17. The Wound She Left
THE WOUND SHE LEFT
Capitol Guard tents flapped in the cold wind—navy and black banners snapping against an iron sky. Soldiers moved like shadows, silent and purposeful, their boots crunching over frozen mud. Most did not look Surian in the eye as she passed.
Luko walked ahead, silent, shoulders squared against the chill.
He didn't speak nor did he need to. Surian felt it in her bones, the air itself was braced, like the camp had grown sentient and now held its breath.
They passed the central watchfire, its embers guttering low.
A few guards sat around it, armor dulled with ash, eyes rimmed red from sleepless nights.
The atmosphere was oppressive, laughter a distant memory, song an impossibility.
Behind her, Lord Surin strode with the same measured calm as ever.
His black cloak barely stirred, his blue eyes scanning the camp like he was reading a battlefield.
He had expected the emptiness, the particular weight of a place that had forgotten how to be anything else. Nothing here surprised him.
Luko led them toward the largest tent, pitched at the quarry's edge where snow clung like ash to the canvas.
"He stays here," Luko murmured, his voice arriving like something foreign in the dead air. "He doesn't leave unless he thinks she's near. Some days, he doesn't come out at all."
Surian nodded once. Her heart hammered. She hadn't seen her brother in more than half a year — not since Allora escaped and Malec stopped being Malec and became whoever this colder, hollowed-out Awyan was.
They walked a few more steps before Luko spoke again, his voice low and raw. "I need you both to prepare yourselves for what you are about to see. Malec has been rotting from the inside out. Beyond broken, and the worst part? He thinks if he suffers long enough, the gods will give her back."
The words settled over Surian like ice water.
A pause. Then Luko continued, quieter now.
“It’s the Vash’telor bond. When it isn’t accepted, when it only pulls one way…
it doesn’t just hurt. It destroys. The soul keeps reaching for a bond that isn’t returned, and eventually it starts consuming the Awyan from within.
” He drew a breath, his voice taking on the careful cadence of someone reciting hard-won knowledge.
"I've read the old texts. Unrequited soul bonds are slow poison.
But Malec's case is worse than most because Allora isn't just ignoring the bond.
She's actively fighting it. That resistance creates a constant strain, like a rope being pulled from both ends until the fibers start to fray. "
His gaze dropped to the frozen ground.
"And paired with the way his mind works, he needs order and control and patterns... Allora was his anchor. She calmed the chaos in his head. Without her, everything he used to manage has started collapsing at once. The compulsions, the obsessive thoughts, the need for routine. All of it spiraling."
Luko's voice roughened. "That's why he's spiraled so quickly. Most Awyans with unrequited bonds deteriorate over years. Malec's been at it for months, and he's already..."
Surin's voice cut through the cold air like a blade. "Then he should have known better than to forge one."
Both Surian and Luko turned to stare at him, startled by the harshness.
"Soul bonds are not destiny," Surin continued, his voice flat and unyielding. "They are choices, poor ones. More often than not."
Luko's mouth compressed into a hard line. "With respect, Lord Surin, Vash'telor isn't something you choose. It chooses you."
"Then it chose poorly." Surin's tone brooked no argument. "And now we deal with the consequences."
Surian opened her mouth to protest, but a look in her father’s face made her close it again. There was a coldness there she didn’t understand, deeper than his usual pragmatism.
Luko looked like he wanted to argue further, but instead he just shook his head and kept walking.
They ducked beneath the tent flap and froze.
The inside was dim, warmed only by a small brazier smoldering in the corner. Maps covered every surface, veins of red ink slashing over mountain passes and trade routes. Pins. Threads. Dozens of markers stabbing into parchment.
The center table was no longer just a war board. It was a shrine.
And Malec sat at its heart.
He was hunched forward, pale fingers twitching as they traced the same path again and again along the southern border.
Eyes fixed, blank, unblinking. Platinum hair spilled loose down his back, unbraided and snarled at the ends.
The uniform hung looser than Surian remembered, gaping where muscle had wasted away.
Thinner, gaunt like a body devouring itself.
