Chapter One #3
His gaze didn't waver. Doubt flickered there, not in my claim but in its sufficiency. An omega bond amplifies. It stabilizes. It alters the architecture of power. We both knew it. It could break my mark and bring me more power than I ever experienced.
I reached for him again, slower this time, and closed my hand at the back of his neck, resting my forehead against his.
“I choose you. Every time,” I said.
His breath shifted. The tension in his shoulders eased a fraction.
The forest stirred as his magic flared and then settled. Leaves rustled where no wind moved. A bird lifted from a low branch and vanished deeper into the trees.
He exhaled and straightened fully. “After,” he said, his voice more confident.
“After.”
We resumed our advance, closer now, shoulder to shoulder, studying the surrounding terrain.
The ground shifted beneath our boots. Stone pressed through soil in irregular lines, etched with sigils worn smooth by time but not inert.
Power was embedded in them, a faint buzzing that filled my body and made my mark burn.
I crouched, studying the pattern without touching it. Binding work. Not lethal. Made to contain something. I stifled the thrill of excitement that confirmed we were on the right path.
Thane lowered beside me, head angled slightly as though listening for music. His affinity for magic is much closer to the surface than mine, more open and attuned.
“This was not designed to keep intruders out,” he said quietly. “It was designed to hold something in.”
“Yet it kept previous searchers out, diverting them, confusing them. Who created it? The king or one of his magic-users?”
Thane’s expression darkened from memories he didn’t want. He had been one of those magic-users once upon a time. Not my choice, but forced into service, eventually escaping. “It feels different.”
I rose and scanned the tree line. The canopy thinned ahead. Light shifted from filtered green to pale silver.
We moved through the last line of trees and into a clearing.
Stone rose from the earth in a single narrow column, pale against the sky. The tower climbed into the clouds, its surface wrapped in vines that didn't choke but anchored. The forest didn't reclaim it. It obeyed it.
The mark on my wrist flared sharply, pain shooting up my arm. I rubbed it absently as I stared at the tower of stone.
Thane stepped to my side, gaze tracking upward. His throat moved once.
“That was not in the reports.”
“No,” I said.
The tower dominated us. Deliberate. Imposing.
If the king had hidden a weapon, he had not buried it. He had placed it somewhere that would endure.
And the forest guarded it. But it had let us through. Why?
Thane
Malric hesitated as we stood before the tower, which was unusual.
Malric didn’t retreat from anything. He advanced, or he held. There was nothing in him that yielded ground unless forced. His focus was always on the mission, always forward, locked onto the objective with the same precision he brought to a battlefield once lines were drawn.
I followed him without question.
I always had.
He would say it was the mission that focused him this way.
The rebellion demanded it. His entire childhood was shaped by tradition and duty, raised as the heir to his fae noble house.
He accepted that role, carrying it on broad shoulders that would have dwarfed a lesser man.
Yet, this tower of stone made him pause.
I wished I could do more for him, that he would allow me to carry some of the burden. But that wasn’t Malric. He sheltered and protected others. He didn’t allow them to protect him.
I suspect he still saw me as the broken male he first encountered on that muddy, bloody battlefield so many years ago when I had shattered. I was stronger now, but he had put me in a box, and I remained there.
When my magic first surfaced, it did so without warning.
Glass shattered through the main dining hall of our keep, broken by lightning zigzagging from the clear sky.
Rain fell where no clouds had gathered. I was terrified of the power surging inside of me, as was my family.
They knew what it meant, what unwanted attention it brought to them.
But they still sold me. They sent me to the king, as per the law, in exchange for a paltry sum.
Recompense for my family’s “loss” of their son.
I was struck from the family lineage and became one of the king’s magic-users.
I was supposed to be trained to control my magic and use it responsibly.
Instead, I became a monster on a leash, controlled by the tyrant who preferred me as a wildling.
He turned my magic onto the battlefield as needed, to destroy everyone and everything in my path.
Until the day I snapped the leash. My control was gone, burned through like wildfire. Lightning rained down with torrential rain. I killed all in my path—friend and foe—and the king called for my death. One man fought through the torrent to soothe the storm.
Malric. The moment he touched me, peace flooded through me. The storm calmed, and the magic left me. I sagged against him, and he carried me from the field over his back. The rebellion wanted to execute me. I was the enemy, but Malric intervened again, vouching for me. He earned my loyalty.
The bond formed later. Not before witnesses. Not in ceremony. It grew in shared silence after battle and knowing that neither of us would leave the other behind.
My magic was muted now, not uncontrolled, but I feared it and rarely used it, much to the rebellion’s dismay. They had hoped for a weapon. And they got…me.
We stared at the tower, at the vines wrapped around its surface in structured patterns that reinforced rather than strangled. All of it protected what was inside and to keep what was inside there.
My breath slowed without conscious intent.
The air around the structure was heavy with magic. My magic shifted, leaning into what was already woven around the structure as if trying to become a part of it. And the magic recognized it.
Recognition is too simple a word for it—something in the air aligned with my magic. Fine threads of power extended from me without conscious release, testing the boundary. Something answered. Something beyond the protective runes. Something inside.
Someone.
Someone lived there. Not an inert object but a living, breathing person with magic of their own.
The realization settled into me with quiet certainty.
I scanned the windows carved high along the tower’s length, the reinforced lower stones, the sightlines positioned for observation rather than defense.
This was not an abandoned outpost to guard something.
It was what we sought.
Movement flickered at one of the upper windows. Not wind. Not a shifting vine.
A figure stood within the shadowed frame.
Pale against the dim interior light. Still. Watching. A woman.
She was not armored. No blade glinted at her side. There was no posture of readiness in her stance. Only stillness. Deliberate and aware.
For a suspended heartbeat, neither of us moved.
Then she stepped back from the window.
The air tightened around me. My magic surged before I restrained it, lightning coiling along nerve and bone. Branches at the clearing’s edge groaned in response. Leaves shuddered.
I drew the storm down with steady breath, forcing it into discipline.
“Malric,” I said.
He turned at once, already calculating lines of approach and potential threats.
“There’s someone in that tower.”
He followed my gaze upward. The mark on his wrist burned brightly.
For the first time since we entered the Wyrdwood, the magic running beneath my skin didn't feel entirely like my own. Something answered my magic, and it wasn’t Malric.
And whatever waited within that tower had sensed us as clearly as we had sensed it.