Chapter 3
VAREK
The battle is turning.
There’s a rhythm to violence once it fully takes hold, a pattern beneath the noise and blood and impact that levels out into something almost predictable.
The Queen’s soldiers came fast, hard, confident enough to think surprise would be enough.
It wasn’t. Dathanor bends, reroutes, endures.
The outer lanes are chaos, the old bowling alley structure trembling under the force of impact, but the settlement proper still holds, and I feel the exact moment the enemy realises they’ve miscalculated.
A Glowranth lunges for my throat with a hooked blade slick with rebel blood.
I catch his wrist, twist until bone gives with a brutal crack, then drive my elbow into his chest hard enough to collapse his breath. He folds. I end him quickly and move on.
There is no pause.
No satisfaction.
Only momentum.
The air burns with the scent of iron, heat, and discharged energy.
Rebels shout, orders cut through the chaos, bodies fall.
A Veilvox fighter drops to my left, skull crushed by a mace swung by a palace guard who doesn’t get a second strike.
I intercept, deflect, drive my blade up through the male’s jaw, and turn before he hits the ground.
Too many.
Not too many to hold.
Too many to forgive.
Kael is ten paces away, cutting through enemies with cold precision, every movement efficient and lethal. Shanae holds the western line, voice sharp, keeping the retreat structured instead of breaking. Aelith is somewhere to my right, and wherever he moves, the line fractures under him.
Still, the dead gather.
A young Riftborn falls before I reach him. An older Glowranth ally collapses protecting a route that should never have become a battlefield. Two others hold long enough for the wounded to escape. Only one survives.
The Queen sent her guards to die.
The thought burns through me with every kill. She did not send enough to take Dathanor. That is clear now. This is not conquest. It is pressure. A test. A message.
It brings no relief.
A guard charges me, screaming.
I meet him head-on, slam his strike aside, break his stance, and put him down before he can recover. Another comes. Another falls. The line shifts.
We are winning, as we should be.
Then the bond hits.
Not a flare.
Not a warning.
Wrong.
It slams into me hard enough to disrupt my footing—not pain, exactly, but something worse. A fracture. A pull. Pax.
I miss my next strike by a fraction. The guard still dies, but the error freezes something deep in my chest.
Pax.
The awareness tears through me.
I sent him away. It was the correct decision. Jamie needed protection. Solan would get them there. Jack and Sonny would reinforce. It was the right call.
The bond convulses.
Urgency. Fear. Need so intense, it borders on command.
I turn vicious.
A Glowranth with twin blades comes at me fast and skilled. I let one blade scrape my armour to gain the angle I need, catch her wrist, drive forward, break her stance, and end it in one brutal motion. Blood sprays across my hands.
I don’t slow.
I don’t think.
Pax is in danger.
Another strike. Another kill. I push forward, forcing the enemy line back. They are faltering now. We will hold.
It should be enough.
The bond tears again.
This time it is worse.
It isn’t just fear. It’s conflict. Overwhelming and impossible to interpret cleanly. Hope tangled with grief. Want tangled with something that feels like loss before it has happened.
I feel the tremor under my feet.
Not from the fight.
Deeper.
The air changes, and I look up.
Beyond the tree line, the sky flashes white. Lightning.
Wrong lightning.
Rift lightning.
Everything aligns at once.
Pax.
Jamie.
The medallion.
The Queen’s timing.
Fear slams into me. Not for the battle, but for him.
The sky flashes again, and instinct names it before thought catches up.
A rift. But not like the others. This one is larger and holds.
The bond stretches towards it, pulled taut, screaming.
Pax is going to leave.
The certainty hits with brutal clarity. I cannot ask him to stay. I will not. Even now. Even with something inside me breaking open under the weight of it.
Another soldier comes at me from behind. I turn and kill him without thinking. Blood spatters across my chest.
“Varek!” Kael reaches me, blades wet, eyes bright. “The line’s holding,” he says. “We can finish this.”
I look towards the forest. The sky pulses again, and even here, the air carries that wrongness.
Pax.
I don’t hesitate. “I have to go.”
The words carry guilt before I even process it. I am leaving my fighters. Leaving the field. Leaving the dead and the dying and the ones still standing.
Kael follows my gaze, understanding hitting him instantly. “It’s Pax,” he says.
“Yes.”
He looks back at the fight, then at me. “I know,” he says.
“Hold it,” I say.
Kael bares his teeth. “Go.”
I run. I move because if I don’t, I will break where I stand.
The forest swallows me whole.
Branches tear at my arms. Roots try to trip me. I don’t slow. The storm builds overhead, lightning ripping through the sky in violent bursts.
Blue flickers between the flashes.
