Chapter 73
Live.
The shadows sang, soft now. Fierce still. The blade slipped from Ashterion’s hand with a muted thud as it hit the grass. His whole body trembled. His shoulders were hunched, breath ragged, fingers curled into the earth as though he might fly apart without it.
The shadows cradled him.
Ashterion sat there, curled in on himself, forehead pressed to the inside of his arm as the song hummed through his bones.
He should pick up the blade.
He should finish what he started.
That had been the deal. The only real path forward.
But…
The song said otherwise.
The song said no.
It said: You choose. You always have.
A sound caught in his throat, sharp and unfamiliar. A sound made by someone who had forgotten how to want.
His hands shook as he forced himself to sit upright again, bracing one palm against the tree trunk behind him. The world felt different—warmer, brighter, too full and too loud all at once. He hadn’t heard silence in so long, not really, and now he wasn’t sure he wanted to.
The air in his lungs vanished as a strange heat unfurled in his blood, a hum threading through his veins, slow and rising. Not pain. Not magic in the familiar sense. No, this was older. This was other.
He inhaled, head tipping back as his body tensed.
The shadows, his ever-present companions, stilled with him.
For the first time in centuries, they felt crowded. Ashterion’s pulse thundered in his ears. It wasn’t their usual sentience. Not the way they pressed or warned or sang. This was… someone. He swore he felt it, fingers brushing the edge of his consciousness.
And just as quickly, it was gone.
Ashterion’s lips parted, a cold breath escaping. “What the fuck?”
No answer.
The hum beneath his skin surged. The tingling became fire.
And the sky screamed open.
Power tore through him. A surge of heat and pressure that twisted up his spine and cracked open the air around him. His back arched with the force of it, eyes flying wide as the magic he hadn’t known in decades roared back to life, ripped free of the quiet cage it had been buried in.
His power.
His.
It didn’t just burn. It breathed. It remembered.
The wards around the garden shattered. The skies above his city blackened, blotted out by a rising storm of raw magic that howled and shimmered.
From far below, shouts rose.
Cries of fear. Gasps of awe.
Ashterion sat frozen, chest heaving, half-kneeling in the grass beneath the tree as the sky swallowed itself.
He’d seen shadows move. But never like this.
Not to him.
Not to anything.