Chapter 43
“We need to go.” Zeriel’s voice cuts through the fog in my mind.
Words refuse to form. The past hours are fragments: flashes of steel, sprays of blood, magic vanishing into nothing.
Zeriel steers me toward the exit, his body a shield between me and the carnage behind us. The path stretches ahead, impossibly long, each step an effort, as if my boots are nailed to the ground.
Imperial guards flank the gate, their faces hidden behind helmets, impassive as statues.
Outside, the air feels no cleaner. Copper and fear cling to every breath, only thinly masked by the strange scent of the forest.
The carrier gloamwyrms wait in formation. Ours lowers its head as we approach, nostrils flaring. Its mind brushes mine—curious, detached, unmoved by the day’s carnage. Like every imperial dragon, it knows only blood and duty.
Zeriel helps me mount, then swings up in front of me. I clutch him again as the gloamwyrm surges forward. Wind tears at my face, but I barely feel it. He’s quiet too.
Before I know it, we bank toward the clearing where the champions’ lodges stand. We dismount quickly, not casting a glance back toward the other champions.
Inside our lodge, fresh garments wait on the beds—this time, not the ceremonial silks or parade leathers. These are black, close-fitting, with reinforced seams, made for endurance.
My eyes land on the tray of food sitting on the table and the truth lands heavy. Survival doesn’t pause for shock, or grief. Or questions. Like where the hell did Lira and Nyx go?
Zeriel moves to the table where food has been laid out. He picks up a piece of bread, tearing it with more force than necessary before shoving it into his mouth. His movements are mechanical, a fighter’s efficiency rather than appetite.
“You need to eat,” he mutters, nodding toward a seat. “Focus on what you can control.”
I stare at the food, my stomach churning with the memory of blood soaking into dirt. I don’t admit it aloud but I know he’s right. I force myself to sit, biting and chewing without tasting. Each swallow feels like pushing stone down my throat.
I’m barely a quarter through my plate when a knock comes at the door. Not urgent, but purposeful. Three sharp raps.
Zeriel moves to answer it, revealing Selen standing there in full view. No void-drake suit, no attempt at concealment this time. Just her silver hair and teal eyes, stark against her dark training suit.
Apparently she thinks it’s an acceptable moment for the Ironhold champion to receive a visit from an Ironhold trainer.
And I’m glad. Because I’ve got more than questions.
She steps inside without invitation, and Zeriel closes the door behind her.
“What happened out there?” I blurt.
Selen's gaze flicks to me, cool and assessing. “I don't know. I've been busy with other matters.”
I stare at her, momentarily speechless. Her absence confuses me, but her dismissive tone makes my hands curl into fists. “Excuse me? Other matters? People died out—”
“People die every day in the empire,” she cuts me off. “The question is whether their deaths serve a purpose.”
There’s something different about her today—a tightness around her eyes, a subtle tension in her shoulders. She seems coiled, focused with an intensity that makes the air feel charged.
But it clashes with my already boiling nerves.
“And what purpose would their deaths have served?” I snap. The women you were supposed to protect, I want to add, although I know there was never any such guarantee. Selen’s an opportunist—and one with unknown motives. She’ll use and discard you at will, that much is clear by now.
“We have very little time,” she continues swiftly as if I hadn’t asked the question. She moves closer, eyes narrowing as she scrutinizes us. “The first round’s about to begin, and there's something we need to address.”
She reaches into her pocket and withdraws a small vial. The liquid inside isn't black or the golden serum from before, but something that glistens almost purple in the lodge's dim light.
“What is that?” Zeriel asks, suspicion edging his voice.
“An amplifier,” Selen replies. “For what I've already awakened in you both.”
She unstoppers the vial, and the scent hits me immediately, sweet but with an undertone of something metallic, like blood and honey mixed together.
“Wait—” I start, but Selen is already moving, faster than seems possible.
She dips her fingers into the liquid and before either of us can react, presses them to our foreheads, one hand on Zeriel, one on me.
The effect is immediate and overwhelming.
Heat blooms where her fingers touch, spreading outward like wildfire through my veins. I gasp, staggering backward as the sensation races through me. It isn’t exactly pain, but a pressure so intense it feels like my skin might split from it.
