Chapter 18 Harper
HARPER
Athick, oppressive silence settles over Myrindale as we move toward the source of the sound.
The path winds between sagging cottages and empty animal pens, the ground wet beneath our boots.
Everything smells of damp earth and illness.
Sebastian paused only long enough to press Anne gently back inside the cabin, lowering his voice so she'd listen, urging her to bar the door, to stay hidden, to keep quiet until he returns.
She nodded, timid and pale, clutching her blanket like armor as she disappeared through the warped frame.
The rest of us pressed on.
Villagers peek from behind broken shutters as we pass, though most are too frightened, or too exhausted, to bother hiding their fear properly.
Liam keeps close at my side, his jaw tight, his breathing uneven.
Theo walks slightly ahead of him, wand glowing lightly as he finds his bearings, his other hand lifted just enough to catch the vibrations of the air.
Sebastian leads us through a narrow alleyway that opens onto the village square.
And that’s where we see them.
Four Shadeborne scouts stand in the center of the clearing, dressed in black leather so dark it seems to swallow the overcast light.
Their hoods cast their faces in shadow, but the sigils burned into their chests glow with a faint, silver pulse, an unmistakable mark of their allegiance.
The runes look almost alive, shifting with the scouts’ movements.
A small group of villagers has been forced into a loose formation before them.
Old men and women with hollow cheeks. People who look like they haven’t eaten in days.
The kind who would have nowhere to run even if they dared try.
One elderly man kneels on the ground, his wrists bound behind him with rope.
His shirt has been split open cleanly, exposing the curve of his spine.
A whip cracks across it.
The sound is jarring, sharp enough to make the villagers flinch and several of them cry out. The man trembles violently, his whole body shuddering, but he doesn’t make a sound. His breath comes in pained, wheezing pulls, each one shallower than the last.
“We warned you,” the largest scout snarls. His voice carries through a distortion charm, rolling through the square like a threat made of stone. “Your tribute is past due. All of you.”
Another scout prowls behind him, boots grinding into the dirt. “Shadeborne law exists for a reason. You do not ignore it. You do not test us. And you do not forget what happens when debts go unpaid.”
Sebastian goes completely still beside me, shoulders squared, hands balled into fists at his sides.
Rage radiates off him like heat from a forge.
Myrindale is his home. These people are the only connection he has left to anything resembling family.
Seeing them hurt turns him into something I’ve never seen before.
Theo tilts his head slightly, his expression tightening. “There are four,” he murmurs, voice low. “Three standing evenly spaced. One with the whip. He’s… focused. Almost too focused.”
Liam swallows, his voice strained. “Shadeborne scouts don’t normally go this far into Vireldan territory more than once. They must think no one here has the strength left to fight back.”
The words twist my stomach into knots. My hand inches toward my wand, not thinking, only reacting to the man on his knees, the blood dripping down his spine, the villagers shrinking back in terror. Liam notices and moves instinctively, lowering my hand with a subtle shake of his head.
Not yet.
Not until we know what they want.
But the urge to fight, to stop this, burns so fiercely beneath my skin it feels like it might crack me open.
The whip cracks again, this time only inches from the man’s face. A cruel warning.
“You’re a Vireldan supporter,” the scout sneers. “Your protections are conditional. Privileges, not rights. You’ve squandered them. And now you pay the price.”
A woman near the edge of the group sobs into her hands, her entire body trembling. A man attempts to pull her back, but the scouts catch the movement and jerk their attention toward him, sending a shock of terror through the crowd.
My pulse spikes. The world narrows.
Before I even think, before I can stop myself, my body shifts forward, only a step, but enough to draw Sebastian’s immediate reaction.
His arm sweeps in front of me, stopping me hard at the ribs. His breath is sharp, uneven. “Harper,” he warns under his breath, “don’t.”
He doesn’t say it out of fear for himself.
He says it because he knows exactly how this could end. For all of us.
But the scout pauses mid-strike. His hood lifts slow, turning toward the sound of my name leaving Sebastian’s lips. Though his face is shadowed, the air changes, thickens, like recognition is blooming where it shouldn’t. The sigil on his chest pulses.
