I pulled back, shaking my head, trying to force the light down, back into silence. It surged instead. The air grew denseand metallic, every hair on my arms lifting as thunder rolled not from the distance, but from the sky directly above us.
Eryndor stumbled one step back, bowstring drawn back now, his scarred face had gone pale. His shoulders stiffened, the cords in his neck standing out as though even his breath had sharpened. The bow creaked under his grip, wood bending in protest, and his eyes slid back up to mine with the tautness of a man staring at a wolf too close.
His gaze landed on me as if I were the storm given flesh. The curse every whisper had been waiting for.
Eryndor stumbled back a step, bow half raised, gaze fixed on me as if the curse from every whisper had just unfurled in my skin.
Heat roared up my throat. Not fear, but fury. Not at the storm, not even at him. At all of it. The whispers, the council, the way every set of my eyes weighed me before I could even speak.
“I said it’s nothing,” The words cracked like a whip, sharper than thunder itself. The brook answered me, water slapping stone like an applause. My hand burned, silver threading up through my skin, refusing to be hidden.
Erydor’s knuckles whitened on the bow. His boots scraped back another pace, as if the ground itself was sliding me towardhim. “The council was right,” he muttered, voice rough, “you carry something no one should.”
The words struck harder than an arrow. For one vicious moment I wanted to scream, to show him exactly how much the storm was mine to command. But that was their story, not mine. Their chains, not mine.
So, I did the only thing left. I turned and ran.
The woods seized me, roots clutching at my boots, ferns clawing like hands. I tore through anyway, fury hotter than the storm, hotter than fear.
Branches clawed at my cloak, the air thickening with every stride. I didn’t notice the raven until its cry split the hush, sharp, ragged, insistent.
It wheeled low across my path, ember bright eyes flashing once before it veered deeper into the trees.
Atlas
From the tree line, I watched, veiled in stormlight and silence, yet tethered to her all the same. Fear bled off Eryndor in waves. I could taste it on the air.
Eryndor looked at her as if the verdict had already been written. There was fear in it, yes—but also expectation.
He expected her to falter under it. To lower her eyes. To make herself smaller beneath the weight of being called unnatural.
She didn’t.
Her shoulders stayed squared. Her voice did not thin. Even with fear flickering beneath her skin, she did not let it bend her. She held it. Tempered it. Turned it outward instead of inward.
She would not yield to him.
The realization tightened something deep in my chest.
She does not bow.
Not to accusation. Not to authority.
Not even to the storm that moves through her veins.
My hunger sharpened with every beat of my heart, and it was not only the ache of flesh, though that burned fiercely enough to make restraint a conscious effort. It was something older than desire, something that settled deeper than instinct. Reverence, yes—but not the gentle kind offered in temples. The kind that kneels only because it chooses to. The kind that recognizes power when it sees it and does not flinch.
To watch her stand there—fire in her voice, fear trembling beneath her skin and still refused—while the world tried to wrap chains around her… gods. It did not undo me. It remade me.
The council calls her dangerous. The hunter calls her unnatural. They look at her and see something to contain, something to manage, something that must be bent before it grows beyond their reach.
Fools.
They mistake her defiance for recklessness. They mistake her fire for instability. They do not understand what it means that she does not bow.
I do.
And what I feel when I look at her is not the urge to cage or control. It is the urge to claim. Not with iron. Not with fear. But with the quiet, irrevocable certainty of something that knows itsequal when it sees it. The kind of claim that kingdoms rise to defend and empires fall trying to challenge.
