Page 28 of A Sunwoven Ascent

Someone in the room drew in a sharp breath. Whispers stirred around him. Heidara made a sound that was not quite a sob, nor quite a prayer. But Cillian did not look up. He could not. The moment he did, he knew he would lose the thread. The light had slipped beyond his control now, surging stronger, pulling harder. He felt it catch on the darkness inside Alaric like a hook and begin to drag.

The warmth in Cillian’s chest intensified.

Too bright.

Too fast.

He tried to rein it in, to press it down, to pull back.

But the light refused restraint. It strained for release, desperate to blaze.

And the darkness fought back.

A voice hissed through the thread of contact, not Alaric’s voice but something coiled beneath it, something slick and ancient.

No.

The word didn’t come as speech. It came as a shove, a spike of cold that slammed into Cillian’s mind.

No. Mine. He’s mine.

Cillian’s vision flickered. For a heartbeat he saw nothing but black roots and blood, a mouth full of teeth that were not Alaric’s, a mist that laughed. He jerked in place, but his hand remained pinned to Alaric’s chest as if glued there by the light itself.

His lungs seized as the heat burned across his sternum. It crawled up his throat and down his spine. It was too hot. Too much. He couldn’t hold it anymore.

Cillian tried to inhale and couldn’t get enough air.

Stop, he told himself. Stop. Pull away.

His fingers didn’t obey.

Instead, the power surged again, and Alaric screamed louder. The sound made the hair on Cillian’s arms rise and something primal inside him wake.

His gums ached. Painful pressure built behind his teeth, and then he felt it: the push of fangs pressing down, trying to break through flesh. His nails sharpened, lengthening into claws. His hands curled, not with intention but with instinct, as if his body had decided the only way to survive this was to become something made for violence.

A low growl vibrated in his chest before he realized it was coming from him.

“Cillian!” Evelyne’s voice cut through the haze. “Stop. Stop, you’re hurting yourself!”

It didn’t matter. The light kept pouring. His chest burned hotter, the sickening heat so fierce it stung his eyes and filled his mouth with the taste of metal.

“Cillian!” Evelyne shouted again, panic fraying her words. “Look at you, you can’t—”

Cillian couldn’t answer. Couldn’t even turn his head. It was like being caught in a current stronger than his will, dragged along by something that felt both holy and merciless. Alaric thrashed beneath his touch. Screaming and wailing in a voice not his own.

“Please,” Heidara cried, the word torn from her like she was begging him to keep going and pleading for him to stop all at once, caught between hope and horror.

Alaric snarled aloud, clearer now, his voice like claws scraping stone. “I said NO.”

Cillian’s light found the corruption the way heat finds ice. Cold slammed up his arm and into his chest, so sudden it stole his breath. Not ordinary cold. Not winter air. No, this was the same cold he remembered from Vaelora. The wrongness of it. The way it didn’t chill the skin so much as the soul, sinking past bone and settling in the mind like a parasite.

And it came at him like it recognized him.

For a heartbeat, Cillian was no longer in the lodge. He was back in that hollow place Vaelora had carved inside him, where the air tasted of blood and iron and the world lay dimmed, as though light itself had been smothered. The cold pressed in at once, searching for the old wound, trying to slip into the same broken path it had once claimed.

This time, it found no emptiness waiting for it. Light surged up to meet it, and the force of that collision cracked through Cillian’s skull like flint against stone. The cold pushed to spread, to numb, to silence. The light rose harder in answer, burning through rot and horror wherever it touched. What began as warmth turned quickly into heat that demanded room, that pressed outward until there was nowhere left for darkness to hide. The cold recoiled in thin, frantic tendrils, and Cillian knew with sick certainty that it was working, because the darkness was no longer simply there.

It was afraid.