Khaivor
The frequencies are no longer sound. They are alive.
Each wave Orrick releases from beneath the temple does not simply press against my barriers — it reaches inside them, past the discipline of decades, past every wall I built in the years after Kantor, and pulls.
The resonance knows what I am. It was designed by someone who studied what I am.
It finds the seams in my control the way water finds cracks in stone, patient and inevitable.
I hold but barely.
Another pulse detonates across the square and the cobblestones beneath my feet crack in a jagged line running toward the docks.
I redirect the worst of it, bending the frequencies outward, away from the cluster of people still sheltering behind the overturned market stalls. My hands shake. The tremor began in my fingers and slowly reached my shoulder.
And then Kantor finds me. Not the city but the room. The room beneath the Chivdouyu estate where the stone walls were thick enough to swallow screaming. Where Lord Vaeren sat at the far end of a long table with his wine and his patience while I stood at the center and did what I was made to do.
“You are nothing without us,” their voice echoes through my subconscious.
Another wave hits. I absorb it and somewhere behind me, a chimney collapses.
You are doing it again.
I can't help doubting myself.
"Khaivor." Roseth's voice cuts through my disarray.
I turn and she stands at the edge of the square, soot darkening her jaw, one sleeve torn at the shoulder. Her amber eyes find mine through the smoke and dust and chaos and she does not flinch from what she sees in my face.
"Come with me," she says.
"I cannot leave the—"
"You can't hold on, not in that state." She holds out her hand. "Come with me."
The forge lists to one side where the southern wall took the first shockwave. Half the roof is open to the sky, rafters hanging at broken angles, but the furnace still stands.
Roseth closes what remains of the door behind us. The sound outside does not vanish. It dims. The stone walls absorb enough of the resonance that the frequencies stop feeling like fingers reaching directly into the base of my skull but doesn't stop the sting.
I lean against the furnace, wincing as the pain becomes unbearable.
"Look at me," Roseth says.
"I am looking at you." I pant.
"No. You are looking through me." She crosses the floor and takes my face in both hands, pressing her palms flat against my jaw. Her hands are rough.
"Look at me, Khaivor. Right here."
I focus and her face resolves out of the blur. The gold flecks in her amber eyes.
"There," she says quietly. "Stay there."
"I can hear them," I say. "The people I hurt. The frequencies — they use the same patterns. Every wave he releases sounds like something I—"
"I know." She exhales.
"You do not know what I did."
"I know what you told me." Her thumbs trace along my cheekbones. "I know you chose to leave. I know what you have been running from. I know you have spent every year since then trying to be something other than a weapon." She holds my gaze. "You are not in that room. You are here. With me."
The frequencies pulse outside and the ground shudders beneath.
She steps closer, and I feel the warmth of her before she touches me. Her hands slide from my face to my chest, pressing flat over my heart.
"Can you feel that?" she asks.
My own heartbeat.
"Yes."I swallow.
"Match mine."
She takes my hand and presses it against her ribs, just below her heart. My fingers can't help but brush up her cleavage.
Carefully she adjusts her work gown and mounts on top of me. Her radiating eyes piercing mine deeply in a way that leaves no room for thought.
She whispers words I can't hear through the commotion in my head and outside the forge.
Slowly, she pulls in and kisses me. My body remains still as I feel all the noise slowly drown away. My hands instinctively wrap around her waist as I succumb to it.
“You are not the man they think you are…” she breathes as she lowers the strap of her dress, displaying her tasty nipples.
“You are mine,”
Like a child, I munch on them. Sucking and heaving as she moans loud enough to disrupt all other sounds.
Her hand finds its way into my pants and takes out my hard dick. Calmly she grinds against it, spilling her wet juices all over while I drool over breasts.
My body lightens up with an unexplained excitement and the resonating magic shoots around.
“You are mine as well,” I utter and the glow in her eyes deepens. I can feel my erected rod tugging against the entrance and with a slight move, it slips in.
"Uhhh..." she gasps, her fingers clawing into the back of my neck as she rolls her hips on top of me. I have lived for over a century but never have I witnessed such beauty.
The look on her face as she rides me—eyes half-closed, lips parted, cheeks flushed—melts something fundamental in my chest. Her dark curls fall wild around her shoulders, swaying with each movement. The forge light catches the sheen of sweat on her skin, turning her bronze.
With time I realize the pain in my head is subsiding. The screaming frequencies that have tormented me for hours are fading beneath the sound of her breathing, the rhythm of her body moving against mine.
