Chapter 32
CORIN
Years later, I learn that glamour is less a disguise and more a polite agreement between you and reality.
It works—mostly.
Until it doesn’t.
I catch it in reflections first. Always reflections.
Glass is honest in a way people rarely are, and mirrors have a nasty habit of telling the truth when you forget to remind them of your preferred version of it.
This morning it’s the window of Bess’s shop, warped and imperfect, but good enough to show me exactly how much I’ve stopped pretending to be entirely human.
My horns flicker.
Not fully there, not fully gone—just a ghost of them, curving back from my temples like a memory trying to become a fact. The glamour stutters, then settles again, smoothing my silhouette back into something that won’t alarm villagers or attract unwanted theological discussions.
“Behave,” I mutter under my breath.
The reflection does not answer, which is either a blessing or a missed opportunity.
I adjust my coat, roll my shoulders once, and step away from the glass.
The street smells like bread, damp stone, horse sweat, and the faint metallic edge of old coin changing hands.
Ordinary things. Human things. I have learned to catalog them the way I once cataloged arcane variables—precisely, quietly, with a kind of reverence I would never admit out loud.
Because I remember what it felt like to belong to this world without qualifiers.
Now I belong to it with… footnotes.
My eyes don’t need the glamour anymore.
That’s the other change.
They settle into gold as easily as breathing, the color rising and falling with my mood, my focus, my patience for nonsense.
I keep them dimmed most of the time out here, letting the old pale shade hold while I move through town, but it takes less effort with each passing year.
Sometimes I forget. Sometimes I don’t bother.
Today, they glow faintly without my permission.
I let them.
A man nods to me as I pass. “Morning, Corin.”
“Morning.”
He doesn’t stare. Not anymore. People have a remarkable capacity for accepting the unusual if it arrives slowly enough and carries its own groceries.
I’ve been coming here for years now, trading, talking, learning the rhythms of a place that once would have been just another stop on a road I didn’t expect to walk for very long.
Longevity changes your relationship with roads.
You start noticing where they lead.
You start wondering how long you’re willing to follow.
The contract saved me.
That’s the simplest version.
The truest version is messier.
It didn’t just save me. It rewrote me.
The Ardyn bloodline—our stubborn, human, very mortal lineage—no longer ends the way it used to. It bends now. It stretches. It lingers where it should have faded. I carry that in my veins the way I carry memory: not always visible, never absent.
Sometimes, when I stand still long enough, I can feel it distinctly.
Two pulses.
One mine.
One… other.
Not foreign anymore. Not invasive. Just there, steady and warm, like a second rhythm learned over time until it feels as natural as breathing. Rhazek calls it integration. Sable calls it “not dying, which I’m fond of.” I call it complicated.
I pick up a sack of flour from the miller’s stall and sling it over my shoulder.
It weighs less than it should. Most things do now.
Strength came quietly, the way all the worst changes do, slipping into muscle and bone without ceremony until one day you lift something and realize the world has become lighter than it used to be.
“Careful,” the miller says. “That’s fresh.”
“I’ll treat it with the respect it deserves.”
“Last time you said that, you dropped a crate of apples.”
“They were structurally unsound.”
“They were apples.”
“Exactly.”
He shakes his head, amused, and I move on.
The market hums around me—voices layered over voices, the clink of coin, the low murmur of negotiations, laughter, arguments, the occasional shouted insult that somehow still sounds friendly. It’s a symphony of ordinary life, and I have grown inordinately fond of it.
I should go.
I have everything we need.
Coffee. Oil. Flour. Something sweet Sable will pretend she didn’t ask for. Something bitter Rhazek will claim is medicinal.
I turn toward the road that leads back to the house.
And then—
Something pulls.
Not physically.
Nothing so crude.
It’s a sensation that starts low in my chest, a sharp, electric thread that tightens without warning. My breath stutters, not from pain, but from the sheer unexpected intensity of it. It’s not the bond. I know the bond. I know Sable’s presence, Rhazek’s steady infernal weight. This is… different.
Focused.
Directional.
“Now what,” I mutter.
The pull sharpens.
I stop walking.
The crowd moves around me, annoyed but not enough to comment. A cart wheel creaks past my knee. Someone swears about spilled grain. The world continues, stubbornly indifferent to the fact that something inside me has just locked onto a point I cannot yet see.
