Chapter 10 Echo in Her Veins
Chapter ten
Echo in Her Veins
-Maris-
Maris woke greeted by silence, head pounding, a foreign hum under her skin. No voices. No footsteps. No rustle of the wraith-twins laying out her clothes. Just stillness, thick, unnatural pressing against her like another layer of skin.
Her body ached.
Not the deep bruising ache of swordplay or drills, but something stranger. She pressed a hand to her chest and found her heart steady. It wasn’t pain, exactly. It was… dissonance.
Like the notes of a familiar song played slightly out of key. She sat up slowly.
Her nightgown was fresh. Her boots had been removed. Someone had placed her beneath the velvet blankets of her bed.
Did I faint? The question stirred in her mind.
Her last memory came in flashes.
Kael’s body above hers.
The sweat-slick heat of him.
The glint in his eyes, somewhere between hunger and awe.
Then — light, sudden and blinding, flooded the space, directionless as if it came from everywhere and nowhere at once.
And after that… nothing.
She swung her legs off the bed and winced as the stone floor chilled her bare feet. Her fingers trembled as she reached for the goblet of water set beside her but not from cold.
Her body sagged under its own weight, like something sacred had been spent, and her body hadn't caught up yet.
She reassured herself it was nothing, a simple wave of weakness. She hadn't eaten much that morning — maybe she'd fainted from a lack of nourishment mixed with too much exertion in the spar.
And yet the unease clung to her like smoke.
She looked in the mirror. Her reflection stared back, same jet-black hair, tangled now; same pale green eyes, though… were they brighter? Or was it just the light?
A knock sounded sharp and immediate at the chamber door.
It opened without waiting for her answer.
Valea.
The woman entered like a blade unsheathed, all precise movement and unreadable eyes. She gave Maris a once-over and crossed her arms.
“You're to rest for the remainder of the day. You're training and lessons will resume tomorrow.”
Maris blinked into the dim light, "Where's Kael?" she asked, then after a beat, "I need to ask him what happened."
“Your King decided the lesson was complete,” Valea said coolly.
That wasn’t an answer. She watched Valea’s face, noting the faintest twitch at the corner of her mouth.
A smirk?
“I can see it in your face Valea. Say it. Whatever it is you're keeping from me.” Maris said before she could stop herself.
Valea's eyes sparkled with interest as one brow crept upward, the beginnings of a wicked idea already forming.
Maris stood, pushing down the ripple of dizziness that greeted her. Fury bloomed in her chest raw and unforgiving — as the weight of every lie, every withheld truth, finally broke loose.
“Why was he gone for a week? And why did he show up like that, like he’d been waiting to pounce?” She snapped.
Valea held her silence her gaze flicked toward the mirror.
“Perhaps,” she said at last, “you should ask yourself why he has waited at all.”
She turned and left without another word.
Maris stared at the empty doorway, her heart hammering against her ribs. She paced the chamber for what felt like an hour before finally settling near the hearth, curling beneath a fur throw and pulling a book from the stack Aldwyn had left her.
The words passed through her, empty and unanchored. Her mind wandered to the memory of Kael's sculpted figure hovering over hers, heat and hunger suspended in the space between them. He now lingered in her mind like a promise — dangerous, delicious.
She clenched the book in her hand so tensely she almost snapped the spine of it. She slammed it shut willing the heat in her chest to fade, to forget how it had felt to be beneath him.
But deep in her chest, something shifted again she didn’t know what it meant. Only that she wasn’t the same.
The fire had burned low when she chose a new tome to read through. Her mind was still too fogged with her thoughts spinning but something in her hands itched to find distraction.
It was a thick tome, bound in cracked navy leather, its corners softened by age.
The contents unraveled the forgotten glory of the Borderlands — once a great metropolis of art and trade reduced to its current state of waste and ruin by the vengeance of the Gods.
Aldwyn had assigned it early in her studies, but she hadn’t reached the final chapters yet.
She thumbed toward the back, hoping for something that might ground her.