"Rose," I growl subtly before sinking my teeth into the curve of her neck, tasting the essence of her skin. She shivers violently, her inner walls clenching around me as she sinks even deeper, taking all of me in until I'm buried to the hilt.
My raw instinct kicks in. I brace my back against the wall to gain more leverage, gripping her hips to guide her movements. She whimpers—a desperate, needy sound that makes my control fracture further.
"I can't get enough," she moans as my movements quicken, as I begin thrusting up to meet her downward rolls. Her chest presses flush against mine, the soft weight of her supple breasts creates a friction that makes my cock throb harder within her tight love garden.
"Ohhh… give it to me," she gasps against my mouth, her voice breaking on the last word.
Our movements become involuntary, purely instinct. She rides me with increasing desperation while I drive upward with brutal force.
At this moment, the vibrating noise in my skull has subsided completely. The magical chaos, the resonance storm destroying Bellmere outside—all of it fades until all I can hear is her. Her ragged breathing. Her small cries of pleasure. The wet sound of our bodies joining again and again.
"Khaivor—" My name on her lips sounds like salvation.
"I can't—" My voice breaks. An ecstatic rush spirals through my very being, unraveling me from within. Every nerve ending ignites. The magic responds, harmonizing with the building pleasure until I can't separate one from the other.
I can sense the urge to release building impossibly high, but not yet. I need to feel more. I want to feel everything—every clench of her body around mine, every gasp, every tremor.
I shut my eyes and thrust upward harder, feeling her fingers claw even deeper into my skin as she suddenly floods with wetness.
The sensation nearly destroys me—slick heat coating my length, dripping down to where our bodies join.
The sound of it, the feel of it, harmonizes with my very being until it becomes impossible to hold back.
"I'm going to—" I try to warn her, try to pull out, but she doesn't let me.
She wraps her arms and legs firmly around me, locking me in place as she grinds down. "Inside," she gasps. "I want to feel you—all of you—"
"Aargh—" The groan tears from my throat as I spill into her with violent force.
Release crashes through me in waves, each pulse sending more of my seed deep into her welcoming heat.
My magic surges in response—not destructive this time, but pure and harmonious, ringing through the forge like perfectly tuned bells.
She follows moments later, crying out as her climax hits. I feel her tightening rhythmically around me, milking every last drop as her body shudders in my arms.
“Khraivo,” my name escapes her lips as I watch her eyes roll to the back of her head.
"I —" The words have lived behind me all this time.
For longer than that, if I am truthful. Since the first autumn I stood at her stall and watched her hands move over the bells she had made and understood, with the particular clarity that only lonely people know, that something in the world was extraordinary and I was not permitted to be near it.
"I love you. I have loved you far longer than I should have allowed myself to."
She pulls back enough to look at my face.
"I know," she pants. "I've known for a while."
"Then you know I cannot survive losing you."
"You're not going to lose me." Her hands tighten in my shirt. "But I need you present,”
Inside the forge, with her breathing against my neck and her hands flat against my back, the chaos becomes something I can hold the shape of rather than something holding the shape of me.
After a long moment she lifts her head.
Her expression has shifted. I recognize the look. I have seen it when a bell speaks to her — that particular inward focus, like she is listening to something the rest of the world cannot hear.
"It's us," she says.
"What is?" I ask in disarray.
"This. What just happened to the sound in your head.
" She presses a hand flat to my chest again, then to her own.
"When we're close,” She shakes her head slowly.
"It's not just comfort. It's frequency. Our voice, our heartbeat, the resonance patterns in how I move when I work — they counter what Orrick's bell produces. "
She meets my eyes.
"I need to forge a counter-bell," she says. "I need to build something tuned specifically to collapse the frequencies that bell is producing. And I think — I think I've been hearing the pattern this whole time. Every bell I've ever made has been reaching toward it."
"If you forge it," I say carefully, "I can amplify it. Use what I have left to carry the harmonic across the whole town."
"Will it harm you?"
A fair question. I consider it honestly. "I do not know."
She holds my gaze for a long moment.
"Then stay close to me while I work," she says. "As close as you can. Let me be your reason to stay rooted to reality,”
I brush the loose curl from her face. "You have always been that."
She straightens her torn sleeve, looks at the furnace and the tools arranged on the wall, at the raw bronze stock stacked in the corner.
The competence in her face is extraordinary. It always has been. I simply could not say so for the longest time.
"Ready?" she asks.
I roll my shoulders. Feel the frequencies outside pressing at the edges of my restored control, testing, persistent, but no longer inside the walls.
"Yes," I say.
She takes my hand once as we cross to the broken door and walk back out into the broken festival together.