40. Chapter 40
AMARIA
The rupture site sprawled below us.
Worse. So much worse than the last time I'd stood on that ground.
The Veil tear had grown into something that didn't belong in a sky.
A vertical wound in reality stretching from the scorched earth to the stars, centered directly above the altar where I'd been bound.
The edges rippled and convulsed—raw, unstable, bleeding shadow that pooled on the ground and rose into toothed spires.
The Nullatheon. Taller now. Denser. Pulsing with sick internal light, the heartbeat of a creature that should never have drawn breath.
The air screamed. Not really a sound. More a vibration, deep enough to rattle my bones, my teeth, the marrow of everything I was. It burrowed behind my eyes and tried to drive me backward.
The ground below flickered—solid, then translucent, then solid again. The basalt was warped and buckled, cracking apart in places where existence itself had stopped trying.
The three griffins dove.
They landed in a ring around the altar—ancient guardians taking positions they hadn't held in two centuries. Wings spread wide. Bodies coiled. A barrier between the chaos and the center.
The void pressed against them. Tendrils of un-reality reaching, grasping, trying to break through the circle.
The griffins held.
Their cries rang out—piercing, sovereign—and reality firmed beneath them. The flickering ground steadied. The screaming air quieted to something my lungs could actually process.
A pocket of real. Stable. Solid.
A place to do what we came to do.
I dismounted. My boots hit the basalt.
The same stone. The same altar. The same scorched earth that had drunk Brannick's blood and activated the circuit that nearly ended everything.
My body remembered before my mind could stop it. Brannick taking my blades from my hands. Ropes binding me. The exact angle of the sky above this altar, the last thing I'd seen before they broke me open and poured me out.
I'd been lied to the first time. Bound. Used. A sacrifice on someone else's altar for someone else's war.
I was walking back on my own legs.
The altar stood at the center. Stone and iron and glyphs I recognized now as intimately as any scar. Every carved line. Every dark stain.
Eryndor stopped beside me. His eyes moved across the altar, the glyphs, the void-iron frame. Reading the scene the way a soldier reads a battlefield—cataloging the evidence of what had been done here. What had been done to me.
His jaw tightened. The bond between us pulsed—hot, protective, a snarl of rage that he buried before it reached his face.
I put my hand on the altar. The stone was warm. Alive with the hum of the Veil pressing against the wound from the other side—pushing, straining, desperate to close but unable to do it alone.
The Marks in my chest blazed. His answered.
The Veil could feel us. Could feel what we carried. What we'd chosen.
Above us, the tear pulsed wider. Below, the ground cracked. The griffins screamed and the void screamed back and the whole world held its breath on the edge of a blade.
I stepped onto the dais and my body revolted. Hands shaking. Breath too fast, too shallow. Skin going cold and clammy before my mind could catch up.
The altar looked different now. The Veil tear screaming above it, the griffins holding reality in a ring around us. But the stone was the same. The carvings were the same. The void-iron restraints still embedded in the basalt, rusted now, stained dark.
I could see the grooves where my blood had run.
I stopped walking.
Eryndor was beside me. He saw it—the way my whole body locked up. The way my eyes went somewhere else. He didn't touch me. Didn't push.
He waited.
I breathed.
One breath. Two.
The altar waited. The Veil screamed. The Void pressed against the griffins' barrier.
Then I forced my body forward. One step at a time.
The void-iron pole stood at the center of the dais. The restraints still hung from it. Rusted. Stained. The ropes coiled at its base—the same ropes. The exact ropes that had bitten into my wrists while Kaelen twisted my power into a weapon.
I stared at them.
The void-iron grounded magic. Stabilized the connection to the Veil. Focused everything toward the tear. That was why I needed to be bound to it.
That was the practical reason.
The real reason was simpler. If my body tried to run—if the terror kicked in and I panicked and tried to flee while the surrender was still incomplete—
I walked toward the pole.
Eryndor's horror hit me through the bond a full second before his face changed. His eyes moved from me to the restraints to me again.
"You're asking me to bind you to the thing that broke you."
"Yes."
He closed his eyes briefly, steeling himself.
“Then tell me you're here. Tell me you're choosing this. Words, Amaria."
"I'm here. And I'm not her anymore."
He nodded.
“Your weapons,” he said quietly.
I went still.
Of course. The void-iron would stabilize the current. I couldn’t go onto it armed.
