Chapter 10
Ruka
I was ill as a hornet whose nest had been kicked. I'd been stomping around the village for the last three days, snapping at anyone who crossed my path. Even Ardin said I was acting like a bear with a thorn in its paw. Ryhain had been more direct—she'd called me an asshole.
The training dummy exploded under another savage strike, wood fragments spinning through the air like shrapnel. Sweat carved rivers down my spine. I raised my blade again, every muscle in my body coiled tight, screaming for release—
"You know," came Sarsa's dry voice from somewhere behind me, "that dummy never did anything to you."
I didn't turn around. Didn't stop. The blade whistled through the air. "Go away, old woman."
"Charming as ever, I see." Her footsteps scraped closer across the packed earth of the training grounds. "This wouldn't have anything to do with a certain human female, would it?"
My blade froze mid-swing, suspended in the air like a held breath. "I don't know what you're talking about."
"Of course you don't." Sarsa's tone dripped with that infuriating, all-knowing quality that made me want to punch something. Preferably the training dummy, or maybe Kael. "That's why you've been prowling around like a wounded beast ever since she left."
"She didn't leave," I snarled, whirling to face the elder. Wood chips clung to my sweat-slicked arms. "She was never staying. She was always going back to her world."
"Mmmm." Sarsa crossed her arms, one eyebrow raised in that way that said she saw right through me. "And yet here you are, murdering training equipment over it."
My jaw clenched so hard I heard my teeth grind. "What do you want from me?"
But even as the words left my mouth, I knew—deep down, in a place I didn't want to examine too closely—that she was right.
I missed Jordan. Missed her laugh, her endless questions, the way she looked at our world with wonder instead of fear.
The village felt wrong without her in it.
Hollow. Like something vital had been carved out and taken away.
Carved out of my very heart.
Sarsa's expression shifted, the teasing edge melting away like morning frost under sunlight. When she spoke again, her voice carried the weight of ancient truths. "You're acting like a male suffering from an unrequited mate bond."
A harsh laugh tore from my throat, bouncing off the trees. "Orcs don't have mate bonds. Not like that. We choose our partners—we don't get... hijacked by some mystical force that decides for us."
"Not anymore, we don't," Sarsa said, and something flickered in her eyes—something old and sad and knowing. "But once upon a time, when our feet still walked beneath open sky, we did."
My blade hung forgotten in my grip. "What are you talking about?"
"I'm talking about before, Ruka. Before the underground welcomed us.
When sunlight warmed our skin and moonlight blessed our ceremonies.
When we were still woven into the full cycle of nature's magic, not cut off from it like severed roots.
" She stepped closer, her weathered hands moving through the air as if tracing patterns only she could see.
"The mate bond was real then. Sacred. The rarest and most precious gift the old magics could bestow upon our kind. "
I sheathed my blade with a sharp click, my full attention riveted on her now. "I don't understand."
Sarsa lowered herself onto a nearby rock, moving with the deliberate care of someone whose bones remembered too many winters.
Her gaze drifted past me, seeing through walls and stone to something far beyond.
"Long ago, our people lived on the surface alongside the natives of this land.
We traded stories and steel, learned their songs and taught them ours, shared in their ceremonies as they shared in ours.
We were allies. Friends. Family, even." She paused, and the silence felt heavy with ghosts.
"Then the first settlers came from across the seas.
Vikings, they called themselves. Pale men with dragon-prowed ships and an appetite for conquest that knew no bounds. "
My jaw tightened. I'd heard bits of this history before, fragments caught in dark corners and late-night conversations, but never the full story.
Sarsa's eyes grew distant, haunted. "They called us jotunn.
Giants." The word came out like a curse, bitter on her tongue.
"And they were right to fear us. We fought like the very demons they accused us of being—protecting ourselves, protecting our native friends, driving the invaders back to the frigid waters that had vomited them onto our shores.
For a time we thought we were safe. Decades passed in peace.
Generations were born, grew old, and returned to the earth.
We dared to believe the nightmare was over. "
"But nightmares don't die so easily," I said, my voice rough.
