Chapter 30
Elora
Elora’s boots struck the polished floors with purpose, each footfall resonating through the empty corridor.
This wasn’t like before—she wasn’t wandering to avoid stares or to silence the whispers of uncertainty that plagued her.
Tonight she had a target. Florence had answers, and Elora intended to extract them, to lance this wound of suspicion before it poisoned her from within.
She checked her office first.
Empty.
Where is she?
The lab. That’s where Florence would be—hands busy with whatever secretive work that had Elora’s instincts screaming warnings.
Retracing her steps through the corridor seemed to take half the time.
Something primal stirred beneath her skin, not the full-throated roar of anger, but a vigilant, coiled readiness that sent electric prickles across her flesh.
The sharp tang of alcohol sliced through the hallway, followed by the sterile bite of polished metal and glass.
Elora’s steps faltered. Her vision narrowed to a pinpoint, then widened too far.
Cold tables. Needles. Thorn leaning over her, his breath hot against her ear: “Isn’t it excellent? My finest work.”
She pressed her back against the wall beside the door, thumb digging so hard into her palm that the skin blanched white around it.
In through her nose. One-two-three. Out through her mouth.
Again. Her fingers uncurled from the fist she hadn’t realized she’d made.
Her hands steadied, the violent trembling subsiding to mere twitches. Only then did she reach for the handle.
The room lay quiet; lanterns dimmed to a faint glow that cast long shadows over empty tables.
No child slumped in the chair; no alchemists hunched over their work.
The space was cleared as if nothing had happened, only the faint metallic scent lingered.
Her gaze locked on the device in the center, its brass coils and glass vials humming faintly, still processing whatever had been fed into it last.
She crept toward the device, her fingertips tingling with each step closer.
The beast inside her—no longer snarling—seemed to cock its head, curious.
Vials of blood swirled through the system, dark red liquid threading along narrow tubes.
She leaned closer, studying the filtration system where the blood funneled through layered membranes, each one sieving out impurities with a precision that still twisted something bitter in her gut.
Harmonic crystals lined the inner chambers, vibrating just enough to stabilize the volatile separation, keeping the life essence from degrading into useless sludge.
She traced the path with her eyes, the way the blood separated under pressure, es-sence condensing into glowing droplets that collected at the base, shimmering with a faint, unnatural light.
The hum buzzed against her eardrums, steady and mechanical, pulling her deeper into the process despite the nausea building at the back of her throat.
She could almost hear Thorn’s voice overlaying it all, smug and instructive, like he was standing right there beside her.
“See here, the crystals resonate at a frequency that binds the essence, preventing it from dissipating. Clever, isn’t it?
Most wards wouldn’t grasp the elegance.” Back then, he’d droned on, believing her clueless, just a blank slate absorbing his genius.
And she’d let him, playing the wide-eyed Flora he’d imagined her to be a replacement of, all na?ve curiosity and fluttering admiration to stroke his ego, to buy herself moments of reprieve from the pain.
The memory turned her insides to acid—how she’d crafted herself into a shadow-puppet version of his lost niece, just to make it through one more session without the extra pain he reserved for defiance.
Bile rose sharp in her mouth. She straightened, forcing a breath, and looked up, only to lock eyes with Florence standing in the doorway. She was a dark cutout against the hallway’s amber glow, posture straight and unyielding as if she’d been there all along.
That vigilant animal part of her consciousness perked its ears.
Florence’s expression remained a mask of practiced composure.
Those blue eyes, though—Elora knew them too well, felt them cutting through her defenses like cold steel.
Florence didn’t flinch or stammer accusations.
She simply regarded Elora with the steady gaze of someone finding exactly what they expected.
Elora didn’t move from the device, didn’t let her hands tremble where they gripped the edge of the table, the cool metal grounding her enough to keep her voice steady.
“How long have you been using this?” The words came out sharper than she’d intended, edged with the memory of Thorn’s lectures still echo-ing in her skull.
Florence came to stand beside the humming coils. In the bleached light, the resemblance hit harder—the curve of her jaw, the freckles dusting her skin—stirring that same fractured ache in Elora’s chest, like staring at a mirror warped by time and choices she hadn’t made.
