The oak throbbed under my hand.
A thunderclap split the day and then lightning bit a low branch, splitting it like bone. The raven launched skyward and was gone.
The oak bled silver, sap welled in a slow tear glowing faint as embers refusing to die. My palm answered, just one pulse.
My wrists tightened, chains that weren’t there cinched around bone, precise and merciless, stormglass biting where no glass lay. For a heartbeat, two, three, I could not move.
Then it passed, I staggered back, chest having. The oak loomed above me, massive, scarred, a witness older than any court.
The oak remembered chains.
The echo of the man they bound still lingering in its roots.
Chapter 10
Dreams of Ruin
CAELIRA
Sleep didn’t take me gently. It never did anymore. It pulled. One breath I was staring at the rafters, the next I was listening to the faint hum threading up from beneath the floor, where the shard of stormglass lay hidden like a buried pulse I could never quite forget.
The shard hummed in time with my heartbeat, the vibration threading into my bones, until I went under as if both sea and sky had claimed me at once, dragged down and pulled upward, nowhere left to stand.
The ruins waited.
The walls sagged as though sinking back into the earth, their faces veined with moss, their edges dripping stormwater in slow, constant tears. Towers broken off like snapped teeth. The air seemed to shiver, a vibration deep enough to rattle bone. I stood where I had before, ankle deep in black water and grit, the ground slick with the storms refuses. But this time everything was clearer. The lightning burned sharper, the echoes louder, as if the storm had decided I was ready to see more.
A raven perched on a topple column. Ember right eyes found mine, and when it opened its wings, ash lifted with it in a black spiral. It cried once, ragged, insistent, and took flight.
I followed.
The raven wove me deeper into the ruins. Statues stared down with blank faces, their features scoured by rain until only hollow sockets remained. Archways sagged, vines threading their ribs until the stone looked alive again. Every step forward felt like trespass, but also recognition, as if the ground knew me even if I didn’t know it.
Then the air shifted, and for a moment, the ruins were not ruins at all.
The world snapped into a vision so alive that it hurt.
The towers stood whole, carved from stormstone, slick and gleaming, their veins alive with trapped lightning. Banners snapped in the wind like sails unfurled for war, blue-black cloth embroidered with silver that shimmered when the storm struck it. People walked in the streets below, their heads tilted into the rain as though it were sunlight, faces open and fearless.
Children darted barefoot through the puddles, laughing when lightning broke overhead. Their laughter was not drowned out, it was carried by the storm itself, folded into the thunder like harmony.
Storm court.
I knew it without being told.
And Gods, it was beautiful.
The vision shattered, a circle of figures stood cloaked in relics stolen from Gods. Their armor glowed faint with stormglass, jagged and cruel, humming as if voices long dead were still trapped inside. In their hands they bore the remnants of power: fangs pried from titans, claws torn from primordial beasts, crowns broken from dead gods. The air itself recoiled from them, as if it knew.
At their center was a pillar carved from shipwreck wood, and to it, a man was bound.
Chains of stormlight coiled around his limbs, serpents of lightning that sank into his flesh and tightened with every breath. His head was bowed, hair dark with rain, blood carving rivers down his chest.
Atlas.
I knew his name before his eyes lifted.
And when they did, the sky split, a sound sharp enough to shear the world in two. His eyes were black, not with emptiness but with depth, the color of stormclouds swollen with lightning, the kind that split horizons when they finally broke.