Then Zeriel’s presence washes over me like a breaking tide.
Not just the awareness of him standing across the room, but him: a surge of foreign emotions pouring into me with such vivid clarity it knocks the breath from my lungs.
His shock collides with mine. I feel the flash of anger at Selen’s intrusion, the desperate grasp for control even as it slides through his grip.
Beneath that surface turmoil, deeper currents run: grief for the morning’s dead, determination tempered in years of survival, and something darker still—a wound left to fester, raw and aching at his core.
My knees hit the floor, the weight of our merged awareness buckling me. Two selves—his and mine—separate, yet suddenly tangled so tightly I struggle to find where one ends and the other begins.
“What have you done?” Zeriel bites out.
Selen steps back, wiping her fingers clean. “Enhanced what was already there,” she says simply. “The preliminary bond I created between you was a seed. This allows it to bloom. And, it gives you a handy way to communicate with each other.”
I stare up at Zeriel. His deep brown eyes are already locked on mine, a flicker of alarm breaking through.
“What do you mean?” he asks.
“Try it,” Selen replies. “Try talking to each other without opening your mouths.”
I hesitate, still staring at him, hardly believing what Selen claims has happened. Then, hesitantly, I focus, trying to push a thought across the space between us, the way I would to a dragon. Something simple. Zeriel?
The response isn’t a thought. It isn't a feeling. It’s his voice, low and rough, speaking directly inside my skull.
Leave my head, he snaps.
The words are a physical shock, so clear and resonant it’s as if his throat is vibrating in my own chest. It’s an impossible intimacy, like stumbling into the most private room of his soul.
I feel the anger in the words, yes, but also the rigid wall of control he’s throwing up against the intrusion, the sheer, visceral alarm of being so suddenly exposed.
Wow. Charming, I send back, cautiously testing the link.
Not charming. Obnoxious. I hear plenty of your voice already. His response is immediate.
Obnoxiously effective, I counter, and I can’t help but smirk slightly. To think my voice can ring inside his head any time now? That’s an opportunity.
His scowl deepens. Stop talking.
You first.
“You see?” Selen’s voice cuts through the charged quiet between us, a hint of amusement in her tone. “Pure communication. No risk of being overheard. No signals. In the games, you can move as one.”
Move as one. The thought lodges deep, both terrifying and… something else. To have him this close, to feel the raw weight of his grief and the burn of his vengeance brushing over my own thoughts—it’s like leaning too far over a drop. A tremor of instinct says to pull back, to throw up walls.
Don’t. His voice is there suddenly, strong enough to halt the retreat before it starts. The word hums through the link, steadying and unyielding.
I push against the link—my reflex to rebel against what he wants, to find my own space—but his mental presence holds firm, not crushing, but like a hand on a shuttered window, keeping it open.
My heart hammers against my ribs as I realize I'm anchored to him—in a way that feels more intimate than a touch, more permanent than a scar.
She’s right. This can help us. His voice comes again.
I look up at him, and the intensity in his eyes slams into me.
The forest’s light snags on the flecks in his irises, and for a breath, it feels like I’m falling into something bottomless.
The link between us flares—and I’m hit with a surge that isn’t thought but instinct, raw and consuming, directed at me with a force that almost scorches.
Too sharp to be comfort, too wild to be named.
Then it’s gone, shuttered behind his walls.
But the echo lingers, burning against my skin, leaving me unsure whether it was warning, possession… or something worse.
“Any new information on the first round?” he asks Selen, his voice rough. The words sound level, but through the link his question is a blade—sharp, precise, aimed.
“It won’t be in the arena,” Selen replies, her eyes flicking between us as if she can sense the charge I still feel. “You’ll be in wild forest territory.” Ice knots in my gut. “That’s all I know. You’ll be briefed further when you arrive.”
“But Zeriel…” Her gaze locks on him. “If the chance comes, I’d like you to take something for me.”
His head turns toward her, but I feel the spike of his attention through the link before he even speaks. “What?”