I follow it.
Of course I do.
Curiosity is a fatal flaw I have no intention of curing.
The sensation draws me down a narrower street, away from the market’s noise into something quieter, more deliberate.
The buildings here are taller, older, stone instead of wood, their windows narrow and shadowed.
There’s a different smell here too—less bread and livestock, more incense, ink, something faintly metallic beneath it all.
I recognize the architecture.
Dark Elf construction.
Refined. Controlled. Just unsettling enough to remind you that you are not entirely welcome but not so overt as to give you a reason to leave.
“Wonderful,” I murmur. “This seems like a good life choice.”
The pull intensifies.
I slow as I approach one particular building. Its windows are cleaner than the others, glass polished to a clarity that borders on unnatural. Dark wood frames the panes, carved with patterns that catch the light in ways that suggest intention rather than decoration.
I shouldn’t look.
I know that instinctively.
I look anyway.
Through the window, I see her.
Human.
Unmistakably so.
She stands near a table, head bent over something I can’t quite make out—papers, perhaps, or a ledger.
Her hair falls over one shoulder in a loose, unguarded way that suggests she hasn’t noticed it slipping free.
The light from inside the room touches her skin, warm and soft, catching at the curve of her cheek, the line of her throat.
And something—
Something hits me.
It’s not gentle.
It’s not subtle.
It’s a jolt straight through my chest, sharp enough to make me grip the window frame before I can stop myself. My pulse spikes, the second rhythm surging alongside it, and for a terrifying instant I think I’m under attack.
I’m not.
This isn’t fear.
This isn’t anger.
There’s no bloodlust in it, no hunger for violence, no familiar edge of danger that I’ve learned to recognize and manage.
This is—
Gods.
This is want.
Raw.
Immediate.
Absolute.
My breath comes shallow as I stare through the glass, unable to look away. Every instinct in me leans toward her, not as prey, not as threat, but as something… necessary. The need is physical, visceral, a pull that goes deeper than thought, deeper than reason.
I swallow hard.
“Easy,” I tell myself.
Because the first, most immediate thought is not a flattering one.
Is this the demon?
Is this the part of me that was rewritten, that now looks at a human woman and decides she is something to be taken, consumed, devoured in ways that have nothing to do with kindness or choice?
My hands tighten against the window frame.
No.
No, that’s not it.
I know what that feels like. I’ve stood close enough to Rhazek in his worst moments, seen the edge of that kind of hunger when it’s stripped of restraint. This is not sharp like a blade. It’s not cold. It doesn’t carry that violent inevitability.
This is heat.
This is pull.
This is—
I exhale slowly, trying to steady the sudden chaos in my chest.
This feels like what Rhazek described.
Gods help me.
It feels like what he described when he talked about Sable.
The way his voice would change, quieter, more dangerous, like the world had narrowed to a single point and he was choosing, constantly, not to burn everything else away just to reach it.
The woman looks up.
Our eyes meet through the glass.
The world tilts.
There’s recognition there.
Not familiarity.
Not memory.
Something deeper, stranger, more immediate.
Her expression shifts—surprise first, then something sharper, something that mirrors the sudden intensity clawing through my own chest. Her hand stills over the table, fingers curling slightly as if she’s feeling it too.
I step back.
Because I need distance.
Because I need to think.
Because I need to not crash through a Dark Elf Noble’s window like a lunatic driven by whatever the hell this is.
“Right,” I say under my breath. “That’s new.”
The pull doesn’t lessen.
If anything, it tightens, a steady thread connecting me to that room, that woman, that moment of shared recognition neither of us understands.
I drag a hand down my face.
“This is a problem.”
Understatement.
I glance back at the window.
She’s still there.
Still watching.
Still—feeling it.
I can tell.
And that terrifies me more than anything else.
Because this isn’t one-sided.
This isn’t me losing control.
This is something shared.
Something forming.
Something—
I close my eyes briefly, grounding myself in the familiar: the weight of the flour on my shoulder, the distant sound of the market, the faint, steady hum of the bond that still connects me to Sable and Rhazek, warm and constant and chosen.
This is different.
This is new.
And I have absolutely no idea what comes next.
I open my eyes.
The window is still there.
She is still inside.
And whatever this is—
It’s not going away.