Chapter 37
The settlement was louder on the inside than it had looked from the outside.
It wasn’t loud in a way that suggested comfort or ease, but that specific, layered noise of a place that had figured out how to keep itself running despite being in an unsurvivable hellscape.
Metal striking metal. Low voices carrying across the open ground between buildings.
The sound of movement that had purpose behind it, which was somehow more unsettling than silence would have been, because it meant this place had a rhythm, a routine, and that it had been here long enough to develop both.
The structures up close were rawer than distance had suggested, every wall and roofline bearing the evidence of what it had taken to build them.
Score marks and heat scars where the obsidian had been cut and shaped, lengths of stripped bone and dense reddish timber used where other materials hadn’t stretched far enough.
Nothing here had come easily. Everything said so.
The ground between the buildings had been worn flat by foot traffic alone, paths pressed into the cracked earth by sheer repetition until the ground had simply given up and accepted them.
The people watched us as we passed.
Some kept their eyes down or their backs turned with the practiced disinterest of people who had learned not to be curious about new arrivals.
But others tracked us openly, and the ones who tracked us had a quality to their attention I recognized immediately and liked very much less up close.
The jaw held slightly too tight. Eyes that moved a fraction too low, catching the line of my throat before sliding away again.
The restraint that looked like stillness but wasn’t, coiled and patient and acutely, privately aware of every step I took through their space.
Their clothing matched what Cael and Rhen wore.
Salvaged fabric bleached to rust and ash, crude metal reinforcements, and those pale, stretched strips binding it all together that I had already decided I was never going to look at directly again.
Because up close, in the red light with nothing softening the details, they looked exactly like skin.
Treated and preserved and stitched into place like any other material, worn without apology by people who had clearly long since stopped thinking of it as anything other than practical.
‘There are humans among them.’ Dominic’s voice moved through my mind as we wound deeper into the settlement. ‘I can hear at least four heartbeats. Possibly more.’
I kept my eyes forward and my pace steady and filed that information somewhere I could think about it later, when we weren’t walking through a settlement full of Revenants who could apparently smell me from twenty feet away.
Granted, the tension in my chest eased a little knowing that at least these particular Revenants weren’t running on empty and starving for human blood.
Because that definitely would not have boded very well for me here.
Trace’s hand found the small of my back as we walked, and I instantly felt the bond humming between us. I didn’t look at him, but I didn’t pull away either, needing that brief contact to anchor me and remind me that we were still in this together. For better or worse.
Cael led us to the mead house at the center of the settlement, which he referred to simply as the Hold, pushing open its heavy door and holding it with two fingers, his posture loose and his expression unchanged, not even bothering to verify whether we’d followed him in.
Inside, the space was mostly bare but seemingly functional.
The walls were the same obsidian as the exterior, but the interior surface had been worked smooth, the worst of its irregularities ground away until it reflected the firelight in long, dark ribbons across the floor.
A long table ran down the center of the room, constructed from the same salvaged logic as everything else and flanked by benches hewn from what appeared to be red timber.
At the far end, a low fire burned in a hollow that had been shaped into a hearth, the smoke threading upward through a narrow gap in the roof above it.
The light it cast was the first warm light I had seen since arriving in this place, and despite everything, I felt my shoulders drop half an inch.
Rhen took a position near the door as Cael moved to the far end of the table and gestured for us to take a seat, the three of us settling onto the bench across from him.
Trace sat close enough that his arm pressed against mine, warm even through the fabric of my jacket, and some small, traitorous part of me focused on that instead of everything else.
“Are you thirsty?” he asked, though the way he said it suggested the answer was assumed rather than required.
He glanced toward the far corner of the room and gave a slight nod, and a woman appeared from the shadows at the back of the hall.
Quiet enough that I hadn’t registered her presence until she was already moving.
She carried a single chalice to the table, set it down in front of me without making eye contact, and then retreated just as silently.
“That’s really nice of you, thank you,” I said as I looked down into the glass, my brows pulling together. The chalice was dark and opaque, giving nothing away about what was inside. “What…is it?”
“Water,” answered Cael, his eyes already moving to Dominic, who reached across me without a word and picked up my chalice.
He brought it to his lips, took a single deliberate sip, and set it back down in front of me.
“Thirsty?” asked Cael, one brow lifting.
“It happens from time to time,” said Dominic, his lie coming out so smooth that it almost convinced me. Revenants had no use for water and everyone at the table knew it. “Old habits.”
I looked between the two of them.
“Water, wow,” I said, jumping in before the silence could sharpen into something worse. “We didn’t see a drop of it anywhere on the way over here.”
“There’s a source.” He leaned back slightly, arms crossing as his gaze flicked back to me. “Several miles out.”
“And you go out there to get it?” The surprise in my voice was genuine. After what he’d said about the sky going dark and not wanting to be caught in the open when it did, a few miles suddenly felt like a whole lot of time to be out there hauling water back and forth.
“No choice,” he answered evenly, his expression giving nothing away as to how he felt about it. “It’s a vital part of keeping our settlement running.”
I picked up the chalice and took a sip, and then another. My throat had been dry since we arrived, the air here pulling the moisture out of everything in sight, including me. I’d guzzled almost half of it before I’d even realized. I lowered the chalice and met his eyes again.
“For your humans, you mean?” I asked, before thinking it all the way through.
The corner of his mouth twitched almost imperceptibly. “Yes,” he said. “For our humans.”
He said it the way you stated any other fact of life, plainly and without apology, and I understood then that the rest of it went without saying.
Whatever needed to be done to keep their humans healthy and functional, they did it with the same calculated care you gave anything you depended on to survive.
