Page 13 of She Who Was Severed

My hand shakes as I unwrap the chain.

It’s glowing faintly now. Symbols rising and fading along its length. Not from any of the five paths. No Flameborn flicker. No Stormbound hum. No Tidewalker crest. No Veilmarked blur. No Stonecalled weight. But it moved like it knew how to protect me. Or how to end something, if asked.

Just a chain.

My chain.

A voice slides through the back of my skull: Two will come.

The second link.

Something stirs. Far away.

Not a threat. Not a promise.

A door.

Opening.

I rewrap the chain. Tuck it close. And keep walking.

Let them think I’m fading.

I’m not.

I’m forming.

- x -

After Daxira’s threat and the chain’s flare, I should’ve run. I should’ve hidden. But silence can be worse than violence—especially when it comes from something inside you.

The chain hasn’t moved since morning. It hasn’t pulsed. It hasn’t whispered. It’s waiting. So I go looking.

Not for safety. For understanding.

There’s a gate beneath the temple the bonded don’t speak of in public—but I remember it. My father used to pass it in silence, his jaw always set too tight. I didn’t understand his fear back then. I think the chain does now.

It’s been coiling tighter every time I pass the old stairs.

And today?

It’s too still.

That’s the first warning. When it wants, it writhes—slick heat under skin, the sensation of something unsheathed inside muscle. But now, silence. Not absence. Waiting. Like a predator content to let me step into its teeth.

So I move. Slowly. Deliberately. My boots find the pitted stone of the back corridors, the ones layered in old wax and lost prayers. Dust swirls with every step. No one ventures this deep anymore. The main halls of Virelle’s temple rise above like sanctified ribs—gilded, perfumed, heavy with light. But here? Here the dark breathes. Sanctums gutted by collapse, shrines locked and half-forgotten. This place belonged to something before the Paths had names. Maybe still does.

I pass under a crumbled arch where a mural once sang in color—only rusted outlines remain now, teeth and talons blurred with time. My fingers brush a seam in the wall, rough stone laid over smoother work. Hidden. On purpose.

The gate reveals itself with the kind of arrogance only the old gods could afford—subtle, veiled, etched in the shape of a sigil most eyes were trained not to see. I’d seen it once. As a child, holding my father’s hand, watching guards bend their knees to the Stonecalled mark on his palm. Watching shadows draw back from him like obedient dogs. He never let me near the gate then.

“For the bonded,” he’d said. “For the worthy.”

I press my hand to it now. No words. Just skin to cold stone.

I don’t expect anything to happen.

But the veil stirs. A breath drawn inward.