Chapter Fifteen
The hardest weight a soul can bear
Is every life that isn’t there
Therion Ashborne has learned that rest is a luxury other people afford themselves.
Vigilance is his inheritance, following him like a silent, endless sentry.
Like a shadow he cannot outrun—watchful, unsleeping, patient.
The moment he relaxes, the past finds him.
Mistakes. Gaps. The faces of those he failed to protect.
So he watches. Always.
Even now, standing in the corner of Rubi’s workroom in the back of the Elarion library, his back to the wall, eyes tracking movement before thought can intervene.
Teddy notices the bottle before he notices the time.
It sits open on the worktable beside Rubi’s mortar, the glass already sweating despite the chill that seeps through the limestone walls. The smell hits him next—sharp spirits cutting through bitter herbs and iron—wrong in a room meant for precision.
Rubi doesn’t look drunk. That’s the problem.
“You know, Teddy, I can feel your judgment from here,” Rubi says, voice irreverent and unperturbed.
She lifts her eyes from her workbench to her brother, settling her gaze on him, and takes a long, exaggerated pull from her flask.
“Fortunately, I judge myself more than anyone else ever could, so it affects me less than you might hope.”
Her eyes stay pinned on him, imbuing them with a flare of defiance. But his stomach clenches. She may cover her pain in pranks and cheek, but he knows she’s only averting everyone’s gaze from the cracks that’ll never mend.
Teddy pushes off the wall, stepping toward her. “I’m not judging you, Rubes. I’m worried.”
She stands steady at the table, sleeves rolled to the elbow, sandy-blond hair twisted back in a knot that’s come loose in places.
Her hands move with practiced care as she grinds dried leaves into powder, the pestle turning slow and deliberate, like she’s pacing herself through something that refuses to be rushed.
“Well, you needn’t be. Drink comforts me when the world cannot,” she says with levity and a flourish of her hand.
He’s heard that before—just phrased differently. Different bottles. Different nights. Because the world never comforts Rubi, only reminds her of how much she hurts.
Teddy leans against the wall next to her and watches. “I can comfort you,” he says, keeping his tone neutral.
Rubi doesn’t look up. “I won’t take comfort from someone I failed, Teddy.”
He knows it isn’t the drink she reaches for—it’s the silence it gives her.
The pestle scrapes harder against the bowl.
He draws back, just slightly. “Rubinia,” he admonishes, his tone darkening. “You are paying penance for something that you did not do.”
That makes her stop. Her eyes drag up from her work toward her brother. She bares her teeth, but he doesn’t miss the way her hand trembles around the pestle.
“Exactly. I did nothing,” she snarls. “I got high and laid while your fucking wife was slain by a monster.”
He’s learned that “nothing” is the word people use when they can’t survive the truth of what happened.
Her breath comes in short, fractured pants, rasping between her teeth.
“Or did you forget? That your baby girl didn’t live because I chose to fuck the flutist that played at the solstice celebration?” She hurls the words at her brother like she’s wielding a weapon.
Maybe she is.
She says it like confession, like punishment—but he knows she’s been saying it long before he walked into the room.
The words hang between them, ugly and irrevocable.
But Rubi doesn’t stop.
“I let the lure of her beautiful eyes and pretty smile take me away from the honor of protecting your wife and daughter, Teddy. You should hold nothing but hatred in your heart for me,” she snarls, voice thick with disdain.
“You do enough of that for the both of us,” he murmurs so low she doesn’t hear.
He closes his eyes, trying desperately to keep ghosts of the past from his mind. “Rubi,” he breathes. “There is only one crime they committed that led to their deaths.”
His burnished bronze eyes find his sister’s of the same hue.
“They loved me. That is why they died. If you need absolution, you have it. I deserve the guilt—it’s not yours to hold,” he murmurs, barely above a whisper.
Rubi’s eyes are glassy, throat bobbing.
“I was meant to be on watch, Teddy. There is no one else to blame, no matter how you look at it,” Rubi admits, hanging her head, pestle clattering to the work bench.
Teddy strides across the room, dragging his hands through his hair and down the harsh lines of his face.
“It is done,” he says with finality, and the words offer no comfort at all.
