28. Chapter 28
AMARIA
Dawn came in green through the leaf-windows, and I stood at the basin longer than I needed to.
The room they'd given me was small with walls of living wood curved into a space just large enough for a bed and a basin. Flowering vines crept across the ceiling.
I caught my reflection in the water basin. Dark circles under my eyes. Hair a tangled mess—though the braids still held, and with them, the razors. My fingers found the bone bead without thinking, the small pale thing that secured the blade nearest my temple.
My grandmother's bone. Carved by my mother's hands before everything fell apart.
No one had ever asked about it. Not my new family, not the Uncrowned, not anyone in the years since I'd started wearing death in my hair. They saw the razors and assumed the bead was decoration. Practicality.
In Liraeth, someone would know better. Here, they understood what bone jewelry meant—that you carried your dead with you, wove them into your body, kept them close enough to cut.
My thumb ran over it once. Twice. Then I let go.
The Garden of the Griffin was different at dawn.
The amber light had turned silver, mist curled through the ancient trees like spirits too lazy to leave. The fountain's griffin looked sharper in this light—more predator than statue, with water streaming from wings that were poised for flight.
I walked past carvings I hadn't noticed last night. Griffins everywhere—worked into doorframes, woven into tapestries, etched into the stone benches where moss hadn't yet claimed them. Storm-blue feathers edged in copper-bronze. Eyes that watched.
I wasn't the first to arrive. The others had already claimed spots around the fountain.
Serenya sat cross-legged in the grass, the Codex open in her lap, her face tight with concentration. Maxx leaned against a tree, looking like he hadn't slept at all—or had slept too well and was regretting the wine that had made it possible. Dreadscale stood apart, arms crossed, and waiting.
And the Crownforged.
He must have arrived only minutes before me—I hadn't felt the tether's pull when I woke, which meant he'd still been on the other side of our shared wall. We'd arranged the rooms that way last night, beds pushed up against the same stone, close enough to keep the bond quiet while we slept.
He looked as tired as I felt. The wound on his shoulder had healed overnight—fae regeneration, finally given time to work—but the tension in his stance hadn't eased. Neither had the shadows under his eyes.
Three figures emerged through the garden entrance.
The female in front looked forged by a life spent teaching others to fight and survive—cropped hair, scarred knuckles, eyes that assessed us like recruits on our first day.
Behind her came a lithe female whose fresh tattoos danced across her arms in patterns that seemed to move, and her hair was threaded with dozens of bones in varying sizes.
And behind her—
Oh no.
Cormac. Tall, broad-shouldered, too masculine for this situation. His face was plastered with the same warm smile he'd worn last night when he'd called me "little Amaria" and made Eryndor nearly lose his mind.
I didn't have to look at Eryndor to know his reaction. I felt it through the tether—a spike of territorial dominance that he immediately tried to smother.
Cormac's eyes found mine. His smile widened.
Then his gaze slid to the Crownforged, and amusement flickered in his eyes. Like he loved a good challenge.
This is going to be a disaster.
"Name's Thessaly," the lead female said, either oblivious to the tension or choosing to ignore it.
"Veyla briefed us last night. We train the warrior refugees who come through Liraeth—teach them to unlearn the King's system and find their real power.
" She looked at me, then the Crownforged.
"She says you two don't have time for the usual approach. "
"Did we have a choice?" Maxx muttered.
"There is always a choice." Cormac settled onto a stone bench, his voice rich with that same warmth I remembered from childhood. "Some choices simply have consequences you cannot survive."
The tether went rigid. Eryndor's jaw could have cut glass.
Maxx looked between them. Looked at me. His eyebrows rose slowly toward his hairline.
"Reading the room," he murmured. "Wishing I hadn't. Again."
Thessaly gestured for us to sit. We did—spreading across the earth and stone, the fountain burbling behind us.
"Veyla explained what your bond is," she said. "We're here to teach you what you are."
She looked at me. Then at Eryndor. Then at each member of our group in turn.
"All of you. Not just the tethered ones. What we teach here will change how you understand your gifts—if you're willing to have everything you know unmade."
Serenya closed the Codex. "What do you mean, unmade?"
Thessaly smirked.
"Tell me, Memory-weaver. What is your Mark?"
"It's..." Serenya hesitated. "It's my gift. The power I was born with. The ability to—"
"To do what your brand allows." She cut her off. "To drink from one well. Open one door. And you think that's magic."
