Chapter 32
THIRTY-TWO
Selene
The “Luxury Suite” lived up to none of its title. The stone bed was hard enough to realign a spine, and the air held the damp chill of the deep underground. I stared at a ceiling carved from raw rock. It was a tomb.
Which, considering who built this place, wasn’t entirely off the table.
I sat up, rolling my neck. A crack echoed in the silence, loud as a gunshot. My body felt stiff, but the magic in my veins was quiet, a low murmur rather than the chaotic distortion that had been plaguing me for days. Riven was close, but the room across the hall was silent.
I dragged myself to the shower block at the end of the hall. Torvin was right about the plumbing’s personality; the pipes rattled like a dying engine, but the water was hot enough to scour the tunnel filth from my skin.
Clean, at least in body, I returned to the room. The alternative clothing provided was a roughly woven tunic folded on the chair. I ignored it. Dragging on yesterday’s skinny trousers and jumper felt like sliding back into a second skin. They were stale, but I preferred the grit I knew.
The scent of toasted oats and tea drifted down the corridor, stronger than the smell of damp earth. It drew me out of the room and down the winding stone passage towards the central atrium.
The atrium opened up before me, vast and resonant, illuminated by wavering lanterns. It was a fortress, a bunker wrapped into one architectural impossibility.
At one of the long stone tables near the centre, two figures sat amidst the emptiness.
Goran looked like he had been carved from the same rock as the walls—immobile, massive, and terrifyingly still.
Next to him, Dane looked startlingly human.
I paused at the edge of the atrium, blinking. Yesterday, Dane had been broken, grey-faced, and barely holding onto consciousness. Today, he was sitting upright, his posture straight, buttering a piece of dark bread with the focus of a surgeon.
His colour had returned, the deathly pallor replaced by his usual tanned ruggedness. He looked tired, yes, but not wrecked.
“You’re upright,” I said, my voice echoing slightly as I approached.
Dane glanced up. Relief washed over his face, quickly masked by his usual deadpan expression. “Morning, partner. I’m told the coffee situation is dire, but the tea is acceptable.”
I slid onto the bench opposite them. “Dire is my baseline these days.”
“You look…” Dane tilted his head, assessing me.
“Like I slept on a rock?”
“Like you’re alive.”
“I’ll take it.” I reached for the thick ceramic teapot and poured a cup. A bowl of porridge sat waiting, steaming gently. It wasn’t what I’d normally eat, but my stomach gave a feral growl of appreciation.
Goran ignored the meal. He watched the perimeter of the room, his dark eyes scanning the still shadows.
“How’s the back?” I asked Dane, nodding at him.
He rolled his shoulders, a test of range. “Sore. But the shattered feeling is gone. That healer, Una… she’s potent. I feel restless. Sitting here is making my skin crawl. I need to move. Run drills. Something.”
“Maybe don’t bench press the furniture just yet,” I suggested, blowing on a spoonful of porridge. “We don’t want to undo the miracle.”
“I’m fine,” he insisted, his voice dropping into that stubborn register I knew too well. “I’ll be cleared for sparring by this afternoon if I have my way. I need to burn this off.” He tapped his chest. “Too much adrenaline with nowhere to go.”
“You know you don’t have to be here,” I said, watching him tear into the bread. “You were not seen during the extraction. As far as the precinct knows, you’re just a detective on medical leave recovering from back surgery.”
He paused mid-chew.
“I’m serious, Dane. You’re not on the wanted list. You could go back to your flat, sleep in your own bed, and pretend you haven’t seen me in days. You have an out.”
Dane swallowed hard. He set the bread down on the stone table.
“I told you,” he said, his voice low and unyielding. “I promised I would find who killed Eamon. That debt stands. But look around, Selene.”
He gestured with his bread to the empty atrium, where only a handful of people stood.
“You’re going up against Highspire. Against Korenth and Varessia. And what do you have? A consultant, a couple of archivists, and…” He glanced sideways at the massive figure beside him. “The numbers don’t add up. You need bodies. You need muscle. I’m not leaving you to fight a war shorthanded.”
He took a bite of the bread, chewing slowly, his look hardening.
“Besides, if half of what Riven says is coming actually arrives, you’re going to need someone watching your flank who doesn’t speak in riddles.”
He swallowed, and his focus drifted. He stared past me, locking onto the giant man beside him.
The silence at the table shifted, tightening into a razor’s edge. Dane studied Goran with a mix of confusion and instinctive agitation. It was the way a dog looks at a wolf through a fence—recognition, but wrong.
Goran ignored the scrutiny. He remained fixed on the dark corners of the atrium, a statue carved from patience.