I took Dawnrender and Voidbringer from their sheaths and held them out to him hilt-first. Eryndor took them like relics, careful and wordless. Then the rest—daggers from my thighs, throwing stars from the vambraces, each hidden blade surrendered one by one.
I held still while he reached for the strapped edges at my shoulders, elbows, wrists, knees, ankles—every weapon I had built into myself after the world taught me what happened to girls who could not fight back. He removed them with reverent hands, as if unmaking an altar.
Last came the small razors braided into my hair. His fingers hesitated there for half a breath before he eased them free.
Only then did I settle against the void-iron pole.
Cold seeped through my clothes. The same cold. The basalt pressed against my spine and every nerve in my body fired at once. Run. Run. Get up. Get out. You know what happens here.
I stayed.
Eryndor knelt before me and gathered the ropes.
He lifted my wrist. His thumb traced across my pulse point—one heartbeat, two, three. Counting. Making sure.
He wrapped the rope around my wrist.
Once. Twice. The fiber scored into my skin. The same roughness. The same bite. My stomach lurched and the stone beneath me tilted and for one white-hot second I was back in the dark with Kaelen's voice in my ear and Brannick's retreating footsteps—
"Tighter," I whispered.
His eyes snapped to mine.
"I need to know I can't run."
He searched my face and found whatever he needed there. His hands steadied. The trembling stopped as he pulled the rope taut.
The pressure settled around my wrist—firm, secure, inescapable. His fingers brushed my skin as he moved to the other wrist. The same care. Each pass of rope deliberate. Precise. The hands of a male dismantling every instinct he had because the fae in front of him asked him to.
He reached behind me. The rope circled my waist, my ribs, lashing me to the pole at my back. Each wrap pressed the void-iron closer—cold metal through the thin fabric of my shirt, flush against my spine. I arched away from it on instinct. The ropes held me against it.
That was the point. The void-iron hummed.
He ghosted his lips over my throat as he secured the knot behind my back, skimming his teeth against the tender skin. Heat rushed up my core intermingling with the fear and adrenaline.
He tied the final knot. Tested it.
Then lifted my tied wrists above my head and pinned them to the pole.
His lips brushed the cusp of my ear.
"I'm not leaving." His thumbs traced my jaw. "Whatever comes through that tear. Whatever the Veil demands. You will not do this alone. Am I clear?"
He drew back and held my gaze.
"Yes," I whispered.
"Good." He nodded and traced my lip with his thumb. He nipped it and knelt down to secure the ropes around my legs. He looped it around, once, twice, and looked up at me from his knees.
“Are you ready, Rupture?”
Breathless, I nodded.
This time the hands on the ropes traced my pulse before they tightened. This time the voice said I want the war in you instead of kill false hope. This time I chose the altar. And the male kneeling before me chose to stay.
"Let no child of mine forget that they are made of Ferus and flame, and let her bow to no man, not already on his knee."
My mother’s prayer, answered at last across two centuries of time.
Eryndor skimmed his hands up my legs as he stood.
He rose to his full height before me and I tipped back my head to take him in.
He silhouetted against the void-filled sky like some kind of God-King.
He leaned down and pressed his mouth to the scar over my Marks.
Steady. Intentional. Like he was making a promise to the place where we'd been ripped apart.
My Unravel purred at his honesty.
His eyes found mine. Held. His fingers moved to the first latch of my tunic.
One.
The leather loosened across my collarbone.
Two.
Cool air hit the skin between my breasts.
Three.
My breasts and stomach now bare. The tunic hanging open like a confession he'd coaxed out of me one latch at a time.
My spine softened against the void-iron. The ropes burned my wrists and I didn't care. My thighs were slick and my breath was ragged and every latch he'd undone had unwound something inside me that I thought was unreachable. He gently stroked the underside of my breast. One slow caress.
My head dropped back. The ropes caught my weight. The sky blurred and I stopped trying to see it.
His mouth found my lower belly. Open. Hot. The scrape of his stubble against skin. My muscles clenched and his hands were already there—rough fingers hooking into the waist of my leathers, yanking them down my thighs with a violence that made my hips jerk.
He didn't pause. His mouth followed the trail his hands had cleared—breast to navel to the crease of my hip—and then both palms gripped the swell of my ass and pulled.
He buried his face in me like a male who'd been starving and just found the kill.