Chapter Thirty-Three
The past will beg you not to roam
The future asks you to come home
The Perils thrash like a caged beast, ripping Seren’s hair from its braid in a wild whip.
Fear lives at the boundary.
Teddy’s words reverberate in her skull. Not because she’s afraid, but because she refuses to be the woman who watches or waits at the boundary. Every version of Seren that survived until now was built by retreat. This version is built by claiming territory.
Now, Seren is the woman who runs into the fray.
She moves.
The glassy onyx ocean stirs in response, drawing back like a bow gaining leverage before loosing an arrow. But she does not falter.
Keep your feet.
Claim ground.
Run into the fray.
Her boots pound against the jagged rock, her ankles working hard to maintain alignment with the fractured surface.
She shortens her stride, driving force into each step. Lands her foot strike beneath her center. Breathes with a rhythm that steadies her.
The ocean rises over her like a pounding fist, ready to land a blow.
Seren pumps her arms—no rotation.
Efficiency is everything.
She studies the shape of the swell. The way it curves over, swirling in an arc.
A plan starts to form.
A plan to use the architecture of the wave against itself.
If you enter force, force loses power.
Seren diverts her path, instincts and strategy driving her forward. Not away from the swell—toward it.
The swell peaks, curling at the crest like obsidian claws. The claws stretch, but Seren does not stop. She runs hard, efficient, force driving through her legs—into the fray.
The wave stretches over her, around her, looping under itself in an arc, black as pitch. It crashes to the stone, spraying with outward force on impact, and for a heartbeat, Seren stares.
Her legs stop turning over, stilling without conscious intention.
The wave forms a tunnel like the eye of a storm, and through it, the Silent Choir sway in the mouth of The Dreaded’s caves.
The calmness of calamity.
Her breaths rush in and out of her, joining the constant whoosh of the violent seas.
Teddy was right: fear lives at the boundary. Because inside the eye of the storm? Here, it is beautiful.
Calm in the calamity of the violent seas. Peace in the perils of this land. Serenity in the strength of her own strategy.
Something burns against her chest.
Seren frowns, attention diverting from the wave, her breath still heaving from the run. At first she thinks it’s just the strain in her ribs, the bruised ache of muscle and bone protesting the violence of the crossing after Teddy’s training.
But the heat sharpens.
The amulet.
It pulses once beneath her collarbone, hot enough to sting through the fabric of her tunic.
Seren’s hand flies to it instinctively.
Another pulse.
Stronger.
Her breath catches.
“Seren.”
The voice isn’t sound.
It’s inside her—threaded through her bones, reverberating through her mind like a distant echo, carried along the same invisible current that binds the amulets together.
Her heart slams into her ribs.
The wind howls around her, The Perils tearing at the edges of the barrelled wave, but the voice cuts through it all with terrifying clarity.
“I need you.”
Elyssara.
Desperate.
Seren paces forward, her feet carrying her before she can think. She stumbles, boots skidding against wet stone as she nearly loses her footing.
“Come for me.”
The amulet flares hot in her palm as she grips it.
“Please.”
Her pulse roars in her ears.
For a heartbeat, there is nothing but the roar of the sea and the thunder of her own blood.
“Azhareth.”
The word cracks through the connection like a snapped thread.
“They have Kael.”
Seren stops dead.
The wave crashes somewhere behind her with the violence of a collapsing mountain, spray exploding across the rocks, but she barely notices.
Kael.
They have Kael.
Seren gasps, trying to open her mouth to speak, but realizing her words are futile.
She tries to push her will through the amulet…
But The Perils surge.
The sea screams.
Magic here belongs to older things than bound trinkets.
Seren lunges forward to keep moving, and her boot catches on a jagged lip of stone.
She stumbles.
She rips her hand forward to steady herself, but the sudden jolt tugs on her neck, snapping the clasp of the amulet.
Fuck!
A sharp metallic crack rings out.
Seren feels the tension vanish from her neck.
“No—”
The necklace slips free.
The amulet drops.
It hits the stone once, skidding across the slick surface before tumbling toward the edge of the rock shelf.
Seren dives for it.
Her fingers scrape against wet stone, reaching—too slow.
The amulet disappears over the edge. Gone.
The sea swallows it without ceremony. Seren scrambles to the lip, staring into the churning black water below.
“El!” she screams, but the words only disappear into the chaos of The Perils.
