7. Naera
Naera
The cold doesn't lift, even as the sun claws its way above the horizon. Light filters through the trees like it’s too tired to try. Pale. Thin. Useless.
I feel it in my bones now—that kind of cold that settles, that clings.
Selis doesn’t bother with words when we stop near a thick patch of trees. She yanks the chain forward, locking it tight around the base of a gnarled oak. The iron bites against bark, the shackle clicks home, and she pockets the key without ceremony.
Then she steps back. Just far enough to be out of reach.
Just far enough to remind me that I’m not company. I’m cargo.
I sit on the ground, on the least frosty patch I can find, and I watch her, waiting for the next cruelty. Another jeer. Another twist of the knife she seems to enjoy so much.
But instead, she hesitates.
Barely.
Her fingers twitch at the hem of her cloak before she digs into her pack and pulls out the blanket—thick, patched in places, but warm-looking. The same blanket she slept on yesterday.
Today, she stares at it. Then, without a word, she stands and crosses the short distance between us. Each step deliberate. Measured .
I watch her come closer, heart beating somewhere in my throat. I don’t know what she’s doing. Don’t understand—until she stops in front of me and drops the blanket over my shoulders.
It settles with a soft weight, smelling like cedar smoke and old wool.
She doesn’t say anything, just turns and walks back to her spot without looking back, then lowers herself to the ground, settling with her back against a stone, and stretches her long legs out like nothing matters.
She’s given up her blanket, but not her distance.
Selis glances over and quirks a brow, as if staring down a challenge. She leans forward on one elbow, grinning that grin again—like a wolf with blood on its teeth.
"What, your goddess never taught you gratitude?"
I lift my head, slow and deliberate, and meet her eyes across the cold-packed space.
The chain that keeps me tethered to the oak glints like a vein of silver in the dirt. The trees creak in the wind. Somewhere, a bird cries sharp and short.
And I let the words fall—flat, steady, unshaken.
"She taught me not to mistake cruelty for protection."
Something flickers across her face.
A twitch. A shift. Gone before it can settle. Buried deep again beneath smirk and scar and violence.
For a second, I think she might say nothing at all.
Then her voice slices through the quiet.
"Then she should’ve taught you what protection costs. "
She leans back, casual, pulling a wrapped ration from her coat and tearing into it with her teeth. The blade she always keeps at her side is unsheathed a moment later—wiped clean on her sleeve, then spun lazily between her fingers. Like a ritual. Like a threat she doesn’t need to voice.
I curl under the blanket. The fabric smells like her—smoke, metal, leather worn soft at the edges. Underneath it all, something sharper. Like blood that’s dried on steel and refused to wash out completely.
There’s no comfort in the scent.
Only presence.
Selis lingers in the fibers like she does in everything—unyielding, heavy, impossible to ignore.
I press my nose to the seam before I can stop myself. Breathe it in.
Then I squeeze my eyes shut and bite down on the want curling low in my stomach—want for safety, for softness, for a kindness she doesn’t have. For the savior I thought Selene was sending me.
I don’t thank her.
Not for the blanket. Not for the heat.
Not for being slightly less cruel than usual.
Because the second I do, she’ll turn it into a weapon.
I just curl tighter against the cold, listening to the way she chews, the way the trees breathe, the way the wind ghosts over my skin and whispers that I shouldn’t sleep.
But I do.
Eventually.
Because exhaustion is heavier than fear. And because the woman they want on that altar? She needs to survive a little longer.
Even if it means sleeping beside the monster who caught her.
** *
The dream takes shape the way woodsmoke does—too fast to stop, too thick to breathe through. It curls around the edges of my mind, thick with ash and memory.
I see her.
Not the mercenary. Not the predator who drags me by a chain.
But a girl.
She’s barefoot in the mud, streaked with soot and fear, small in a way Selis never seems now. Her braid is half-unraveled, flying behind her like a tattered banner as she runs. The panic in her movements is animal. Wild.
She’s sprinting across a wide, black field—toward a house already burning.
Flames roar through the windows, chewing through the wood with greedy tongues. Smoke coils into the sky, thick enough to swallow the stars.
A boy stands in the window, no older than twelve, backlit by flame. He’s screaming her name, raw and terrified, as he tries and fails to open it.
“Selis! Selis, help!”
She stumbles to the window. The fire’s already roaring inside, light pulsing behind the glass like a second sun.
She reaches up, tries to force the window open from the outside, but the moment her palm meets the pane, the glass sears her skin.
She jerks back with a strangled cry, hand blistering on contact.
Inside, he shrieks louder .
She throws her shoulder into the glass. Once. Twice. The heat warps the air. Her breath burns in her lungs. Inside, he’s sobbing now. And then—
He disappears in a rush of flame.
Just… gone.
She falls to her knees. Her desperation floods me. Her dread. Her hope cracking in her chest like glass under a boot. She bows her head, hands trembling, and prays. Not quietly. Not prettily.
"Please. Please help! Save him. Save him. Take me instead—"
But nothing answers. Not the stars. Not the gods. Only fire.
The roof groans. A timbre of death. Then the house collapses inward with a sickening roar.
And Selis—she screams.
The sound rips through the dream like a blade. It shatters everything.
The house, the field, the sky—until the world dissolves in smoke and ash, and I wake choking on the grief of a girl I’ve never met.
A girl who became a monster because no one came when she begged.
***
I jolt awake with a sob lodged in my throat—and this time, it breaks free.
Not a cry. Not a scream. A ragged, full-bodied sound that tears out of me like something being wrenched loose.
I curl inward, my whole body shaking, my face buried against the blanket as the grief swells and crests and drowns me.
It’s not mine—it shouldn't be mine—but it lives inside me now, blooming like fire behind my ribs.
