Chapter 28
JASSYN
Humid air clung to Jassyn under the Everglow Rainforest’s canopy.
The trees breathed around him, and his pulse quickened before he could place why. Sweat slicked his palms. Every inhale came thick with damp soil and the sweet rot of fallen blooms, a familiarity his mind refused to name.
He had no memory of the hours before Elashor sent him to Farine. But his skin did.
Elashor might’ve stripped information from him and erased the memory with it. Or maybe Jassyn had severed himself from whatever happened during those missing hours. With nothing he could recall to contain the fear, his body spread it across every leaf and root.
But Elashor and Farine were dead. That truth should’ve loosened his shoulders, quieted the beastblood pacing through his veins. Yet his body still braced against hands that would never lay claim to him again.
He’d returned deliberately. Letting this place keep a piece of him would be one more theft, and the dead had already taken enough.
He sealed the rift behind him.
Lykor stood a few paces away, scowling up at the dim morning light filtering through the canopy’s crown. His gaze flicked to the closing portal, then to Jassyn. “So you’re an arch elf now?”
“No.” Jassyn exhaled a sound that wanted to be a laugh but fell short. “Though I may have taken certain liberties as First Keeper of the Ember Accord. No one argued when I said I wanted to borrow a portaling talent.”
Lykor grunted.
The wraith had torn those abilities from elves in the capital, and the alliance had only distributed a portion of the plundered power, the rest kept under guard in the caverns.
Jassyn wielded the stolen gift with full awareness of its wrongness. Yet when the rift had unfurled in front of him—air splitting, distance collapsing—his body recognized the freedom it offered.
“I didn’t know whether a memory buried beyond reach could open a portal,” Jassyn said quietly. The location had branded itself into his marrow, too deep for Elashor’s tampering to erase. “But this is where Saundyl’s soldiers brought me.”
“You shouldn’t be the one out here,” Lykor muttered. Every line of him had gone taut with vigilance, his weight angled toward the darkness between the trees.
The familiar argument offered safer ground, and Jassyn let his tone lighten. “So you agree with Kaedryn this time?”
“Yes,” Lykor snapped, turning to face him. “Portaling here was reckless. Elashor’s forces could’ve still been holding this position.”
“But they weren’t.”
The undergrowth beyond Lykor had been crushed into a broad corridor, branches hacked back, the mud churned from thousands of boots. A few glowbugs still drifted above the flattened fronds, their light trembling against the dawn.
Crimson burned in Lykor’s eyes. But he visibly forced the fury down, a muscle twitching in his jaw. “You could’ve sent anyone else to scout this morning.”
“I wanted to do it.” Jassyn heard the anger in his voice only after he’d spoken. “I wasn’t going to stay underground while everyone else risked their lives.” Safety had begun to sound like a gentler word for being kept where others wanted him. “I’ve had enough of cages.”
Lykor’s nostrils flared, but Jassyn didn’t wait for his argument.
“I can find the army without alerting it.”
Jassyn lifted his hand, drawing on Blossom’s gift. A vine unwound from a tree above to settle into his palm.
“Blossom taught me how to see with the earth,” he said as the tendril slid around his wrist. “We’ll trace the force Elashor sent north and learn its numbers and formation.”
Lykor stared at the vine, shadows coiling at his shoulders. “It would be faster to snatch one of the soldiers. Rip the answers out.”
“And reckless.” Jassyn met his stare. “I could’ve brought Vesryn if I wanted to do that.”
Lykor’s upper lip curled, baring the point of one fang. He held Jassyn’s gaze a fraction too long before he tipped his chin toward the vine, urging him on.
Jassyn closed his eyes and sank his awareness into the depths of the earth, the forest unfolding in his mind.
Roots lay bruised and broken from the army’s passage, carrying every disturbance through the soil.
He followed the damage north. The ground bore the disciplined weight of columns—iron-laden footfalls, thousands moving in the same direction.
The tendril loosened as he opened his eyes. The army remained impressed upon his senses, its numbers too vast for any precise count.
“They’re leagues to the north. We should get above the canopy. With a clear horizon, we can portal closer.”
Lykor nodded, and Jassyn drew on the bloom in his chest. The forest rippled above—branches bending apart, leaves drawing back until a strip of pale sky opened overhead. They shifted, their wings unfurling into the humid air.
Lykor extended a claw toward him. “Do you want to warp?”
Jassyn’s wings locked against his spine. His stomach clenched, vertigo already spinning through his skull while his feet remained planted in the mud.
“Not particularly.” But he swallowed and slid his hand into Lykor’s.
