Chapter 13 The Voice
The Voice
CAELIRA
Ihad spent years trying to become small enough to be ignored, keeping my head low, my voice soft, my hands always busy. Ink stains, kneaded bread, balanced ledgers, all safe marks of a life that left no trace. If I didn’t draw the storm’s eye, maybe it would forget me.
But storms don’t forget.
They wait. They circle. They press against the shutters until the wood splinters.
And I was starting to realize… maybe I didn’t want them to.
The memory of the Hall still burned in my mind’s eye, the looks, the accusations, their hunger to bind what they didn’t understand. They wanted me to cower, to kneel, to be silent. But silence had never saved anyone. It hadn’t saved my parents, and it wasn’t saving me.
As the thunder rumbled outside, the sound cracked through me like a dare, sharp and alive. My hand burned, flashing silver, and for the first time I didn’t look away, I welcomed it.
The storm wasn’t outside, not anymore.
It was in me.
And the truth that terrified me the most was that I no longer only feared it. Some part of me wanted to answer back.
I thought of the oak and the dream that followed when I laid my hand against its bark.
Silver had veined through it beneath my palm, bright as lightning caught in living wood.
In sleep, I had felt the memory of chains carved deep into its grain, the echo of him bound there, too much storm for the world that tried to hold him.
But the tree had not broken.
And when I touched it, it had not recoiled.
The current that moved through its marrow had not felt like a curse. It had felt like recognition. As if what ran through the oak ran through me as well.
My fathers unfinished story came to mind, the man bound in stormglass, cursed for being too much storm.
The storm does not forget. It always comes to collect tis debts.
For years I thought that was meant to frighten me into obedience.
But now I wondered if he had been speaking of something else, something too dangerous to finish.
And my mother’s voice wove through the memory like a tether. Never let them see you afraid. I had taken it once as a plea for safety, but now it felt like a command.
The council had called me dangerous. The town had called me cursed. And for the first time, I didn’t want to run from either.
Something in me straightened, quiet but undeniable. A seed of defiance pushing against the soil it had been buried under for too long. I could not make myself smaller forever and I didn’t want to.
I closed my hand, feeling the pulse of silver beneath. I lifted my chin to the room as though to bind myself with my own words. “You are not theirs to chain.”
The words should have stayed in my chest, fading like breath. Instead, they seemed to echo outward, into the rafters, into the air, into the storm raging outside itself. And something echoed back.
At first, I thought it was only the memory of dreams. The ruins. The chains. His eyes like stormcloud split with lightning. But memory doesn’t speak and this… this spoke.
Not aloud.
Not in thought, exactly.
It came in the hush between thunder and strike, threaded into the pulse of my hand, words I couldn’t have invented if I tried.
Caelira.
My breath snagged on the sound of it. The same voice I had heard once before, outside my door, and I swore I had imagined it. The hearth was calm, the shutters closed, nothing moved, and yet I felt the weight of a voice inside the silence, shaping itself around my name.
I rose to my feet, heartbeat loud enough to shame the quiet. “Not real,” I whispered to the empty room.
But the storm doesn’t care for denial.
You heard me.
I froze by the shutter, palm flat against the wood. The words weren’t sound, weren’t thought, they were pressure. Like the storm itself had leaned in close to test the shape of my name inside its mouth.
“I don’t hear you,” I hissed under my breath, fingernails biting into the wood.
The hum in my hand brightened, the silver pricking like frost breaking through the skin.
Lie.
The single word curled low, like thunder hushed to a whisper. Dark. Deliberate. And intimate enough to feel like breath against my ear.
My throat burned. “You’re a dream. Nothing more.”
If I am a dream, why do you answer back.
I stopped dead, heat crawling up my neck. “Because dreams don’t know how to shut up, apparently.”
The rafters creaked above me, no wind to blame. The sound bent strange, low and rough, almost like laughter, as though his amusement had threaded itself into the bones of my cabin.
Careful, little storm.
His voice unfurled inside the silence. Velvet threaded with thunder.
You bite like you want me closer.
“I don’t,” I hissed, louder than I meant to. My voice rang against the cabin walls, making the silence after feel even sharper.
I lowered it to a rasp. “I don’t want you. I don’t want any of this."
Another ripple of sound, half laugh, half growl, slid through the space between heartbeats.
Then why do you keep answering?
I spun around, staring at nothing and everything, unsure where to look. “Because you won’t shut up.”
Oh, I’ll hush if you wish. The voice came low, intimate. But we both know silence would taste lonelier now.
Heat crawled up my throat. “You’re the chain, you’re the curse they warned me about” I snapped. Trying to sound sharp, but instead it felt like striking a flint against steel. Sparks, not fire.
He chuckled again, a sound so quiet it felt like it had been pressed against my ear.
Curses don’t call you by name, Caelira. Chains don’t laugh when you defy them. But I do. And I like the way you burn when you fight me.
My pulse stuttered, “I’m not yours,” I said, steel this time, not flint. The silence bent.
His voice curved back slower, like thunder rolling deliberate across the horizon.
You’ve never been anyone else’s.
The mark flared in my palm, silver spilling it agreed with him. I clenched my hand into a fist trying to smother it, but the only throbbed brighter for the pressure.
“You don’t get to decide who I am,” I bit out, though the words shoot more from heat than fear.
No. His voice softened, but there was something in it that made my pulse trip.
Deny me all you like, little storm. Pretend you can outrun what already holds you. But storms don’t bargain, and fate doesn’t ask permission. You were mine the moment the storm marked you,
--and no god, no court, no chain, nor time itself will keep me from you.
Atlas
Through stormlight, I watched her. Every flicker of defiance in her voice struck me like lightning down my spine, a reminder of the bond that burned between us. She thought she could push me back into silence, but each word she spat only tethered her tighter.
Gods, the hunger of it. Not the hunger of flesh alone, though that lived there too, but the hunger to be seen.
To be recognized after decades of chains and silence.
Her gaze had met mine in a dream, her palm against mine in waking, and still she fought to call me curse.
Storm or curse, chain or fate, it didn’t matter. She had answered.
Every instinct screamed at me to go to her now. To tear down the walls of her little cabin, to press her storm marked hand to mine until she could no longer deny what already bound us.
The bond hummed in my blood, old as the first storm, certain as thunder finding the ground. I had felt her long before chains ever broke. The night they bound me, the sky itself had whispered her presence into me. But when her hand touched the pillar, when her storm answered mine, I knew.
The world thinks I was freed by lightning, but it was her. It has always been her.
I swallowed the urge, letting the restraint bite deeper than chains ever had. If I broke too soon, she would only run further. So, I stayed in the stormlight, just beyond her reach, watching. Waiting.
She thinks I’m a dream. A phantom carried on thunder.
A low growl curled in my chest as the storm bowed its head to me, as it always had.
The next strike of lightning flared, painting her face in silver fire, stubborn and beautiful in her denial.
I vowed then that when the storm called again, she would not mistake me for something imagined.