Chapter 29 Aurelia #2
My heart skipped. It was the same design that was on the box under my bed back home. I remembered the old stories about this blade—about truth and blood and binding.
My face must have betrayed my unease, because Kaelith paused.
“I’m not going to hurt you tonight, Aurelia,” he said smoothly.
But I wasn’t so sure he hadn’t already carved deeper wounds—forcing me to wear crowns I never wanted, to play the queen in games that were never mine. A blade scars the body. Kaelith scarred the soul.
“That’s a beautiful hilt,” I said, forcing my voice even.
“Ah yes,” Kaelith said, admiring the blade. “Eryndis’s Dagger of Truth. One cut from this, and you’ll answer any question asked—whether you want to or not.”
Kaelith flipped the dagger expertly, holding it by the blade and offering the hilt to me.
I hesitated. Mama’s stories flickered up like warnings—truth and blood bound speaker to listener, questioner to questioned.
Ask wrong, cut wrong, and you’d find your own tongue spilling truths you never meant to give.
The moment my fingers closed around the serpents, a pulse of warmth shot up my arms. It was electric, euphoric.
A sound escaped me—a soft, involuntary moan.
Kaelith’s mouth turned into a dangerous smile. “Interesting,” he murmured.
Without ceremony, he removed his cloak, then his shirt, revealing a body marked from neck to navel in ancient sigils and black ink.
Runes wound down his arms, across his chest, over his back, layered with markings I couldn’t decipher.
For a brief, shameful moment, I wondered if the tattoos continued further.
Lower.
“You have a lot of markings,” I said.
Kaelith’s smirk deepened. “Yes, I do,” he said, voice curling with amusement. “They cover every part of me.”
He stepped closer, cupping my face with surprising gentleness. “Cut my wrists,” he said.
I recoiled slightly. “What? Why?”
“Cut them,” he repeated, voice still soft, but iron hidden underneath. He extended his arms toward me, palms up.
I swallowed hard. “As much as I would love to harm you, I’m not doing that until you explain what this place is and why you brought me here.”
Kaelith stared at me so long the silence became uncomfortable, before tilting his head and biting his lower lip as if to keep from smiling.
“I cannot tell you.”
“Then I’m not doing anything.” I turned to leave the way we came in but the entrance had vanished.
My fingers tightened around the dagger. “You see, Aurelia, no one knows this room exists. No one. Not the Shadow Elves, not the Keepers. Not Malachi,” he said softly.
“My father did not know of this room. The goddesses do not know of this room. You’re alone and stuck with me here until you do as I ask. ”
“Then just tell me…”
“I cannot!” Blood began dripping from his nose. Wiping it away with his thumb, he walked toward me until I was looking up at him. Grabbing my face, he growled. “Do not ask me again.”
“Now, cut me,” he demanded.
My fingers trembled as I pressed the tip of the dagger into his wrist—just enough to draw a bead of blood, dark in the torchlight. The magic shivered between us, waiting for the question that would pull it tight. I kept my mouth shut.
Truthblades demand balance—any truth I cut out of him would give him the right to carve one out of me.
“Good,” Kaelith said, voice approving.
My stomach knotted tighter with every heartbeat. Something felt wrong.
“Give me the dagger,” Kaelith said, holding out his hand.
I hesitated but placed the blade into his waiting palm.
“You are powerful, Aurelia,” he said, voice thick with hunger. “I can feel it beneath your skin. I intend to harness that.”
He set the dagger down and pulled me sharply against him, spinning me so my back pressed flush to his chest. His warmth bled through the thin layers of my dress.
Kaelith lifted his left wrist, the blood still dripping from the fresh cut. “Drink,” he said.
“No,” I whispered, panic rising. “No, I won’t—”
Old whispers clawed at the back of my mind—fragments of stories, warnings scrawled in the margins of forgotten texts. Blood shared was power shared. Blood taken and returned was a chain, a bond no blade could sever.
“Aurelia,” Kaelith murmured, lowering his wrist to my lips, “drink.”
I tried to plead. I twisted my wrist to break his hold but he blurred; the air folding around him, the movement too fast to track. He was already where my arm would be, catching and turning me before the motion finished. It wasn’t that I’d missed—it was that no mortal could have hit him.
When I opened my mouth to protest, he shoved his bleeding wrist against my lips.
Heat filled every hollow, every ache. It claimed. And in the pit of my gut, shame bloomed hot, because Aeryn waited for me to save him, while here I was, swallowing someone else’s power.
I couldn't stop.
A moan tore from Kaelith’s throat—a low, guttural sound of triumph. “That's my good girl,” he breathed.
Flashes of memory not my own seared through me:
Two boys playing in a garden drenched in gold light. One with snow-white hair and eyes the color of burnished bronze. The other with skin like polished mahogany and eyes like molten gold.
Brothers. Inseparable. Until they weren’t.
“Enough,” Kaelith said, pulling his wrist away, blood trailing down his arm.
I staggered back, wiping my mouth with a shaking hand.
What had I done?
Another single strip of crimson blood leaked from Kaelith’s nose. He wiped it away with a careless swipe of his hand.
Then he picked up the dagger again.
“Your turn,” he said, voice heavy with dark satisfaction.
Terror seized my limbs.
“No,” I said, but my voice was too weak.
He grabbed my wrist with careful precision and dragged the blade across my skin. A sharp, burning pain flared through my arm. I gasped, paralyzed by it.
Kaelith brought my bleeding wrist to his mouth, his canines flashing in the firelight. He drank. Deeply. And as he drank, I felt the world tilt again. Felt something ancient and heavy coil around my spine. Binding me. Changing me.
He pulled away, licking the open wound before dropping my arm.
“I can’t have you choosing to die on me to back out of our arrangement, now can I,” Kaelith said, almost casually, as he wiped my blood from his mouth. “I noticed you don’t have a mark of immortality yet.”
The reminder burned. Unmarked meant mortal. Mortal meant killable.
He took a step closer, watching me like a cat watches a cornered mouse.
A dull ache bloomed in my chest. At first, I thought it was just the adrenaline finally crashing down.
But then, the pain spread.
A thousand needles of lightning, branching out across my wrist, stabbing deep into the half-healed wound Kaelith had opened.
I stumbled back, clutching at my chest as something else—something cold and wrong—writhed beneath my skin.
Darkness began to leak from me. Shadows, thick and oily, curling into the air.
“I can’t—” I gasped, the words sticking in my throat. “I can’t breathe—”
Panic clawed at my chest. I dropped to my knees, hands scrabbling at the floor, desperate for air that wouldn’t come.
“What’s happening to me?” I rasped.
Kaelith knelt before me, his bloody smile widening until it split his face into something monstrous.
“You’re dying, my nychta,” he said, almost lovingly.
The world narrowed to a single point of agony. Shadows poured from my skin, thick as tar, twisting like they meant to strangle me.
And the last thing I saw before the darkness swallowed me whole—
was his teeth.
Too sharp. Too bright. And stained with my blood.