Page 142 of She Who Was Severed

She just reaches out. One hand. Light on my knee. The graft flares under my collarbone. Warm. Like a heartbeat. Like it heard me.

We don’t talk for a while. Just sit in the dark, breath slowing, the aftershock of all that heat still crawling behind my ribs.

I roll my neck. Graft’s still hot, like it doesn’t trust me yet. That’s fine. I don’t trust it either.

Freya shifts beside me. Chain still draped over her shoulder like it’s part of her spine. Still silent. I stare at it for a while. “Mine acts like it wants to rip through me,” I mutter. “Yours… doesn’t. It just waits.”

Freya looks at the Chain on her shoulder. Doesn’t speak.

“What’s it waiting for?” I ask.

She exhales. “Judgment.”

That’s when the stone doorway creaks.

And, of course Owen appears. In his usual haunted scarecrow aesthetic. Velvet waistcoat over god knows what, hair a mess, sleeves dusted in soot like he rolled through a battlefield just to make a point.

“Oh good,” he says, stepping inside like it’s a social call. “The identity crisis circle has begun.”

“Don’t you knock?” I ask.

“I do,” he says. “Just usually with force.”

He gestures vaguely between the two of us. “Now. You want answers or a demonstration?”

“Both,” Freya says flatly.

He grins like it’s his birthday.

“All right then.” Owen drops to a crouch near the scorched wall and pulls a shard of old glyphstone from his pocket. “Let’s play a game called Why Can Vale Go Boom But You Can’t?”

He sets the shard down. Snaps his fingers. The spiral on my chest flares. A gout of heat lances up my spine. I hiss but hold steady.

“Vale,” he says, voice sing-song, “has what we call a graft. A delightful abomination of ritual, blood, stubborn will, and my personal brand of chaos.”

He tosses the shard up. It flashes once. “She doesn’t have a bond. She has a shortcut—to a Chain that didn’t choose her, but tolerates her just enough to burn things on command.”

I glance at Freya. “Sounds flattering.”

“She’s a matchstick,” Owen continues, twirling the shard. “Sharp, hot, fast. She lights the fire but risks burning the hand that holds her. Her power? Combustion. Raw force drawn from a splintered thread in the Chain’s punishment core.”

Freya’s brow furrows. “So why doesn’t mine—”

Owen doesn’t miss a beat. Still crouched on a broken slab like he’s hosting a picnic in a graveyard, he twirls a match between two fingers and points it at her like a scepter.

“Because yours doesn’t need to,” he says. “You’re not channeling the Chain. You are the Chain.”

I snort. “Little dramatic, don’t you think?”

“Not at all,” he replies, cheerful as ever. “She’s the judgment they tried to bury. The system they outlawed. The one that made the rest of us look like amateurs.” He pauses, as if struck by a profound and terrible memory. “And then they set it on fire.”

Freya’s eyes narrow, but her voice stays steady. “That doesn’t explain why I can’t do what Vale does.”

“Because you weren’t made to start fires,” Owen says, flipping the match again. “You were made to decide who deserves to burn.”

My eyebrows lift. “So I’m the arsonist and she’s the judge?”

“Precisely,” he says, beaming. “You’re the fuse. She’s the verdict.”