Page 1 of She Who Was Severed

Prologue

Somewhere, something is burning.

Only, there’s no flame. No heat. Just the scrape of metal over bone—alive, endless, grinding. Chains stretch in every direction, wrapped tight around a battlefield that doesn’t remember what it once was. Just silence now. Silence and ash. And in the middle of it—me.

Not the version of me that could run. Not the girl they trained or the body I used to know. Just a shape, cracking open from the inside.

The sky’s wrong. It’s this bruised stone color with veins of red-gold light twitching through it like nerves, like something dying slow. The ground hums under my feet, low and steady. My hands are torn open. I don’t remember how. I just know I’m bleeding. But the pain doesn’t land. There’s only pressure. Something older than gods, locking around my chest like it means to stay.

I see it before it moves.

A manticore—huge, watching me, its face half-bone, half-smoke. Eyes like they’ve been gouged open and lit from the inside. It doesn’t speak. But its mouth shifts.

Chainborn.

I hear it in my head. No, not hear. Feel. Like it was carved into my skull with a dull knife. That word knows me. Like it was waiting.

I don’t mean to move, but I do. My hand reaches for the chains.

They reach back.

They wrap around my arms before I make contact. Cold first. Then blister-hot. They don’t ask. They pierce. They pull. They bind. I scream.

Not because I’m scared.

Because I know this.

Somehow, I know this.

And just before the vision tears itself apart, I see them—five beasts, silent on a crumbling wall. Dragon. Griffin. Leviathan. Golem. Phoenix. None of them roar. None fight. They kneel.

The chains cinch tighter.

The world folds open like something giving up.

And I wake to the sound of my name being called.

The Bonding ceremony has begun…

Chapter 1

I was meant to die at sixteen.

Not by fire. Not by blade. By forgetting. That is the Severing’s design. It doesn’t end life—it unthreads it until your name collapses in on itself and the people who once spoke it start looking through you like you were never real in the first place. That’s how they kill us. Not with violence, but with vanishing. They make the world pretend you were never meant to belong. And you start to believe them.

The Bonding Grove is too beautiful for what’s about to happen.

They built it just beyond Virelle—the capital of Selvarra—so the city can crown its chosen in silk and forget the rest bleed under trees.

Mist hangs low over the carved stone path, catching the weak morning light like it wants to make this moment look holy. Someone’s lit memory lanterns along the inner ring of trees. They burn low and white, like teeth. The altar at the center has been polished until it gleams like wet bone, and the air smells thick with phoenix-petal oil and saltwine incense, the kind that gets rubbed into robes before ceremony. It’s all very sacred. Very important. Very fake.

The whole grove hums with tension disguised as reverence—crowds in silk watching from the shade, high council priests standing too still to be human, and bonded initiates flickering with the first signs of mythic magic. They sparkle. They tremble. They radiate worth.

I do not.

My hands are dry. My breath stays cold no matter how many times I swallow it. The girl beside me is crying softly from joy and fear, her fingertips already glowing with the shimmer of a forming bond. She’s being called. Something ancient and magnificent is curling around her bones and deciding she’s enough. My bones stay silent. They have nothing to say.

Someone calls my name—“Freya Thorne”—and it doesn’t sound like a name at all. It sounds like a verdict. No warmth in the voice. No joy. Just the volume needed to make it official. One more name in a sequence. One more girl to step forward and be sorted into the world’s great divine logic.