Chapter 27 #6
The priest began to chant, her voice distant and measured. The incense blurred my vision, muffled my thoughts, and dimmed the edges of sound until everything felt submerged, as if I was sinking slowly beneath still water.
In the distance, screams rose, followed by the clash of steel striking steel. I fought against the pull dragging me under and forced my eyes toward the priest beside us. She was still chanting, but her brow had tightened, her composure strained.
Something was wrong.
Vayren didn’t seem to be conscious as I shook him.
Her voice didn’t falter, and suddenly I felt it again—Vayren’s magic, as in the courtyard, only stronger now.
It poured into me in a steady surge, filling every hollow space, driving back the weakness that had claimed my limbs.
My fingers tightened on his shoulders as he shuddered beneath my hands, a low groan escaping him, strained and guttural, as though the force passing between us carved through him even as it strengthened me.
Light burst behind my eyes, not darkness but brilliance, and the fog that had wrapped around my thoughts burned away.
“Rise.” The head priestess ordered.
Vayren stood, and when I looked into his eyes I saw it clearly this time—not a trick of shadow or reflection, as I had thought in the courtyard, but an actual light igniting within his pupils, bright and golden like a fragment of the sun caught beneath the surface.
It flared for a brief, searing moment before contracting inward, the radiance dimming as control reasserted itself, leaving his gaze its usual dark green.
“I will now seal the bond,” she said. “Wait here. I will summon your witnesses before we finish the ritual.”
She turned and disappeared beyond the door. For a moment, the chamber felt suspended between breaths. Vayren’s gaze returned to me, intense and unguarded.
“You are moments away from being mine in full,” he said, his eyes tracing the line of my body in the cold wash of moonlight.
Before I could answer, another scream tore through the temple, closer now, followed by the unmistakable thunder of boots.
Vayren turned.
The doors burst open and Jorius stumbled inside, Kharos and Ilyth close behind him. Their bulks filled the chamber. Kharos stopped beside me and Vayren moved without hesitation, bending to seize my cloak and drawing it around me. He covered me fully and shot Jorius a look before straightening.
“What happened?” He demanded.
Jorius shifted and spoke the words that, instead of dread, stirred something dangerously close to hope within me.
“The rebels,” he said, nodding behind him.
“They’re here. They erupted as if from nowhere and began killing the priests.
” He frowned as he took in the remaining priests in the chamber, their composure fractured, fear plain in their eyes.
“Jorius! Open the door!” A scream tore from the other side.
He turned at once and pulled it wide. Rhenik rushed in, carrying the head priestess in his arms, an arrow lodged deep in her chest, blood running freely down the front of her robes.
The priests within the chamber broke from the wall and fell to their knees around her, cries rising as they realized what was already clear. The head priestess was dead.
Vayren sprang into motion. “Rhenik, close the door!”
He lunged to obey, but it was too late. The door burst inward with force, and a woman stepped across the threshold as if the temple belonged to her.
A black scarf lay wrapped around her throat.
Her dark brown hair was braided tight from her scalp into a high tie, slick with blood, bronze skin streaked crimson, dark green eyes sweeping the chamber as she slowly raised her fist.
At once, a volley of arrows rained in behind her, cutting through the incense-laden air and striking the remaining priests where they knelt. One by one they fell, white and silver robes darkening as blood spread across the grass and marble alike.
Only then did her gaze settle on Vayren.
“Hello, little brother.”
I turned to him in shock. He was utterly still, his stare locked on her as though the rest of the room had ceased to exist.
She shifted to me, assessing, taking in the silk, the cloak hastily wrapped around my shoulders, the position in which she had found us.
“And you must be Valentina,” she said, a slow smile forming. “Elion has spoken very highly of you. We have come for you.”
The words struck harder than the arrows, stealing the air from my lungs as something inside me tore loose. I dropped to my knees, the impact barely registering, my hand flying to my ear as pain split through me—sharp, foreign and wrong. It wasn’t fear. It felt like grief. It was not mine.
It came from my piercing.
I lifted my head slowly, the world tilting as my gaze found Vayren’s. I felt it the moment understanding dawned on him, saw it in the way his eyes shifted past me toward the fallen head priestess, toward the body that had been meant to seal what we had begun.
The ritual. It was incomplete.
The agony coursing through me was not my own. It was his.