13. Sabine
SABINE
The mountain path blurs beneath my boots.
I don't remember leaving the caves. One moment I was in the dark, staring at the stone ceiling above our chamber, and now I'm here—halfway down the mountain, supply sack over my shoulder, fog swallowing my ankles like the earth is trying to reclaim me.
The valley materializes slowly below through the gray morning, smoke rising from chimneys, the faint bleat of livestock, the ordinary pulse of a world that used to be mine.
I watch it like a stranger watches a painting.
Focus, I tell myself. Bread. Salted meat. Candles if Corren has extras.
But my body won't cooperate. My body is still up there, in that chamber, beneath eight hundred pounds of obsidian-gray gargoyle. Still feeling the precise weight of him settling between my thighs like he was carved specifically for that space.
My skin still remembers the temperature of him—not human warm, but deeper than that, volcanic, a heat that had no business living inside stone. I had made sounds I don't recognize as mine. I had arched into him when every rational instinct told me to push back.
The worst part isn't what we did.
The worst part is that I wanted it. Desperately. Completely. Without a single moment of hesitation once we crossed that threshold—and I can't determine whether that want belongs to me or to whatever ancient magic stitched itself into my blood the moment I smeared it across his face.
Father Corren's temporary sanctuary is a low-ceilinged storage room tucked behind the old miller's building, the mill itself having survived the fire that gutted half the eastern cottages.
He's made it almost habitable—salvaged blankets, two oil lamps, a crate serving as a table.
It smells like cedar shavings and old incense.
Leif is sitting on the floor beside a bedroll, sharpening a short blade Corren must have given him. He looks up when I push the door open, and for one suspended second, I see relief flood his face—then something more complicated moves in behind it.
"You're alive," he says.
"Obviously."
He stands. He's taller than I remember, or maybe I stopped looking at him properly. "Sabine—"
"I'm fine." I set the supply sack down and turn to Corren, who watches me from his chair with those tired, knowing eyes. "I didn't know he was staying here."
"He had nowhere else." Corren gestures to the second crate. "Sit down, child."
I don't sit. I look at my brother—at the familiar slope of his shoulders, the nervous way he rolls the blade's handle between his palms—and I wait for the feeling to arrive.
The one that used to be automatic. The fierce, bone-deep protectiveness I built my entire existence around after our parents died.
It's there. Somewhere.
But it comes to me like sound travels through deep water. Muffled. Late.
"Sabine." Leif's voice drops. "Where are you? You're looking at me like you don't—"
"I'm looking right at you," I say, too fast.
Corren waits.
I sit down.
"I don't know what's happening to me," I say finally, and my voice sounds mechanical even to my own ears. "I think about my life before the cave and it feels—it feels like something I read about once. Like it happened to someone with my name."
I press my fingers against my sternum like I could locate whatever is shifting inside. "The morning I fell into that cavern. The moment my blood hit his face. It's like everything before that is just fog and everything after is—" I stop.
"Is real," Father Corren finishes quietly.
I nod once.
Leif is very still. When I finally look at him, his eyes are bright in the way they get when he's trying not to cry and furious at himself for it.
"I'm right here," he says.
"I know." And I do. I know it in my head with perfect clarity. The distance isn't in my love for him. It's in me—in the architecture of whoever I'm becoming. "I know, Leif."
Neither of us says anything after that.
I leave with Father Corren's half-answer about Velka's hunting camp still in my ears, heading northeast through the pine-dark woods above the settlement. The cold is sharp enough to cut. I focus on that—the bite of it against my cheeks, the crunch of crusted snow beneath my boots.
The woods go silent before I hear her.
"You walk like you're already grieving." Flora steps out from between two snow-laden pines as if she materialized there, tall and elegant, her dark stone skin catching the winter light in fractured blue.
Her wings are tucked tight. Her expression is pleasant, clean, and without warmth. "I almost feel sorry for you."
I stop. My hand doesn't go for Vorgrym's blade because I know that's exactly what she wants.
"Flora."
"I only want a conversation." She angles her head back. "Ask me what happens when a bonded Alpha loses his mate."
The air feels thinner suddenly.
"I don't need your lessons."
"You do, actually." She steps closer, unhurried. "When a gargoyle male bonds, his mate becomes part of how his power regulates itself. His corrupted earth magic anchors to her presence. Her heartbeat. Her heat." Her voice is almost kind.
"If she dies, that anchor severs. Violently. The magic doesn't mourn quietly, little human. It erupts."
I say nothing.
"Tovian's territory sits on the mountain directly above your valley," Flora continues. "His grief, uncontrolled, does not weep. It fractures stone. It pulls faults apart." She watches my face.
"I wonder if the people below have any idea that their lives are entirely dependent on you staying breathing."
She leaves without another word, her wings spreading once in the silent trees, and then she's gone.
I stay in the snow for too long. Then I turn back up the mountain.
I don't speak when I return to the caverns.
I move through the great cavern with my eyes down, past Vorgrym's watchful stare, past the newly awakened warriors reorganizing equipment near the far columns.
I find our private chamber and I sit on the far side of it, as far from his sleeping space as the walls allow, and I stare at my own hands.
The silver markings along my wrists look like cracks in porcelain.
He finds me within minutes.
Tovian fills the doorway the way weather fills a valley—completely, inevitably. He reads the room in one breath and his wings shift. A slow, almost involuntary adjustment, like a sail catching a wrong wind.
"You've been gone longer than necessary," he says.
"Supply runs take time."
He moves into the chamber. I stand and move to the stone table on the opposite side and begin sorting supplies I don't actually need to sort.
"Look at me."
"I'm busy."
A beat of silence. His claws drag once across the stone table.
"Sabine."
"Just—” The words get stuck in my throat. I keep my eyes on my hands. “Give me space, Tovian. Please."
The vibration in his chest deepens.
I don't look up. I don't trust myself too. If I look at him now—at the gold beginning to simmer at the edges of his irises, at those enormous shoulders drawn tight with something he can't name—I will either break or I will fall back into him. Both options terrify me equally.
Because Flora is right. Because that's the trap. Because there is no version of loving him that doesn't make me a loaded weapon aimed directly at every person I have ever cared for.
He doesn't leave.
He stands on the opposite side of the chamber with his wings drawn in and his claws curled against the stone and that sound rolling continuously through his chest like a fault line waiting.
The silence between us is so heavy I can feel it pressing against my ribs.