Chapter 28 Elle
Elle
The dream didn’t start like a dream. It started like being yanked from the bottom of the ocean by an invisible hand—sudden, disorienting, gasping into awareness.
I found myself in another fantastical garden, but different from before.
Roses grew downward from clouds that drifted at waist height, their petals glowing with sunset hues.
Trees sprouted from pools of bright, flowing water, their branches reaching down instead of up, heavy with fruit with surfaces like oil slicks—rainbow patterns constantly moving.
The grass beneath my bare feet felt like silk and hummed with a melody I almost recognized—something my grandmother used to hum while tending her tomatoes.
I walked deeper into this impossible place, drawn by the sound of water. A stream flowed in spirals through the air, fish made of golden light swimming against gravity. Where droplets looked like candy, flowers bloomed in midair, their roots dangling like jewelry.
There was a swing hanging from nothing—just two ropes extending up into empty sky that somehow held my weight when I sat.
My cheeks heated when I thought about the Pleasure Garden, and the last time I was in a swing.
As I swayed back and forth, butterflies with wings of stained glass gathered around me, each one carrying a different memory reflected in its wings.
My first day of school. My mother’s laugh.
The taste of birthday cake. Kaelren’s eyes when he’d first really seen me.
I reached out to touch one—the memory of my grandmother’s hands teaching mine to braid—when I heard footsteps approaching from behind.
“Elle?”
I turned, nearly falling off the swing, and there he was.
Kaelren, but not quite as I’d last seen him.
His corruption was present but controlled here, creating patterns across his skin that looked like calligraphy written in ash.
His eyes—those impossible silver eyes—were looking at me like I was something he’d lost and found again.
“How—” I started, but he was already moving.
He hit me like a wave, crushing me against him with desperate force that drove the air from my lungs. His hands were everywhere—my face, my hair, my back—like he was trying to confirm I was real through touch alone.
“Elle. Elle. Elle.” He kept saying my name like a prayer, his face buried in my neck, his whole body shaking. “I felt you dying. Through the bond, I felt you screaming, and I couldn’t reach you. I couldn’t—”
“I’m here,” I gasped, clinging to him just as desperately. “I’m here, I’m okay—”
“You’re not okay.” He pulled back just enough to look at me, and the anguish in his face made my chest ache.
His hands came up to frame my face, tilted it toward what passed for light in this place.
“I can see the marks. The welts. Your lip—” His thumb ghosted over my split lip, and his eyes went black. “What did he do to you?”
“Kaelren—”
“What. Did. He. Do.”
“Tests,” I said, and my voice broke despite my best efforts. “He’s trying to tune me. Make my marks align with the Bloom properly. It’s—” I couldn’t finish. Couldn’t find words for what Auradelle had done to me.
The space around us responded to his fury—the stars beneath our feet went dark, the roots above writhed and screamed, and something that might have been thunder, if thunder could exist here, rolled through everything. The temperature dropped so fast I could see my breath.
“I’m going to tear him apart,” Kaelren said, and his voice was barely human. “Cell by cell. I’m going to make him experience every moment of pain he’s inflicted on you magnified a thousand times, and when he begs for death I’m going to keep him alive just to continue—”
I kissed him.
Hard and desperate and probably stupid given my split lip, but I needed to ground him, ground us both.
He made a sound low in his throat—half growl, half sob—and kissed me back like I was oxygen and he’d been drowning.
His hands slid into my hair, angling my head, and I tasted copper and salt and desperation.
When we finally broke apart, we were both shaking.
“Where is this?” I asked, my forehead pressed against his. “How are you here?”
“I don’t know.” His hands were still in my hair, his thumbs tracing small circles against my skull like he couldn’t bear to stop touching me.
“I’ve been pushing against the bond for days, trying to find you through the suppression.
And then suddenly, I felt you. Like a light in the dark. Your mind created this, I think.”
“So this is a dream?”
“No.” His eyes searched mine, silver and desperate and more alive than anything else in this impossible place.
“Or maybe. I don’t know. But it feels real.
You feel real. The bond between us—it’s clearer here than it’s ever been, like all the interference has been stripped away.
” He pulled me closer, if that was even possible.