“You’re not a Varkyn,” Dane said.
The statement landed like an accusation, delivered with awkward bluntness. Dane usually avoided poking bears, but his common sense had been hijacked by the instinctual curiosity of a wolf trying to place a strange new member of the pack.
Goran turned his head slowly. “No.”
“But you smell like one,” Dane pressed, his brow furrowing. “Not… exactly. But close. It’s like looking at a photo of a fire instead of feeling the heat. You’ve got the blood, but the instinct is different. Quieter. Older.”
I lowered my spoon. I recognised it too—Goran carried a dense, terrestrial gravity, entirely unlike the weightless frequency of Aetherkind.
“What are you?” Dane asked.
Goran placed his hands on the table. They were scarred, large enough to crush a human skull with zero effort.
“I am Vor-Kahn,” Goran said. His voice was a deep rumble, vibrating through the stone table.
Dane frowned. “Vor-Kahn? That’s not in the history books.”
“You wouldn’t find us there,” Goran said. “We were forgotten before your great-grandfathers were born.”
He fixed Dane with his black eyes, his gaze steady and devoid of the jittery energy Varkyn usually carried.
“In the Old World—Vaelor—the masters were the Aetherkind,” Goran began, the word landing with grave significance. “They were beings of absolute light and shadow, creators and destroyers. But gods do not bloody their own hands if they can help it. They needed swords. Shields. Enforcers.”
He gestured to himself.
“They took the beasts of the wild—the wolves of the chaotic fringe—and they bound them with Deep Magic. They poured Aetherkind blood into animal veins. They carved away the weakness and left only loyalty and lethality. They created the Vor-Kahn.”
I felt a chill ripple up my arms. “You were engineered.”
“We were crafted,” Goran corrected, his tone lacking resentment. He offered a grim, humourless baring of teeth that wasn’t quite a smile. It pulled his lips back enough to reveal the truth.
His canines were distinct—thick, elongated, and far too sharp for a human mouth.
Dane stiffened, his gaze locking onto the man’s mouth. “Your teeth,” he murmured, hand drifting to his own jaw. “I only have those when I shift. When the transformation takes the bone.”
“Shifting is unnecessary,” Goran said, his rumble dropping an octave. “We are the weapon. The Hounds of the Dusk. Immortal and unbreakable. We lived to serve the High Lords.”
Dane had stopped eating. He stared at Goran with a look of horror and awe. “Slavery.”
“Purpose,” Goran countered. “To a Vor-Kahn, without a master, there is no sky. There is no ground.”
He looked down at his massive, scarred hands.
“But the Aetherkind… they were flawless beings with flawed hearts. They split. The Schism. Light-born against Dark-born. It tore Vaelor apart. And because we were their shadows, we were torn too.”
“You had to pick sides,” I whispered.
“We were ordered to,” Goran said. “The nature of the wolf is predatory. It calls to the dark. Most of the Vor-Kahn went to the Umbrael Sovereignty. They became the butchers of the Dark Court.”
He looked up, meeting Dane’s eyes.
“I did not. I chose the Luminaris. The Light. I chose to protect, not to conquer.”
“You went to war with your own kind,” Dane muttered.
“An endless slaughter,” Goran corrected. “When the world broke, we ran. A handful of us. Light-born, Dark-born refugees who saw the end coming, Vor-Kahn who severed their leashes. We came here. To Aurathen. A world of humans.”
Dane leaned forward. “So, we’re… what? Copies?”
“Echoes,” Goran said gently.
“We were few. Too few to sustain our numbers,” Goran explained. “The Aetherkind tried to keep their blood pure, but they failed. The Light-born faded into the Calysteri. The Dark ones into Umbrakynn.”
He pointed a thick finger at Dane.
“And the Vor-Kahn… we were soldiers without a war. We began to take human mates. The magic in our blood was diluted, generation by generation. The immortality faded. The size diminished. The blind, telepathic obedience to the pack leader shattered into simple loyalty.”
Goran’s eyes softened, just a fraction.
“The beast remained, but the godhood was lost. You call yourselves Varkyn now. But the wolf inside you? That is the remnant of Vaelor. That is the memory of the Vor-Kahn, screaming for a master it will never find.”
Dane sat back, looking stunned. He looked at his own hands, clenching and unclenching them as if testing the reality of his own skin.
“That’s why the loyalty binds feel so strong,” Dane murmured, half to himself. “Why losing a partner feels like dying.”
“Because you were designed to be bonded,” Goran said. “It is not a flaw in your psychology. It is the architecture of your soul.”