Veinblood (The Veinbound Trilogy #3)

Chapter 1

Chapter One

ELLIE

“What is severed from its source seeks always to return.”

The Healer's Codex, ancient Tidevein manuscript

Darkness surrounds me. It isn’t the same as the shadows Sacha wraps around us, the ones that pulse with his heartbeat.

I know those shadows. They don’t scare me.

This darkness is hungrier. Colder. It swallows sound and space alike, and presses in on me from every side, like it’s trying to crush me into nothing.

I reach inward, searching for that bright thread of power that became part of me before River Crossing. When I find the place it lives, there’s nothing there. The energy is gone. The connection is gone. It’s almost like it was never real to begin with.

I keep searching, refusing to accept the absence, but it’s still not there.

Panic surges through me, fast and hard, dragging memories I don’t want to remember with it. I don’t want to see them, but closing my eyes won’t block them out.

Thornspire Keep.

Those final seconds before everything went dark. The moment when everything came undone.

Sereven’s face forms in my mind, contempt melting into fear, as our combined power flowed into the crystal.

Light breaking outward in waves that made the air around us shimmer and bend.

And the pressure … the pressure built so fast I was sure my ribs were going to snap.

Every breath turned to fire. My hands shook with the strain, willing the power to ease, to stop, to bend.

But it didn’t. No matter what I tried, I couldn’t stop it.

I remember Sacha’s hand tight around mine, the tension in his body as he battled to hold his shadows in place.

The crystal’s whine kept climbing, growing higher …

louder, until it was all I could hear. The sound cut through everything—my thoughts, my fear, even the pain—until it was an endless, rising shriek.

Sereven’s face twisted, his mouth moving as he tried to prise the crystal away from his palm. Blood dripped from his nose, his ears, his eyes. He was saying something, shouting maybe, but I couldn’t hear him over the crystal’s scream.

The crystal pulsed brighter. Brighter. The light became so intense I could see it through my closed eyes. And then the sound changed, until it was no longer a whine, but something deeper. Something … wrong.

And then …

Oblivion.

For a long moment, there was nothing. No light. No sound. No thought. Just a vast, aching silence.

That’s when the darkness surrounded me.

I float inside it, lost in the emptiness. Then images start to form. They flash through my mind like fever dreams, showing different versions of me.

Ellie Bennet, dressed in winter clothes and stumbling through a desert, drawn toward a silver tower.

Elowen, with silver-streaked hair and eyes like mercury, the vessel Sereven claimed to create, filled with stolen power.

The Varel et’Arvath, storm that follows shadow, arms raised and calling down lightning, fulfilling prophecy despite all efforts to prevent it.

Each version feels both real and wrong. The woman who first stepped into that tower seems impossibly naive now, unaware of the actions her appearance set into motion. She thought her biggest problem was being estranged in a strange place.

The woman who commands the storm feels more real, more like who I’m supposed to be. That version understands what it means to have power, to use it, to accept the responsibility that comes with it.

But Elowen, the name Sereven spoke with such recognition and fear, remains a mystery still unfolding. A history I lived, but don’t remember. A childhood stolen from me twice. Once by the Authority, once by the people who saved me from them.

The images fade, and a voice whispers the words that have haunted me since River Crossing.

Where shadow leads, storm will follow.

I didn’t understand them at first. I resisted the way people linked the prophecy to me, certain they were trying to force me into becoming something I wasn’t ready to be.

But now, those words are woven through everything.

What happened in the tower, and every step Sacha and I have taken since.

Every choice we’ve made. Every battle we’ve fought.

Was the connection between us ever just coincidence? Or was it always meant to happen, written into the veins of this world long before I ever returned to it?

If it was fate, then none of it was accidental. The thought chills me more than the darkness does. What if I never had a choice in any of this? What if every decision I made was just another step along a path someone else had already carved out?

Falling between worlds. Finding the tower. The way his shadows weave around my silver. Even Sereven, with his obsession and his hatred and his desperate need to control what he created.