The scout who turns at the sound of my name is built like a fortress, broad shoulders, thick arms, posture stiff with military precision.
His hood hides most of his face, but the moment those blue eyes meet mine, something in my chest jolts.
Not with fear. Not even recognition. Something stranger, deeper, like a thread pulled taut between us without consent.
He seems just as startled. His stance shifts, not back, not forward, but inward, like he’s recalibrating something he doesn’t fully understand.
The moment fractures the instant one of the scouts raises his wand.
There’s no shouted warning, no command to stand down, just the sudden crack of air splitting open as a streak of sickly green launches toward us.
It moves so fast the world seems to shrink around its path, light bending off its edges like heat off metal.
Behind me, villagers scream, their panic rising in a desperate tangle of voices.
Liam’s entire body locks beside mine, ready to throw himself forward.
Theo shifts with that almost eerie accuracy of his, aligning himself like he’s already calculated every possible outcome.
Sebastian’s curse slips out in a low hiss, sharp enough to cut through the noise.
But none of it has time to root. I don’t think, there isn’t room for thought.
My mind barely registers the danger before instinct claws its way up my spine and takes control.
Something cracks inside my chest, a sudden bloom of pressure that feels too fierce to contain.
Heat rushes through me in a violent surge, familiar and terrifying all at once.
My magic answers before my wand even rises.
It tears out of me like it’s been waiting for the moment, wild and unrestrained, far stronger than anything I’ve ever willingly summoned.
It collides with the incoming spell midair, and the green light splinters on impact, breaking apart in a shower of shattered sparks.
They rain down over the wet ground, sizzling as they fade, leaving the air humming around me.
The recoil of that power slams through me, flooding every scar along my back with blistering heat.
It crawls beneath my skin, too intense to be anything but pain and yet too familiar to make me stop.
Before I can catch my breath, another scout lunges toward us, wand leveled at Liam.
But the magic has already taken hold, spiraling through my bloodstream, sharper than instinct, faster than thought.
I pivot toward him, lifting my hand without even realizing I’ve done it, and what erupts out of me isn’t anything controlled or practiced.
It’s a violent rush of violet-black energy, raw and jagged, tearing through the air before slamming straight into his chest.
He drops instantly.
The first scout is still crumpled against a shattered fence.
The second lies sprawled at Liam’s feet, his wand rolling uselessly across the dirt.
I stand in the center of the square, lungs seizing around a tangled breath, the scent of scorched earth curling upward like smoke from a dying fire.
My heart hammers hard enough to bruise my ribs, each beat pushing more of that volatile magic outward until my entire body feels like it’s humming.
Theo murmurs something under his breath, fingers wrapping tightly around his wand, his posture taut as though he can feel the energy vibrating through the space just as clearly as I can.
Liam isn’t looking at the fallen scouts anymore, he’s looking at me.
Wide-eyed. Startled. Trying to understand what he just witnessed, and maybe what it means.
Two scouts remain.
One turns and bolts, panic overtaking duty.
But the last, the one with the blue eyes, doesn’t move.
He stands completely still, chest rising and falling beneath his dark leathers.
The Shadeborne sigil stitched across his breastplate glows faintly, pulsing like a second heartbeat.
His gaze stays locked on mine, unwavering in the chaos, and something in it shifts again.
A flicker of emotion I can’t name, sharp enough to twist in my stomach.
It isn’t hatred. It isn’t fear.
It’s something far more unsettling.
Recognition.
The shift happens suddenly, violent enough to snap the air between us.
The blue-eyed scout’s hand flies to his head at the exact moment a sharp, ringing crack detonates inside my skull.
The sound isn’t real, not in the world around me.
It’s buried deep within, a piercing, bone-deep strike that feels as though someone reached straight into my mind and hit something vital.
The force of it is so brutal I nearly vomit.
My knees buckle, slamming into the dirt as my palms claw at the ground, trying to anchor myself against the spinning world.
