It was the terrible truth that some part of me wanted him to.
The fragments of his voice clung to me like smoke after a fire, unseen but everywhere, filling my lungs with every breath. I hated that. I hated the way my chest tightened around it, as though I had already let him inside, as though some treacherous part of me had cleared space for him.
These feelings were a storm I couldn’t master. Steel was clean, final, honest. A blade never pretended to be anything but what it was.
I reached for the dagger, the leather grip familiar in my hand, its weight settling into me with the inevitability of thunder finding the sky.
The leather grip was dark. Along its length, faint carvings cut into the binding. Spirals broke midway, jagged lines that never met, and circles etched too tight. When my thumb passed over them, I felt a weight in the shapes, as though they had been waiting for me to notice.
Symbols without language, but heavy with promise.
I stepped into the narrow clearing at the cabins side and began to move.
Step, pivot, strike. Footwork first, left shoulder leading, right foot anchoring, then the elbow, then the snap of the wrist that made the blade sing. The carvings pressed deeper with each strike, edges cutting into my palm until they felt like they were being written onto me.
My breath came in a steady rhythm. The sweat beading along my forehead stung my eyes. Each swing was a sentence, sharp, where words had failed me. My fury found its mark in the air, but the blade returned more than I gave. Every arc pulled heat from me and left a residue of something colder and stranger, humming just beneath my skin.
The hilt ground into my palm, rough against my hands and I felt the bruise blooming as I tightened my grip. I struck again anyway, harder this time. My shoulders burned first, then the base of my neck, every muscle waking up and answering.
I moved faster, each motion folding neatly into the next. Step, pivot, snap of the wrist, until the world around became nothing but the rhythm of steel and breath.
When my footwork faltered, I corrected it, driving on until the ache in my palm throbbed steady, a rhythm I could trust when nothing else held.
I struck until my arms trembled, until the tremor steadied into a fire. Each blow bled the wanting down to something smaller, containable. Pain sharpened and became the line I could hold.
When I finally let the dagger fall to my side, breath ragged, the silence had shifted. The wanting was there, but quieter, beaten back, at least for now.
I sheathed my dagger and stepped back inside. The cabin smelled of cooled sweat and damp leather, heavy with the heat of my body. I went straight to the basin, filled it with bucket after bucket until the water steamed faintly, then added a few drops of oil from the small vial on the shelf.
The oil spread across the surface, cedar and lavender rising with the steam until the air filled with it. I sank down all the way, closing my eyes as the warmth seeped into my sore muscles.
For a time, there was nothing but the heat, the weight of the water, the quiet stillness of it. The ache in my body loosened beneath the surface.
The wanting was smaller here, dulled by the water’s embrace, but it hadn’t left. It waited just beneath my ribs, as steady as my breath, patient as the silence that trailed me from the clearing.
“I can resist,” I said softly into the steam.
But the moment the words left me, I felt the lie in them, thin and hollow against the truth already rising underneath.
Chapter 17
Until It Burns Again
ATLAS
The storm broke around me, my reach splintering before it could reach her. Her name burned in my throat, trapped there, unfinished. But the wards caught it, sealing the sound away and leaving only the hollow weight of silence behind.
I pressed my palm to the stone wall beside me until grit dug into my skin. The hall smelled of rain and damp cedar, the air heavy with polish and old smoke. They had kept it alive in my absence, sweeping stone, mending cracks, patching roof tiles.Quiet work, hidden work. The kind that meant loyalty outlasted fear. The court wasn’t whole, but it wasn’t gone.
“You look like someone kicked you out of your own storm.”
The voice came from the shadows. A figure unfolded from where he’d been perched on the arm of a cracked throne, grinning as though the world weren’t falling apart around us. Joren, the last of my brothers in arms and the first to mock me when I deserve it.
“You didn’t see her,” I said.
“I saw you,” he shot back, “and it wasn’t your most graceful performance. All that lightning and then… what? A strangled syllable?” He badly mimicked a choke. “Very inspiring.”
I should have ignored him, but the corner of my mouth betrayed me with the ghost of a smile. Joren had always known how to needle through my armor.