Not this world’s blue. Earth. The sight hits harder than any blow.
Pax.
His home.
I feel it in the bond—his pull towards it, the ache of it, the weight of ten years of wanting.
And something else.
Hesitation.
Conflict.
Me.
The bond strains harder. He’s choosing.
I run faster.
The clearing opens ahead, and I swallow hard. The sky is broken.
The rift hangs there, vast and unstable, edges tearing inward even as it holds. Through it, I see blue. Real blue. Clouds. A horizon.
It is shrinking, and Pax is close. I feel him.
The bond is unbearable now, stretched between us, full of fear and something like grief.
I am too late. I feel it in my heart, my soul, my very being.
The rift contracts again.
I push harder, and the bond screams.
The sky snaps shut, and I stagger under the violence of it.
One moment, there is a tear in the world—a wound held open just long enough to offer something impossible—and the next it is gone, sealed over by the sickly green of this realm as though it had never existed at all. The blue vanishes. The horizon vanishes. The possibility vanishes.
It is so abrupt, it feels like a lie.
Momentum carries me forward before my body can reconcile what my eyes have seen. I hit the ground hard, knees slamming into wet earth with enough force to jar up through my spine, my hands catching late, breath torn violently from my lungs.
Gone.
The word does not form in my mind so much as it tears through me.
He’s gone.
There is no space for anything else.
No strategy. No command. No battle. No rebellion.
Only absence.
I close my eyes because I cannot bear to see the sky where the rift had been. I cannot bear to confirm it again, to look up and find nothing but green and know, without doubt, that I am too late.
The bond should be empty. It is what I brace for.
It is what I expect—the hollowing out, the silence, the absence of him where he has been since the moment he chose me back.
I have lost people before.
I have buried warriors, friends, allies, family by blood and by choice. I know what loss does. I know the shape it carves out of a life, the way it harrows and leaves sharp edges behind.
But this…
This is different.
This is not the loss of a person who stood beside me. This is the loss of someone that became part of me.
The space where Pax exists inside me does not feel separate. It does not feel like something that can simply be removed without consequence. It is threaded through everything—my awareness, my instincts, my sense of direction, my understanding of the world.
Without him—
The thought fractures before it can fully form.
Pain floods in instead. It’s not physical but something deeper.
It tears through my chest, intense and consuming, like something vital has been ripped free and the rest of me does not know how to continue without it. Breath becomes difficult. Thought becomes disjointed. There is no clarity, no structure—only the raw, overwhelming reality of loss.
I let it take me.
For a moment—for one brief, devastating stretch of time—I do not fight it.
I kneel in the dirt, head bowed, hands dug into the earth hard enough to tear skin, and I feel it.
All of it.
The fear I refused to name.
The grief I knew would come if he chose what he has every right to choose.
The helplessness of it.
Because I would not have stopped him.
Even now. Even knowing this is what it would do to me.
I would not have taken that choice from him.
That truth sits like a blade in my chest.
And then—
The bond slams back into place.
It is not gradual. It is not subtle. It hits with the force of something snapping taut again after being stretched to breaking, flooding through me so completely it drives the air from my lungs a second time.
Alive.
The realisation comes with the sensation, inseparable from it.
Alive and here.
My breath stutters violently as everything inside me tries to recalibrate around that single, impossible fact.
Warmth presses close.
Not imagined.
Not memory.
Real.
A hand touches my face.
“Varek.”
His voice.
Pax.
I drag my head up, the movement rough, unsteady, panic still clawing through me because I do not trust it yet. I do not trust that this is real, that I have not already lost him and am now grasping at something my mind has constructed to soften the impact.
But he is here.
Mud-streaked. Breathing hard. Eyes bright with something fierce and unsteady and entirely, undeniably him.
Alive.
He stayed.
The truth lands with more force than the loss did because it is not just relief. It is shock. It is disbelief. It is something dangerously close to reverence for the choice he has just made.
My hand closes around his wrist before I can stop myself, my grip too firm, too desperate, anchoring him to me as though he might still vanish if I do not hold on.
He doesn’t pull away. Instead, he leans in.
Close enough that I can feel the heat of him, the steady rhythm of his breath, the solid, grounding presence of his body right in front of mine.
The bond surges, not strained now, not tearing, but full and overwhelming and alive in a way that nearly drops me again.
He chose this.
He chose me.
Something in me breaks under the weight of that.
The sound that leaves my chest is not controlled. It is not dignified. It is raw, torn loose from somewhere deep enough that I do not recognise it as my own until it is already out in the open between us.
He brushes his thumb under my eye.
Gentle.
Comforting.
Only then do I realise I’m crying.