Rubi doesn’t move. Doesn’t speak. There is nothing to say about such a tragedy.
“We do our duty,” Teddy says. “So one day, vigilance and penance won’t be the price of survival.”
Because if the world requires constant watchfulness, then the world itself is already broken.
He expects Rubi to pick up her flask, but she simply nods. Tight and resistant, but she nods. And he hopes that he can hold the weight of the guilt so his sister doesn’t have to.
Rubi returns to her mortar, grinding the herbs into a fine powder. Teddy follows Rubi’s eyes as they flick—briefly, involuntarily—toward him. Then back to the table.
“What is it?” he asks.
Her eyes snap back to the herb. “Something isn’t right,” she mutters, more to herself than either of them. “It should be binding by now.”
Teddy straightens slightly. “The threvenar?”
Rubi nods once, irritation flashing across her face. “I’ve tried purging herbs, blood cleansers, absorbent minerals, solvents. But look…” she trails off, gesturing to Teddy to move closer.
She takes the sage green powder she’s been working in the pestle, and pinches some between her fingers. She drags another mortar close by. “This is threvenar. Watch…”
She sprinkles the pinch of sage green powder atop the mortar of fine black threvenar powder, and…
It separates. Not in some messy, unstructured way. Just… cleanly.
She tries again with another ground herb. Same reaction.
“I’m looking for a chelating agent—something that binds to the threvenar more strongly than the body does, so it can be dragged out.”
Makes sense.
Teddy nods. “But?”
“But the threvenar repels every potent binder I try.”
She finally reaches for the flask she’s been resisting, pours a measured amount into a chipped cup, and takes a swallow that’s too practiced to be casual. Like she knows exactly how far to go without falling apart in front of him. Exactly how far to go before her work suffers.
“And I’m guessing that’s odd?” Teddy clarifies.
Rubi purses her lips, furrows her brow. “Very. It shouldn’t happen. Scientifically, it can’t happen.”
Teddy lifts his head. “You sure?”
“I’m always sure,” Rubi snaps, then exhales, shoulders dropping. “I’ve worked with this plant my entire life. It doesn’t behave like this unless…”
Therion feels the room tighten.
“Unless what?” he asks.
Rubi swirls the cup, watching the liquid cling to the glass. “Alchemy. Contamination. Or… intention.”
She meets Teddy’s gaze then, eyes sharp and unflinching. “And I don’t believe in accidents.”
Silence settles between them, heavy and familiar.
After a moment, Teddy speaks quietly. “What do you believe?”
Rubi doesn’t answer immediately. Her fingers curl around the cup until her knuckles blanch.
“I believe… that something isn’t right. I’ve tested fifty-two herbs and compounds, and at least one of them should’ve been able to bind to it. This is how we’ve purged it from the body hundreds of times before. I don’t know what I believe, yet, but I’ll find out.”
Something inside Teddy shifts, because seeing Rubi like this—purposeful, determined, working with herbs in this way… it reminds him of who she is. Who she really is beyond the guilt, the grief, the liquor. Who she was before Maldrak’s Purge.
He’s seen this before—how people don't choose the vice, they choose the only thing that makes the hurt stop for a while.
But before he can say it, reality fractures.
A ripple tears through the air behind them in the main library.
Magic snarls.
And Seren steps out of the Gateway, bloodied, altered, and not the same woman who left.
For a heartbeat, Teddy doesn’t see the blood. He sees her eyes—brighter, sharper, wrong.
No. Not wrong. Different. Like the softness has been leached from her bones. Like conviction has taken root where wonder used to bloom. Like she’s still Seren, but changed.
He knows it before she says a word. She has crossed a threshold. Something old and drilled into his bones stirs—the reflex he learned on battlefields, not in libraries. The part of him that knows when a warrior has crossed a threshold they can’t return from.
He takes her in—all five foot and two inches of her. Not weaker. Not broken. Just… sharper. Like something unnecessary has been stripped away. Like a sculpture that has been carved closer to its true shape.
Rubi watches her for a beat too long—like she’s looking at the version of survival she didn’t choose.
Seren’s breaths come in ragged pants, but Teddy’s eyes snag on her hands.