Footsteps crunch in the frost. Then a shadow falls over me.
“Hey—”
Selis. Her voice, sharp and uncertain in the dark.
She kneels beside me, close enough that I can feel the heat of her body, the weight of her attention pressing down like iron. She smells like smoke and wind and old leather, and the moment her hand hovers—just hovers—above my shoulder, I start to sob harder.
Not from fear. From knowing .
“What’s wrong?” she asks, quieter now. Less sharp. Still rough around the edges, but there’s something almost… cautious in it. A carefulness. “Another bad dream crawl into your head again?”
I lift my face, barely able to see through the blur of tears. She warps in the sunlight.
And for just one breath—I don’t see the mercenary crouched over me…
I see her . The girl. The one in the dream, knees in the mud, crying out to gods who never answered.
And I see the boy in the flames. See his eyes, his voice echoing in my skull like it belongs to someone I once loved.
The name bubbles to the surface, trembling on my tongue.
“Lior,” I whisper. “I saw him.”
Her brother’s name.
The boy in the dream.
It leaves my lips like a secret too heavy to keep.
Selis goes very, very still. Like I just said something that cut her deeper than any blade could. The clearing holds its breath. And for a moment, neither of us moves. The look she pins me with could carve flesh from bone .
"What did you just say?" she asks, voice flat and too quiet.
The air tightens around us like a drawn bowstring.
I sit up slowly, the blanket falling from my shoulders in a whisper of fabric. My heart is beating too hard, too loud. It echoes in my ribs like a warning drum.
"I saw him," I repeat, soft but certain, sniffling. "The boy. Your brother."
"You don’t know what you’re talking about," she says, but it’s too fast. Too controlled.
She doesn’t sound angry. She sounds like someone trying very hard not to believe me. But I know what I saw. The mud under her nails, the smoke in her hair, the way she prayed until her throat gave out. The way the gods didn’t come.
No wonder she hates them so…
"You begged for help," I say, voice shaking now, not from fear but from something worse—something too raw to name. "And no one came."
The moment the words leave my mouth, I know they’re a mistake.
Selis is on me in a blink. Her hand fists in my hair and yanks my head back so fast I see stars behind my eyes. Her face looms near mine, breathing fire and fury.
"You think you know me, little star?" she snarls, voice low and savage. "You think a dream makes you wise?"
I bite down on the cry rising in my throat. Grit my teeth. Dig my fingernails into my palms.
She won’t get a scream out of me.
"I know you lost something," I breathe, every word costing more than I can afford. "I know you still bleed for it."
For a heartbeat—a fragile, broken heartbeat—she hesitates.
Her grip falters. Her breathing sharpens .
And in the hollow space between rage and ruin, I see her again.
The girl in the dream, kneeling in the mud, crying out for a brother the gods never saved.
And the woman built from fire and prayers and loss.
Selis rips her hand away from me like she's touched something hot—something that burns even her.
She stumbles back a step, teeth bared, breathing ragged.
"You don't know a fucking thing about me," she spits.
I flinch like the words strike skin, but I don’t look away. I straighten, blood pounding in my ears, throat raw, heart breaking.
"Maybe not," I whisper. "But you don't have to be this."
The words hang in the cold.
Neither of us moves.
Neither of us breathes.
Overhead, the sun is fractured, watching us through a veil of clouds—silent. Unblinking. Unmoved.
Selis turns sharply, her boots grind hard into the frost, each step away from me loud in its refusal. For a heartbeat she stands at the edge of the forest, shoulders heaving, hands flexing open and closed like she doesn’t know whether to draw steel or rip the world apart with her bare fists.
I don’t move.
I don’t dare.
The blanket around me feels thinner now, like ash instead of wool.
The clouds clear the sun, light illuminating the space she stands, and in that breath of light, she looks haunted—a creature half-born of violence, half-drowned in something heavier.
She wipes a hand across her mouth, rough and fast, like she's scrubbing something off.
My words, maybe. The memory I cracked open without meaning to.
When she speaks, it’s not loud. It’s not rough.
It’s cold.
"Don’t speak to me again unless I tell you to."
Not a threat.
A law.
“Selis…” I plead. I can’t help it.
Her head turns slightly—just enough to feel the knife’s edge of her voice slice back toward me.
“I’ll cut your tongue out,” she says.
There’s the threat.
I nod—a tiny, broken thing.
Selis stalks to the farthest edge of the clearing. She plants herself by an oak, in the shadows like she means to become one. Arms crossed. Back turned. Jaw sharp.
Like a wolf that can't decide whether to bite or howl.
I stare at the trees because looking at her hurts more. The trees don’t flinch when they’re stared at. They don’t shake like her body does—just once, barely a breath—when she thinks I’m not watching.
I should feel victorious.
I wounded her.
I reached past the steel and sharpness and found something cracked beneath all that armor. Something human.
But all I feel is cold.
All I feel is sick.
All I feel is this awful, hollow ache blooming like frostbite behind my ribs.
I hate it.
I hate that I can still see her kneeling in the mud, bloodied hands clutching at nothing, screaming for a god who never answered.
I hate that I know what that feels like.
To beg.
To plead.
To be ignored.
I lean back against the tree, and dig my nails into my palms harder—deep enough to anchor myself in the present, in the pain.
She is still my captor. She still drags me like an animal toward my death. Whatever pain carved her into this—it doesn't change what she is now.
I press my forehead against my knees, breathing slow through the hurt, through the quiet, through the way my body aches in places no wound has touched. The silence between us remains heavy; thick with my guilt and her grief.
Neither of us speaks.
Neither of us moves.
And somewhere deep in my chest, something dangerous and fragile unfurls. Something I don’t have a name for, not yet, but it terrifies me more than any of her knives ever could.