Serenya's brow furrowed. "It is magic."
"It's a shackle."
The lithe female stepped forward—the one with bones threaded through her hair. She moved like water—fluid, unhurried, inevitable.
"Naia," she said by way of introduction.
"We begin." She didn't waste time on history lessons; we all knew what was at stake.
"To wield the Ancestral way is to open the door the King tried to seal.
You must bypass the Mark and draw from the Source directly.
And you are the Source." She looked Serenya dead in the eye.
"Never believe anything that tells you power is outside yourself. "
Serenya held her gaze then nodded and scribbled down her notes.
Naia knelt and picked something from the foliage at her feet. When she stood, she held a seed in her palm—small, brown, ordinary.
"This seed does not try to become an oak," she said, her voice low and resonant. "It does not beg the earth for roots or the sky for leaves. It does not hope. It simply is."
She held it up to the light.
"The oak is not a future possibility, Amaria. It is a finished reality, folded into this single point. The seed already contains the roots, the bark, the shade, the centuries of life. It is all there, sleeping, waiting only for the breath of attention to expand it."
She dropped the seed into my palm.
"Make it grow."
I stared at it. "I don't have a growth Mark. I can't—"
"You are listing the locks of your self-made prison," Naia cut in. "I am asking you to remember you are the prison, the ground under it, the key to its door, and the sky stretched above it."
I closed my fingers around the seed. Reached for My marks—the Unravel, the Griefweaver. I pushed that energy into the tiny shell, commanding it to break, willing it to change, trying to drag the future into the present—
The seed blackened and crumbled in my palm.
I stared at the blackened husk in my hand.
That means I am the blackened husk. And I am the destroyer.
Naia didn't balk.
"You commanded it. Pushed your will into it like a blade." She brushed it from my hand. "The seed didn't need your power. It needed your awareness.”
Maxx exhaled slowly.
"Right."
He glanced at the blackened husk, flipping a dagger lazily from hand to hand.
"So the problem wasn't that she failed." The blade caught the light.
"It's that she tried."
Naia nodded. “Precisely.”
Maxx rubbed his face with his free hand.
"I need wine. Or a nap. Or a small, comforting lie about how none of this applies to me."
Naia smiled. "Come. All of you. The first lesson is simple." She smiled wickedly. "Get comfortable with failing."
We trained until the sun climbed high and then kept training.
Serenya burned through three seeds before she managed to make one sprout—a tiny green shoot that wilted almost immediately, but still.
A beginning. Maxx couldn't stop laughing at his own failures, which Naia said was actually a good sign.
Dreadscale sat in silence for two hours before the tree he was touching began to hum, and when it did, the look on his face was something I'd never seen before.
Wonder. Pure and unguarded.
Serenya watched him, a quiet smile tugging at her lips.
Even Maxx went quiet for a moment. Then he ruined it.
"So," he said, squinting at the tiny sprout in Serenya's palm, "just to confirm—these lessons eventually stop being about seeds, right?"
Naia’s smile sharpened.
“Very much so.”
Maxx grinned.
“Good. Because I was really hoping this leads to something loud.”
The trainers laughed—warm, genuine—and the lesson continued.
But not everyone was laughing.
Eryndor struggled the most.
It came through the tether—his frustration, his need for structure, for rules, for a system he could master through discipline alone. The Ancestral Way had no system. It had only presence, connection, surrender. Everything he'd been trained to reject.
"Stop asking," Naia told him. "The Ancestral Way does not answer questions; it echoes conclusions. You are trying to find the rules of the echo, but the echo has no rules. It only repeats what you are. Assume you are the master, and the power has no choice but to submit."
Eryndor ground his teeth. Another seed turned to ash in his palm. "I need to know the mechanism."
"There is no mechanism," she corrected. "There is only the being. You do not call the lightning by learning its name; you call it by occupying the reality where it has already struck. You are trying to get power. You must assume you have it already."
Eryndor's lips pressed together. More seeds turned to ash. His frustration bled through the tether—sharp, exhausted, edged with defeat.
He reached for another seed. His hand was shaking.
I watched him close his fingers around it. Watched him try again—shoulders rigid, breath controlled, every muscle locked in discipline.
And there it was. He was trying to control his way to surrender. Trying to force softness with the same iron grip he used for everything else.