Chapter 29
Elora
Florence encouraged Elora to stay where she could be seen.
Not in so many words. It was never phrased as instruction—only suggestion, gently repeated. Sit with the apprentices during meals. Walk the halls when the children were out of lessons. Let them see her face. Let them ask questions.
It helps, Florence said. They need proof that survival is possible.
She acquiesced because refusal would have demanded a vulnerability she couldn’t afford.
Better to follow Florence’s guidance than expose the raw truth that the eyes of strangers crawled along her skin, or how even the smallest touch—an accidental brush of fingers against her sleeve, a child’s curious hand at her elbow—registered as a minor invasion.
The very sound of laughter, brittle and unfamiliar, felt like a sharp subtraction from a limited store of safety she hoarded for herself.
She became a polite outline in the periphery of these communal spaces: present but never central, always careful to avoid the charged orbit of genuine engagement.
The apprentices watched her like they wanted to see what freedom looked like after The Institute, as if every movement might hold the secret to their own rescue.
Because being hunted across Adruimor and forced to connect her spirit with a tree was definitely freedom.
The children, unscarred by The Institute, were bolder.
They trailed behind her in loose, giggling knots, peppered her with questions in the blunt language of the very young.
“Did you really escape?” “Did it hurt?” “Was it as bad as our parents said?”
She learned to answer the factual and dodge the personal. Yes, she escaped. Yes, it hurt. Did it compare to the stories? She didn’t know how to answer that one. Her experience was different from the others.
Sometimes she drew The Institute for them, a blank stone block with tiny windows, and let them fill in the details. Sometimes she just shook her head and excused herself, feigning thirst or fatigue or the need to find Rell or Vye.
By the second day, she started drifting.
At first, it was instinctive stepping away when the air grew too thick, when the questions stacked too fast. Here, in this place designed for refuge, she measured every new hallway by its echo, every stairwell by the quality of its silence.
Some corners felt safe, old wood and warm dust, while others vibrated with the restless currents of too many people living too close together.
She expected challenges at each corner turned, each stairwell descended but found only nods of acknowledgment or averted gazes.
Florence’s influence hung in the air like a silent permission.
Freedom should have tasted sweet. But more than anything, it unsettled her. Something had to be off about this place. About Florence. She was a Thorn. Maybe more Tehvan than Abernathy but the need for control was in their blood. But Florence seemed to actually want to make a difference.
It was during the third day of quiet wandering that she noticed the bandages.
A strip of white wrapped neatly around a mercenary’s forearm. Another on an apprentice she passed in the hall. Later, a child scraped her sleeve back without thinking, revealing the same telltale wrap beneath.
Elora slowed.
The first bandage she dismissed. The second bandage raised questions, but the third sent ice through her veins.
She didn’t ask right away. Watched instead. Counted. The wrappings were always fresh, always similar. Always on the arm. She followed the pattern through The Hive until it led her away from the living quarters, past a set of doors she hadn’t noticed before.
She pushed them open, their hinges silent and well-oiled, releasing a sharp sting of alcohol that clawed into her nostrils and set her pulse racing before she even crossed the threshold.
Light glared down from hanging lanterns, bleaching the room’s edges, and there, bent over a squat workbench, an alchemist in crisp robes eased a needle into the pale arm of a boy no older than ten, the vial at the end blooming red with his blood.
Behind them, two more figures hunched around a gleaming apparatus of tubes and brass coils—the exact contraption Thorn had created, designed to distill life essence from stolen vitality, its low hum vibrating through the floor like a remembered nightmare.
Her heart slammed against her ribs, the beast uncoiling in her core with a hot, feral twist, urging her to lunge, to rip the needle free and scatter them all.
She clamped down on it, breath ragged, reminding herself she’d handed over Thorn’s notes to The Hive willingly, that the process itself wasn’t evil in isolation—blood could fuel healing potions, sustain the weak, if harvested right.
But this child, so small and still, his eyes half-lidded in a daze—had he chosen this?
Or was he bound like she’d been, wrists raw from restraints, begging for it to stop?
She swallowed the bile rising in her throat, forcing air through her lungs until the initial wave of shock ebbed, then edged forward, her boots scraping faintly on the tiled floor.
The alchemist at the table glanced up, her face stern beneath a hood, and thrust a hand out in warning. “Not now—schedule’s full.”
Elora’s feet rooted to the floor, her spine stiffening as heat rushed to her cheeks.
From her place in the doorway, she could make out the boy’s shallow breaths, the loose twitch of his free hand—no straps visible, though his skin gleamed with a faint sheen that might have been sedative oil.
The contraption whirred steadily, drawing blood through its coils, and she tracked the drip of condensed essence into a waiting flask, glowing faintly blue.
Questions pressed in all at once—Who sanctioned this? How many more? How long?—layering over one another until they blurred.
Elora turned away before the questions could harden into something sharper.
She slipped back into the corridor and triggered a partial shift, letting the predator’s calm submerge the human panic.
The edges dulled. The pressure eased. Thought narrowed to what mattered: movement, direction, next steps.
Which meant she could keep moving without thinking about the room she’d left behind.
Florence’s words about protection and choice echoed differently now, stripped of warmth by sterile light and glass tubing. Elora pushed forward through The Hive, the halls blurring as she walked, until she spotted a familiar door standing ajar, voices murmuring inside.
Rell.
She let the shift fade as she pushed the door wider, the low murmur sharpening into Rell’s familiar voice mid-sentence: “—flank from the east, if we time it right.”
