I grabbed the bowl off the table, cheeks burning with fury. My grip tightened until my knuckles went white. I raised it,ready to smash it against the hearth, to splinter it into silence before it betrayed me.
The bowl hovered in my grip, the hearth only a breath away.
And then the truth cut through the fury.
If I shattered it, they would know. There would be no more pretending, no careful half-truths or quiet deflections. They would call it proof. Say I had destroyed it because I feared what it might reveal.
Slowly, painfully, I lowered it back to the table, though my hands still trembled with the force of what I wanted to do.
The fury didn’t vanish. It thickened, bitter and hot at the back of my throat, sharp as the taste of the brook still clinging there. I wanted to smash it, to hear the crack of it breaking, to reduce it to splinters beneath my heel.
Instead, I stepped back, making myself turn away. Each step heavier for not giving in.
Eryndor’s face haunted me as much as Atlas’s voice. The hunter’s fear had been raw, unguarded, the kind men tried to swallow but couldn’t. He would carry it back to the Hall of Crowns, not as rumor but as record. And once they named it, the judgement would cling to me like a second skin, a verdict branded before I could ever speak a word.
I told myself their whispers couldn’t touch me, that I had endured worse than hushed voices and sidelong glances. I had survived silence that stretched for years, storms that tore my world apart, losses that hollowed me out and left me standing in their wreckage. I knew how to weather cruelty. I knew how to outlast it.
But this felt different.
Silence pressed in, heavier than the walls around me, thick enough that it felt like something with shape and weight. For a moment, I found myself wishing for the storm’s rage instead. Thunder was honest. It struck, it broke, it passed.
This was worse.
It was the echo of a sentence already spoken, already believed, already set in place without me.
And there was nothing to fight.
I paced to keep from breaking apart, but each step only drove the fury higher, pounding through me with nowhere to go, nowhere to strike. I pressed my palm over my mark, willing it to still, but it beat like a second heart. Steady. Treacherous. A reminder that no matter how I hid, there was always proof under my skin.
“I am not cursed,” I spat into the emptiness. My voice cracked sharp against the silence, but it was swallowed before it could cling to the walls.
I tried again, louder this time, daring the air to defy me. “I am not cursed!”
The words rang, but the silence devoured them. My throat burned, my fists clenched. I wanted to scream, to tear the rafters down with my bare hands, but all I managed was the taste of blood on my tongue where I’d bitten too hard.
It would be easier to face thunder. To stand beneath lightning and let it split the sky wide, to feel something honest strike and know exactly where it hurt. I could brace for that. I could bleed for that. Storms are brutal, but they are clear.
This was not.
This felt like erasure, like being rewritten without my consent.
And there was no storm fierce enough to undo that. No bolt I could call down to split it cleanly in two. Just the slow realization that some things do not wash away with rain—that once a name is spoken often enough, it begins to harden.
For a moment, the thought of continuing felt heavier than the storm ever had.
The silence held, my words swallowed, my fury unanswered, leaving only the ragged sound of my breath.
I pressed my fists against the table hard enough for the wood to creak, almost wishing it would break beneath me.
And then the silence fractured.
Not with lightning or with rage, but with a voice. A voice that sounded unfinished, almost fragile.
The beginning of my name brushed against me, no louder than breath. Then another word snatched away before it could truly become anything.
It hooked something deep in me. The sound should have terrified me, and it did, but not for the reason I tried to convince myself of.
The fear wasn’t that he might reach for me.
