer.
“I’m sorry, Aria,”she whispered, and for once her voice held something raw, something almost maternal. She sat on the edge of the bed and brushed my hair back, the same hands that had taught me to suture sinew now trembling slightly.“I wish things could be different for you. One day you’ll understand why they can’t. But tonight…”
Her voice changed then, less instruction and more song. It startled me, how lyrical she suddenly became, how her clipped words loosened into something dreamlike. She painted a world I’d never seen: phoenix flocks dancing beneath aurora-streaked skies, their wings scattering stardust and half-remembered lullabies; crystal deer whose antlers chimed melodies that could heal broken hearts; shadows that bloomed into constellations before folding back into dusk.
“Some creatures weren’t born from the world. They are the world,”she said, and I remember how her eyes had gone distant. “They existed in the spaces between reality, in the breath between moments.Their magic wasn’t contained in vessels or bound by rules, it simply was.”
I fell asleep with salt drying on my cheeks and stars blooming behind my eyes, my dreams riotous with impossible colors and creatures without names. It was the only story she ever told me, the only time she allowed herself to be mother instead of mentor. A single, flickering glimpse of who she might have been in a life where science and obligation hadn’t carved her hollow.
I never heard her speak that way again, and sometimes I wonder if I imagined it. But I remember the tremor in her hands, the way her voice snagged on certain words, and I know in the marrow of me that she loved me the only way she knew how.
My ruby pulses, drawing me back to the journal and I highlight another passage:
Some bonds do not form, they awaken. I’ve observed cases—rare, undocumented—where one half of a bond begins to shift inexplicably, and the other follows. Not always in tandem, and not always willingly. There’s no traceable spellwork or chemical trigger. Only evidence of change and influence.
Her journal brims with the theories and questions I used to overlook, and the guilt gnaws deeper. I’d been their perfect little scientist: precise, obedient, razor-sharp where it mattered. I was never meant to askwhy. Only how and when. But now I have to ask. Have to know what all of this means.
My current theory is that these bonds carry something older than magic, a resonance rooted deeper than blood or intent. When disrupted, they react, and when studied, they twist. I’ve spent years trying to measure the variables. None remain stable. The moment I think I’ve isolated the source, it adapts, as if the bond itself refuses to be known. Perhaps that’s the point. Not all power can be quantified. Not all bonds are meant to be understood. Some are simply endured.
I never pushed beyond the lab’s clean surfaces to uncover what any of it was for. If I had, maybe I’d have more than these scattered puzzle pieces that refuse to form a clear picture.
And Alexander . . .
Why would he want them dead?
It doesn’t make sense. They were his brightest minds, his miracle pair. They weren’t just his researchers—they were his legacy. So why end them?
My stomach twists every time I circle back to the so-called “accident.” They wouldn’t just die, wouldn’t just leave me behind like this. Not without a reason, or without trying to tell me something first.
Their theories, their discoveries, their secrets—they’re laced through the veins of Eclipsera. Through the bones of this city. Throughme. I’m not ready for any of it, don’t want the weight of their unfinished symphony echoing through my bloodstream. But choice was never mine to begin with.
The apartment door clicks open, and soft footsteps, hesitant but determined, make their way across the floor. Only Luna walks like that, announcing her presence while bracing for rejection. She stops in the doorway, outlined in golden lamplight, and even without looking up I can feel her eyes sweeping the wreckage of my workspace.
“You look like death,” she says flatly. “Worse, actually. Death probably exfoliated.”
I don’t glance up from the journal. “Nice to see you too.”
“I brought soup, and something that might’ve been bread in a past life.” She crosses the room, frowning at the battlefield of coffee cups, ink-smudged notes, and half-eaten food containers scattered across my desk. “Seriously, Aria. When was the last time you slept? Or, I don’t know, remembered you have a body?”
“Hard to say. Time’s a circle.” I mutter, flicking myruby. “Also, I’m working.”