As if summoned by fate’s listening ear — tucked between two pages like a secret meant to be forgotten.
A torn corner of parchment with a spidery line of ink, faded, no signature or date — read:
“She shall bear the sky’s mark in her gaze and the quiet God’s will in her blood. When the Veil thins, she will walk between what was and what should be.”
Maris read it once. Then twice.
The sky’s mark…
She glanced toward the mirror again.
The pale green of her irises, ringed in silver like starlight had once fallen through her eyes and gotten stuck.
The quiet God’s will…
Was that Eiren, the dead Goddess?
She didn’t know why the name echoed in her chest like a half-remembered lullaby.
A whisper of dread coaxed her flesh. Maris closed the tome with a thud, sharp and deliberate.
-Kael-
The council chamber was thick with torchlight and tension.
Kael stood at the long table, palms braced, eyes flicking over every face that dared meet his. The air foul with old magic and worry.
Corin and Riven stood to his left. The war-mages kept their silence, twin statues of muscle and menace, but Kael could feel their unease.
He’d felt it, too, ever since he carried Maris from the training yard like a thing already claimed and cursed the moment he touched her.
“You summoned us, Highness,” said a voice to his right, deep, rough like stone cracking under snow.
Lord Draeven, husband to Commander Valea.
Warden of the Iron Peaks and a loyalist of Kael’s bloodline for three reigns.
His pewter hair cropped short, He wore the ache of exsistence like a second skin, the years had not been kind to his features.
A thick silver beard was braided tight, and a blade rested at his hip below his shadowed cloak.
Kael turned toward him.
“I need counsel,” he said flatly. “From someone who has not yet let their fear poison their judgment.”
Draeven gave a short nod. “Very well, your highness, let the truths of the girl be laid bare.”
“Her name is Maris.” The words slipped out before Kael could stop them.
He grit his jaw, glaring down at the stone floor. “Power erupted from her in a burst that set my instincts on edge — raw, unchecked, and unlike anything I'd ever felt. I don't believe she was even aware it came from within her.”
“Fae?” Riven asked. “Or vampire?”
Kael shook his head. “Neither. It was something older and far more dangerous. Even my shadows twisted away, instinctive and afraid.”
“Well, that's comforting. The walking darkness recoiled. Definitely not a problem at all.” Corin snorted raking a hand over his scarred eye.
Kael shot him a glare that could have gutted a deer. But Draeven remained calm.
“Long ago, my mother spoke of a similar magic… though we all thought it was just legend,” he said, slowly.
“During the last thinning of the Veil, when many still worshiped the gods, hoping to win favor, a temple priestess named Liora erupted in a blinding flare of magic. She spoke in a tongue no one recognized — anicent and immortal — before bursting into flames from within. Her body turned to ash before the eyes of the villagers, leaving behind a scorched symbol in the temple square. Many called it a warning. ”
Kael looked at him sharply. “Do you know of any written accounts of the event?”
Draeven’s eyes narrowed.
“Like I mentioned your grace, we believe it to be only legend.
" He hesitated. “My mother, the imaginitive thing she was, had her own theories about the tale.
She believed the priest was saying something about the dead goddess as it occurred on Eiren's temple ground. She said loosely translated to 'The dreaming god stirs.’”
Kael’s pulse skipped. His mind went back to the Seer’s words.
She is the storm in the dreamer’s heart.
You cannot bind what is already chained to the sky.
Ask not what she is. Ask why you were drawn to her.
He exhaled sharply.
“Could it be that Maris is bound to Eiren the same way that priest was — tethered by fate. We cannot let her be used and left to burn.” Kael said, rising fully.
Riven exchanged a glance with Draeven.
“Then the question is,” said Draeven carefully, “do we teach her what she may be… or do we use her power before she learns?”
Kael’s voice was ice. “She is not a weapon.”
Silence.
Then Draeven, eyes sharper than steel, murmured, “She might be something far more dangerous.”
