Chapter 37 Esme
ESME
The heavy stone door of Merlin’s chamber groans open under Blythe’s hand for what I hope will be the last time in these circumstances, and the familiar scent of dust and a terrifying, dormant power rushes out to meet us.
But it’s not the tomb that catches my eye first.
It’s… him.
Dayn leans against the far wall, his tall frame cast in shadow. His arms are crossed over his chest, his jaw set, eyes gleaming like molten gold in the dim light.
He’s already here, waiting. As if he knew the exact moment we would arrive. The breath stalls in my lungs.
I stop so abruptly that Blythe’s grip yanks my shoulder. She hisses a reprimand, but I barely hear it. All I can do is stare across the candle-glow at the man—the dragon—who has apparently claimed squatter’s rights inside my pulse.
His gaze locks on mine like he’s been counting heartbeats since I left.
Mine stutters. A flicker of heat, quick as static, arcs through my sternum.
I don’t know why. I don’t know him, not really.
Not outside kidnapping and blood vows and that odd, hollow ache behind my ribs whenever he’s near.
But the air feels different with him in it, thick with cedar and storm and something achingly… familiar.
Blythe releases me, stepping aside with a curt exhale. “Dayn,” she says, her voice sharp with surprise and disapproval. “You were not called this time.”
Dayn’s expression doesn’t waver, nor does his focus shift from me.
If anything, it seems to sharpen, like he’s reading every micro-twitch of my body and translating it into a language only he understands.
His fingers flex once against his biceps, a tiny motion, but my body somehow answers without permission, stomach tightening, breath shallowing.
I tear my gaze away, focusing on the glowing runes in the floor.
“We do not consider your presence required for this final round,” Blythe continues, gesturing around the empty chamber. “Nor is it appropriate. This trial requires more solitude; not even Esme’s mother or sister will be here.”
“I understand the protocol, Warden,” Dayn says, voice low, but I catch the edge of steel. “But I will sit as an observer. There is no time to discuss this so I suggest you don’t argue.”
Blythe’s mouth sets in a hard line. I can see the argument warring in her expression, but the truth of his words is undeniable. Our clock is down to zero. She gives a stiff, reluctant nod, the motion sharp with displeasure.
“Fine,” she snaps. “Sit if you must. But touch nothing, or I’ll bury you in this stone myself.”
She turns her full attention back to me, her face a mask of grim purpose. Then her hand is on my nape, firm but gentle, pushing me forward. She steers me to the edge of Merlin’s tomb—dark granite laced with veins that glint as if they’re breathing.
It seems darker now, hungrier, the carvings deeper, the granite radiating a palpable cold that seeps through my fatigues.
I feel Dayn’s gaze burning into my back as Blythe explains, “You will have no introduction or instructions for this final trial. You will simply need to survive it, without breaking.”
Survive. My stomach tightens. That’s all she gives me. She places her hands on my shoulders and guides me down until my knees meet the cold, unforgiving floor. I kneel before the sarcophagus.
“Close your eyes,” Blythe commands from behind me.
I obey, plunging my world into darkness. The sounds of the chamber amplify—the faint drip of water somewhere in the stone, the whisper of Blythe’s robes, the steady, unnerving quiet of the dragon watching me. I feel Blythe’s fingers, cool and dry, press against my temples.
“Your coven is with you,” she murmurs, and her voice becomes distant, like it’s coming from the other side of a long tunnel. “The ancestors watch over you. Do not fail them.”
Her thumbs press harder. A strange, tingling numbness begins at the points of contact, a cold that isn't cold, spreading inward. It snakes through the bones of my skull, down my spine, a chilling wave that dissolves thought, erases sensation. The ground beneath my knees feels like it’s turning to sand.
The air thins, the scent of stone and magic fading into a sterile nothingness.
My body feels impossibly heavy, then weightless: a pendulum swinging between worlds.
Then I’m falling.
Not down… but inward. The feeling is of being turned inside out, every memory, every secret, every scar exposed to an invisible, knowing light. There is no ground, no sky, only a silent, gray expanse that feels like everything has been put on pause.
This isn’t a construct like the others. There are no forests, crumbling cities, or obsidian plains.
There is only me, and a single, towering bookshelf that stretches into the gray nothingness above and below.
