Chapter 1 #3
Here in the city, it’s just survival. Strategy. Waiting for the right weakness to pry apart.
I rub at my shoulder absently. Varek notices.
“Sit.”
“No.”
“Pax.”
“Don’t start.”
He takes one step closer. “Let me see it.”
I open my mouth to argue. Then the pain gives an acute throb that makes the decision for me.
I mutter something rude under my breath and drag out a chair to get closer to the table. “Fine. But if you make a fuss, I’m revoking your warehouse privileges.”
A strange softness moves over his face. “You have not granted them.”
“I’m considering it retroactively.”
That almost-smile again.
I hate how much I want to earn a real one.
Varek moves behind me. Not looming this time. Just… there. Close enough that the air shifts with his heat.
I busy myself with the grain sack, pouring a measure into one of the storage jars because apparently dried grain requires my full emotional commitment right now. “You should be in Dathanor,” I mutter.
The words come out casual. They’re not.
Behind me, leather creaks softly as he folds his arms. “Yes.”
I glance over my shoulder. “Yes?”
“Yes,” he repeats. Calm. “I should.”
“And yet?”
“And yet.”
I twist the lid onto the jar harder than necessary. “You’re the commander of a rebellion, Varek. Pretty sure that’s a job that requires you actually being there.”
“I have capable leaders.”
“Shanae will stab you if she hears you say that like it’s a reason.”
His mouth twitches faintly. “Possible,” he says.
That’s the closest he gets to humour most days.
I scoop more grain. “You’ve been gone weeks.”
“Three.”
I pause. “You’re counting?”
“I count many things.”
Right. Of course he does. That’s very on-brand for the terrifying purple war commander.
I glance at him again. “Three weeks… and you haven’t gone back once.”
“No.”
“Why?”
His gaze doesn’t waver. “Because leaving is not simple.”
“That’s a load of shit and you know it.”
“Perhaps.”
The calm in that answer makes me grit my teeth. I slam the scoop back into the sack. “You can cross half this bloody world in a day if you want to. I’ve seen you do it.”
“Yes.”
“And Dathanor’s warded up to the eyeballs.”
“Yes.”
I drag the scoop through the grain sack again, watching the pale kernels settle there. “Right. So explain it to me like I’m stupid.”
Behind me there’s a small pause. Not an offended one. Just… thoughtful.
When I glance back, Varek’s silver eyes have narrowed slightly, and he’s studying me the way he studies most things—like I’m a puzzle with a few missing pieces he intends to find.
“I have never believed you to be stupid,” he says.
I snort. “Good. Because if this turns out to be some mysterious monster-logic problem, I’m going to be very annoyed.”
His mouth almost curves. “Then I will explain.”
He shifts his weight slightly, folding his arms across his chest. The movement pulls the leather across his shoulders, and the dried blood on the strap creaks faintly. “The city is watching.”
I frown.
“More than usual,” he continues, voice low and steady. “Since the citadel incident.”
Right. Kael and Sonny. Breaking into the royal citadel to dig up records the Queen would rather burn and nearly turning the entire palace security apparatus upside down.
It’s hard to forget that, given that the patrols started the same day. Palace guards have been everywhere since then. Patrols thicker than flies around meat. Armour gleaming, bows strung, tempers short. The people at the markets whisper about it constantly.
I ease away from the table. “You know you could leave through the tunnels.”
Or at least he does now. Three weeks ago, he didn’t. When he showed up at my front door with Kael and Sonny half dragging trouble behind them, he had no idea about the access points to the city’s forgotten canal network.
I showed him after that, which was probably the smartest and stupidest thing I’ve ever done in the same week.
“They are not for me,” Varek says quietly.
I frown. “They’re for anyone who needs to disappear.”
“They are for escape,” he corrects. “Not for command movement.”
I know what he means.
The tunnels are narrow in places. Unstable in others. Half-flooded sections that require careful timing to cross. Some passages collapse if too many bodies move through them too quickly.
They work for small groups.
Refugees.
Desperate people trying not to die.
Not for the leader of a rebellion moving back and forth regularly.
“They lead to you,” he continues.
My stomach tumbles.
“If I use them, and they are discovered…” His gaze drifts briefly around the warehouse. “…this place burns first.”
