Page 27 of She Who Was Severed

“They gave you a week.”

“Yeah.” I exhale. “Tick tock.”

He doesn’t smile.

“To be judged,” he says quietly.

I already knew that. But hearing it from him makes it worse. Makes it real.

“And there was me thinking the fight was judgment enough.”

“That was the test.”

“So what’s this?”

“The public execution,” he says. “Just drawn out.”

I sit again. Slower this time. My limbs feel stretched, wired with too much heat.

“They want to make a show of my fall,” I say.

Kellen nods once.

“And if I don’t fall?”

He hesitates. “You will.”

We don’t look at each other after that. The silence between us is sharp-edged. Not empty. Just overfull.

He leaves without touching me again. No apology. No comfort. Just the click of the door.

When he’s gone, I unwrap the chain.

It’s warm.

Alive.

Symbols shimmer along the metal like breath on glass. One mark I haven’t seen before glows faint gold—not red like pain, not silver like presence. Gold. Like a countdown. Like a warning.

The whisper doesn’t come in words.

Just a pressure in the back of my skull.

Link Two. Nearing.

I close my eyes.

Then I open them.

“Then I need to be ready.”

Chapter 4

The Ash Tower doesn’t creak when I return. It exhales.

Wind slips through the broken slats in the roof, coiling through burned rafters like it remembers the fire that hollowed them. I step through the warped threshold, pulse already loud in my ears, and pull the door closed behind me with both hands. Not to lock it. There’s nothing to lock it with. Just habit. Just nerves.

The tower’s colder than I remember—but not in the skin-deep way. The kind that settles between bone and breath. That listens.