CHAPTER SEVEN
Talon had been correct.
After twenty-three unbounds, I was met with only silence—and a growing sense of aversion that made my skin itch.
I should have just picked the one I felt most comfortable with, but my stomach churned at the idea.
I hated that the High Court discredited the simple right to choose, but more than that, I hated that I was failing to find a way out that did not feel like a cage.
I wanted to feel what it would be like to be free. To make my own mistakes. But I had forty-eight hours left, and I was standing in the largest library in Haelen, searching for a miracle in the dust.
The musty air of the Royal Archives greeted me as I walked through the archway, thick with the scent of aged parchment, crumbling leather, and iron-gall ink.
Outside, twilight was draining from the sky, the last threads of light thinning behind the narrow windows.
I trailed my fingers along the spine of a chained volume. Generations of names had passed through these pages. Bonds recorded. Lineages traced. Lives documented as though they were tidy entries in a ledger.
A true bond was not something one hunted through indexes. It was supposed to find you. Yet here I stood, scanning titles like a merchant searching for fabric.
“Lost in thought, child?”
I turned to find Keeper Sora stepping from between two shelves. Her silver hair was gathered neatly, her movements unhurried. She wore thin frames that sat low on the crooked bridge of her nose, and her long white robes were an almost blinding contrast to the shadows of the chamber.
“Keeper,” I said, bowing my head as I gestured to the messy stack of books behind me. “Thank you for the access. I am afraid I was getting ahead of myself with the rummaging.”
“You are welcome to do as you please here, Kaelia,” she said, waving off the apology with a faint curve of her mouth. “We can dispense with the ceremony if we are to spend the night among these stacks. Now, tell me—what is it that weighs so heavily on you?”
“It feels,” I began with slight hesitation, “as though everyone is waiting to see whether I succeed or disappear.”
Sora did not flinch at the bluntness of it. She merely adjusted her glasses, her gaze steady.
“People fear what disrupts order. And you, Kaelia, are currently a very loud disruption.”
I frowned at that, not sure if it was a dig at my stubbornness, or a nod to the thousands of Haelenians who never thought to question the law.
I did not have time to question her, because she was already moving, her shadow lengthening against the rows of ancient leather.
She guided me deeper into the labyrinth, her fingertips brushing certain spines as though greeting old companions. We stopped before a section marked with an intricate glowing crest—a sun eclipsed by a crown. She pulled three thick, unadorned volumes and laid them on a heavy oak table.
“Our history does not begin with decree,” Sora said, opening the book with careful hands. “It begins with the Sayel. Before the High Court, before the Veythar—there was only resonance.”
She turned a page, revealing two spirals curved toward one another. “The Architects understood that for the world to hold, souls had to align. The Sayel was not a choice; it was a reflection. Two people meeting and realizing they were already one.”
I leaned closer, the candlelight flickering against the faded ink. “What happened to it?”
“Greed,” she said simply. “People decided they were better than fate. They wanted to bond for land, for titles, for bloodlines. They turned their backs on resonance and started choosing for convenience. They broke the balance.”
“What does that have to do with the Veythar?”
“Everything. When we stopped seeking the Sayel and started bonding for convenience, we created hollows—invisible fractures in the fabric of our realm. Nature does not like an empty space, Kaelia.”
She flicked the page to a drawing of dark, smoke-like figures pouring through a crack in a mountain.
“The Veythar were the consequence. They are creatures of the Void, drawn into our world to fill those hollow places. But they are too heavy for our realm.”
“The War of Veil and Void,” I whispered.
It was the largest war in our history, a cataclysm that allowed the Umbral realm to bleed into our own and press its jagged borders against the human provinces centuries ago.
“Yes,” she confirmed. “In its aftermath, the Elders realized that if we could no longer find the Sayel, we had to simulate it. So the Lunthra was born.”
She flicked the page and tapped her blunt nail on a drawing of the Thrynn Bridge. “As you know it, every mortal must be bound by their twenty-first year, or they are surrendered to the Veythar to maintain the barrier.”
“A trade,” I murmured.
“A preservation,” she corrected. “The Veythar agreed not to cross into our realm beyond the terms of the pact. They would cross only to claim the unbound or conduct ward assessments. They are bound by the same laws we are.”