Kael sat alone in the private dining hall, firelight reflecting off the polished obsidian walls like the flicker of passing thoughts. The wine in his goblet had long gone untouched.
Draeven’s question still gnawed at the edges of his mind:
Guide her… or use her?
She is not a weapon, he had said. He believed it.
Didn’t he?
Kael leaned back in the high-backed onyx chair and let the thought devour him.
She could be a weapon — something carved of starlight and wrath, wrapped in mortal skin, claimed by the goddess.
But to wield her that way…
He had seen the tremble in her hands. The confusion in her gaze when her magic burst forth.
She didn’t know the extent of her power. But she would soon with or without him.
His seer had spoken in riddles. The council had pressed. Even Valea had begun to act like she was watching a wick inch toward a flame.
But Kael?
Kael couldn’t shake the memory: Magic radiating from her, soft and searing. He'd frozen in that moment barely breathing. He saw her fear — but even more, the fierce life force it awakened in her. A missing piece to her soul.
He needed to see it again. Feel her again. Even if it meant breaking the last bit of sanity he clung to.
A slow, grinding creak split the air as the massive door edged open behind him.
There she was — as if she heard his silent prayer and he fell apart quietly within himself.
-Maris-
The gown shimmered like liquid starlight, each thread catching the light as if it had been spun from raw lightning. It clung to her, whispered across her skin, dipped scandalously low along her back, and trailed in soft tendrils like smoke.
She had stared at it for a full minute after the twins laid it across her bed.
“Dinner with the King,” they’d said, smiling in tandem. “Alone.”
Now, standing in the threshold of the private dining room, she felt stripped bare, more than she ever had in the copper tub or wrapped in sheer lace. Because this wasn’t about nudity. It was about being seen.
And Kael saw her.
His gaze traveled over her slowly, lazily, like a flame licking across parchment. When their eyes met, something tightened in her belly —not fear.
Something worse. Desire. Curiosity. A sick fascination with her beautiful captor.
“Love,” he murmured, voice like silk pulled over a blade. “Tell me — should I be feasting … or falling to my knees.”
She lifted her chin, walking toward the table with measured steps. “I don’t recall choosing this dress myself.”
His lips curved. “Then I owe someone a favor, little star.”
Maris took the seat across from him. She hadn’t even touched the wine, and already her skin burned like a flame. The King’s gaze was too much it unwrapped her slowly, like he could taste every thought she didn’t share.
She cleared her throat. “Is this your idea of a reward or a warning?”
Kael smirked. “You tell me. Did you enjoy the floor of the sparring ring?”
Her spine straightened. “I held my own.”
“Oh, for a moment. Then the world spun, and you were flat on your back like a wilted rose.”
Maris bristled. “I passed out from exhaustion.”
Kael hummed. “Strange —that exhaustion rarely crackles with light.”
Her breath caught, and he leaned forward just slightly.
“You sparked. Right before darkness dragged you under.”
“I— I don’t remember.”
“No?” His voice softened, and it was somehow worse. “I do.”
She stared at him, unsure whether he was mocking her or warning her. Likely both.
Kael tilted his head, silver eyes gleaming with something unreadable. “Tell me… do humans often faint from pleasure?”
Her cheeks flamed.
“I wasn’t —It wasn’t,”
He chuckled darkly. “It’s just a question. You were quite flushed, if I recall.”
“Maybe you caused my withering with your shadows.” She tilted her head in accusation.
“Maybe,” he said, sipping his wine at last.
-Kael-
She remembered something —even if she wouldn’t admit it. The spark in her eyes, the way her body tensed when he mentioned what had happened, the flicker of discomfort at his suggestion of pleasure. She didn’t know what had happened when she fell, not really. And he wouldn’t tell her. Not yet.
If he did, it would steer the course too soon. Pull her too fast toward the truth she wasn’t ready to wear. Let her unravel it on her own. Let her burn slowly.
Kael raised his goblet in mock salute. “To second chances in the ring,” he said silkily.
She scowled at him but didn’t look away.
He smiled.