Chapter 38 Nerina
Nerina
Skeldrhall, Ymirskald
The cold of the hall doesn’t bite the way it once did.
I can’t tell if I’ve grown numb to it… or if something inside me has changed.
There is fire now—coiled deep in the hollow of my chest. Not warmth.
Not comfort. A living thing. Fed by anger.
By grief. By the slow, merciless return of power that was always mine.
It moves beneath my skin like something waking from a long, starved sleep.
I chose to stay. I repeat that to myself every morning when I wake beneath furs heavy enough to crush the sea from my lungs.
When the air feels too thin. When the quiet feels too loud.
I would remain only until I had a plan. Until I understood what they stole from me.
Until I could stitch together the shape of the lie I had been living inside.
I’ve been here five days. Maybe six. Time fractures in the cold. The nights stretch long and breathless. The days blur into white silence. I measure them not by the sun, but by the way my fury grows.
The nights… the nights are worse. Sleep comes hard, and when it does, it drags me under.
My dreams are jagged things—half-memories, half-nightmares.
Hands pressing against my skin, chants threading into my veins like chains.
My mother’s voice calling me daughter in tones that no longer sound like hers.
I wake choking on the fear that if I return to Thalassia, they will drag me back into their circle, bind me, lock me away for good.
That’s my worst fear: not dying, but returning to the girl I was before I knew the truth.
I wish I had been born without it. That I was ordinary.
That I could live without every choice, every breath weighed down by someone else’s expectation.
There are nights I wish they would take it all from me—scrape the magic out until nothing burned, nothing whispered, nothing remained.
So I would never have to feel like this again.
Without it, I am nothing. That’s the echo that keeps me awake at night. That’s the lie that creeps into my chest when the silence grows too heavy: without my power, I have no worth.
I’d never seen cooks in the hall. No servants. No clatter of trays or murmured orders. And yet, without fail, the long table was always set—steam curling from fresh bread, bowls of fruit glazed with frost-sweet syrup, roasted meats and spiced grains arranged with quiet care.
Veyrion insisted we eat together—every morning, every evening. Not as a demand, exactly. More like an inevitability.
I tried to skip a meal once in the morning, claiming I wasn’t hungry. Another time at dusk, pretending I’d lost track of the hour.
Veyrion didn’t argue. He simply lifted me and carried me to the table, resistance had never been an option. He set me in my chair, poured me tea, and carried on. After that, I stopped trying to avoid the meals. Infuriatingly, he was persuasive like that.
Now, he’s sitting across from me, steady and silent.
A snake in the grass, coiled and patient.
He already tried to lead me into a marriage I didn’t want, into binding myself to him without knowing the cost. What else hid behind his patience, his careful words, the flicker of storm I sometimes caught in his eyes?
I don't trust him. But trust or not, I can’t ignore him.
The silence stretched too long. Too heavy. It pressed against my ribs until I couldn’t stand it anymore. My fork scraped hard against the plate, the sound grating through the silence.
“Do you ever wonder,” I blurted, my voice rough, “if you’d be better off without it?”
Veyrion’s head lifted slightly.
I stared down at the half-eaten food, my fingers white-knuckled around the goblet.
The words tumbled before I could stop them.
“The power. The hunger. Curse, gift, or whatever they want to call it. Do you ever wish you were just… normal? Unremarkable. That you could’ve lived your life without all of it.
” The admission left me raw, trembling. My chest ached with how much I wanted to take the words back and how much I needed them to be heard.
Veyrion didn’t answer right away. The only sound was the fire popping in the hearth, the storm whispering beyond the stone walls.
His silence was unbearable. So I kept going, unable to stop myself.
“Because sometimes I think it would be easier. That if they stripped it all away—if they took all of it, this magic, and left nothing, at least then I wouldn’t have to carry it anymore. ”
My voice cracked on the last word. I hated the sound of it. Weak. Small. But it was the truth, and it was out now, bleeding into the air between us like smoke. My crescent mark flickered.
He only watched me, firelight catching on the hard planes of his face, the weight of his silence pressing heavy against my skin. I almost wished he would laugh, or dismiss me, or turn the knife the way Alaric always did with his words. Anything would be easier than that stillness.
He set his knife down. The sound of steel against stone was deliberate. Final. “Yes,” he said at last, his voice low. “There are nights I wish the gods had left me to the frost. That I had lived and died like any other man.”
His eyes flickered—storm breaking, just for a heartbeat—and I saw something jagged there. “But wishing doesn’t change what was carved into us. And pretending otherwise makes us weak.”
I swallowed hard, the words scraping against the hollow in my chest. “So you just… live with it?”
A corner of his mouth twitched, but it wasn’t a smile. “No. I wield it. And if the gods hate me for it, let them choke on their own curses.”
The fire snapped, sparks spiraling up the chimney like stars that burned out too quickly. Veyrion leaned back in his chair, his expression steady, his voice dropping to something quiet but unyielding.
“I won’t lie to you. The weight never leaves. It burrows deeper, until it’s part of your marrow. You learn to carry it—or it consumes you.”
Yet beneath that grim comfort lingered a shadow: the unspoken warning that if I failed to master the weight, it would master me. But fury and anger clawed back up. “Why are you helping me?” I demanded. “Why let me stay here?”
There was a silence before he answered. Not hesitation—calculation.
“Because I know what it means to be betrayed by the ones you trusted most. Because I know what it feels like to have your purpose stolen before you ever understood what it was. And because”—his voice dropped lower now, weighted like stone sinking into water—“I know the fury that comes after.”
My heart tight in my chest. “What do you want from me?”
“I want you to become unstoppable,” he said—not with fire, but with something heavier, forged from memory and regret shaped into a blade.