I hesitated, the image of those piercing blue eyes flickering in my mind. “Except for Talon.”
Sora’s expression shifted, her gaze momentarily distant. “Yes. He stands outside that restriction. He is the master of stabilization—the equivalent of Lord Evander for the Umbral realm. He ensures the pact holds and that neither side manipulates the terms. He is… necessary.”
Necessary.
No other Veythar moved freely among mortals, and no other crossed the threshold without a formal summons. Yet he did. He moved through Isvale like he owned the air we breathed.
I pressed my palm flat against the table. “So, the Sayel is the alignment of souls rather than the compatibility?”
“Correct,” Sora said. “There is no such thing as severance with this bond. It just is.”
A pulse surged through me, so sudden and sharp that I had to grip the edge of the table.
Every word she spoke was a mirror to the ache I had carried for years.
I had always hated the Lunthra, not because I was stubborn, but because it felt like a cage.
I had spent my life wondering why I could not just be content with ‘compatibility.’
Perhaps I was simply born in the wrong age. I did not want a ‘measure of success.’ I wanted this—this impossible, undeniable alignment.
“What would it feel like?” I swallowed, my voice barely a whisper.
Sora’s eyes drifted to a faded symbol inked in the margin—a circle containing a small flame.
“The earliest texts describe it as convergence,” she murmured.
“The moment two currents realize they were always meant to meet. They say the world falls silent. Everything uncertain finds its axis. You no longer question who you are, because you see yourself reflected back—whole and unafraid. Not I. Not you. But we.”
Her finger tapped lightly against the flame. “You would not question it, you would simply know.”
The market square flashed behind my eyes. I remembered the sensation of Talon’s gaze moving across the crowd until it reached me. It had not been leering or devouring. It had been seeing. He had looked at me as if cataloging something rare.
I had burned beneath that look. Every instinct I possessed should have told me to lower my eyes, to disappear into the noise of the market. But I could not. It had felt as though looking away would mean missing something essential to my very existence.
I forced my shoulders to loosen, shoving the memory back into its cage.
Coincidence, I told myself. Power recognizes defiance. That is all.
But a whisper of doubt threaded through the logic. He had not left me alone since. He appeared where he had no reason to be and spoke my name as though it belonged in his mouth. He watched me not like a task to be completed, but like a riddle he intended to solve.
If the Sayel was about recognition… was it possible he saw something in me that I was too afraid to see in myself?
“Could it exist across species? Could a mortal resonance find its axis in… something else?”
“In theory?” she asked, finally looking up. “Yes. The Aether does not recognize the borders of kingdoms.”
My eyes wanted to widen, but my body felt stiff and frozen.
“But such a connection would be a catastrophe,” Sora added, her gaze sharpening until she looked less like a scholar and more like a judge. “A bond that answers to no king and obeys no law is a fire that cannot be governed. If it were to ever resurface, it would be executed.”
“Executed?” I managed.
“We have found the balance that works for our realm, Kaelia, and that is the Lunthra. Anything that exists outside the pact is a threat to our preservation.”
She closed the heavy volume with a definitive thud, her academic mask slipping back into place. “Fortunately, we do not need to worry about such tragedies. The Sayel is a relic of a broken age.”
“Why are you so certain?”
“Because its last recorded connection was over two hundred years ago. It is extinct.”
Centuries extinct.
A breath of relief almost escaped me, but my body refused to relax. I was being paranoid. I was looking for impossible explanations for the way Talon’s presence reached inside me—searching for reasons why I had not been able to look away from a creature of the Void in a crowded market.
It was not an ancient bond; it was simply the weight of his power.
Keeper Sora’s eyes searched my face. “Are you all right, Kaelia?”
I offered her a wry, tired smile. “Yes. Thank you for the history, Keeper.”
“Rest now,” she said softly. “Knowledge settles differently after sleep.”
I nodded and moved toward the dark corridor.
The Sayel no longer existed.
That was what the records said. And records did not lie.
I had to believe that. Because the alternative—that I was a target for the High Court and the destined half to a creature born of fracture—was a thought I could not afford to have.