47. Chapter Forty Seven
Chapter Forty Seven
Fen
The whispers started as judgment.
Every step I took through Riftreach carried the weight of eyes and murmurs, of Riftborn pretending not to flinch when I passed. Widow, they called me when they thought I couldn’t hear it. The one who lost control. The one who lost her brother. They didn’t understand what I had lost.
Not just Felix.
The way he used to laugh when I burned breakfast. The stupid hand signal we used when we were bored on watch duty. The way he’d hum to calm me down after a mission went bad.
The best part of me died in that tower. I wasn’t mourning him. I was mourning the version of myself that only existed because he believed I was good. Everything else now was bone and blade.
I stopped sleeping in the barracks after the first night. Couldn’t stomach the way people looked at me. Couldn’t stand the way they avoided saying his name. As if silence would make my grief cleaner. As if their pity wasn’t worse than their fear.
The caverns below Riftreach became mine. The lowest halls where the lanterns flickered and the stone was cool to the touch. Where the echoes made it feel like maybe—just maybe—someone else was still walking beside me.
Down there, I trained.
Not to get stronger.
To feel something.
The crack of blades against stone. The wheeze of breath in my lungs. The soreness in my shoulders. Pain was honest. Pain didn’t ask questions. Pain didn’t watch me like Avod did, hovering at the edge of the shadows, pretending not to flinch when our eyes met.
Let him worry. Let them all worry. They should be.
Avod asked me once if I’d heard anything. He didn’t say what. Didn’t have to. I had.
The whisper had started the night of the funeral, quiet as breath.
I thought it was grief at first—my own thoughts turning cruel.
But the voice had shape. Rhythm. Intelligence.
And every night since, it had grown louder.
I didn’t seek it out. Not at first. But the nights were long.
The silence too sharp. And there was nowhere else for me to go.
Fen…
The voice was like velvet now, wrapped around a blade. It found me again while I sat with my knees drawn to my chest, Felix’s scarf clutched in my hands like a lifeline I couldn’t let go of. The dark had settled thick around me. The lanterns had long since gone out.
“You’ve lost everything,” it murmured. “Your brother. Your name. You’re drifting, unmoored. But you could have it all again. I can give it back.” I didn’t speak. Not that night. But I didn’t walk away, either.
I trained harder the next day. Dug the edge of my blade so deep into the practice wall it stuck, hilt-deep.
When a recruit came too close, I didn’t threaten—I warned.
And when I saw Eva standing at the edge of the shadows, watching me with those wide, green eyes full of guilt, I nearly lost what was left of my restraint.
She wanted to talk. Of course she did . I turned my back on her before I did something I’d regret. Or maybe something I wouldn’t.
She didn’t belong in the dark anymore.
I did.
That night, I returned to the tunnel. The voice greeted me like an old friend.
“Felix,” it whispered, shaping his name like a promise. “Wouldn’t you like to hold him again? Hear his voice? Feel him hug you like he used to, when the nightmares came?”
I didn’t realize I’d begun walking until I felt damp air brush my cheeks. The tunnel beneath the old shrine curved deeper than I’d ever explored, narrower than a Riftborn should be able to pass. But I did. And the deeper I went, the louder it became.
“You’ve always known you were more,” the voice crooned. “More than soldier. More than weapon. More than sister. But they never let you become what you were meant to be. You loved him. I don’t ask you to stop. I ask you to use it .”
The tunnel widened into a hollow drenched in pale, silver light. The stone walls throbbed with some unnatural pulse—alive and cold. Azh’raim stood in the center of it, wearing the dark like a cloak. His eyes were endless. Bottomless. A void you could fall into and never stop.
I should’ve felt fear. I didn’t. I felt relief. Like I had finally stopped pretending.
“You are ready,” he said, his voice a hiss of wind over steel. “You’ve already begun walking toward me. Let me show you where the path leads.”
My grip tightened on my daggers. They felt small now. Pointless. Like children’s toys in the presence of a God.
“What do you want from me?” I asked.
Azh’raim smiled. “Nothing you weren’t already willing to give.”
The air shifted. Heavy. Binding.
“Say yes.”
I should’ve said no. Should’ve remembered Felix’s voice— Don’t lose yourself, Fen. We fight monsters, but we don’t become them. But he wasn’t here. He wasn’t the one being haunted. Hunted. Hollowed.
He wasn’t the one who’d been left behind.
My throat tightened. My hand hovered at my side.
I whispered the word before I could stop myself.
“Yes.”
The shadows closed in like a second skin.
And this time, I didn’t fight them. It didn’t feel like betrayal. It felt like becoming.