If the world is sharpening her into a blade, he will make damn sure she learns how to wield herself.
He pushes off the wall, done with all this talking.
“Then I suppose I’ll see you at first light,” he grunts with finality.
Seren’s eyes snap to Rubi, but she only shrugs indifferently, already taking another pull of her flask.
“And why is that, Teddy?” Seren asks, eyes narrowing in suspicion.
“Because that’s when training starts.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Beware the walls that promise peace
The safest cages never creak
Night and daybleed into one another. Impossible to know when one ends and the other begins. The sun stands sentry over Caeloria—on permanent watch. Unblinking. Unforgiving. Unrelenting.
Kael has stopped measuring time. He measures heat instead. In breaths. In blisters. In the way Elyssara’s head drops lower and lower without her noticing.
They’re both moving slower.
Kael feels it in his muscles before he registers it with his eyes—the slight drag in his gait, the hesitation before each step, the way his breath saws shallow and sharp through flared nostrils. Even shadow offers no mercy here. The sun presses down regardless, flattening the world into heat and glare and mirage.
His own thoughts have begun to slip. Not panic—never panic—but something quieter and more dangerous. The blurring of edges. The loss of sequence. He can no longer remember howlong it has been since they last stopped, only that stopping feels like surrender.And surrender feels like dying.
Elyssara sways.
Not enough to fall. Just enough that Kael’s hand shoots out instinctively to catch her waist, fingers biting into sun-warmed leather and skin. She doesn’t protest. That, more than anything, sets his teeth on edge.
She should protest. She should swat him away and insist that she’sfine.
Her lips are cracked. Salt has dried white at her temples, at the hollow of her throat. The heat has demanded a cost—her leathers, her armor, now draped across her forearm. But the sun’s too oppressive to expose her skin—she’s draped her cloak across her shoulders in protection instead. The desert takes without ceremony. It does not care who you are.
“Do you know where we are yet?” Elyssara rasps, the words scratching from her throat.
Kael lifts his gaze to the unending horizon. To the blur of sand and glare and dunes spiraling in every direction.
“No,” he says. “We’re only fucked if we’re going west.” His words sound lazy and slurred, as if he’s too deep in his cups.
Elyssara doesn’t even speak, simply quirks a brow in question as if to say, “What’s west?”
“The Throat,” he answers. “The narrow strait between Nymeris and Caeloria. Full of pirates intercepting shipments.”
Elyssara grunts her acknowledgement, not wasting energy on something as trivial as words.
So Kael lets down the walls blocking the tether.
North, we hit Kethra. South, Solmere. East, Azhareth.He sends the words to Elyssara through the tether.
She looses a sharp breath of relief. Or maybe it’s hope because he let her in.
My love. Her words slide down the tether in a breathy pant, and Kael can feel the ache there. The grief. The absence.
But the Decay is opportunistic, lashing its tongue across the boundaries of Kael’s mind and coiling down the Starbound tether, as if it feeds off Elyssara’s Light. And for a heartbeat, Kael isn’t sure it knows the difference between her Light and prey.
Elyssara feels it, too—he can see it in the way she stills. Sensing, curious, disquieted. Unsettled by the gnawing, empty, sinister darkness that drenches everything it touches in eternal absence.