It is made of dark, polished wood, and instead of books, it is filled with…
moments. I see them glittering behind thin panes of glass: my first successful blood-sigil, a trembling pattern of a bird drawn from a single drop of my blood; my mother’s hand brushing hair from my face; Jax laughing so hard he snorts soup…
my father teaching me to hold a dagger when I was nine, his calloused hands adjusting my small fingers on the hilt, his smile proud and cautious at once.
The time I broke my arm falling from the academy’s eastern wall.
The day I received my first mission scroll. My life, curated and displayed.
A chill seeps into the gray void, a familiar cold that reminds me of grave dirt and judgment. Then Esther is standing before me, her spectral form more solid here than I have ever seen it. But her eyes are on the shelf rather than on me.
“Disappointing,” she says, her voice echoing in the non-space. She gestures to several of the panes of glass. “So much potential, but still unfulfilled.”
“Why are you here?” I breathe.
“To do what I have always done, child: guide you toward survival. Both yours and our kind’s. Now, I’m here to help you cross this final line.”
“What line?” I ask, my voice thin in the oppressive silence. “What is this place?”
“This is the crucible,” Esther says, her gaze sweeping over the glittering memories. “The final filter. An Ide is not summoned by strength alone. It is summoned by sacrifice. By the willingness to burn away the parts of you that are weak.”
Her spectral hand lifts, pointing to a memory of me at six, crying over a dead bird I'd tried to heal. “This,” she says, her voice laced with calm. “Emotion that offers nothing in return. A drain, a liability.”
The glass pane glows with a sickly light. I feel a tug deep in my gut, a phantom ache as if that piece of me is being pulled taut.
“To invite the power that awaits, you must be pure purpose,” she continues, her eyes cold as winter stone. “You must offer the Ide a conduit untainted by regret or love. You must choose what to cut away.”
My blood runs colder. This isn't a test of combat where I can dodge and parry, or a trial of endurance where I simply outlast pain. This is like… spiritual surgery. The precise excision of what makes me too human. And my dead, ruthless grandmother is here to hold the knife.
My gaze fixes on the memory of the bird. I remember the frantic beat of its tiny heart against my palm before it went still. The first time I understood that my magic couldn't fix everything. That some things just end.
My throat tightens. “If we did this, would I lose these memories forever?”
Esther’s spectral lips curve into what should be a gentle smile, but nothing ever looks truly gentle on a Salem matriarch. Maybe that’s what decades of blood do to a face. Gods know I’m likely already wearing versions of her expression.
“Forever is rarely accurate when it comes to the mind, child,” she replies.
“Memories are stubborn things. They lurk beneath the surface, waiting for a trigger to resurrect them.” Her cold fingers hover near the glass.
“The detachment would be... sufficient. Long enough to complete what must be done.”
My breath comes sharp, scraping against lungs that might as well be lined with ice. The bitter truth settles in: I'm about to carve away parts of myself at the command of a woman whose blood runs in my veins but whose intentions I’ve learned to question.
“Let us begin,” she says, and her spectral fingers drift past the crying child, past the dead bird. They stop on a memory that makes my breath catch.
My father. He’s smiling, his eyes crinkling at the corners as he adjusts my nine-year-old hands on the hilt of the training dagger. The memory is warm, solid, a cornerstone of who I am. And one of the few I have of him before he disappeared.
“No,” I whisper, the sound swallowed by the void. “Not that one.”
“Love makes a blade hesitate,” Esther says, her voice devoid of any warmth the memory holds. “It makes a wielder weak.”
I watch her hovering there, this woman who could look at her own son—my father—with such clinical detachment. Theodore Salem's mother had perfected the art of excising emotions like tumors, cutting away anything that might burden her pursuit of survival and power… that much is clear.
And she wants me to become just like her.
Esther’s fingers move with unnerving calm as they near the image of my father’s smile. I flinch, my deepest instinct wanting to slap her hand away.
Then a voice cuts through the gray void, solid and real and utterly impossible.
“Emotion doesn’t necessarily make you weak.”
I spin around.
Dayn’s somehow standing there, barely ten feet away, arms casual at his sides. He looks exactly as he did in Merlin’s chamber—dark fatigues, imposing frame, eyes like burning amber. Real. Like he just simply walked in.
Esther’s spectral form stiffens, her irritation almost a palpable wave of cold. “You have no place here, Draxion. This is a Salem trial. A sacred space.”