Chapter 50 #2
His lips curved into a smirk. “An experiment. I’ve been working with stones that haven’t gone through the Convergence, trying to use them as conduits for ether. The sun charges them, and with the right spell, they work. But only once, and, as you remember, they can be unpredictable.”
Elara’s face flushed. “So you knew all along that’s how I managed it?”
He tilted his head slightly, his expression flat. “Was that ever in doubt?”
She let out a small laugh, despite herself.
“I'll look into the blade.”
Elara went still. “I need something else from you.”
His lips curled into that small, infuriatingly slow smile, the one that tugged at just one corner, the one she was starting to recognize right before it appeared. “Of course you do.”
She didn’t let herself hesitate. “I want you to teach me how to rift.”
The smile faded, his expression shifting into something more serious.
He didn’t argue, didn’t scoff, or make some quip.
He just looked at her for a long moment, and she could almost see the realization setting in—how real everything was becoming, how the stakes had quietly risen, how it was more than just talk and experiments now.
“I need to be able to travel on my own.”
Finally, he nodded.
“What do you know about void fractures and how they affect temporal stability?”
Elara raised a brow, trying not to roll her eyes. “I’m guessing you’re about to enlighten me.”
He grinned. “Let’s see if you can keep up.”
Elara and the Hunter practiced rifting in her room as the hours slipped away, night fading into the soft gray of dawn. They worked in near silence, the earlier tension dissolving into a shared, wordless focus.
Each attempt demanded more than she had yet mastered.
Rifting wasn’t brute force—it was balance.
Will and instinct. The Void was always there, stretched thin between worlds, waiting.
You had to feel for the fractures—the places where the veil weakened—and then, gently but decisively, part it.
It came down to control. Knowing exactly when to push—and when to pull back.
When she tried to open a rift back into her cell, she felt it—a brief pull, the seams of the world loosening beneath her touch. It wasn’t much. Just a spark, a hairline tear between realms before it snapped shut.
But it had worked.
For the first time, she had touched the Void and bent it, if only for a heartbeat. Afterward, the Hunter slipped her back into her cell, vanishing through a fissure in the stone as swiftly as he’d arrived.
She had surprised him. Apparently, opening a rift with only hours of practice wasn’t something most could manage.
Now, as the moment replayed in her mind, she couldn’t stop the surge of pride warming her chest.
She couldn’t try again here—not with guards loitering outside, not with iron bars hemming her in. Still, as she sat across from Reynnar, trying to eat dinner, her mind stayed locked on rifting. The precision of it. The strain. The way it demanded exactness.
The bread crumbled under her touch. She grimaced at her plate. After a week at the Hunter’s, the meal was nearly inedible, every bite tasting of damp stone.
Reynnar fared little better, despite forcing the food down. They’d spent the day combing through what they knew of the Aelfhenge, the dagger, the night he was taken—the one near his village, dormant for centuries until it called them from their homes.
His voice had dropped as he explained, as though he still couldn’t quite believe it himself—how they were pulled from their homes before they could even grasp what was happening, time stuttering, then snapping forward. And then he was gone. Taken.
Elara turned the description over in her mind.
It was uncomfortably familiar. Too close to the trance the Druids used on Summons Day—your body obedient, your thoughts dulled, awareness reduced to a hazy echo.
It had taken her years to learn how to push back, to anchor her mind and resist, even a little.
The Hunter had said she could still reach for the Draoth Cara from a distance.
Not impossible—just difficult. He’d been right.
After nearly an hour of meditation, she’d managed to sense it: a faint thread grazing the edge of her awareness.
She could tug, coax the connection into place, but it was fragile—barely there.
In an emergency, she doubted it would hold.
It frustrated her, but she kept practicing. Slow or not, faint as smoke, the effort itself mattered. Focusing on that fragile thread—however briefly she could hold it—gave her something solid to cling to. A task. A rhythm. Proof that she wasn’t entirely helpless.
“You’re thinking too hard, Eilíara. I can practically see the smoke coming out of your ears.”
Elara’s gaze snapped up from where she had been staring at the floor, her eyes narrowing, but her lips betrayed her with the slightest twitch.
Now that she could understand him more clearly, she’d come to realize just how much of a smartass he could be.
It was something she’d suspected for a while, but actually hearing it in the words, in his tone. ..
“You’re one to talk. I’ve seen you—”
Before the noise registered, she saw it—the way his body tensed, muscles coiling, alert. That split-second of warning was all she had before Malak appeared at her cell, leaning casually against the frame with that twisted, cruel smile that made her skin crawl.
Her pulse quickened as he pushed through the wards, the creak of her cell door echoing through the corridor.
“Let’s go.”
Elara felt Reynnar rise behind her, felt his presence at her back like a wall of tension. She swallowed hard but didn’t move.
Malak’s laugh was a low, dark rumble that sent a chill down her spine.
"Some highborn pricks paid for a night with you. Guess you’re worth something after all."