“You should be,” he growled, whipping around to face me.
The sight of him stopped my breath.
Blood painted his neck. His jaw. His hands. Some of it had splattered across his chest like a second crest. There was dirt smudged beneath his eyes, and something darker behind them.
Not anger.
History.
“So, you believe this is me?” The words were barely breathed, laced with a chilling certainty. “A broken blade, always seeking flesh? Well, you’d be right.”
“No,” I refuted, my head shaking a silent denial as my heart struggled against its confines.
His laugh was short and bitter. “You didn’t see what I wanted to do to him. You stopped me. If you hadn’t stopped me…”
I stepped closer, even though my legs screamed not to. Even though I didn’t recognize this version of him, his furious, blood-soaked echo of the boy I trusted.
“You think I don’t see you?” I whispered. “But I do. I see all of you, Erindor. And that’s what scares me.”
He flinched as if I’d struck him.
And then, he turned and strolled away from me.
Deep down, past the fear, past the ache in my chest, something even more dangerous stirred within him.
A part of me understood that kind of rage. The bone-deep grief that makes you want to hurt the world before it can hurt you again.
And that terrified me most of all.
That night, I opened my journal. My hands still smelled faintly of blood and lavender oil.
I don’t know what scared me more—what he did to that man, or how familiar it felt watching it.
Erindor’s hands didn’t shake. His voice didn’t rise. But I saw something in him fracture open, and I didn’t look away.
I should have.
But I didn’t. And that means something.
Maybe because I understood. Not all of it, but enough. Enough to know there’s a kind of pain that turns your skin into armor. That hollows you out so you don’t have to feel the next blow. Rage isn’t always chaos. Sometimes it’s memory sharpened to a blade.
And I wonder if that’s what I’m becoming, too. Someone who would burn the world down to keep one person breathing.
I used to think mercy was my greatest strength. But now I’m starting to wonder if I ever meant the fire in me to be kind.
I still trust him. But part of me is afraid that we’re both becoming people we won’t recognize when this ends. And gods help me…Part of me doesn’t mind.
-W
Chapter Twenty-Four
Wynessa
The climb had grown sharper; the ground shifting from soft moss and forest loam into brittle, cracking shale. Grass no longer grew here. Roots gave way to stone, and the trees had thinned into gnarled silhouettes; stunted, wind-bent figures that clung to the mountain like half-forgotten thoughts.
Each step felt like an unanswered question.
The air grew thinner, and yet it didn’t feel clean. It stung the back of the throat, laced with the strange, sour tang of mineral steam rising from deep within the earth. Sulfur. Salt. The smell of something long buried emerging to the surface.