“I can feel everything you’re feeling right now. The fear. The pain. The exhaustion.”
“Then you know I don’t have much time.” I forced myself to say it. “He’s breaking me down, Kaelren. Systematically. Tomorrow he’s going to try something worse—”
“We’re coming.” His voice was steel. “Tonight. We leave Silverpine tonight. The rebels have found tunnels under the Heartspire, old Root-pathways that—”
“No.” I grabbed his face, making him look at me. “Not yet. Auradelle’s expecting you. He told me you’d arrive ‘just in time for the Convergence.’ He wants you to come. It’s a trap.”
“I don’t care if it’s a trap—”
“I care.” My voice cracked. “I care because if you walk into whatever he’s planned, he’ll use you against me. He’ll hurt you to make me cooperate, or he’ll hurt me to make you cooperate, and either way we both end up exactly where he wants us.”
“Then what do we do?” His hands tightened in my hair.
“You want me to just leave you there while he tortures you? I can’t—Elle, I physically cannot do that.
The corruption is eating me alive without you.
Every hour we’re apart, it gets worse. I’ve destroyed three groves just by walking through them.
I’m becoming the monster everyone always said I was. ”
“You’re not a monster.”
“I will be if he hurts you again.” It wasn’t a threat. It was a promise. “I will burn down both worlds if that’s what it takes to get you back.”
I believed him. That was the terrifying part—I believed him completely.
“How much time do we have?” I asked. “Before you get here?”
“Five days if we push hard. Maybe six if the tunnels are worse than Sarnyx thinks.” His forehead pressed against mine. “But Elle, I don’t think you have that long. I can feel your marks through the bond right now, and they’re spreading faster than—”
“I know.” I cut him off before he could finish that thought. “I can feel it too. But if you come early, he wins. We need—we need a plan. A real one. Not just charging in and hoping for the best.”
“Then help me make one.” His hands slid down to my shoulders, my arms, like he was mapping every inch of me he could reach. “Tell me everything. The layout, the guards, the restraints, everything. We’ll find a way through this that doesn’t end with both of us as his puppets.”
So I told him. Everything I could remember through the haze of pain and fear.
And he held me while I talked, his hands never stopping their gentle movement, grounding me in this impossible space where we could finally touch without suppressions or barriers or the weight of two dying worlds between us.
“I’m going to get you out,” he said when I finished, and the certainty in his voice almost made me believe it. “I promise you, Elle. I’m going to get you out, and then I’m going to make him pay for every second of pain he’s caused you.”
“Just don’t die doing it,” I said. “Because I’ve gotten really attached to you, and I’d hate to have to burn everything myself to bring you back.”
He laughed—short and sharp and almost surprised, like he’d forgotten how. Then he kissed me again, softer this time, like he was trying to memorize the taste of me.
“Hold on a little longer,” he whispered against my lips. “Just a little longer. I’m coming.”
“I know,” I said. “I can feel it.”
And I could, I could feel his determination, his rage, his absolute refusal to let Auradelle win. It wrapped around me like armor, and for the first time since the guards had dragged me to that ritual chamber, I felt something other than fear.
I felt hope.
Kaelren
She was trying to protect me. Even here, even after everything Auradelle had done to her, she was trying to protect me.
The realization hit me like a physical blow, and the garden around us responded shuddering, almost seeming to collapse in on itself. My corruption spread further across my dream-form, turning my hands nearly black.
“Elle,” I said, and her name tasted like prayer and damnation combined. “How much time do we have?”
“Seven days until convergence,” she said immediately. “Auradelle was very specific about that. He wants me ‘properly conditioned’ before it happens.”
Seven days. Five of those would be spent traveling from Silverpine Hollow to the Heartspire, pushing hard through hostile territory.
That left us one day here to plan, and one night to rest in the tunnels beneath the fortress before the convergence.
One night between me and her, with an entire realm in between.
“Tell me what happened,” I said, pulling her closer, needing her solid against me despite knowing she was so impossibly far away. “I need to understand what I’m walking into.”
She hesitated, and I felt her exhaustion through the bond—bone-deep, soul-deep, the kind that came from being systematically broken down. But she nodded.