Blood drips from her fingertips in slow, deliberate drops—so dark it reads as black at first glance, until the candlelight catches it and reveals the faintest glint of red beneath, like heat lingering in coals long after the fire has gone out.
Rubi’s breath stutters—not at the wounds, but at the color. Her gaze lingers a beat too long, brow creasing as if her hands itch to test something they shouldn’t.
Teddy’s gaze rakes over Seren’s body, no longer taking her in, but assessing.
Her face.
Bloodied and slashed.
“Why are you back?” he demands, though not unkindly. Just concerned.
Seren strides through the apothecary, brushing past the Ashborne siblings, and slumping in the chair beside the workbench.
She reaches for Rubi’s flask, and takes a long, rough swig like a woman who’s had a night she’d rather forget.
But gods, she’s beautiful like this.
Stripped of fear and obedience, a raging wildfire palpable and alive in her eyes instead.
Teddy closes the gap between them. “What happened, Seri?”
She sweeps her eyes up, mouth twisted—all bitterness and bite. “Oh, aside from a deathly ocean, a sentient storm, a coven of witches who don’t want me, and trials I’m meant to begin after facing the ocean again? Oh, not much. Just these wounds, I suppose.”
She takes another swig of Rubi’s flask, her movements clipped.
“Apparently survival means nothing the first time,” she adds flatly.
But Rubi sucks in a quiet gasp.
“You actually found the witches,” she murmurs in awe. She reaches for the flask at that, drawing a long pull and shaking her head in disbelief.
Seren’s demeanor changes instantly. “I did,” she admits.
“Lara… the High Witch of The Dreaded,” she sneers bitterly, but her voice holds a certain type of gravitas too.
Lara.
She found her.
Holy fucking Stars.
He wants to ask her about it, to hear about what she was like, but Teddy homes into the places he can add value instead.
“This ocean. Tell me about it,” he says, cutting through her acidity with his usual pragmatism.
Her brows draw in. Not angry, this time. No, this time she’s sad.
She looses an exhale, eyes dragging to Teddy’s, round and reaching and desperate. Like she’s decided to ask for help. Or guidance. Or maybe both.
But Teddy knows what it’s like—to ask for help when you’ve spent a lifetime devoted to others. He knows what it’s like to feel selfish for the simplest of things.
“The Gateway opens in The Perils, atop jagged, broken rocks,” she begins, bitterness gone and replaced with quiet resolve.
“I need to get to the cave mouth, where The Dreaded are a couple hundred yards away. But the seas, the storms… they’re aware.
They don’t want me to cross. So I crawled.
Then I dragged myself,” she says, raising her shredded palms to the lantern’s light.
Rubi hisses between her teeth at the sight. “I’ll tend to those,” she says, already gathering supplies.
“I thought if I proved I wanted it badly enough,” she says, voice low, “they’d let me stay. But… it just meant… nothing.”
Pain grips Teddy’s chest. Not his own pain. Seren’s. The kind he wished he could take from her.
“I need to do it again. And I have this suspicion that I’ll be doing it… a lot. I have to earn Lara’s trust by proving my loyalty. I can’t see her letting me stay any time soon,” Seren explains.
Teddy nods, a low hum of acknowledgement rumbles from his throat. But he doesn’t speak. Not because he doesn’t want to, but because a plan is forming in his mind.
“If I cross again, I have to pass some tests… The Harrows,” she adds.
The Harrows.
Lara.
The Dreaded.
“So this is who the old bat thought could save the realms?” Teddy clarifies, narrowing his eyes.
If you can get to Lara, the war is won.
That’s what Mavyrn said.
“Lara of The Evening Star. High Witch of The Dreaded. Keeper of The Harrows,” Seren announces with a performative—and perhaps a little sarcastic—flourish.
Teddy nods, taking it all in.
He sees it then—not just what she’s endured, but what she’s becoming. And the answer settles in him.
If the world is sharpening her into a blade, he will make damn sure she learns how to wield herself.
He pushes off the wall, done with all this talking.
“Then I suppose I’ll see you at first light,” he grunts with finality.
Seren’s eyes snap to Rubi, but she only shrugs indifferently, already taking another pull of her flask.
“And why is that, Teddy?” Seren asks, eyes narrowing in suspicion.
“Because that’s when training starts.”