“Long enough to see its potential,” Florence said, her tone even, almost conversational.
Potential. The word twisted in her mind, echoing Thorn’s justifications, and she fought the urge to bare her teeth, to let the beast loose just enough to make Florence back off.
Instead, she traced another droplet of essence as it fell into the collection vial, glowing brighter now, and wondered whose blood it had come from—Rell’s? That boy’s?
Florence’s voice cut through the hum, too close, too even. “Thank you for sharing the notes, by the way. When Rell first handed them over, I could hardly believe it. But then I saw the details—Abernathy finally cracked it, after all those years of fumbling.”
Elora’s fingers tightened on the table’s edge, then commanded her grip to loosen.
Part of her wanted to scream that she’d been betrayed, that this wasn’t what she’d intended when she handed over those notes.
Another part whispered that she’d known exactly what she was doing.
Hadn’t she seen Thorn’s methods up close?
The glowing vial filled drop by drop, each one accusing her.
She’d armed them willingly. She’d wanted this power to be used.
Just... differently. Somehow. Her face re-mained carefully blank even as her thoughts warred: was she victim or accomplice?
Florence leaned in slightly, her breath carrying a faint, clean scent like fresh mint, her eyes flicking to the device. “You must have seen it up close to steal something like that. He always was thorough with his... demonstrations.”
The implication slithered under Elora’s skin, stirring memo-ries she shoved down hard. Her pulse thudded in her ears, but she held it together, breath by breath, refusing to let the tremor show. Florence’s words poked at the edges, maybe accidental, maybe not, but Elora wouldn’t crack. Not here.
“Yes. He strapped me to his gurney once a week. Sometimes more. Took what he wanted until the room spun and I felt faint.” The words came out flat, matter-of-fact, even as the re-membered ache ghosted through her veins.
“Never bothered with a calming agent to keep me docile, though. Probably liked the straps better—they let him pretend it was control, not cruel-ty.”
Florence’s expression didn’t flicker, but something in her eyes sharpened, like she was weighing the question hanging unspoken between them—what set her apart?
The older woman straightened. “He always did prefer things... contained.” She turned slightly, gesturing to a shelf lined with similar glowing flasks, their light casting blue shadows across the tile.
“But this isn’t about punishment here. It’s progress.
The essence powers healing elixirs bolstering the weak.
We’ve already saved lives with it. Children who would’ve withered in the villages otherwise. ”
Healing. Not the twisted experiments Thorn had whispered about while he drained her, promising breakthroughs that never came for anyone but him.
Still, the boy’s slack face from earlier flickered in her mind, his shallow breaths too much like her own back then.
She traced the edge of the table with one finger, grounding herself in the cool metal, the beast inside pacing rest-lessly, urging her to push harder.
“And the donors?”
“Volunteers,” she said, her voice smooth, like she was reciting something rehearsed. “We explain the need. The benefits. No one is coerced.”
Elora’s throat tightened, the sterile air biting sharper now, stinging her nostrils with each breath. Volunteers. That’s not how Rell described it.
She glanced at the glowing vials again, their blue light pulsing faintly, and imagined that boy’s slack face behind them, his small body draped in the chair, eyes glazed. Had he nodded eagerly, or just stared blankly while someone taller loomed with promises?
“Even the children?” The words came out edged. “That boy I saw earlier—he didn’t look like he was chatting about benefits.”
Florence stepped closer to the device, her fingers trailing lightly over one of the brass coils, the metal humming under her touch.
“Their parents gave permission,” Florence replied, her tone still even, almost gentle.
“We monitor everything—vitals, recovery. It’s minimal, and it helps fund what we’re building here. ”
Elora’s stomach churned, the faint metallic tang in the room turning sour on her tongue.
Fund. Like blood was just another resource, siphoned and bottled for trade.
She thought of the vil-lages Florence had mentioned, the ones starving through win-ters, families hunched over empty hearths.
How easy it would be to nod at a stranger’s offer, to hand over a child’s arm for a sack of grain.
Consent, sure, but what did that mean when hun-ger clawed at your belly?