He doesn’t say it dramatically, just as a simple fact. And that cuts deeper than anything else he’s said today.
Because he’s right. These tunnels are the reason people escape. If the crown ever finds them, the city’s only quiet exit closes.
“And if the Queen ever finds it,” I mutter, staring at the grain jar, “that’s the end of the rebellion.” I’m absolutely referring to the tunnels and Dathanor.
I blow out a breath. “So you’re hiding here,” I surmise.
“Observing.”
“You’re hiding,” I press, because I’m feeling like a snipey fucker and want to be an arsehole.
“Observing.”
“Bloody semantics.”
“Important ones.”
I scrub a hand down my face, feeling the rough scrape of stubble and the pull of old lines that never quite faded. “Fine. Patrols. I get it.”
The silence that follows stretches just a fraction too long.
I glance up. “But that’s not the real reason.”
Varek doesn’t answer. He doesn’t have to.
I sigh. “Right. The bond.”
His jaw constricts. Barely. But I see it.
The bonds between us stir faintly in my chest, like they know we’re talking about them.
Two bonds now.
Two.
Apparently fate looked at our already complicated situation and decided what we really needed was a sequel.
“You could still go,” I say.
His gaze narrows slightly. “You believe that?”
“Yeah.” The lie tastes bitter. I look away first. “It’ll be uncomfortable,” I admit. “But doable.”
Varek moves a single step closer. Close enough that the air shifts, the bond pulling a little firmer between us like an invisible thread.
“Incorrect.”
My breath catches before I can stop it.
“The bond is incomplete,” he says quietly.
“Yeah,” I mutter. “I gathered.”
“Distance would worsen the strain.”
“You’re saying you’d miss me,” I deadpan, hoping he can’t hear the uptick of my pulse.
His expression doesn’t change. “I am saying the bond would cause pain.”
I snort. “Romantic.”
“It is not intended to be.”
Fair enough. I shove another jar harder than necessary onto the shelf. “So you’re stuck here because our stupid cosmic marriage paperwork hasn’t been finalised yet.”
“That is one factor.”
“Fantastic.”
Silence settles between us again before he says quietly, “There is another.”
I glance up. Varek is watching me again. Not assessing this time. Something else.
“You are searching,” he says.
I freeze. “Don’t start.”
“You have contacted your sources.”
“They’re not sources.”
“They are.”
“They’re people who owe me favours.”
“Yes.”
“That’s different.”
“It is not.”
I glare at him, but he doesn’t budge.
“You are asking about the rifts,” he continues.
My shoulders tense. “And?”
“You are attempting to find a path home.”
The word hangs in the air.
Home.
Earth.
Australia.
Dusty roads and red dirt. The smell of eucalyptus after rain. My mum yelling at the telly during cricket like the players can hear her from Melbourne. Long summer evenings. The mines out west. The stupid V8 Thomas insisted on buying even though it drank fuel like a dying star.
I swallow. “Yeah,” I say roughly. “I am.”
Varek doesn’t look surprised.
“When you told me the Pyronox mentioned it,” I continue, “I started asking questions.”
“Solan.”
“Yeah, the Pyronox. The one bonded to the human male.” It seems there’s been a lot more happening outside of the city than I realised, especially recently.
Sure, I’ve seen the rifts, each one making my hairs stand up on end, but that so many humans have travelled through so close together is unprecedented.
“Jack, Solan’s mate.” Varek nods once. “He believes a rift can be… reversed.”
“Or stabilised, I expect,” I say. “Or something.”
“Something.”
I rub the back of my neck. “Look, I’m not exactly working with peer-reviewed research here, all right?”
His gaze flickers faintly with something like curiosity. “You wish to return.”
“Don’t you?”
Surely he does. Othrynn was his homeworld, the place he was ripped away from.
He doesn’t answer immediately, which is interesting. Because Varek is not usually a man who hesitates.
“I arrived in Terrafeara nineteen years ago,” he says.
I blink. I didn’t actually know that. “That long?”
“Yes.”
“Bloody hell.” I shake my head slightly. “But you must still think about going back?”
“Sometimes.”
The quiet honesty of it catches me off-guard.
I clear my throat. “Well. I’ve only been stuck here about ten.”
He tilts his head slightly in acknowledgement. He found me after I’d been dragged through a rift and dumped into this nightmare world for about three weeks.
