Chapter 5 #2
I felt it like a physical weight, like eyes opening across impossible distance. He knew. Somehow, through the connection between us, he knew exactly what I was doing. I should have stopped. Should have been embarrassed, ashamed, should have pulled my hand away and pretended nothing had happened.
But he wasn't stopping me.
His desire surged in response to mine, feeding back through the bond until I couldn't tell where my arousal ended and his began. He was feeling this too. Feeling my pleasure as I felt his, a loop of wanting that built on itself, spiraling higher with every stroke of my fingers.
Was he touching himself too?
The thought made me whimper. Made my back arch off the bed, made my fingers move faster, chasing something that felt vast and inevitable. I pictured him somewhere in the dark, one hand wrapped around himself, stroking in time with my movements because he could feel them, could feel everything—
The shadows in the room began to stir.
I barely noticed. Too lost in sensation, in the feedback loop of desire that had become something almost unbearable. His wanting fed mine. Mine fed his. We were linked across all that distance, caught in something neither of us could control.
"Please," I heard myself whisper. To him. To the darkness. To the bond that connected us. "Please, please, please—"
Through the connection, I felt his response. Not words exactly. Something deeper. A pulse of authority, of possession, of permission granted. Take what you need, little one. Let me feel it.
I came apart.
The orgasm hit me like a wave—no, like a storm, like the kind of weather that reshapes coastlines.
My whole body seized with pleasure so intense it bordered on pain, every nerve I possessed firing at once, shadows swirling around me in response to the magic I couldn't control.
The room darkened and brightened in turns, starlight pulsing in time with my release.
I cried out—his name, maybe, or just sound, meaningless syllables torn from a throat that had forgotten how to form words.
And through the bond, I felt his satisfaction.
Deep. Primal. The pleasure of a man who has claimed something precious, even from hundreds of miles away. His release echoed against mine—a shadow of sensation, a whisper of his own completion.
Then his voice, soft as darkness, threading through my mind:
Good girl. Now sleep.
And I did.
The shadows settled around me like a blanket, warm and protective, his presence wrapped around my consciousness even in absence. The pleasure faded slowly, leaving behind a sweetness that almost covered the ache.
Almost.
Because when I woke hours later, still trembling with aftershocks, still marked by what we'd shared across all that impossible distance, the wanting was worse than before. Not less. Worse. I'd tasted something now. Felt what it would be like when he finally claimed me for real.
And nothing—not my own hands, not the bond's echo, not any of the comfort this place could offer—would ever be enough again.
I needed him.
I needed him to come home.
The restlessness drove me deeper than I should have gone.
By the second afternoon, I'd worn a path through the nursery floor.
Paced the length of the dining chamber until the shadows started giving me looks—or what felt like looks, anyway, that patient disapproval of creatures who had never needed to move to feel alive.
I'd read three books of shadow-script I could barely understand, rearranged the shelves in my room twice, and nearly screamed at the star-veins in the walls for pulsing so slowly.
The transformation energy had nowhere to go.
Without Morgrith here to ground it, without his hands on my hair or his voice in my ears, the power building in my blood had become a living thing. Restless. Hungry. Demanding outlet.
The archives called to me.
I told myself I was just exploring. Just stretching my legs, learning the Sanctuary the way he'd wanted me to. I could feel the way back through the bond—his heartbeat distant but present, a compass pointing toward wherever he was. I wouldn't get lost. I was being careful.
The lies sounded hollow even in my own head.
But I followed the pull anyway.
The corridors narrowed the deeper I went. The ceiling lowered. The star-veins grew sparse, then disappeared entirely, leaving only the faint luminescence of my own shadow-marks to light the way. Ancient air pressed against my skin, heavy with the weight of millennia.
The shadow paths. That’s how I’d get to the archives. I had to shadow step, find my way through the danger.
It wasn’t easy. To find my way in, I had to find the space between the shadows. I held out a hand, touched the darkness. I felt it pull to me, try to take me. I followed into a dark space, a black pathway that led me far.
