Chapter 15
JASSYN
The vines obeyed Jassyn’s will, folding around Lykor’s prone form like a cradle meant for ruin. Face down, he lay still as Jassyn gathered his hair and tied it aside, baring the length of his spine.
Jassyn slipped raw Essence beneath skin, assessing without tearing, mapping the fractures time had buried—calcified pain, old injuries sealed wrong, nerves twisted by strain. Every scar whispered a story of endurance, but Jassyn didn’t intend to heal them. He meant to undo them.
He drew in a slow breath and reached into Vesryn’s side of their Well.
Shadows spilled from his fingers, curling above Lykor’s back, held at the ready.
He’d never wielded rending before, but he shaped it as precisely as he did mending—convinced the difference lay only in the ability itself. Stitching or severing.
But when Jassyn steered the first wisps of shadows into the flesh of Lykor’s shoulders, he nearly flinched. Rending sliced deep with surgical sharpness, blood surging in a dark rush.
Hauling on Vesryn’s force talent without thought, Jassyn funneled Essence into a siphon of blue light. The garnet-black spill lifted from Lykor’s back, held aloft before it could sink into the moss. The sphere swelled above them, rippling as it fed along the thread of power he kept taut.
Jassyn worked shadows like scalpels, peeling back layers of skin and muscle. Each tendon parted with a wet snap, and ligaments followed, severed one by one with rending’s strike.
His eyes darted to the side of Lykor’s face, watching for a flinch, a twitch, any sign of pain, but Lykor lay utterly still while Jassyn’s fingers shook.
Now exposed, the vertebrae lay warped and misaligned. Between the shoulder blades, the faint indent of the king’s golden stakes still scarred the ridge of spine. For a moment, Jassyn’s breath caught. Then he braced himself and cracked the first bone.
It crumbled beneath his shadows. Jassyn exhaled through his teeth as he summoned each fragment upward, holding them aloft in a beam of illumination.
He turned them, examined the ruin, and began weaving lattices into the cavity left behind—rebuilding the spine bone by bone into the shape it was meant to hold.
And then he began again.
Fragment by fragment, he reforged the marrow, weaving the lattice from the center outward. Nerves knit next, filaments spinning into fragile webs. The bones followed slowly as Jassyn fractured and reset them, restoring what the king had mutilated, one vertebra at a time.
“I can’t feel anything.”
The words came soft, slurred.
Jassyn glanced toward Lykor’s face, resting against the moss. “That’s the idea,” he murmured. “But if you do, you need to tell me.”
“You said the venom wouldn’t addle my mind.”
“I never said that,” Jassyn said, refocusing on the shadows and mending light coiling around his hands. “Fenn said the effects could go either way.”
Lykor huffed. “Feels like anything could flap off my tongue right now.”
The corner of Jassyn’s mouth nearly lifted. “Then I’ll assume it’s just the venom talking.”
Lykor snorted. “And if it’s not?”
Startled by the near laugh, Jassyn looked back at him, pulse quickening at the sound.
“Speaking of Fenn,” Lykor mumbled. “What do you think of him?” The words spilled free, as though they’d been waiting behind his teeth.
“I…like him,” Jassyn ventured, unsure where the question led. He bent his attention back beneath his palms, fingers steadying the healing weave.
“He smiles too much,” Lykor muttered instead of answering. “Makes me want to knock it off his face.”
Even though Lykor couldn’t see it, Jassyn bit back a smile of his own. “That’s part of his charm. He’s carefree enough to mean it.” And maybe that was why Fenn’s ease needled Lykor, because he carried none of their scars.
Jassyn pressed on, sealing bone, stitching muscle, coaxing nerves back into line.
His breath grew ragged with effort, shadows quivering faintly with the strain.
Blessedly, when he released Vesryn’s rending, the prince didn’t barrel into his thoughts or barge his way back into the tree.
The worst of the healing was nearly over, hanging just beyond his grasp.
Lykor had gone quiet, the venom haze no longer spilling words but thickening in the silence between them. When he finally spoke, his voice rasped against it.
“And are you…” He began, then cleared his throat. “I mean, is someone like Fenn…”
The question drifted unfinished. Jassyn stilled, wishing he could see Lykor’s whole face—whether his expression came cloaked in caution, cracked by nerves, or already steeped in regret.
“If that’s the venom talking…” Jassyn said softly, offering him a way out.
“Would you choose someone like Fenn?” Lykor pressed instead, voice dipping lower.