"No, they don't." Her weathered face hardened.
"Centuries later, they returned. And this time, we understood the terrible truth—they would never stop coming.
Wave after relentless wave of them, an endless tide of pale faces and iron crosses and the kind of righteous fury that justifies any atrocity.
" Her hands trembled before clenching into white-knuckled fists.
"The natives chose to stay on the surface.
To bend like reeds in the storm rather than break.
To extend the hand of peace to the Europeans, to try and coexist."
She looked at me then, and the anguish in her ancient eyes made my chest tighten.
"You know how that mercy was repaid," she whispered.
"Genocide. Death marches. Reservations that were nothing but open-air prisons where spirits went to wither.
Their children ripped from their arms and civilized—beaten for speaking their own tongues, stripped of their names, their songs, their very souls.
The Europeans tried to scrub them from existence like blood from a blade. "
The silence that followed felt like a tomb.
"Our people chose differently," Sarsa said, and now her voice carried the weight of centuries.
"We retreated. Down into the deep places where sunlight became a memory, where the darkness could swallow us whole and keep us safe from those who would see us extinct.
" She met my gaze, tears finally spilling down her weathered cheeks.
"But survival always demands payment. And the price we paid.
.." Her voice cracked. "The price was everything. "
"What do you mean?"
"We are children of nature, Ruka. Our magic doesn't just flow from the earth beneath our feet—it needs the sky above.
The sun's kiss on our skin. The moon's pull on our blood.
The endless, sacred dance of seasons and stars.
" Each word seemed to cost her. "Buried in the deep dark, severed from those gifts, our magic began to starve.
To wither like plants cut from soil. Generation by generation, it faded—and the fated mate bond, the most precious blessing our magic could bestow, dimmed with it.
Until it became nothing more than a story.
A beautiful tale we told ourselves to remember what we'd lost."
I stood frozen, her words sinking into my bones.
"Until now," she whispered, soft as a prayer.
The true mate bond. I'd heard those words my entire life—whispered around dying fires, woven through the old songs, invoked at mating ceremonies like prayers cast into an empty void. A connection that could survive death itself. A pull toward another granted by the fates.
Just stories. All of it.
They were hollow promises spoken over clasped hands, wishes that evaporated like breath on winter air. Every mated pair hoped they'd be the chosen ones. None ever were.
My own parents loved each other with a ferocity that could shake mountains.
I'd watched my mother hold my father's cooling body, her screams of anguish tearing holes in the night.
If that soul-deep, world-ending love wasn't a fated bond, then the magic had died generations ago—if it had ever truly existed.
And yet.
The instant Sarsa named it, something primal awakened in my chest. A truth I'd been fighting like a cornered beast since Jordan's scent first slammed into me and knocked the air from my lungs.
That pull. That relentless, suffocating need.
The insistence that every fiber of my being demanded I protect her, possess her, mark her so completely that even the gods would know she belonged to me.
I'd told myself it was lust—powerful, yes, all-consuming even, but nothing more than flesh calling to flesh.
I'd been a fool.
This ran deeper. Older. It lived in the spaces between my breaths, in the very marrow of my bones.
When Jordan stood beside me, the chaos of the world settled into perfect order.
When she left, her absence carved itself into my ribs like a wound that wouldn't close.
Her scent didn't simply draw me—it ignited something ancient and sleeping, something that had claimed her as mine before my mind could even comprehend what was happening.
My parents had built something extraordinary together—a partnership forged in fire and tempered by time. I understood devotion. I'd seen it in every glance they shared, every touch, every unspoken word that passed between them like a secret language only they could speak.
But this thing with Jordan? It devoured all comparison. Swallowed it whole and left me grasping for words that didn't exist.
This wasn't a choice I'd made. It was a force of nature—inevitable as gravity.
"The bond." The words scraped out of me, raw and reluctant. "You're saying it's come back."
Sunlight played across Sarsa's weathered face, catching in her eyes until they blazed with something timeless and knowing. "I'm saying our people have wandered in darkness for too long. That the surface world has stirred something in us—something we thought lost to the ages."