20. Chapter 20
ERYNDOR
The fire had burned to embers by the time my watch started.
Maxx was sprawled across his bedroll, one arm flung over his face, snoring in a way that would get him killed in hostile territory.
Serenya had curled tight near the dying warmth, the Codex curled against her chest. Dreadscale had taken the eastern perimeter—I felt more than saw him out there, still as stone, watching the approaches I couldn't cover.
I positioned myself where I could see the western treeline, the canyon edge, the path we'd come from.
And her.
She slept like she fought—curled tight, coiled, ready to spring. One hand gripped the hilt of Voidbringer even in unconsciousness. The other was tucked beneath her chin, fingers loosely curled around nothing.
I catalogued without meaning to. The scars on her knuckles. The calluses. The small razors braided into her hair, glinting faint in the low light.
Armed even for dreams. A fortress built for keeping things out.
My jaw tightened.
The tether had taken something from her. Something private. I should have felt only guilt for that. But the tether had made her legible in a way she'd never chosen. I couldn't unread her now.
She murmured in her sleep.
Just sounds—soft, fragmented. Her brow creased. Her lips moved around syllables that belonged to someone else.
The tether pulled. Not the low hum of proximity—but sharper. An ache behind the sternum that wanted me closer, wanted contact, wanted the distance between us erased.
I stayed where I was.
She turned toward the fire's warmth. Toward me. Her body curling in my direction like the tether was pulling her even in sleep.
My fingers twitched against my thigh. I stilled them.
She made another sound. Smaller this time. The crease in her brow deepened.
I could end it. One touch. Palm against her shoulder, her hand, anything. The tether would quiet. The nightmare would release her. She'd sleep deeper, and I'd—
I'd have taken another part of her she hadn't offered.
I didn't move.
The tether pulled again. Harder.
My eyes tracked to her throat. The pulse there, visible in the low light. Steady. Strong. A drum beat summoning the darkness.
The Soulbinder woke. Like a predator lifting its head at the scent of blood.
I felt it unleash—that ancient, hungry thing the King had sharpened into a weapon. It didn't want her the way a male wants a female. It wanted her the way a fire wants air. The way a void wants filling.
I could taste her from here. Not her skin, not her sweat—her essence. The bright, burning thread of her life force pulsing through the tether like light through a cracked door. The Soulbinder pushed against that crack. Starving. Patient.
Just a sip, it whispered. She wouldn't even feel it. She's sleeping. She's full. She has so much and you have nothing and she wouldn't even know—
She whimpered in her sleep and my hand was moving.
I hadn't told it to move. Inches from her shoulder, fingers reaching for the pulse point at her throat, her wrist, anywhere the life ran close to the surface. My body leaning forward like instinct had sunk hooks into me and was reeling me down.
I saw it. The way it would happen. Palm against her skin. The sigh she'd make as the tension drained. The way her face would soften, peaceful, even as I pulled and pulled and—
Stop.
Three steps back, four, until the fire's warmth stopped reaching and the dark swallowed what was left. The training room. The child's face.
Stop.
My hands were shaking. I watched them like they belonged to someone else. Someone dangerous. A soldier that should be put down before it killed again.
I held the line. Minutes passed. The fire burned lower.
Her hand opened. Reached for something that wasn't there. Closed on empty air.
I was beside her before I knew I'd moved.
Kneeling. Close enough to feel the warmth of her through the space between us. My hand hovering over her cheek—not touching, not quite, but there. An inch of air and years of training the only things keeping my hand from her skin.
Her fingers curled tighter. Grasping at nothing. A moan caught between her lips—ragged enough to almost break my control.
She's reaching for them. The ones who left. The ones who were taken.
My thumb brushed her cheek.
I didn't tell it to. I didn't choose it. One moment I was holding the line and the next I was crossing it—the pad of my thumb tracing the path a tear would take, skin against skin, and the tether sang.
My Little Fox exhaled. Soft. The crease in her brow smoothed.
I stayed.
One heartbeat. Two. Three.
Get up. Get up. This isn't yours to take—
Four heartbeats. Five.
Her face had gone slack. Peaceful. The nightmare releasing its grip because I was touching her and the tether was feeding her safety and warmth. I know I should stop. I should stop. I should—
Six heartbeats.
Monster.
I pulled back like I'd touched a brand.
My hand hung there between us. I stared at the thumb that had traced her cheek without permission. At the proof of what I was—what the Soulbinder had made me—this thing that took and took and couldn't stop itself even when it wanted to.
She didn't wake.
She'd never know. That was worse. That I'd crossed the line and she'd never know, and I'd carry it like all the other secrets, and tomorrow I'd look at her and she'd have no idea that I'd touched her in the dark like a starving beast. Her skin and her most guarded memories.
The Soulbinder thrummed in my chest. Hungry and waiting, but I would not be the thing that drained her dry.
I could still feel her cheek against my thumb. I thought I'd feel it for the rest of my life.
I retreated to the stone at the edge of camp. Let the wind cut the warmth from my fingers.
The hours stretched. I counted them in the shifts of shadow across the canyon floor, in the slow rotation of unfamiliar stars. I did not look at her. I watched the dark instead—the treeline, the ridgeline, the places where threats had shapes I knew how to fight.
