Chapter 16 #2
The question had no answer. The tunnel stretched ahead, damp and indifferent, and I kept walking because stopping meant thinking and thinking meant seeing his face again.
Maxx peeled off somewhere behind me with a quiet "Night, Flameheart" that I didn't return. My feet carried me the rest of the way on autopilot—past the sleeping quarters, past the cold hearth, to the one place that had never asked me to be more than I was.
Serenya was perched on her cot with prophecy scrolls spread across her lap, brow furrowed in that particular way that meant she'd forgotten to eat, sleep, and exist as a person.
She glanced up when I walked in.
"Something's happening to the texts, Amaria." She pointed at the scroll.
"The prophecy fragments in the archive," she continued, unrolling it across her lap. "The ones I've been cross-referencing with the Mirrored verses." Her voice had gone quiet. "The ink is moving, Amaria."
I dropped beside her. "Moving how?"
"Shifting. Rearranging." She pushed the parchment flat, and I leaned to see the faded glyphs by the dim torchlight.
I recognized some—the angular slash of a Shadow sigil, the spiraling loop of a Luminar glyph.
Standard iconography, the kind carved above temple doors and branded onto children's skin.
But between them—
"There." Serenya's finger hovered over a space on the parchment that should have been blank.
Faint lines bled through, partially formed, like something pressing through the surface of the page.
Not ink. Not quite. More like a bruise rising under skin.
"A new symbol. It started appearing three days ago—right after the last Veil surge.
" Her voice faltered. "The text is rewriting itself.
As if the Veil's decay is… unlocking something that was always underneath. "
I stared at the emerging shape. It sat nestled between the Light and Shadow glyphs like a bridge between two cliffs—incomplete, but deliberate. Not random decay, a pattern.
"What does it mean?"
"I don't know yet. The shape isn't finished. But the symbols around it—they've rearranged." She traced the line of text below the glyphs, and I watched her finger stop on a cluster of words that looked newer than the rest. As if they'd been written yesterday into parchment that was centuries old.
"This line wasn't here last week." Her voice dropped to barely a whisper. "The soul shall stitch what gods have torn."
My Shadowmark twitched. Just once. Like it recognized something my mind hadn't caught up to yet.
"That's not in any version of the prophecy I've ever found," she said. “It just… appeared. As if the Veil thinning is forcing the full truth to the surface, one piece at a time."
She looked up at me. The torchlight reflected the fear in her eyes—and with it, that fierce, starving hunger for understanding that had driven her out of her temple and into the dark with me.
"The prophecy isn't just old, Amaria. It's alive."
I looked at the parchment. At the words that had stitched themselves into ancient vellum while the world unraveled.
The soul shall stitch what gods have torn.
"Keep reading," I said. My voice came out rougher than I intended. "Whatever it's trying to say—we need to know before it finishes saying it to someone else."
Neither of us said what we were both thinking—that the word stitch had never sounded so much like a warning.
Serenya was already bent over the scroll again, fingers tracing glyphs, lips moving without sound. I pulled my cloak tighter and leaned back against the wall, closing my eyes. Sleep was a long shot, but my body was collecting on debts my stubbornness had been writing all day.
The scratch of her quill followed me down into the dark.
Sleep came, but it didn't stay.
I sat propped against the stone wall, knees drawn to my chest. Most of the torches had been snuffed for the night. Around me, the stronghold breathed its sleeping sounds—hushed voices, the rhythmic drip of water, the occasional shuffle of a body turning in restless sleep.
My body hadn't gotten the message that the crisis was over.
My Marks throbbed, a dull ache that pounded in time with my heartbeat. But it was more than that. My vision kept sliding in and out of focus, the edges of the cavern warping. Every few minutes, a wave of nausea rolled through me, sudden and sourceless, leaving a sour taste at the back of my throat.
The worst part was my skin. Everywhere my marks touched felt tender. Burned. Like I'd pressed myself against hot iron and the nerve endings hadn't figured out how to stop screaming.
The time-loop kept replaying behind my eyes—the lantern's flame coiling backward, the sick wrongness of reality stuttering, and then him. His hands on my wrists. His voice cracking through the mayhem. The black veins that crawled across his skin as he staggered away from me.
