Amaria.
Her name moved through me like a crack spreading through ice. The girl who bled shadows and light. Who had looked at me in that tunnel with blood on her face and fury in her eyes andseenthings I had spent a lifetime burying.
I kept my expression blank. The King was watching.
He was always watching.
"You say you serve peace, Eryndor." His voice dropped. "But you carry rage."
The air shifted. Constricted. His Truthshard Mark threaded—not into my mind, but around it. Sensing the fissures. The contradictions. The lies the heart tells itself when it cannot afford the truth. That was his Mark. His gift. The Truthshard could taste deception—not just spoken lies, but the ones buried beneath intent, beneath feeling, beneath the things a male tells himself so he can sleep at night.
"You cannot deceive me, boy." He rose from his throne, unhurried. "Even when you deceive yourself."
My fist clenched. A muscle feathered by my ear. I willed it to stop. It didn't.
He saw. Of course he saw. That was his gift—labeling paradox as impurity. Framing nuance as treason.
"Fourteen days."
The words hung in the air between us.
"Bring her to me in fourteen days, or I will assume your loyalty has... fractured." His smile was a wound. "And you know what happens to fractured things in my kingdom."
I knew. I had been the one to break them.
Then his hand reached out—pale, unblemished, steady as death—adjusting my armor for a fresh atrocity.
Not the V-mark. That scar was old, carved into me the day I became Crownforged. The brand that bound my gift to his will, ensured my power could only be unsheathed at his command. I had worn that leash so long it had become part of my bones.
This was something new.
His fingers closed around a stone—small, onyx-black, ticking like a heartbeat. An Oath-stone. I had seen them used on prisoners. On traitors. Never on a Thread-Warden.
Never onme.
"A new leash for a new hunt," the King murmured, almost gentle. "You understand."
I understood.
He placed it against my breastbone, just above the old scar, and pushed.
The pain was—
There are no words for it. Some agonies exist only as nerve and fire and the animal need to make them stop. The Oath-stone didn't sit on my skin; it cleaved into it. It parted my body like a seam, slicing through muscle until every layer burned white-hot.
My teeth cracked. My spine tried to arch—loss of motor control, my training-voice catalogued, distant and useless—but I caught the impulse, converting the scream into a rigid, bone-deep stillness.
They want the scream. Don't give it to them.
Then the stone scraped a rib. I heard it inside my own skull—a wet, grinding violation conducted directly into my inner ear.
The pain was secondary to the erasure. My body snapped taut. I was a passenger in my own skin. My arms didn't move; they were jerked into position, pinned to my sides by a will that wasn't mine. Every twitch of a finger had to pass through the Oath-stone's cold filter before my brain could even register the intent.
My vision whited. Returned. The King watched me with mild interest, the way a child watches an insect struggle under a glass.
"The Oath-stone binds us," the King said, withdrawing his hand. A smear of my blood marked his palm. He didn't wipe it away. "A Thread-Warden's mission is too vital for distance. If you encounter resistance beyond your capacity, I will know. If you require reinforcement, I will feel it." His smile was paternal. Almost warm. "Consider it... protection."
Protection.