Easier enemies than the one sitting behind my ribs.
The fire burned lower. The cold settled in.
Then I heard a sound.
My hand was on my blade before the thought finished forming. Body still. Breath held.
I waited. Didn't move. Didn't blink.
The fire crackled behind me. Maxx's breathing, slow and even. Serenya's softer, steadier. The wind moving through the scrub grass at the canyon's edge.
And underneath all of it—
A scrape. Stone on stone. Faint. Coming from the western approach.
I stalked toward it. Each step deliberate, weight rolling from heel to toe the way I'd been trained. The cold bit through my clothes but I barely felt it. Every sense was focused outward—listening, watching, waiting for movement.
The scrub grass rustled to my right.
I pivoted. Blade up. Ready.
Nothing. Just the wind. Just the grass bending and straightening.
But the Hunter was out there. I'd seen the tracks pressed into solid stone. The mechanical precision of that stride. The pacing pattern of something that had waited at the Sensorium's edge for days without rest, without fire, without food. Something that didn't need anything except to find us.
To find her.
My grip on the blade tightened at that maddening thought.
The King had sent me after her once. I knew what that felt like—the single-minded focus of a weapon pointed at a target. The way everything else fell away until there was only the hunt, only the quarry, only the inevitable end.
Someone else had that focus now. Someone—something—was moving through the dark with her name carved into its purpose.
And I didn't know what it was. Didn't know how it tracked us through the Dead Zone, how it knew we'd emerge from the Sensorium, how it had waited with the patience of a thing that had forgotten how to do anything but hunt.
The canyon breathed below me—that vast emptiness exhaling cold air up the cliff face. A stone broke loose somewhere, tumbled, clattered against rock on its way down. Natural. Probably natural.
I scanned the ridgeline. The shadows between boulders. The dark mouths of crevices where anything could wait, could watch, could—
Still, nothing else moved.
The not-knowing was worse than the threat.
I could kill what I understood. I had been killing what I understood since I was old enough to hold a blade. Give me a soldier, a beast, a monster with a shape I recognized, and I would take it apart piece by piece until it stopped moving.
But this—
Footprints in stone. No camp. No fire. No rest.
This wasn't a soldier. Wasn't a beast. Wasn't anything I had a name for.
It wanted her.
The ruthless Crownforged warrior in me growled and gnashed its teeth. Ready to tear through anything stupid enough to come out of that dark tracking her scent.
If it touched her, I would unmake it.
The certainty was absolute. Not a decision.
A fact. The same way I knew the sun would rise, or that the tether would eventually kill one of us.
If a beast came out of that dark with her name in its teeth, I would tear it apart with my bare hands.
I would make it regret ever learning she existed. I would—
Stop.
My jaw ached. I'd been clenching it hard enough to crack teeth.
I forced my fingers to loosen on the blade. Forced the breath in. Out. In.
This was how it started. This was how the weapon slipped its leash—not through hunger or heat, but through this. The cold fire of purpose.
The seductive clarity of violence in service of something that mattered.
The King had used it. Pointed me at targets and let the Crownforged do what it was made for. And I had never questioned, never hesitated, because the certainty felt like righteousness and the kills felt like mercy.
I knew better now. I knew what I became when I let that thing off the chain.
But gods help me, I wanted to let it hunt.
I wanted to find whatever was tracking her and show it what happened to things that threatened what was mine.
Mine.
The word caught in my chest. Dangerous. Not mine. Never mine. She wasn't—
I made myself breathe. Made myself settle and extinguish the raging fire in me.
The dark stayed empty. The wind carried nothing but cold and the faint green memory of the Sensorium behind us. Whatever had made the sound—animal, stone, phantom—it wasn't coming. Not tonight.
But it was out there. Waiting. Patient.
And so was I.
My grip on the blade didn't loosen. Not for a long time.
When it finally did, my eyes drifted back to her. Against orders.
Always back to her.
Time passed as I watched and waited. The sky greyed at the edges. And then—
She said my name.
Soft. Half-swallowed by sleep.
"Eryndor."
I stopped breathing.
Not the Crownforged. Not the weapon, the leash, the monster the King had made.
Eryndor.
She said it like it was a word worth keeping. Like she was dreaming of me and in her dreams I was still—
Don't.
She was asleep. It meant nothing. A sound. A reflex. People said all kinds of things in their sleep; it didn't mean—
She sighed. Shifted. Her lips moved again, shaping the syllables like she was tasting them.
"Eryndor."
Something cracked.
I felt it go—a fissure running through the wall I'd spent years building. Small. Hairline. But there, and widening, and I couldn't stop it because she kept saying it like a spell, like a summoning, like she was calling back the dead.
Tactical intelligence, I told myself. File it away. A data point. Nothing more.
The lie felt like a whiplash.
I wanted to hear it again. That was the truth. The ugly, impossible truth. I wanted to wake her up just so she'd say my name with her eyes open. Wanted to know if it would sound different when she meant it.
Monster. She called you monster first. That's what you are. That's what you'll always—
"Eryndor."
A third time. Softer now. Fading back into deeper sleep.
I closed my eyes. Let the sound of it settle into my chest. Let it hurt.