Jassyn blinked, the words brushing against something long buried, memories he hadn’t unearthed in decades.
Lykor’s next words tumbled out in a slurred rush. “I know you didn’t get the choice before. But…I mean—was there ever someone you wanted? You don’t have to answer. I just…wondered.”
Jassyn drew in a slow breath, stabilizing the net of mending. And himself.
“There was someone I wanted,” he said at last. It was the first time he’d said it aloud, and the admission scraped in his throat.
“Before the contracts. Before I understood what I was to the realm.” Crimson light curled as he reknitted muscle over Lykor’s spine.
“She was the daughter of a councilwoman—one of the last pure-bloods born.”
Jassyn worked deliberately, keeping every motion precise as he stitched together the severed tendons.
“She didn’t look at me like the other elves. To her, I wasn’t just a half-breed curiosity.” He paused, voice thinning. “Or so I thought.”
Lykor didn’t speak, but Jassyn felt the weight of his silence, the stillness of him listening.
“She made me believe that I was wanted,” Jassyn said softly. “That even if I wasn’t a pure-blood, I might still have a place in their world.”
His magic wavered, a thread looping the same ligament twice before he realized he’d been tracing memory instead of bone. Lykor twitched beneath his palms, and Jassyn gritted his teeth, forcing the lattice steady again.
“But one day her family left the capital without warning. Returned to their estates. I waited. Told myself stories. Any excuse for the absence.”
Hands beginning to tremble, Jassyn curled them into fists as if pressure alone might choke off the ache clawing up his throat.
“My mother was the one who told me.” An exhale rushed out of him as he shook his head. “That was the only time I’ve ever seen her proud. She said the councilwoman’s daughter had conceived. That I’d fulfilled my purpose. And only then did I understand what I’d been to her. To everyone.”
Lykor’s breath grew shallow, as if anything louder might shatter what Jassyn had just laid bare.
“That was the only time I thought I’d chosen someone,” Jassyn said with a bitter laugh. “Turns out I never did. Everyone after that just stopped pretending to care first.”
With a tremor in his fingers, he reached outward, calling the blood back from where it hovered.
The globes sank into torn vessels, coursing through sinew, stitching lifeforce along each thread.
At last, he knotted the final weave of mending, sealing flesh and leaving behind the unbroken line of Lykor’s spine.
His gaze dropped to the unblemished skin, fingers drifting along the healed ridge of bone. Spine and shoulders realigned. Not even a scar remained to mark the previous wounds.
“I’m going to purge the venom now,” Jassyn murmured, bracing one hand against Lykor’s back and the other against the tangle of plants holding him, sinking into the earth’s pulse.
He hadn’t needed the earth to mend after all, but he’d kept the energy waiting—held as a reserve for what Essence couldn’t touch. Now he opened himself to that thrum, letting the power flood him.
Green light bloomed from his fingertips as he reached deeper, drawing from the surrounding life.
Leaves curled and moss blackened as the energy surged toward him in waves.
The plants didn’t scream, but they shriveled as though their roots remembered suffering.
Jassyn spun that stolen breath of life into Lykor’s veins, scouring away every trace of the venom.
When the glow finally dimmed from his hands, he withdrew. Lykor stirred, pushing himself up with a slow effort. His limbs trembled as he swung his legs over the edge of the platform, clutching the withered vines to steady himself.
“And now?” Lykor asked. “If you ever wanted to choose again…would it still be someone like her?”
Jassyn didn’t answer at once, his focus drawn to the blackened moss between his boots.
“I mean…” Lykor’s voice softened, cautious. “Would it be another female?”
“I don’t know,” Jassyn said as he settled to sit beside Lykor on the platform. For a heartbeat he nearly swallowed the truth, but then he admitted quietly, “Even before that…shape or gender never mattered to me.”
His gaze fell to a single vine that had survived between them. Curled at the edges, but alive. Jassyn reached for it gently, casting out the last sliver of green light gathered in his fingertips. Leaves unfurled along the stem, fragile but defiant, a small restoration of what he’d taken.
“But if I choose again…” His voice wavered. “It would be someone who sees me. Not my bloodline.”
He looked up, but Lykor was already turned away, his boot scraping at a root’s edge. Jassyn swallowed and let the silence rest for a moment before asking softly, “Do you want to shift into your wings?”
Lykor blinked, as though surfacing from some depth. Jassyn thought he still looked half-lost even as he rose and moved a few paces away. His eyes slipped shut, and Jassyn held his breath, idly tracing the stitched seam of a bracer.