“Not for vengeance. Not for me. For you. So no one can ever take from you again what they stole. So that when you rise, it’s not because they allowed it, but because you decided it. ”
I looked back at Veyrion, the firelight catching in the glacier-blue edges of his irises.
My voice was quieter now, but anger coiled beneath it.
“What changed? Because I haven’t forgotten.
You threatened Alaric’s life to make me bend.
You told me I had no choice but to stand at your side—or lose him.
And when I still didn’t bow, you said you’d give me time. Time to consider.”
My mark flared.
“And then you dragged me into the Elders’ chamber, ready to bind me to Ymirskald like I was already yours. You never asked what I wanted. Not once. You took my love for him, my fear, my desperation, and you made it a leash.”
A shadow flickered across his expression, something caught between guilt and enjoyment.
“And now?” My hands curled into fists. “Now you sit across from me as though you didn’t back me into a corner. You act like this—” I gestured at the table, the wine, the warmth of the fire, “—is some kindness. Some gift.”
My voice cracked, thick with venom. “You only want what you think I can give you.”
The words tore out of me, raw and jagged, and once they started, I couldn’t stop. “And the worst part?” I laughed, brittle and broken. “I don’t even know what my power can do. I can barely touch it without destroying everything around me.”
My fury burned so hot it felt like it might split me apart.
And then—I felt it. A pulse. Heat flared across my forehead, sudden and insistent, like fire pressing through bone.
Veyrion’s expression hardened, and I knew without even touching it that my crescent mark was glowing.
I knew I was pushing too hard. I just couldn't stop.
The light caught in the rim of my goblet—silver-white, pulsing with my heartbeat.
My throat tightened, heat burning behind my eyes. “So whatever your grand plan is—whatever you think I am—it won’t work. You can’t shape me into some unstoppable queen when I can’t even hold myself together. You can’t use me when I don’t even know how to use myself.”
My hands shook as I pressed them into my lap, trying to steady myself, but the tremor ran too deep.
For a moment, Veyrion didn’t move. He only watched me, the weight of my words hanging in the air like smoke. Then, slowly, he leaned back, his hands open on the table.
“You think I don’t see that?” His voice was quieter than I’d ever heard it, stripped of the storm that usually edged every word. “I know your power is raw. Fractured.”
The firelight caught in his eyes, softening them in a way that unsettled me.
“You call yourself incomplete, but I see you. I see what you are even without the crescent.”
He held my eyes, steady and unflinching. “You are already more than enough to frighten those who tried to keep you small.”
The edge in his voice gentled, almost reverent. “I don’t want what’s in those fragments. I want the warrior who refuses to break, even when the world has done everything it can to hollow her out. That is what the crescent will answer to. That is why I believe in you—even when you don’t.”
The words pressed against me, dangerous in their gentleness, brutal in their honesty. They steadied me and cut me all at once, leaving me raw and trembling with a truth I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear. But then the fury came rushing back.
His expression didn’t waver, but I pressed harder, the words tumbling out faster, rougher. “You don’t know what it feels like. To be hollow. To lose pieces of yourself you can’t even name. To have all of you reduced to a mark on your skin and a power you can't control..”
My throat burned, and I hated the way my voice cracked.
“You say you believe in me, but you don’t even know what I am.
I don’t know what I am.” The crescent on my forehead throbbed hot, pulsing in rhythm with my rage.
Light shimmered against the stone walls, betraying the rawness in me I couldn’t hide.
I leaned forward, my words shaking but sharp. “So stop dressing it up like faith. This isn’t about believing in me. This is about bending me into something useful.”
Silence pressed between us, broken only by the hiss of the fire and the faint whistle of wind clawing at the mountain.
Veyrion didn’t flinch. He didn’t argue. His expression didn’t shift into anger or offense, only that calm, maddening composure he wore like armor. When he spoke, his voice was level, quiet, almost too measured. “If I wanted to bend you,” he said, “I would have already. I think you know that.”
Not a threat. Not boastful. Just fact.
He studied me for a long moment, glacier-blue eyes steady. “You mistake me if you think I have interest in taming you, Neri. My only interest is seeing you survive.”
He leaned back, folding his hands on the table with deliberate ease, as if my fury hadn’t touched him at all.
“And if you can’t?” His voice softened, almost thoughtful.
“Then all the world will see is another hollow girl who let others decide what she was worth. But if you can—” his gaze cut into me, steady, unflinching “—then there won’t be a power in this world or the next that can take you from yourself again. ”
He paused, then continued, his voice lower now, edged with something almost vulnerable. “You don’t see it yet—but you’re like me.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Like you?”
“Not in blood. Not in power. In origin.” He turned toward the flames, as if searching for something there. “I clawed my way through ruin and ash, too. Built something from the wreckage of what they tried to make me. And I see that same beginning in you.”
He looked back at me then, eyes fierce with something unspoken. “Maybe I brought you here because I thought we could be unstoppable. Maybe I told myself it was strategy. But now… now I just want to see what happens when you stop running from what you are."
The fire snapped beside us, casting gold along the edge of his jaw, but he didn’t look away. "The unknown doesn’t make you weaker—it makes you limitless. You can still choose what that power means. You get to define it.”
A silence settled between us, softer this time. Not empty—just full of things not yet said.
Then Veyrion stood. The movement was quiet, his chair scraping lightly against the stone. “I asked my sister, Eira, to take you to the market tomorrow,” he added. “You’ll need clothes. Supplies. Whatever makes this place feel less like a prison and more like something of your own.”
“I don’t need—” I started.
“You do,” he said gently, cutting me off before the protest fully formed. “You just don’t want to need anything right now. That's not the same.”
I nodded, small but certain. It felt strange to accept kindness from him—stranger still to want it—but I couldn’t deny the flicker of warmth that bloomed in my chest. Not from the hearth. From hope.