But then I remember the moments when choice felt real. The first time I reached for Sacha's hand in the tower. Being part of the rescue mission at Glassfall Gap. Healing Sacha. Standing against Sereven at Thornspire, knowing I might die.

Is that what he fears most? What we might become together rather than the power we each hold separately. What we already became for those few minutes in Thornspire Keep before everything went wrong?

Sereven.

There’s something about him that I need to remember.

Something important. It hovers at the edge of my thoughts.

What he said, or what I saw in his face in those final moments before everything exploded.

A piece of information that matters, but my mind keeps sliding away from it like it’s too slippery to hold.

My thoughts scatter, pulled in a different direction by names I can’t forget.

Kalliss. Meren. Nyassa. Vorith.

Wielders of flame, earth, tide, and wind. Four Veinblood Masters. People who gave up everything to hide me from the Authority’s reach.

What kind of power could I have carried as a child, that four Masters would die to protect me?

I try to picture their final moments. Did they stand together, all four of them, their powers woven into something vast enough to break through the boundaries of their world? Did the air around them crack and burn as their powers collided?

They must have known it would kill them. Must have weighed the cost of their lives against the possibility that I might survive, might grow up to be someone worth saving.

The idea that they looked at a three-year-old and saw hope worth dying for is almost too much to bear.

I was just a child. I don’t remember their faces. I never knew their names. But they gave up everything for me anyway.

But why would it take four of them to achieve what Sacha did alone, with a single summons? A single desperate act, cast out seconds before they sealed him away.

My thoughts shift again, Sereven’s voice echoing through my mind.

You’re a vessel, Elowen. The most perfect vessel ever created.

Pride and rage were tangled in every word. As though I was his creation, his greatest achievement, and by claiming my own power, I’d betrayed him.

That revelation still makes me sick.

The Authority didn’t just take power. They took children. Used them as containers to strip Veinbloods of their gifts. Temporary vessels. Each one died the second the magic was finished with them.

But I didn’t.

I didn’t just hold the power. I kept it. Something in me didn’t break the way they expected.

I bonded with it.

And now I can’t stop thinking about the ones who didn’t. The ones who died.

How many children were taken from their families? How many names have been scrubbed from history? How many died before they even understood what was happening to them?

What kind of person uses children like that?

Knowing each one would die, but doing it anyway?

The casual way Sereven talked about it, like it was just another tool in the Authority’s arsenal.

Like those children were materials to be used up, rather than people with lives and dreams and families who loved them.

How do you convince yourself that’s acceptable?

How do you look at a child and see only what they can give you?

The worst part is knowing that I survived where they didn't. That whatever quality made me different, whatever accident of biology or magic, it allowed me to bond with stolen power instead of being consumed by it.

I think about all the families who lost children to the Authority. Parents who had held their sons and daughters close one moment, and had them ripped away the next. Did they search? Did they hope? Or did they know, somehow, that their children were never coming home?

The space around me shifts. It’s still empty, still silent, but the tension in the air sharpens. The fine hairs on my arms lift seconds before the silver-haired woman’s voice whispers through my mind.

“Remember what lies beneath. Remember the bracelet. Remember the storm.”

The bracelet I was found with. Was it more than jewelry? A connection to Meridian, sent with me to Earth?

“Elowen.”

She coalesces from the darkness, less than an arm’s length in front of where I drift. Her eyes shine with silver flecks that mirror those in mine.

“The circle was never meant to be broken this way. What was separated seeks reunion.”

I open my mouth to speak, but nothing comes out. She nods anyway, like she can hear my thoughts.

“The crystal’s power was never meant to be contained. It was a conduit, not a vessel. Sereven twisted its purpose, thinking he could bind what was always meant to flow freely.” She lifts her hand and reaches toward me.

Images come to life between us, more real than the visions I had before.

A circular chamber carved from stone. A blue crystal suspended above a pedestal in the center. Figures move in unison, wearing dark robes embroidered with silver threads that catch the light as their hands shape symbols in the air.