Chapter Twenty-Two
I have discovered magic that should not be used.
I found it in a book, in one of the old libraries in Velmoria.
I have no idea who wrote this. But the magic it contains…
It could change everything. It is forbidden, of course.
For it is grave. I am to become a healer.
I will not bloody my hands with such magic.
But the things I could do with this…
Tabitha Wysteria
Bryn Wynter’s blue eyes flew open.
For a breathless moment, he did not know where he was, or even what he was.
Surely he was dead. His head throbbed dully, his eyes burnt, and his mouth was so dry it felt as though he had not tasted water in days.
Every inch of his body ached, the deep, bone-heavy pain of someone who had been broken and hurled back together poorly, as if he had been cast from a cliff and left to shatter on the rocks below.
He forced himself to look around, dread curling in his chest. Was this death?
The place unsettled him for how familiar it was.
Too familiar. It looked too much like home.
Bryn had heard the stories of Nilfheim—the Underworld his people spoke of in reverent tones.
A land of endless warmth, of roaring hearths that never died, of laughter, drink, and eternal comfort.
He had always scoffed at such tales. An eternity like that had never appealed to him.
This was not it.
The air bit with cold. He lay upon thick furs inside a small wooden hut, the scent of smoke and earth clinging to the air. He tried to sit up, only for agony to rip through him so violently that a groan tore from his throat before he could stop it.
‘Don’t move,’ a voice warned from behind him.
Bryn’s breath caught. His eyes widened as someone came into view, crouching beside him. Someone solid, real, and very much alive.
‘How…’ Bryn swallowed hard at the sight of Kage Blackburn, looking exactly as he had the last time Bryn had seen him, unchanged by time or distance. The perpetually gruff wyverian paid no heed to Bryn’s shock, methodically wiping dried blood from Bryn’s arms with quiet care.
‘You should rest,’ Kage said, his tone firm but not unkind.
‘How are ya here?’ Bryn tried to sit up again, only for Kage to press him gently back into the thick furs. ‘Last time I saw ya, ya were headed back to yer own kingdom.’
‘It’s a long story.’
‘Where have ya been?’
‘And that’s an even longer one.’
Something shadowed Kage’s dark eyes then, something heavy and unspoken. Bryn noticed it and bit down on his lip, choosing not to ask. There would be time for truths later. For now, it was enough that Kage was here, real and breathing, when Bryn had thought himself utterly alone.
‘Am I dead?’ Bryn asked quietly.
Kage flinched, just barely, but enough for Bryn to see it.
‘No,’ Kage replied. ‘You’re alive. Barely. You’ve been unconscious for days. You were stabbed so many times I’m honestly not sure how you’re still breathing.’
Bryn went still. ‘I should be dead?’
Kage shrugged, though his frown deepened. ‘Most likely. You were struck in the heart with an axe.’
Bryn glanced down at his own body, brows lifting in muted disbelief. ‘So I should be dead…’
‘And yet you’re not,’ Kage said, studying him with visible confusion. ‘Perhaps the wounds weren’t as deep as I thought.’
Bryn’s breath hitched, sharp and shallow, as panic clawed its way up his chest. He needed air. He needed space. He needed to move. With gritted teeth and trembling limbs, he twisted to one side and forced himself upright. Every nerve screamed in protest.
Kage watched in silence, confusion etched across his face, but Bryn offered no explanation.
He staggered out of the small hut and into the open snow, managing only a handful of steps before his strength gave out entirely.
He collapsed hard, the cold biting through him as if the world itself had turned its back.
Tears slid freely down his cheeks. His chest ached, hollow and unbearable, as though his heart were splintering all over again. Everything he had tried to outrun came crashing down around him.
He heard Kage approach, boots crunching through snow, but Bryn did not look back. He pressed his shaking hands into the frozen ground, struggling for breath as sobs wracked his body. His wounds throbbed, cruel reminders of a truth he had been too afraid to name.
‘I shouldn’t be alive,’ Bryn whispered, the words torn from somewhere deep and broken.
‘Perhaps.’ Even without seeing him, Bryn could almost picture Kage’s shrug behind him.
‘I should be dead.’
‘But you are not.’
‘No…I am not.’ Bryn dragged a hand across his face and stared down at his bare chest and torso, mottled with scars and healing wounds. The cold should have been biting him raw by now, should have driven him back towards shelter. But he felt nothing at all.
Then Kage spoke again, his voice quieter this time, edged with something searching.
‘Why?’
Bryn’s shoulders trembled.
‘Why are you not dead, Bryn?’
Bryn stiffened as he glanced over his shoulder, lifting his gaze to meet those familiar dark eyes.
Kage Blackburn looked much the same as he always had and yet, something was wrong.
Not wrong enough to name, not sharp enough to grasp, but there all the same.
As if something essential had shifted. Perhaps Kage had changed.
Or perhaps it was the world that no longer sat where it once had.
‘Do ya remember that story I told ya,’ Bryn asked quietly, his voice rough, ‘from a different life?’ He swallowed.
‘Da one about da sickness that nearly wiped us all out. Me sista, Wren… she went into da forest and neva told anyone what she did. But folk whispered. They said she bargained with a spirit. That she sold her soul so da wild wolves would hunt for us and bring us food so we could survive.’
He let Kage help him to his feet, leaning heavily as they moved, step by careful step, back into the hut.
Bryn sank down onto the furs with a weary sigh.
For a fleeting moment, something like relief stirred in him when Kage pulled thick pelts around his shoulders, tucking warmth close with a gentleness Bryn remembered well.
Almost, he smiled.
But the expression never quite reached his face.
Because when Kage’s long fingers brushed his skin, Bryn felt it then, clear and undeniable. Cold. Not the clean, honest cold of snow and winter air, but something deeper, something wrong.
Kage’s skin was colder than the snow outside.
And Bryn did not remember him ever feeling like that before.
‘Wren told me what she did,’ Bryn went on, his voice barely holding together.
‘She said she struck a bargain. That when one of us dies, da other cannot.’ His gaze lifted, fixing on that stern face he had dreamt of through endless nights, the face he had prayed to see again.
‘Do ya understand what that means, Kage Blackburn? If Wren dies, then no matter what happens to me, I cannot follow. And if I die… then neither can she.’
Kage went utterly still.
Only then did Bryn truly notice how Kage wore no heavy coat, no furs, only his usual wyverian clothes. The cold here gnawed at bone, even for wolverians. Wyverians should have been shaking by now. And yet Kage stood unmoved, untouched, as though winter itself dared not claim him.
‘If I survived this,’ Bryn mumbled, his heart beginning to thunder once more, ‘then that means…’ His words faltered as he stared into those black eyes, eyes he knew as well as his own, and yet did not. They looked dimmer now. Hollow. As if something vital had gone out and never returned.
What had happened to him? What had the world done to Kage Blackburn?
‘It means…’ Bryn dragged in a breath, sharp and painful, as though the truth itself cut his lungs. ‘It means Wren is dead.’