Elyssara does not hear. Does not answer. The connection is gone. The ocean roars. The Perils rage. Seren is alone again. And for one horrible heartbeat, she feels exactly like the girl she used to be, waiting for someone stronger to save her.
Her chest tightens. Sharp and furious.
Kael.
They have Kael.
Her jaw sets.
Seren pushes to her feet and runs.
The ocean continues spewing its endless waves, cresting into peaks that jut like bony fingers, and sprawling into swells that crash beyond her. She is too close to the wall of cresting water to be crushed by the wave, the arc not tight enough to reach her.
So she uses it.
She runs like a woman with something to prove.
Like a woman who has spent a lifetime letting others fight her battles.
Letting others tell her she was not capable.
Waiting to be chosen. Saved. Claimed.
But now, she is the woman who runs into the fray.
Fire in her belly, steel in her spine, softness in her heart.
The Silent Choir approaches quickly, her strides efficient and fast. Her boots slam into the fractured rock, eyes scanning for flat surfaces to use, bounding off them as she runs.
The end of the ocean’s wave forms a barrel, like a spyglass with its sight fixed on the cave’s mouth.
Seren’s lungs burn with the effort, her muscles screaming. But she does not slow, does not hold back. She pushes through the heartbeat pulsing in her wounded ribs, and drives herself forward.
Until the ocean stills, retracting its claws.
Seren stands at the mouth, Silent Choir swaying in the winds of The Perils.
She does not leap. Does not collapse. She arrives.
Her head drops back with closed eyes, a smile breaking free on her face as her hands find her hips.
She fucking did it.
“Not bad, little witch,” a voice croons from inside the mouth.
Seren snaps her head forward, eyes flying open.
Lara steps from the shadow of the cavern, violet eyes glittering with what might almost be approval. The coven stands a pace behind her, silent and intimidating.
“Using the force of The Perils against itself.”
Her head tilts slightly.
“You learn quickly.”
Is that a compliment?
Warmth blooms in Seren’s chest and she hates herself for liking the validation.
“I do,” she says, forcing composure into her voice. “I was raised by a bastard who thought me worthless beyond selling me off to be used by other men. So I sharpened my mind to prove to myself that I was more than that.”
Seren lifts her chin, but the gesture feels like nothing more than bravado.
Lara studies her for a long time, amethyst eyes boring into her like she can see beyond flesh and into her soul.
She raises a hand and waves the other witches away, dismissing them with nothing more than a flick of her wrist. They retreat into the shadows, and Lara waits for their footfalls to fade to nothing.
She steps forward, pale moonlight hitting her face, and her features shift. Not into softness exactly, but warmth.
“I never knew my mother,” she offers, voice neutral. “I was raised by the matriarchs of The Dreaded—all dead now. I’ve been where you are, using my blood to Gateway to my origin. It always led me here.”
Words snag in Seren’s throat, unable to speak. So she offers a nod. A small one.
“I decided a long time ago that I belong to myself.”
Lara’s words sound neutral, but they feel anything but—they feel like a message crafted especially for Seren. They strike her harder than sympathy ever could.
Seren’s voice comes out a croak. “I thought I was born to a family who hated me because I was a woman. But I was born to a mother who gave me up, instead…” she trails off.
A heartbeat goes by.
Another.
One more.
“I’m not sure what’s worse—being wanted and hated, or being unwanted and discarded.”
She’s never said the words aloud. Never acknowledged the ugly truth buried beneath her skin, trapped in the scar tissue. And they feel exactly how she thought they would: heartbreaking.
Lara takes another step forward, eyes fixed on Seren like two hanging jewels. There’s nothing soft in them, nothing vulnerable. Nothing sympathetic or compassionate. Nothing but resolve and a ferocity forged by force.
“For hundreds of years, witches were hunted by Inquisitors, Seren. Long before we made The Perils home. Our mothers, and their mothers, and their mothers before them, were hunted. They were not taught to raise children. They were taught to save them—hide them.” Lara’s voice is cold, but not cruel. Factual.
Seren’s mind spins. Reality folding in on itself. The truth rearranging itself in her mind.
She wasn’t discarded?
“You may have been raised by a bastard, but he’s no man.
Men who see only a woman’s body have never truly seen a woman at all.
Flesh is the least of what we are. It is women who decide what the world becomes.
Even kings would agree that the world is made up only of mothers and their children,” she says, the words hanging on the ocean breeze like a truth that begs repeating.
“And men know it to their core—that’s why they’d do anything to make us forget our power.
Why they fear women who remember themselves. ”