Rell hunched over the table, his finger tracing a route between pins that punctured the yellowed paper like tiny, red-tipped daggers.
The mercenary opposite him—jaw marked by a scar that twisted his mouth into an eternal sneer—leaned forward, nodding.
Elora’s nostrils flared at the mingling scents: the metallic tang of the ink pot knocked sideways, the musty sweetness of parchment curling at its edges.
Sweat gathered at her hairline as the lantern on the wall cast long shadows that danced across their faces with each flicker.
Rell’s head lifted at the creak of hinges, his tired eyes—shadowed with faint bruises underneath—lighting up a fraction as they met hers.
No leather coat draped his shoulders today; instead, a simple button-up shirt clung to him, sleeves rolled to his elbows, the top few buttons undone enough to expose the dip of his collarbone and the upper curve of his chest, skin marked by old scars.
The other man straightened, glancing between them, but Rell waved him off without breaking her gaze. “We’ll finish later. Go on.”
The mercenary grunted, shouldering past her with a nod, the door clicking shut behind him and leaving the space suddenly too quiet, too charged.
“Elora,” Rell said, his voice warming as he straightened fully, that forced perk tugging at his mouth like he could will away the exhaustion etching his features. “What’s—”
Her gaze snagged on the white bandage wrapped around his left arm, just below the rolled sleeve, a faint red stain blooming at its edge.
Her throat constricted as if gripped by invisible hands, blood rushing in her ears while the antiseptic smell from that sterile room seemed to follow her here.
She couldn’t bear to see him like this—like that small boy, emptied and foggy-eyed, another resource for whatever Florence was constructing.
She lunged forward before he could finish, grabbing his bandaged arm—gently, but firm enough that he winced. Her fingers trembling against the cloth. “What is this? Did you volunteer? How often do they make you do it? Whose idea—were you even able to say no?”
The questions tumbled out, her voice rising with each word until she was nearly gasping. She could almost feel the hollow sting as the needle slid in, the strange weightlessness as her blood flowed out in steady pulses.
Rell’s free hand came up, hovering near her shoulder as if to steady her, but he didn’t touch, his expression softening even as surprise flickered through it.
“Easy there—breathe for a second. See? Still standing. They barely took enough to dull my wit, though Florence might consider that an improvement.”
She didn’t let go, her grip tightening just a fraction, the beast stirring faintly beneath her ribs, urging her to pull him away from this place entirely. “Answer me.”
He exhaled, nodding once, his thumb brushing her wrist in a careful rhythm meant to soothe.
“Florence sanctioned it. Everyone healthy enough is on a schedule—not exactly voluntary, but it’s supposed to be fair.
They check vitals first, make sure no one’s tapped too often.
Once every few weeks, depending on recovery.
And yeah, I could say no... but it’s for the stores, the potions. It helps everyone here.”
She couldn’t breathe for a moment, his words lodging beneath her skin like splinters. Not a choice. The entire Hive. That small boy’s vacant eyes superimposed over Rell’s face, his bandage, his forced smile, his casual acceptance of being drained like a resource.
“She hasn’t put you on the list yet,” he added, voice gentler, as if that was supposed to reassure her. “Probably figuring you’d need time to settle.”
Settle. The word tasted bitter, like one of Thorn’s failed elixirs, and she released his arm, stepping back with a shaky inhale.
The beast coiled tighter, not raging but watchful, tasting the lie in all this supposed fairness.
If Florence was drawing blood from children, from Rell, what stopped her from turning it into something worse?
She turned away, pacing to the table, her fingers trailing over a map’s edge to ground herself, the paper rough under her touch. “This isn’t right. I saw the room. A boy, so young, hooked up to that machine. It’s too close to what he did.”
Rell’s footsteps followed, soft and measured, stopping just behind her. “I know it looks bad. But it’s different here—no one’s forced in chains. It’s to build up reserves, heal the injured, keep us going and not relying on the Empire.”
She whirled back, heat prickling her eyes. “And if it turns into more? If Florence decides ‘fair’ means something else?”
He didn’t have an answer. His hand found hers anyway, warm against her cold fingers.
She let herself breathe.
She didn’t let herself stop thinking.
The boy’s face wouldn’t leave her. The slack jaw. The needle-pricked arm. The way he hadn’t even looked at the machine drawing from him.
She knew that look.
Rell drew her closer with a gentle pull and she didn’t pull back. Her forehead found his shoulder. She fixed her attention on what was real: the slow expansion of his ribs, the muffled rhythm of his heart through the fabric. Here. Present.
Not The Institute. Not Thorn. Not blood moving through clear tubing into a waiting flask.
“Elora.”
Her name came through his chest before it reached her ears.
“If Florence is doing something wrong, we’ll find out.”
She shut her eyes. “That’s not good enough.”
“I know.” Too fast. Then again, quieter: “I know.”
Silence held them both for a moment.
Gradually the panic thinned, and her thoughts came back to her one at a time rather than all at once. She drew back and looked at him. His face offered no dismissal, no convenient reassurances, no attempt to smooth it over. Only attention. Patience.
The knot in her chest loosened a fraction.
Rell always defended Florence’s intentions.
But he looked as if he believed her.
Like her fear deserved to be taken seriously.
Like she deserved to be taken seriously.
The realization hit harder than she wanted it to.
Because it wasn’t agreement she saw in his eyes.
It was concern.
For her.
Elora stepped back before she could lean on that feeling any further.
The room felt colder immediately.
She ignored it.
The answers she needed weren’t in this room. Florence had them.
And the longer she stood here letting Rell steady her, the easier it became to forget why that frightened her.