Chapter 5
AMARIA
We burst into the light.
Sun hit the stone, dust curling in the air like breath held too long.
And then I saw them.
The plaza in front of the shelter was smaller than the Square of Names—hemmed in by a crumbling temple wall on one side, market stalls on the other, a dry fountain clogged with debris at its center.
And it was full—but not loud. No shouting.
Just bodies packed shoulder to shoulder, eyes everywhere except where it hurt to look.
The heat off the stones rose through my boots.
The sour tang of too many people with nowhere to go filled my nose.
The enforcers had formed a semi-circle perimeter, blades visible. Robes creased, boots planted like they weren’t planning to move unless someone bled first. Their helms reflected the light like warning flares.
Behind them sat the containment-wagon, its door hanging open.
Inside—three children, two elders, and one young male protecting his arm like it’d already been snapped.
Spellbars buzzed faintly across the metal, flickering just enough to remind everyone what crossing them would cost. Someone had carved a ward into the side of the cart.
Old. Faded. Didn't matter. Nothing could cleanse what this was.
The rest stood in a line.
Parents. Teenagers. A child gripping her father’s sleeve so hard his hand went white. All of them shadowmarked. All of them waiting their turn—queuing for their own erasure, just the way the Crown had taught them.
At the front—bound in spellwire, faces set—stood the Rhain family.
The boy was there. Rhain's son. Already processed—collar ripped wide, mark on display like a piece of evidence.
His parents flanked him as if standing closer might undo what was coming.
It wouldn't. No blood yet, but the boy’s eyes were blown wide, the pupils swallowing the iris as he stared through the dirt.
Then air shifted—dense, electric. A male moved through the line of enforcers like a storm that had stepped into skin.
The Crownforged.
My breath caught. I felt him before I registered his face. A pressure just beyond the skin. He didn’t look at me, not yet. His gaze was fixed on the family, unreadable below the helm.
A priest’s voice rang out, smooth and damning.
“Illegal concealment of a soulmark. Aiding false classification. Balm smuggling.”
Someone in the crowd gasped and it drew my gaze toward the temple wall, where a figure stood too still to be just another onlooker.
He was cloaked in gray with his arms crossed and his head bowed, but his eyes were edged, tracking everything.
A mark gleamed at his collar: three intersecting lines inside a broken circle.
The Uncrowned. So the rebels were watching too.
Same side didn't mean same fight. I didn't know him, and sharing an enemy with someone didn't make them safe. He had the look of a male who watches a fire not to stop it—but to learn how it spreads.
An Auraseer Enforcer stepped to the front of the line.
Hands weaving the air like it had strings only he could see.
Emotional fishing. The Crown's favorite party trick—a fae paid to feel your fear and call it evidence.
Afraid meant guilty. Guilty meant gone. I wanted to stab him in the eye but I just huffed in annoyance.
I could feel him searching.
He moved from face to face, head tilted, fingers twitching.
"He'll flag every one of them," I whispered to Serenya. "Unless they feel nothing."
Her eyes snapped to mine. She already knew where I was going.
“If I used my other… abilities,” I said, throat constricting, “I could draw it into me. All of it. The fear. The panic. Make them seem clean.”
“No,” she argued.
“He wouldn’t sense their panic. Just calm. Maybe even joy. It’d completely throw him.”
“Maybe, if you’d been practicing, you could do it subtly. As is, you cannot Amaria.”
“They’ll cage the boy. You saw the sigils on that cart. Those are for transport, not holding. They’re moving them tonight.”
“And if you try to draw fear from a dozen people at once? In public? Surrounded by enforcers?” Her voice went taut. “You could tear yourself open. You could reveal everything. Amaria—”
A snap broke across the plaza.
They started with the children. Of course they did. Two guards yanked the smallest from his mother, who screamed once before a third guard shoved her to her knees.
His mother lunged for him anyway. An Enforcer snatched her by the hair and wrenched her back. But she kept fighting, clawing for her son desperately.
That was it.
It woke up. Not the Luminar mark. Not anything I'd ever allowed myself to reach for.
The thing under the amulet. Cold. Rising fast—vertebra by vertebra up my spine, spreading through my ribs like frost on glass.
The Auraseer's head whipped toward me.
Stop. Pull it back. Subtle!
But I could feel the boy's panic. The mother's scream still vibrated in the air. The smaller children's terror, formless and huge, pressed against the inside of my chest. And it was thrashing wildly to be released at full force.