You certainly didn’t maintain a food source by running it into the ground.
“How do you feed them?” I asked, setting the chalice down on the table in front of me. “We walked for hours and saw nothing out there.” No plants, no animals, nothing. Even the soil had looked like it was incapable of growing anything other than dusty dirt.
“It’s difficult but not impossible,” he answered. “There are things that grow in Sanguinarium…if you know how to coax them.”
He didn’t offer what things he was referring to or how exactly one might coax such things. And honestly, the way he’d said it, I decided I was perfectly fine not knowing anything more on the topic anyway. I didn’t plan on being here long enough to require that information.
A beat of silence passed before Cael set both palms flat on the table, his eyes sharpening with the look of someone getting to the part that actually interested him. “This door you mentioned.” His eyes moved to Dominic and stayed there. “What makes you certain it exists?”
“A combination of things,” said Dominic, leaning back against the bench, as though he were deciding which cards to put on the table and in what order. “Some of it witnessed. Some of it reasoned out afterward.”
Cael’s eyes didn’t move from his. “Witnessed how?”
“Well, for starters, we didn’t come through the seam.”
Cael’s eyes sharpened almost imperceptibly, and Rhen, who had been as still as furniture since we’d sat down, shifted his weight by a fraction near the door.
“We were ported here,” continued Dominic, his tone as casual as if he were discussing the weather. “By a member of the Order. Directly. And we saw him leave the same way he came in.”
Something moved through Cael’s expression then, brief and complicated. For just a moment I thought I saw it—the thing underneath all that careful flatness, the part of him that had been here long enough to have opinions about hope and what it cost you. He looked down at the table, then back up.
“The Order built this Realm,” he said finally.
“Their magic made it and their magic sealed it. It stands to reason they can move through their own walls.” He paused, letting that sit.
“That’s not a door the rest of us can use.
Anakim magic doesn’t work here. Whatever you could do on the other side of the seam, you can consider it gone. ”
“We noticed,” said Trace, his voice even but with an edge to it that hadn’t been there before. He pushed his knee against mine under the table and left it there.
“Then you already know what that means,” said Cael, with the quiet finality of someone who had arrived at this conclusion a long time ago and had made his peace with it.
“And yet the Sacred Keeper used Anakim magic freely enough,” said Dominic. “Which would suggest there’s a loophole somewhere in that logic.”
Cael looked at him for a long, suspended moment.
“Perhaps,” he said simply. “But in the four decades I’ve spent in this Realm, we haven’t managed to find anything close to a loophole or a way out.
So unless one of you happens to carry something other than Anakim magic, I wouldn’t go spending that hope just yet. ”
Everything inside of me froze.
I turned the number over in my mind and immediately put it back down, because looking at it directly was not something I was capable of doing right now without completely unraveling, and I had already done enough of that today.
The thought of being here for more than a few days, let alone four decades, made me want to crawl out of my own skin and die.
And then my mind snagged on the other part.
‘Unless one of you happens to carry something other than Anakim magic…’
He’d said it like it was laughable. A joke with no punchline. A throwaway line delivered the way you delivered a foregone conclusion; the conversational equivalent of a period at the end of a sentence that was never meant to be questioned.
I could feel Trace looking at me then, but I didn’t meet his eyes. I turned the chalice slowly between my palms as Cael’s words circled through my mind before settling somewhere that made my pulse go quiet.
Sanguinarium had been built by the Order.
Their Anakim magic had created it, shaped its very walls and sealed it.
And it was that same Anakim magic that was keeping everyone inside it powerless and trapped, stripping every ability at the door like a toll collected on the way in.
That was the cage. That was what it had been designed to do.
But they’d made an assumption they hadn’t accounted for when they built the walls around this place. The same one Cael had just made without realizing it. The same one I had made without even noticing.
That we were all Anakim.
Except I wasn’t.
And if the walls of this place had been built to contain Anakim magic—to recognize it and refuse it, the way a lock refused every key except the one made for it specifically—then maybe we’d just been pushing against the wrong door.
When I glanced up a second later, Dominic’s gaze was already waiting for mine, quiet and still and thinking something he clearly wasn’t ready to say in present company.
“Right,” I said, setting the chalice down. “Something to think about.”
Trace met my eyes then, his pupils bleeding briefly into the blue before pulling back again. “Agreed. Luckily, we don’t give up that easily,” he said, directing the statement at Cael. “I’m sure we’ll come up with something once we’ve had time to rest and regroup.”
Cael studied the three of us for a moment, his sharp eyes moving between us with an expression that was harder to read than it had been a few minutes ago before pushing back from the table and rising.
“I’ll show you the rest of the compound and where you’ll be sleeping,” he said, the bone at his septum catching the firelight as he spoke. “You can clean up before supper.”
The three of us got to our feet.
Dominic straightened his button-up shirt, his fingers briefly passing over the torn fabric where the stake had gone through it, with the air of someone adjusting a dinner jacket before a formal occasion.
“We appreciate your generosity,” he said, and somehow managed to make it sound entirely sincere.
Cael acknowledged it with a single nod and moved toward the door without waiting.
I fell into step behind them. Trace slowed down a step to walk beside me, his hand slipping into mine. I tried to keep my mind focused on that, on our soulmate bond humming contently, instead of the other thing that was trying to muscle its way to the front of it.
There are things that grow in Sanguinarium, if you know how to coax them.
He hadn’t elaborated on what things he was referring to and hadn’t specified how.
And now he was inviting us to stay for supper in a settlement where the only confirmed food sources were water hauled from miles away, mysterious coaxed vegetation, and a small population of carefully maintained humans.
As much as I was praying for vegetables, something told me that wasn’t what he was talking about.