3. Chapter 3 #2
The tether throbbed through my body—a dull, metered ache. I felt his heartbeat through it. Too fast. Uneven. Fighting.
Something in my chest cracked open—pity, horror, and a sorrow that wasn't mine but lived in me now anyway—and I watched him see it. Watched him register my expression and understand exactly what I'd felt.
His face shuttered. Slammed closed like a door.
"Don't." The word came out trembling and raw. "Don't."
The problem was that I couldn't put it back.
That was the thing about the Griefweaver side—it didn't borrow.
It kept. His terror was in my chest now, lodged there permanent as a splinter, and no amount of distance was going to pull it out.
The child in the dark. The hands over the mouth.
The absolute animal necessity of becoming nothing so that nothing would find you.
I knew that feeling. Not the same room, not the same hands—but the same rules. Make yourself small enough and the soldiers ride past. Make yourself quiet enough and the grief doesn't find you in the night. Amputate the parts of yourself that might cry out and give you away.
He'd learned it the same way I had. In the body. At an age when the lesson carves itself into the bone and stays.
That was the part that wouldn't sit still.
I'd spent months building him into something I could hate cleanly—the King's weapon, the hunter, the thing sent to drag me back to a cage.
It was easier that way. Easier to aim at something that had never been soft.
And now I had his childhood sitting in my ribcage like an ember and nowhere to put it, and he was looking at me with that exposed, furious expression that said he knew exactly what I'd seen and would never forgive me for it.
Not for seeing it. For the pity.
The pity was still there—I couldn't make it not be there—but something colder was rising behind it. Faster. More practiced.
Close it.
The door was right there. I'd built it out of years of necessity, hung it on hinges made from every time I'd absorbed someone else's grief and had to keep moving anyway.
I slammed it the way I always did: teeth together, breath steady, eyes gone flat.
The ember didn't go out. It just got walled off.
Something to deal with when there weren't four people bleeding in the soot and a dead sky overhead and a tether screaming between my ribs.
The coldness settled over my face like a mask.
My fingers uncurled from the fabric of his shirt. I hadn't realized I'd been holding on.
I hated how fast it happened. Hated that I could go from cracked open to sealed in the span of three heartbeats, like the crack had never been there.
He'd just shown me the worst thing that had ever happened to him—shown it without meaning to, without consent, ripped open by a tether neither of us wanted—and my response was to close my face and call it survival.
Maybe that made me the monster after all.
Not the kind he'd been trained to hunt. The quieter kind. The kind that absorbs your pain and then shuts the door in your face because keeping it costs too much.
His eyes were still on me. He'd already seen me close. He knew exactly what I'd done.
"Get off me."
My voice came out flat. Not cruel—I couldn't manage cruel right now—but distant.
He pushed himself up. The movement was labored, pain distorting his features, but by the time he straightened, his face had gone smooth again. His own terrible mask sliding back into place like it had never slipped.
"The others." His voice matched mine. Dead. Hollow. "We need to check the others."
Right. The others.
I shoved myself upright, arms shaking with the effort. The tether groaned and grated, like trying to move with my organs rearranged, and I looked for Serenya.
She was on her knees ten feet away. Maxx was crouched over her, his hands gripping her shoulders so hard his knuckles were white.
"Serenya!" I scrambled toward her, sensations from the tether slamming through me with every movement.
I stopped dead.
Blood ran from her nose—thick, dark, dripping onto the ash. But that wasn't what froze me.
Translucent shards of imagery were flickering in and out of existence around her head—a flash of a child’s face, a burning building, a hand holding a quill.
Her memory-weaving was leaking.
"Serenya?"
Her eyes were wide, blown black, and fixed on me with absolute, terrifying vacancy.
Maxx's face lost all remaining color. Guilt and fury warring over his face for purchase.
"I didn't see it coming," he said. His voice cracked on the words. "Eryndor—he was dying, and he still noticed before I did. I should have covered her. I should have—"
"The verses—" Serenya’s voice sounded wet. Fractured. "I was reading the verses. Which ones were they?"
She didn't finish the question. She looked down at her own hands like they belonged to a stranger.
"She's not stabilizing," Maxx whispered. He sounded on the verge of vomiting. "The storm hit her, Amaria. It didn't just knock her down. It went through her."
"The threads," Serenya gasped. She clawed at her own temples, smearing the blood across her cheeks. "They're snapping. I can hear them snapping."
"What threads?" I dropped to my knees beside her, reaching for her hands.
She flinched back, a violent, animalistic jerk. "Don't! Don't touch it—it's spilling—I have to catch it—"
Her gaze darted wildly around the wasteland, tracking invisible flies.
Then she stilled, looked past us.
"Where's Brannick?" Serenya's voice was thin. "He was running the perimeter count."
My stomach dropped.
"Serenya—"
"He was just here."
Silence.
Then she blinked, and the moment passed—or seemed to. Her focus sharpened, just a fraction. She looked at the blood on her hands, then at the Codex strapped to her hip. She grabbed the book with a desperation that was painful to watch.
"Write it down," she mumbled, fumbling with the latch, her fingers slick with blood. "Have to write it down. Before it leaks out. Before the container empties."
I looked at Eryndor. He had pulled himself to sitting, his jaw locked tight. He saw it too.
Serenya was scribbling in the Codex now, her handwriting jagged, desperate. Half the words were smeared with blood. I watched her pause mid-sentence, blink, and start the same line over again.
She didn't notice she'd already written it.
Serenya's writing finally slowed. Stopped. She stared at the page for a long moment, then closed the Codex with clumsy hands and held it against her chest like a shield.
"I'm here now," she said. Her voice was thin, but it was hers again. "I'm—I know where I am."
Maxx hadn't let go of her shoulders. I didn't think he could.
"We need to move," she whispered. "Before I forget why."
Something cracked in my chest. I pulled her into me—one arm around her shoulders, the other hand cradling the back of her head. Maxx folded in from the other side, wrapping us both in arms that held too tight.
"You don't have to remember," I said into her hair. "We'll remember for you. We'll show you. Every step."
She nodded against my shoulder. Her hand flat against my arm—the way she touched objects when she was reading them. Like she was making sure I was real.
We held on for three breaths. Four. Then Maxx pulled back, swiping at his face with the heel of his hand as if he could pretend it was ash making his eyes wet.
I let her go. Turned.
Eryndor was on his feet now, though only by force of will. His body rigid with the effort of standing. Between us, the tether hummed. Low. Constant. A new weight added to everything else.
Our eyes met for half a second. We both looked away. That was the only conversation we were going to have about it. I opened my mouth—to say what, I don't know. Anything useful. Anything that sounded like a plan.
But, then we heard footsteps.
We were all on our feet in an instant. Or trying to be. Maxx stumbled, caught himself. Serenya's hand went to her ceremonial dagger. I yanked two stars free from the band at my forearm.
A shape emerged from the haze.
Dreadscale.
On foot.
He emerged from the grey like a ghost of himself. Same measured stride, same granite expression—but something was missing. The coiled heat that always radiated from him, that sense of barely-contained furnace beneath skin.
He looked... empty. And alone.
"You're alive." Serenya exhaled the words.
"As are you." His dark eyes swept over our group—lingering on Eryndor's prone form, on Maxx's shaking hands, on whatever expression had frozen on my face. "The others?"
The others. The rebels who'd fought beside us. The ones who'd charged the King's lines when everything went wrong.
"I don't know." I said. "We ran. After..."
My eyes flicked towards Eryndor. I couldn't finish. Dreadscale didn't make me.