Everything tilts, sways, collapses inward, as if the square itself is folding in on me.
The pain ricochets through my skull in relentless waves, white-hot and blinding, stealing breath and thought all at once.
But even through that agony, I see him.
I see the way his features twist, his body curling inward just as mine does. I see him stumble, his balance shattering in perfect tandem with mine. It’s not just shared timing, it’s mirrored suffering, synchronized down to the heartbeat.
He isn’t just reacting to something.
He’s reacting with me.
As though whatever invisible vice is crushing my mind has its grip around his too… tightening at the same exact moment.
The remaining scout hurries back, seizing his arm and dragging him backward, forcing a retreat.
The tall one stumbles, clutching his head as though the sound is tearing him apart from the inside.
His hood slips enough to reveal more of his face, shadows and sharp angles and those startling eyes that won’t look away.
He fights the pull for half a heartbeat.
Looks at me again, truly looks, as though something inside him is being dragged toward me even as he retreats.
Then he’s gone, swallowed by the gray haze of the woods.
The ringing inside my skull bleeds into a dull roar, and I sink lower, breath shuddering as the last remnants of unrestrained magic ebb painfully from my limbs. The dirt beneath my palms is damp and cold. My vision swims. Every scar along my spine throbs as if lit from within.
Two scouts dead at my feet.
Two fled into the trees.
And the blue-eyed one, who should have ready to lunge in an instant, hesitated in ways that could get him killed.
The question is why?
The ringing finally begins to ebb, bleeding into a low shudder at the base of my skull.
The ground is cool beneath my palms, but my skin feels fever-hot, as if the magic hadn’t fully settled, as if some part of it is still clawing beneath my ribs looking for a way out.
My breath stumbles, uneven and sharp, and the world sways as I try to center myself again.
Liam drops to his knees beside me first, hands hovering without touching, worried, but cautious.
Theo kneels on my other side, fingers grazing lightly along my sleeve to find where my arm is before anchoring there gently.
Sebastian lingers only a breath behind them, chest heaving as he assesses what’s left of the square, his jaw tight enough to crack.
They’re all talking at once, my name from three different mouths, questions I can’t quite piece together, a tangle of panic building around me, but the only sound that reaches me clearly is the fading echo of that internal crack. It crawls through my mind like a shadow sinking down the spine.
I drag in a breath and force my head up.
The bodies.
The scorch marks.
The villagers staring at me like I’m the newest nightmare Shadeborne has sent.
And the blue-eyed scout’s face, that flash of something I can’t explain, still burned into the front of my thoughts.
A shiver coils through my spine.
Liam touches my shoulder, gentle but urgent. “Harper, just breathe, alright?”
I swallow hard, but the nausea of what I’ve done, what I’ve shown, rises fast.
“He knew,” I whisper, tasting iron on my tongue. “He felt it.”
Theo stiffens beside me. “Who? Which one?”
I force my eyes open fully, though every movement makes my skull throb. “The tall one. The one with the blue eyes. He...he reacted. When I did. As if-”
The sentence collapses. I can’t finish it. Not yet.
Sebastian steps closer, his voice low, trying not to push too hard. “Harper. Look at me.”
I do, eventually. His face is drawn tight, not with anger, but with fear he’s trying to hide. For me. For Anne. For whatever the hell he just witnessed.
I breathe through the pounding in my skull and hear myself say something I haven’t said aloud in years:
“Our father.”
The words tear out of me raw, a scrape of something half-feral and half-familiar.
“He will hear of this.”
Liam’s grip tightens around my arm, steadying me as my legs wobble. Theo braces my other side with a hand pressed firmly into my sleeve. Even Sebastian moves in, close enough that his shadow spills across my knees.
But none of their concern, none of their questions, can drown out the truth I feel sinking claws into my ribs:
My father’s scouts were never supposed to feel my magic.
Shadeborne magic was never supposed to react to mine.
And yet, the blue-eyed scout had.
Which means the one person I’ve feared most, the one who hunted us, who carved the truth into our skin, who would burn the world to reclaim what he thinks is his, knows I’m here.