Do not tame me. Release me.
Thin black filaments bled from my other Mark, like drifting ash—released through my eyes, my chest, the corners of my mouth—indigo-dark and hungry, reaching for every living thing in the square. The amulet at my neck went hot. Then ice. Then shattered.
The lady nearest me stumbled backward. An Enforcer's hand shot to his hilt. A child who'd been screaming went silent.
The Auraseer collapsed. Hands clawing at his own throat like I'd ripped his essence out of him.
Shadowmark.
My Shadowmark—the Griefweaver—tore open. The filaments multiplied, hundreds of dark threads drifting outward, and everywhere they touched they pulled. The crowd’s fear, their shame, their grief—all of it streaming back along those threads and into me.
And giving me a death sentence in the process.
Because then my Luminar Mark answered.
Light burst out with my shadows. Both marks blazing together shamelessly.
The Enforcers stopped moving.
The crowd stopped whispering.
A priest's censer slipped from his fingers and hit the cobblestones. The clatter echoed across absolute silence.
Because they didn't have a script for this.
Shadowmark, they knew. Shadowmark had a name, a sentence. But this—light and dark burning through the same skin, spirals of black threaded with veins of silver, both marks alive and screaming in a body that should have been torn apart by the contradiction—
This only had one name. Abomination.
Both marks reverberated under my collarbone—singing together in harmony.
For one breathless moment, the entire plaza watched me burn.
A dual-marked.
The only dual-marked.
The silence held. Held. Held.
I hit the stone, knees first, hard. Pain shot up through my kneecaps and my palms slapped the flagstones, gritty and sun-warm. The world tilted. Sound came back muffled, like hearing through water. Then it shattered like glass.
"DUAL-MARKED!" The priest shrieked. His arm shot toward me, robes swinging, finger quivering in rage.
The crowd erupted.
A market stall collapsed under the crush—wood splintered, fruit scattered across stone. Someone trampled a prayer banner into the dirt. A lady grabbed her child and ran without looking back. An old fae fell and nobody stopped.
The Enforcers drew steel. Six—no, eight—fanned into formation, blades angled toward me like I was a beast that had slipped its pen. Their captain was barking orders I couldn't hear over the roar of blood in my own skull.
My hands wouldn't stop shaking. Both marks still singing, and every nerve in my body paying the price for it.
Pebbles lifted behind the Enforcers. Hovered for a heartbeat. Dropped.
The Veil had felt that.
The thought should have terrified me. Instead, a defiance uncurled from my core.
Good. Let it feel me. Let them all feel what they've been so afraid of.
A cobalt flash cut through the mayhem. The Crownforged cleared a toppled market stall in one vault, rune-rope already singing from his fist. It lashed toward me—fast, precise, aimed to bind.
I dodged. Barely. And grinned.
"Yield," he commanded, his voice cutting through the stunned air.
I bared my teeth. "No."
He whipped out the lasso again.
I twisted sideways. The rope cracked the air where my neck had been a second ago. The runes on it still keened—hungry, waiting for skin to latch onto.
The crowd broke. Bodies surged in every direction—carts toppling, grains rolling across stone and trampled underfoot. Half of them were screaming saviour. The other half screamed monster.
I found Serenya across the plaza. She was pressed against an overturned cart with her ceremonial dagger drawn.
"Hide!" I shouted. "I'll find you later!"
She held my gaze for one beat. Nodded. Then she was gone.
The Crownforged loosed an arrow. It hissed past my ear and I dove, hitting stone hard. When I looked back, pupils dilated in disbelief.
Bastard doesn’t like to miss, does he? He’ll have to get used to it.
He nocked the next arrow.
I rolled onto my side and found the vambrace by feel—stars sliding free, four-pointed steel, small enough to palm.
Two left my hand before I'd finished aiming.
They buried themselves in the ropes binding the Rhain family. The fibers split—halfway. Not enough. The father jerked against the posts, trying to wrench free, but the remaining strands held him fast.
My fingers closed around a third star.
Steel crashed into my blade. The impact jolted up my arm and I staggered.
The Crownforged pressed into me, his full weight behind the strike, driving me backward.
I locked my dagger against his sword and my boots skidded on loose pebbles.
He shoved sideways, wrenching my blade out of line, edges shrieking against each other.
Sparks bit my skin. His tip sliced my cheek on the follow-through.
A hot sting, then blood ran down my chin.