Three very unpleasant weeks.
“You arrived shortly after your thirtieth year,” he says.
“Yeah.”
“From Earth.”
“Obviously.”
“You were born in the United Kingdom.”
I narrow my eyes. “How the hell do you know that?”
“You told me.”
“When?”
“While bleeding.”
“…Right.”
That tracks. Back then, I’d been badly hurt and, while healing, a little delirious at times.
I didn’t realise I’d shared so much with him.
Honestly, thinking back, I tend to only recall seeing blood and Thomas’s broken, prone form.
And my rage, my fear that Varek had taken the one person from me who was meant to be mine.
“You moved to Australia as a child,” he continues.
“Fourteen,” I say almost absently, curious where he’s going with this.
“With your mother.”
“Yeah.”
“And your father remained behind.”
The words land oddly in my chest. I shrug. “Yeah. Well.”
Silence stretches.
“You have not seen him since,” Varek says.
“Nope.”
Another pause follows before he asks, “Would you seek him if you returned?”
That question punches straight through my ribs. I look away quickly, pretending to be very interested in tying off the grain sack. “Don’t know.”
My dad’s probably still in Coventry somewhere—same stubborn jaw I’ve got, same temper, if he hasn’t mellowed with age. Maybe. If he’s alive. Hell, he could be dead. He could have forgotten I exist. He’s likely to have started a whole new life.
I wouldn’t blame him if he has.
I shrug again. “Doesn’t matter.”
Varek watches me for a long moment. “It matters.”
“Yeah, well.” I shove the sack closed and hoist it onto the shelf with more force than necessary. Grain dust puffs into the air around my hands. “First step is actually finding a bloody way home.”
Even saying it makes something twist low in my gut.
Truth is, I stopped thinking about home a long time ago. The first year here, I thought about it constantly.
Earth. Australia. Roads that went somewhere familiar.
Real rain. Real skies. Coffee that didn’t taste faintly like burnt bark.
I used to wake up every morning convinced that if I walked far enough in the right direction, I’d find the edge of whatever nightmare had swallowed me and tumble back into the world I knew.
Turns out that’s not how Terrafeara works.
Terrafeara eats pieces of worlds and keeps them.
And the city—this sprawling, chaotic, half-civilised mess of markets and towers and alleyways full of creatures that would give Earth biologists a stroke—doesn’t care where you came from. It only cares whether you learn fast enough not to die.
The first months of moving here—after I’d forced Varek to bring me here and then he’d left—were… educational.
I learned which districts to avoid after dark. Which species you never turn your back on. Which ones will cheat you with a smile and which ones will simply stab you.
I learned how to keep my head down when the Queen’s guards passed and how to disappear into a crowd when someone started asking the wrong questions. I learned how to trade, how to fix things no one else understood, how to make myself useful enough that people preferred me alive.
Turns out being a mechanic translates surprisingly well across dimensions.
Machines are machines, even when half of them run on energy no one can properly explain.
So I stayed.
First because I had to, and no fucking way was I living with the rebels, and more specifically with the one being who’d all but torn Thomas’s body apart. Then because leaving stopped feeling real.
The hope of going home didn’t vanish all at once. It just… faded. Year by year, like a photograph left too long in the sun.
Eventually the city stopped feeling like a prison and started feeling like something else.
Mine.
Not in the grand sense. I don’t own it. This is very much the Queen and her minions’ domain.
But I know its rhythms now. The markets when they wake up before sunrise. The canals when the lanterns start glowing. The little underground network of favours and debts and quiet deals that keep half the place functioning while the crown pretends everything runs on royal authority.
Down here, people like me keep the city breathing. And somewhere along the way, I found my place in that.
So, yeah. Thinking about going home again now? That opens a door I nailed shut years ago.
“And if you did?” Varek asks.
I realise I’ve gone still.
“If the rifts could send people back,” he continues, voice quiet but relentless in that way of his, “what would you do?”
I hesitate and stare down at the table as the bond pulses faintly in my chest. It’s annoying and persistent. “I’d go,” I say. The words come out before I can soften them, and silence drops like a stone.
Varek doesn’t move, doesn’t say anything, but his hand flexes once at his side.
The bond tightens, a thrum of pressure.
And I hate that I feel it.