I gasped, looking over Fenrik’s shoulder. Kelda stood by the ritual stone, her hands raised to weave another illusion, but the pulse hit her. Her shield shattered with the sound of breaking glass. She was thrown backward, skidding across the floor, her robes smoking, her perfect composure blown apart. She slammed into the far wall and collapsed, the connection to her Veil magic severed.
twenty-four
Fenrik
Ifloated, suspended in a weightless amnesty that felt suspiciously like death. The silence was absolute, a physical weight pressing against my eardrums, shutting out the roar of the ley-line and the thunder of my own heart. I let myself drift for a time. The relief was intoxicating. No pain. No dragons crawling beneath my ribs. No constant, grinding battle to keep the shadows from swallowing the light. Here, in the deep, there was no light to protect.
Then the current shifted. Kelda poured into me cold and sweet words.
You are broken, Fenrik.
The words bubbled up from the marrow of my bones.
You are a collection of sharp edges waiting to cut.
I tried to push the voice away, to summon the iron will that had kept me alive for thirteen years, but my limbs felt like lead. The ocean thickened, turning into tar, dragging me down.
I am the only one who can hold your pieces together. Surrender.
Scenes flared in the dark, memories I didn’t want to touch, yet couldn’t look away from. I saw my father, his face pale and drawn, locking the library door against me. I saw the fear in his eyes, not love, never love, only terror of the thing his son was becoming.He knew,the ocean whispered.He saw the monster before you did.
The scene warped. I saw my hands, not as they were, but covered in blood. I was standing over a village I didn’t recognize, surrounded by silence, by bodies that didn’t move. The guilt hit me to the stomach, a nausea so profound I wanted to retch. Had I done this? The gaps in my memory were vast canyons where horrors could hide. Perhaps Iwasthe villain of this story. Perhaps I deserved the cage.
Look at her,Kelda whispered.
And there she was. Lysa.
She stood at the edge of the darkness, glowing with that impossible golden light. She wasn’t looking at me with the fierce, stubborn compassion I had come to crave. She was laughing. It was a cruel, brittle sound. She turned her back on me, walking away into the mist.
Why would she want a beast?The thought wasn’t mine, but it sounded like my own voice.She is ashamed of you. She is leaving.
No.
I fought the drift. I was the Lord of Crumbling Manor. I was a Stormgarde. I did not yield to shadows, and I did not beg. I tried to roar, to summon the beast’s fury to shatter the quiet, but the sound dissolved in the tar. I couldn’t tell where the curse ended and Fenrik began. I was drowning. I was disappearing.
And yet, a phantom warmth lingered on my skin. A ghost of friction against my hip, a frantic heartbeat pressed against my chest, the taste of salt and desire on my tongue. It was real. More real than the void. More real than the fear. I clawed at the darkness, trying to find the surface. I forced my heavy, sodden consciousness to focus on that singular point of heat.
“Don’t... leave,” I rasped. The words were bubbles escaping the deep, barely audible.
The ocean pressed harder, trying to crush the thought, but I clung to the image of her hazel eyes, to the way she had looked at me when I was half-monster, not with revulsion, but with hunger.
“Lysa...” My voice cracked. I flailed, reaching out with a hand I couldn’t feel. “Don’t believe her.”
Lysa’s laughter echoed in the void, a brittle sound that grated against the silence. It was meant to be the final nail in my coffin, the proof that I was unloved and unlovable. But then a different sound cut through. It was a jagged, desperate gasp. A noise so raw, so stripped of pretense, that it didn’t belong in this polished nightmare. It was the sound she had made in my study when the storm raged outside and my control had snapped, a sound of terrified, exquisite want.
Fenrik.
My name, torn from her throat.
The illusion stuttered. The image of the laughing woman flickered, her face distorting. The perfection of Kelda’s magic snagged on that single, discordant note. Kelda knew pain, and she knew fear, but she didn’t knowthis. She didn’t know the specific, breathy timbre of Lysa’s voice when she was unraveling.
A hairline fracture appeared in the darkness. Through it, the world rushed in. The void was washed away by a scent I would have known in any hell: river rain, the bitter tang of crushed willow bark, and the faint, sweet smoke of dried herbs. Lysa. She smelled like life itself, muddy and complex and fiercely present.
Wake up,the real world demanded. The water around me turned to glass, and then, with a violent, silent explosion, it shattered.
The illusion of Lysa stood again before me, her face twisted in a sneer that didn’t fit the soft curve of her mouth. “You really thought I could love a creature like you?” she asked. “You are reckless, Fenrik. Volatile. An inefficiency in the system.”
Inefficiency.The word snagged in my mind. Lysa didn’t speak of efficiencies or systems. She spoke of healing, of patience, of thread wound too tight. She spoke to ceramic dragons she kept on her shelf. The woman standing in the darkness of my mind wasn’t Lysa; she was a ventriloquist’s dummy wearing my wife’s skin, speaking with Kelda Morvain’s logic.
