I scramble backward, kicking the heavy furs away, my boots scraping against the fine linens. I hit the carved wooden headboard so hard the impact bruises my spine. I pull my knees tight against my chest, my hands flying up to ward him off, shaking uncontrollably.
"Do not," I gasp, the words slicing my raw throat. "Do not touch me."
Khaelor freezes. His massive hands hover in the empty air between us, the black-gold light beneath his skin suddenly dimming into a bruised, hollow glow.
He misinterprets the recoil. He looks at my trembling frame, at the stark, absolute terror and agony radiating from my dark eyes, and he calculates the threat based on the only variables he knows.
"The relic," he says, his jaw locking so tight the bone audibly pops. The protectiveness in his tone shifts instantly into a lethal, simmering wrath directed at the artifact. "The stone overwhelmed your mind. It dragged you into the deep wards. Tell me what the magic forced you to see. I swear to you on the ashes of my house, I will grind that obsidian shard into dust for doing this to you."
The tragic, devastating irony of his vow twists the knife completely through my ribs. He is promising to destroy the weapon that hurt me, completely unaware that I am the weapon that destroyed him.
"It didn't force me," I whisper.
The freezing air in the bedchamber seems to curdle. The groaning of the walls fades into a hollow, ringing silence.
Khaelor’s brows pull together, a minute furrow of confusion disrupting the severe lines of his face. He lowers his hands slowly, resting them on his thighs, his amber gaze intensely focused on my pale, terrified features. "You touched the Blackflame anchor while the estate was destabilizing. The resonance threw you into a coma. What did it show you, Mireya?"
I press the heels of my hands against my eyes, trying to physically hold the fracturing pieces of my sanity together. The Vanguard siege engines are pounding outside. Theryn Duskryn is marching to execute the monster of Venn Manor. I cannot let Khaelor die believing I am his salvation. He needs to know exactly what he is sacrificing himself for.
I drop my hands. I lift my chin, forcing myself to meet his eyes. I refuse to cower from the executioner’s block I built for myself.
"It did not show me a phantom history," I say, the friction in my throat making the words harsh and broken. "It gave me back what the backlash stole. It unlocked the anchor."
"The anchor is missing," Khaelor corrects gently, though a dark tension begins to coil in his broad shoulders. "The circuit remained open. That is why the curse is starving."
"The circuit remained open because the caster survived."
I grip the edge of the thick woolen blanket, my knuckles turning white. The physical effort required to speak the truth feels like tearing my own tongue out.
"I remember the lower sanctum," I continue, my voice gaining a desperate, reckless speed. "I remember the Vanguard blades. I remember the incendiary wards collapsing the cavern walls on the elders. And I remember the ritual circle."
Khaelor’s stillness becomes weaponized. He is utterly motionless, a predator sensing a catastrophic shift in the wind but unable to track the scent. "You saw the witch."
"The voice in the fire was mine."
The bomb drops in the bedchamber.
The ambient temperature plummets. The faint, pulsing warmth in the veins mapping Khaelor’s chest instantly turns to ice. He stares at me, the confusion warring with a slow, creeping horror that defies every law of logic and time.
"So you said. The relic is playing with your mind. The massacre was a century ago," he states, the words flat, devoid of all inflection. It is the desperate defense of a brilliant mind refusing to process an impossibility. "You are twenty-nine years old. You are a human."
"I am the witch who knelt in the blood of her sisters and built the rot that devoured your mother." The tears finally spillover, tracking hot and fast down my cheeks, but I do not break his gaze. "The spell demanded a sacrifice to lock the anchor into reality. I offered my life, but the siege blast threw me from the circle before the magic could consume me. The spell tethered itself to you instead, and the backlash shattered my mind. I wasn't an elder, Khaelor. I was a nineteen-year-old prodigy, fueled by the agonizing deaths of my mothers and sisters. When the siege blast severed the tether, the magical backlash didn't just knock me out. It crystallized my blood. It froze my cells in absolute petrification for ninety years. When the ambient magic of the ruins finally waned ten years ago, my heart beat for the first time in a century. I woke up physically nineteen, with a fractured mind that invented a human past to protect me from the trauma. When I woke up, the shadow brokers found me. Because my magic was fractured into a perfect void, I could bypass Undercity security wards. They forged my human papers and used me as a smuggler. The last decade of hauling contraband in the Undercity—the callouses on my hands—that was the only real life I’ve lived since the fire. My mind created fake memories of childhood to fill the gaps."
Khaelor does not breathe. He is suspended in the agonizing void between salvation and damnation.
"I am not an anomaly, Khaelor," I whisper, delivering the fatal blow to the only man who ever truly saw me. "I am Purna. The very Purna who massacred your family and turned you into an abomination."
22
KHAELOR
“Iam Purna. The very Purna who massacred your family and turned you into an abomination.”
Her confessions bleed into the shadows of the bedchamber, infecting the air with a century of slaughter. Reason violently recoils at the horror of it. A hundred years of stolen time. A fragile, mortal shell spun from lies just to cage a shattered soul. It is absolute madness. But the cataclysm entombed in my marrow does not barter with logic or beg for proof.
It only demands prey.
The blood curse opens its eyes.