Lykor’s fingers closed around his with steady pressure, asking without words. Jassyn tightened his grip in answer.
Weight and direction vanished, darkness devouring light and sound.
Then the world slammed back in grey light and open air above the canopy.
Jassyn’s first wingbeat faltered as their hands parted. Below him, the rainforest stretched dark beneath the dimming moons. He steadied his flight, then angled north.
His first rift split the air ahead. They flew through, and Jassyn opened another, then a third, each jump swallowing a reach of sky.
Jassyn slowed into a hover. Dawn had begun to light the sky behind them, sharpening their silhouettes above the canopy. “Using Essence any closer could alert them. We should continue on foot from here.”
He parted the branches below, and they descended together, leaves whispering against their legs before folding back into place overhead.
They landed in trampled earth, and the damage throbbed through Jassyn’s awareness—roots hacked open, sap glazing their severed ends.
They followed the scar in silence.
Lykor moved beside him without making a sound, each step falling where the army had already crushed the undergrowth, his attention ranging ahead through the trees.
Jassyn’s focus should’ve remained buried in the earth. Instead, it kept sliding to Lykor—the precision of his movement, the severe line of his profile, the tension gathering along his jaw whenever Jassyn reached beneath the soil, beyond any place Lykor could follow.
A trace of fire rippled through Jassyn’s senses like the shimmer of heat above sun-baked stone.
He caught Lykor’s arm, fingers tightening before ember light flickered through the brush.
Lykor turned. His eyes ignited, gaze snapping past Jassyn’s shoulder.
Before Jassyn could draw breath, three talents ripped free from Lykor—mending, shielding, portaling. The globes flared around Lykor’s shoulders before his wraith cloaking folded over them, dimming the magic and shrouding them in darkness. He stood nearly level with Jassyn, now more wraith than elf.
Lykor warped them behind the nearest tree. Bark struck Jassyn’s spine. The rough trunk became cold marble, and the body crowding him belonged to one of Farine’s guests, eyes glazed with Stardust.
Jassyn’s palms struck Lykor’s chest hard enough to jar his wrists.
Leather under his fingertips. Heat through it. The solid rise of Lykor’s ribs.
Lykor.
Through the earth under his boots, Jassyn sensed the patrol before he saw it—measured impacts traveling through the roots. The vibration climbed his legs and lodged in teeth he’d clenched without realizing.
Lykor braced one claw against the trunk beside Jassyn’s head and angled his body across him, ready to take the first strike. Inside the darkness of his cloaking, torchlight thinned into wavering golden streaks.
The patrol halted a few paces away, underbrush cracking beneath their boots. Armor clinked as one soldier murmured to another.
A stopper creaked free from a flask, and a soldier complained about the buzzing keeping them up all night. Coarse laughter followed as the drink passed from hand to hand.
Lykor’s pulse knocked steadily beneath Jassyn’s palms while Jassyn’s own battered his throat. He counted the beats until the rhythm gave his mind something solid to hold.
The soldiers showed no sign of moving on. As Lykor kept watch, Jassyn cataloged every point of contact between them—hip to hip, the ridge of armor beneath his fingers, each exhale warming the narrow space between their mouths.
Every nerve in Jassyn recognized the position—pinned against walls and bedframes by those who took what they wanted.
But Lykor’s weight never shifted from shielding to claiming.
Even in the dark, when they slept close enough to touch, Lykor had never mistaken nearness for permission. He’d waited for Jassyn to close the distance, and Jassyn had let him keep waiting because asking for more meant admitting his body still knew how to want.
He was ready to admit it now.
The last hands on him had belonged to those who never asked, their touch still lodged in his skin. He wanted Lykor’s instead, to remember what it was to choose.
He was done being the reason Lykor waited.
Jassyn turned Lykor’s face toward him and kissed him.
His mouth met Lykor’s, hard and graceless. Lykor went rigid, still listening beyond the shadows for the patrol, standing only a few paces away.
Then his vigilance rearranged itself around the kiss. His palm settled behind Jassyn’s neck, and he kissed him back.
Jassyn caught a fistful of his hair and pulled.
Lykor followed, chest pressing flush to his, heat bleeding through the leather as bark dug into Jassyn’s back.
Fangs caught Jassyn’s lower lip and tugged.
A helpless sound rose in Jassyn’s throat, and he tensed at the risk of the noise.
Lykor swallowed it before the sound could carry, tongue sliding between Jassyn’s lips as the kiss deepened.
Their breaths rasped, hot and uneven.