Chapter 31 Dayn
DAYN
When the hour in that grotto shattered, the recoil was like a physical blow.
One moment, she was in my arms, the taste of her on my tongue, the pulse of her still echoing in my own blood.
The next, she was gone, ripped away by the trial’s inexorable logic, and I was left with the ghost of her warmth and the cold, hard reality of Merlin’s chamber.
The air here is stale with old magic. Blythe stands like a statue near the altar, her face impassive.
Esme’s mother and sister are a few feet away, a tableau of anxiety.
They see only the silver runes glowing on the floor where Esme’s body lies still, lost in the construct as she completes the trial.
They cannot see what I just saw. They cannot feel what I still feel.
My own body is a traitor. Every nerve hums with the memory of her skin against mine.
The scent of her—salt and shadow and something that is purely Esme—clings to my senses.
That hour was a gamble of a magnitude I have not undertaken in centuries.
I laid my own soul bare, offering her a choice when my every instinct screamed to simply take.
And she chose. For one impossible, suspended hour, she chose me.
Not the king, not the dragon, but the man who would hold her in the water and wait.
The tenderness of it is an ache in my chest, a vulnerability I had forgotten could exist. It is a terrible and exquisite weakness.
I felt the shift. The desolation of the obsidian plain.
I watched through the fragile window I managed to create using our connection as the trial threw a twisted, cruel effigy of me in her path.
The pain was a feedback loop; her exhaustion, her fear, the fresh sting of betrayal—it all floods back to me.
I felt her horror as the construct spoke with my voice, as it threatened to unmake her memories. Our memories.
My hands clench at my sides, the urge to tear this entire chamber apart a physical force I must wrestle into submission.
This is the price. To let her become what she must be—a forger of her own path—I have to allow this torture.
I had to watch as she was forced to destroy the very thing I’d just begged her to trust.
But she is Esme. She does not break; she adapts. When she stepped forward, not with a blade but with her body, when her mouth found the construct’s, a shock jolted through me. It was a desperate, brilliant gambit. She was not fighting me. She was using what I gave her. She was using us.
I felt her reach through the pain, through the violent torrent of power the trial was forcing into her, and find that quiet, golden thread spun between us in the grotto.
She remembered. In the face of annihilation, she chose to remember.
The fierce, defiant pride that swelled in me was so potent it nearly brought me to my knees.
She took the power, our bond, our intimacy, and turned it not into a weapon of rage, but one of connection.
She poured my own essence back into the construct, overloading it, forcing it to look at itself through my eyes, through the eyes of the man who would rather burn than harm her.
When the construct shattered into gold dust, the backlash through the bond was a silent scream of release. She won. She survived. She chose a third way.
But the trial was not finished with her. The scene shifted again, the air chilling, and I felt another presence. Ancient. Female. Bitter as frozen ash. Esther.
A low growl built in my throat, and I saw Blythe’s head turn slightly in my direction, her focus momentarily breaking.
I forced the sound down. I watched, helpless, as the old ghost materialized, her fury a palpable wave of cold.
I heard her accusations, her venomous judgment of the very intimacy that just saved Esme’s life.
I felt Esme’s own rage rise to meet it, her defiance a beautiful, sharp-edged thing that caught in my chest. She defended us. She defended her choice.
And then the ghost moved.
I felt the violation as if it were my own skin being breached.
A cold, spectral intrusion passing through her, a psychic shock that ripples back to me in a wave of nausea.
A pressure behind my eyes, a tearing sensation in the fabric of my own mind as Esther’s magic did…
something. Something invasive. Something wrong.
The world went black for Esme, and for an instant, the feed through our bond cut out, leaving me in agonizing silence. It lasted for minutes, then hours, and now she’s pushing through the rest of the trial—with me infuriatingly unable to see a single heartbeat of it.
What did that bitch do?
I refuse to leave. I stay in the chamber for every excruciating moment, pacing, waiting, listening for anything—until finally, Esme stirs. Until she’s back.
Her eyes flutter open. The silver runes on the floor fade. She pushes herself up, her movements stiff, her expression dazed. Blythe is at her side in an instant, a vial in hand. Brynn and her mother rush forward, their faces etched with relief.
“You did it,” Blythe says, her voice tense with approval. “The second stage. It is done. You’ll have twelve hours’ rest until the third, and final, trial.”
But I am not listening to her. I am watching Esme. Only Esme. She blinks, her gaze sweeping the room, taking in her family, the chamber, the fading magic. Her eyes meet mine.
And there is nothing that indicates she remembers. Remembers the hour we shared.
No uncontrollable flush in her cheeks. No lingering heat. No echo of the water or the steam or the desperate way she clung to me. Just the familiar, guarded assessment she usually gives me. The appraisal of a soldier measuring a threat.
A curse burns the back of my throat. I should have expected this.
She looks away, turning her attention to Blythe, who is already drawing a line of blood from her palm to smear on Merlin’s grave.
The ground shudders violently—more violently, I’m sure, than the previous time—but I barely feel it.
When the ground and dust settle, Brynn congratulates Esme, her voice bright with a relief that I cannot feel.
All I feel is a cold, creeping dread that begins to solidify into a certainty as hard and sharp as stone. The intimacy, the choice, the memory—it’s gone. Wiped clean.
That bitch. That meddling, jealous ghost…
She didn’t just pass through Esme. She took something.
She took our hour. She took me. And looking at Esme’s exhausted yet beautiful, defiant face, I realize with certain clarity that my fight is no longer with a coven or an invading army.
It is with the ghosts of her own past. And for the first time in a thousand years, I’m unsure if it is a war I’m prepared for.
But I am. I must be. The flicker of doubt is a human luxury, one I extinguish with cold, ancient fire. That old hag may have won this skirmish, but the war for Esme’s soul has just begun.