Eventually the shadow corridor forked. Right was a slow corkscrew downward, the air thick with quiet that bordered on liquid.
Left was a sharper turn through a low arch, the stone beneath my feet smooth as glass and cold enough that I felt it through the soles of my shoes.
I hesitated, searching for resonance, for a clue to which path would lead me where I wanted.
Where I needed. I went left. The walls closed in almost immediately—not a true narrowing, but the illusion of it, the way darkness makes space shrink to a pinhole.
The corridor ended abruptly in a round vault lit by nothing at all, and I barely saw the seam of a door before it shivered open under my hand.
The archives of the Umbral Sanctuary were nothing like any library I'd seen.
No shelves, no books. Just rows and rows of shadows, each a perfect vertical slit stretching from floor to ceiling, quivering faintly, as though expecting to be chosen.
And then the archives opened before me like a secret finally surrendered.
The chamber was vast, the way everything in this place seemed to be, as if the Sanctuary had simply decided that physical space was a suggestion rather than a law.
Shelves climbed toward a ceiling I couldn't see, each one groaning under the weight of shadow-script texts bound in materials I didn't recognize.
Leather that moved slightly when I looked at it.
Metal that hummed with contained power. Something that might have been dragon-scale, iridescent in the dim light.
The books were organized by subject, I realized as I walked between the towering stacks. Sections in languages I couldn't read, arranged in patterns I couldn't parse. But one word kept appearing, again and again, in scripts both ancient and recent.
Valdris.
My hands found the first text before my mind caught up with my body.
The First Dragon. The Broken Bond.
I opened it.
The story assembled itself in fragments, pieces scattered across different texts that I gathered like a woman possessed.
Valdris—eldest of dragonkind, first to take human form, bridge between two races that should never have needed bridging.
He had existed before the world took its current shape.
Before mountains rose and seas filled their basins.
Before any of the seven Dragon Lords were born.
He had been meant to lead. To unite.
To love.
I found Evara's name on the third page, and my breath stopped.
She was described as a healer, the text said. One gifted with an unusual ability—she could absorb the pain of others, transmute it through her own body, take into herself what would otherwise destroy.
The words blurred before my eyes.
I knew this gift. I carried this gift. My grandmother had carried it before me, and her mother before her, a line of wound-walkers stretching back through generations I had never thought to trace.
Back ten thousand years?
My hands trembled as I kept reading.
The bond between Valdris and Evara had been unprecedented.
The text used words like "all-consuming" and "transcendent" and "the kind of love that reshapes reality.
" He had given her everything—his power, his protection, his devotion absolute and eternal.
The other dragons had watched their union with something between awe and fear.
And she had rejected him.
The reasons have been lost, the text admitted. Fear, perhaps, of an intensity she could not match. Visions of catastrophe she could not prevent. An attempt to save him from something she foresaw—or an attempt to save herself from what his love would demand.
Whatever the reason, the rejection broke him.
I turned page after page with shaking fingers.
Read about his transformation—love curdling to hatred, devotion twisting into destruction.
How he'd become something the dragons could no longer name without inviting his attention.
How they'd been forced to seal him away, lock him beneath the world in chains that had held for ten millennia.
How he'd been trying to break free ever since.
And Evara—
Evara had died.
The text didn't specify how. Didn't describe the circumstances of her ending or the disposition of her soul. It simply said: Her essence passed beyond the veil and did not return.
Until now.
I set the book down.
My cheeks were wet.
I raised my hand to my face, startled—I hadn't felt the tears start. They weren't the sharp salt of grief I recognized, the kind that accompanied death and loss and the patients I couldn't save. These tears were different. Older. Borrowed from somewhere deeper than memory.
Grief sat in my chest like a stone.
Not mine, I thought. Except it felt like mine. It felt like something I'd been carrying forever, locked in the drawer where I kept all the impossible things, waiting to be acknowledged.
A woman who could absorb pain.
A woman who had loved a dragon so vast and ancient it had terrified her.
A woman who had run.
I remember running.