Surin stood frozen in the entrance, his chest constricting. This was his son. His brilliant, precise son who had once commanded armies with surgical efficiency, who moved through the world like a blade forged in discipline and ice.
And now he sat hunched over maps like a crazed Awyan trying to divine prophecy from ink and obsession.
But it was his face that broke Surian.
When Malec finally looked up, there was no flash of hope or warmth. Only calculation, amplified by strain. His gaze slid over her as though testing for illusions, as if he no longer trusted what stood before him.
"You're not her," he said flatly. His voice was hoarse, rusted from disuse, but steady.
Surian took a step closer. "No, I'm not."
His knuckles whitened against the table's edge, gripping it as if it were the only thing keeping him anchored. His breath shook once, then stilled.
"She should've come through here," he muttered. "I accounted for every passage and route south. She's not where she should be, she's not anywhere and I can no longer feel our tether."
The words hung in the air like a curse.
Surian's throat tightened. "You've been here for months. You look like you need food and sleep."
Malec didn't respond.
Surin moved past her then, stepping closer to his son, cataloging every detail with the detachment of a general assessing casualties.
The twitching fingers, the mechanical repetition, the way Malec's eyes didn't quite track properly.
A genius reduced to obsession. A weapon turned inward, devouring itself.
And it could have been prevented.
His voice came out precisely but quiet, like a scalpel against raw flesh. "You've made this tent into a coffin and you're burying yourself alive in it."
Malec's hollow beige irises flicked toward his father, colder than the snow outside. For the briefest moment, Surian thought he might snap. But instead, he bent over the maps again, tracing the red lines like they were the only veins that mattered.
"She's hiding or someone is hiding her," he said at last, voice flat and stripped of grief. "She should have run to me. She didn't."
There was no sadness there. Just anger.
"And that means someone has to answer for it."
Surian crossed her arms tightly across her chest. "What if it means she doesn't want to be found?"
Malec looked at her then, really looked. His eyes were dull but alert. "I don't care what she wants."
The words cut clean through the air and left nothing standing in their wake.
He turned away again, adjusting a marker on the map as though the conversation had ended.
"I'm not here to beg, Surian. I'm here to correct a mistake."
"You already lost her," she said softly, throat tightening. "You're just trying to rewrite the ending."
He scoffed, low and exhausted. "Then I'll keep rewriting it until it ends the way it should have from the beginning."
"Even if it breaks her?"
His shoulders tensed. His hand hovered over the board.
"I'll put her back together."
Surian stayed still, her eyes fixed on him, taking in the truth of what he had become.
The way he stood too still, as though even motion took effort.
The hollows beneath his cheekbones, the bruised shadows under his stone-tan eyes.
And worst of all, the quiet. Malec had once been a creature of cold brilliance: keen-edged wit, commanding, an Awyan whose mind spun faster than any room. But this version?
He was all blade, no point. A weapon left too long in the snow, still dangerous but dulled by rust and madness.
"You know," she whispered, "I used to think you were incapable of breaking."
He didn't look at her. His fingers pushed another pin into the map.
"I thought the things you did, the choices you made, they came from calculation. From the part of you that didn't feel things the way the rest of us do."
"And now?" His voice was empty of inflection.
She took a step forward, cautious, as though approaching a wounded predator. "Now I think you feel too much. But only for her."
He stilled. A muscle in his jaw jumped.
"Say what you came to say," he muttered. "You didn't ride all the way here for poetic analysis."
“I came,” Surian said, her voice low, “to help you before you make a mistake you can’t undo.”
Malec finally turned, just slightly, enough for her to catch the flicker in his eyes. Not exactly cruelty but not warmth either.
"Everything worth having comes undone first," he murmured. "You think I don't know that by now?"
"You don't have her anymore, Malec," she whispered.
He inhaled abruptly, shallow, controlled. "No, I do not because she ran and now the world is quieter, emptier and useless."
Surin felt a crack deep in his chest—not his composure. That remained intact, carved from decades of discipline. But deeper still, a feeling he had not allowed himself in years. His son was dying. Wasting away in this frozen tomb, consumed by a bond that should never have been forged.
And the Canariae responsible was still running.