She stopped.
Zarrek’s jaw tightened. “What aboutEstâr?”
Her eyes brimmed but tears didn’t fall. “Sometimes I wish I didn’t know,” she admitted, unbearable shame making her grimace. “I wish I’d never seen...”
“You saw it?”
Silence.
Zarrek’s whole frame tensed, his grip on her tightening.
“Has he lost his Voids-damned mind,” he muttered, “letting you see that—”
“It wasn’t him,” she interrupted, her voice cutting through like glass. “It was Shu’Khan. He let me into the chamber after Vargrún took over." Her voice thinned. "He likes to remind me. Vargrún. He likes to show me that memory."
Zarrek stared at her, his mouth hard with fury.
“I didn’t even understand what I was seeing at first,” she continued. “Just cruelty. Worship of violence. Companions crying in pleasure as the monster devoured their mana. And Kailorien, being used like that. Like some divine...breeding beastconnected to the Shields.”
Her breath snagged, words coming faster and faster. “And Istood there. Frozen. Because I realized that I'd never understood. That he kept it hidden so I wouldn’t know.”
She shuddered.
“It has to stop. I've tried. Again and again with the Council. But they’re fixated on it. They think the Shields will fail if he doesn’t do it. No one has ever protected him, and I am failing at that too. I told him I'd save him. I told him I'd stop it."
Her voice thinned, and her final words rasped out, "but I’m failing."
Zarrek cursed again—visceral, guttural. “And you? Who’s protectingyou?”
Auryn blinked. "What do you mean?"
"It’s a simple question."
"Isn't that the point?Everyoneis protecting me! I'm the only one that can't seem to protect those I love."
"You thinkthat's protection?Letting you carry all of this alone because no one knows how deep you're bleeding?"
She opened her mouth, but no words came.
"You’re not being protected, Auryn. You’re beingused. Revered, maybe. Tended to like an icon. But none of them — not the Council, not the healers, not even Resh — knows what you're holding inside. And you won’t let him see it. You won’t let anyone in."
Her brow furrowed. "No, Zarrek! That's not true. Kailorien is burning himself out protecting me. From the Council, from the Companions, the Solutus, even from the Shields—"
"Shields?"
She opened her mouth to answer, but the air shifted — turnedwrong. A sudden, bone-deep pressure pulsed through the alleyway.
The world cracked open.
A portal tore through the space just beyond the alley’s mouth, swallowing the silence with its roar. Light flared white-hot, mana howling through the opening like wind through a canyon.
Auryn!
The voice boomed through the Bond—thunderous, desperate,his.
Her name, called like a prayer shouted into the storm.
The conversation vanished in a rush of longing.
