Page 11 of She Who Was Severed

I got a severing shroud instead.

That’s when I turn. Just enough to let him see the look on my face.

The one that says: don’t make this worse by pretending it could’ve gone any other way.

He doesn’t flinch. Not exactly.

But he doesn’t come closer, either.

Good.

Let him carry the ceremony in his throat while I suffer in silence.

The chain is bleeding.

Not blood. Not light. Something older. It spills in a spiral shape across my skin and vanishes before it lands.

I wipe it away. But my palm still glows faintly. Like a bond mark trying to remember its name.

No Stonecalled I’ve ever seen bled chain. No Veilmarked left behind marks that hum. No Tidewalker’s bond ever whispered in iron. No Stormbound traced symbols in light. And Flameborn don’t flinch like they saw something older looking back.

A whisper drifts through my skull: Two will come.

The second link is stirring.

And I’m not ready.

But it is.

- x -

The world feels too alive when you're meant to be forgotten.

Light presses in from Virelle’s high towers, burning gold along the wall’s cracked edge. The city breathes beyond it—bright, brazen, holy. I stay where the shadow pools. Half in the alley. Half in myself.

The chain lies flat against my skin today. No shimmer. No hunger. Just the weight of it, humming like a second spine. I’ve wrapped it in linen, kept my sleeves low. But it knows I’m pretending. It always does.

A bonded pair passes by on the other side of the wall. I know them by the way the air reacts—tightens. The boy levitates with Stormbound ease, trailing sparks as he lands. The girl beside him bears the braided tattoos of a Tidewalker, her leviathan rippling beneath her like shadow turned sea. They don’t see me. Not really. Just a shape in the wrong place. A rumor made real.

I walk.

The inner Temple Quarter curves with pretense—arches lined in glasslight, incense smoke rising from prayer gates, priests in illusion-thread robes bowing to beasts that barely tolerate them. A pair of Flameborn guards pass, cloaked in ash-red silk, their swords half-drawn from heat alone.

Magic lives here. Not just in the people—in the stones. In the air.

A Veilmarked novice vanishes midstep ahead of me, slipping sideways into some pocket of between. He reappears laughing, throwing a grin at his teacher. The kind of grin that says he belongs.

I tighten my scarf. Drop my gaze. Keep walking.

“Look who death forgot,” a voice says.

I stop.

Daxira.

Of course.

She’s lounging against a statue of Aros the Boundless, one boot pressed to the pedestal like she owns it. Her bonded beast—an ashmaw drake, thick-scaled and smoke-veiled—hunches on the archway above her. Its molten eyes track every breath like they’re measuring it for fuel.