“It’s an object connected to the emperor’s…
particular brand of magic,” she says. There’s a weighted pause, but to my surprise, I don’t detect that Zeriel is surprised to hear the emperor is connected to magic.
I sense caution… edged with that same controlled intensity I’d felt a moment ago.
“It looks like a shard of black crystal, light bleeding from the inside,” she continues.
“You’ll know if you see it. Small enough to hold in your fist. It won’t exist until the emperor wills it into being, usually at the peak of bloodshed. ”
I swallow hard.
“You’re going to need to give me more information than this, Selen,” Zeriel says, voice low. Through the bond I can feel the steel behind it, the refusal to bend. “What is it exactly? Why do you want it? Why should I give it to you?”
She clicks her tongue. “You’d be a fool not to ask. But answers come with weight, Zeriel, and right now you need speed.”
“Thanks, but it’s how I decide whether something’s worth my neck,” he replies dryly.
Selen tilts her head, as if debating how much to reveal now. “It will show up in the thick of the killing. The violence feeds it. It drinks in what’s around it and then… vanishes. The officials think of it as worthless. But I know it’s worth taking. In the right hands, it’s far more than it looks.”
Zeriel’s eyes narrow. “I need more, Selen.”
Her gaze grows sharper, voice dropping. “At the end of this, I give you my word I’ll give you more.
When we have more time. For now what you need to know is this—yes, what I’m asking you to do is risky.
Yes, it is dangerous. But so is playing death games for the empire’s entertainment.
This, by comparison, is child’s play. If you take it discreetly, its disappearance won’t be immediately noticed.
All I ask is that you take this item if you see it, and I’ll find a way to get it off you. ”
Through the bond, his resistance is a living thing—layered suspicion and cold calculation—but it’s laced with a dangerous interest. A possibility rooting itself behind his walls. “Why should I trust anything you’re saying?”
Selen’s mouth curves, not quite a smile. “You’re a man of risk, Zeriel. You’ll have to decide that for yourself. But if you’ve learned anything about me, it’s that I don’t bow to the empire. Not ever. Our loyalties may not align, but our resentments do.”
I study her, her eyes, her silvery hair which seems at odds with the youth of her face. I feel the shift in Zeriel—wariness loosening, just enough for something colder to take hold. Selen knows his trigger points better than I’d like her to.
“What exactly is in it for me?” he asks.
“A chance to wound the emperor in a way he won’t see coming,” Selen says. “Winning only feeds his vanity. But this… this has the potential to help unsettle things.”
Her words land hard. I feel the ripple through him—tension, interest, the slow curl of resolve.
The weight of it presses against me until I almost forget to breathe.
“Fine,” he says at last. “If I see a shard as you’ve described, and I judge it safe, I’ll take it.”
Selen nods, crisp, like she never doubted. “That’s all I ask.”
Without another word, she turns and exits the lodge. I stare after her, feeling almost paralyzed by all that’s just been said. All that hasn’t just been said.
When the door clicks shut, silence settles. It should feel like release, but it doesn’t. If anything, the lodge seems smaller, the air denser.
Zeriel’s presence swells in that quiet, pressing against mine in a dark swirl of thought—calculating, dangerous, humming with suppressed readiness. The echo of that earlier volatile surge rides beneath it, hot and unsettling, as if he hasn’t quite pulled it all the way back behind his walls.
Whatever happens, we do this on our terms, he sends, the words taut, thrumming down the tether between us. Not hers.
The vow sears through me. It isn’t reassurance; it isn’t comfort. It’s like a line carved in steel, binding us together whether I want it or not.
I swallow, fighting the urge to flinch under the weight of it.
The tether hums, alive, dangerous, and I can’t shake the sense that I’ve been caught in something I can’t step out of.
Not only Selen’s snare, not only the empire’s.
His. His emotions churn deeper—and burn far hotter—than I’d ever realized.
The thought drags up another vow: the verse he scrawled across his bathroom wall. A promise etched in words as stark as blood.
My name was inked in blood, not gold,
And blood will call when tales are told.
Though scattered now, we share one breath,
Our story waits beyond their death.
And now I can’t help but wonder, when that call comes, will my blood answer it too?