I ground the heels of my hands into my eyes until I saw stars. It didn't help.
A shadow stirred in the dark.
I went still. My senses, sharpened by exhaustion and paranoia, registered the shift before my mind could name it. A presence detaching from the deeper gloom near the cavern entrance, moving toward me without a sound.
My hand found my dagger before I'd finished the thought.
Eryndor.
I dropped into my bedroll and tucked the blade against my thigh. Eyes shut. Breathing even. One eye cracked open just enough to track him.
He emerged from the dark, his Crownforged cuirass catching the faintest edge of firelight.
The metal shifted with him—muted creak of plate against leather, too controlled to be careless.
He'd loosened the straps. Quieted himself on purpose.
He moved with lethal economy, each step precise, almost furtive.
My breath went shallow. My grip adjusted on the blade.
He's seen what you are now. The full, uncontrolled horror of it. He's here to finish it—to drag you to the King while you're weak and shaking and—
A boot on stone. Close enough that I caught the grit grinding under his heel, the faint pop of a pebble skipping sideways. Then another step. He stopped beside my bedroll, close enough that I caught the metallic bite of his armor.
He didn't speak or reach for me, didn't even look at my face.
His gaze stayed fixed on the ground between us—the uneven stone slick with condensation, pooling light in its thin, wet streaks.
One knee pressed into the damp rock beside my bedroll.
He set a small shape down beside my head.
A small clay pot, unremarkable except for the scent that rose from it: cool, earthy, a blend of crushed herbs and oil.
A salve for Marks.
My eyes snapped from the pot to his face. For a breath—less than a breath—his gaze lifted and met mine.
A heavy, knowing weight settled in his eyes—a brief bridge between two people who had both bled in the dark.
I saw what it costs you. I know.
The air between us crackled, thick with everything neither of us was saying.
Then he was gone. Melting back into the shadows as silently as he'd come, leaving nothing behind but the faint scent of pine and the pot cooling against the stone.
I didn't move for a long moment. Didn't even breathe.
My fingers found the pot eventually. The clay was cool beneath my touch. I uncapped it, and the earthy scent bloomed around me—herbs I recognized, blended in proportions I'd used myself on Shadowmarked children whose parents couldn't afford a healer's discretion.
He knew the recipe. Of course he did.
Strategy, I told myself. You don't let your bounty lame itself before you drag it to the King. He's maintaining equipment. That's all.
The explanation should have settled clean. A week ago, it would have. I'd have thought it, believed it, and gone to sleep.
But tonight the words had to be shoved into place, like bricks into wet mortar. Each one heavier than the last. And underneath them—in the gap where certainty used to live—a fault line shifted. The sound of a wall taking weight it wasn't built to hold.
I dipped my fingers into the salve and spread it over my burning Marks.
The relief was immediate—cool and spreading, sinking into the raw skin where my Shadowmark had lashed out.
My breath slowed. My shoulders dropped. The pain didn't vanish, but it softened into something I could carry, and I kept going—until the pot was half empty and the burning had faded to a distant hum.
I sat there in the dark with the scent of his mercy on my skin.
No one saw. No one would know. That was supposed to make it easier—a thing done in private didn't count, didn't mean anything, could be filed under practicality and forgotten by morning.
But my hands were gentle. I'd been gentle with myself because he had been gentle first, and I couldn't unlearn the permission.
I capped the pot. Set it beside my bedroll where I could reach it again.
The earthy scent still clung to my skin when Serenya stirred beside me. I didn't know how much time had passed—underground, you measured the hours in torch-burns and meal bells, and both had gone quiet.
She sat up, found a tear in her cloak's hem, and started stitching without a word.
Her needle dipped and rose, the familiar rhythm stilling my restlessness.
"You smell like a healer's kit," she said without looking up.
I glanced at the clay pot beside my bedroll. "Couldn't sleep."
"Mmm." The needle dipped. Rose. Dipped again. "And the salve appeared by magic, I suppose."
I didn't answer. She didn't push.
That was the thing about Serenya. She always knew when to leave the silence alone.