Page 35 of She Who Was Severed

Like a beast finally given permission to want.

He collapses to my side, breath ragged, skin slick.

We don’t speak.

For once, the silence doesn’t hurt.

Until the chain stirs.

One pulse.

Two.

A third—deeper than before.

Then the whisper, coiled tight behind my ribs: Link Two: Stirring.

Not now. Not now.

I repeat it like prayer, like a plea. But the voice isn’t listening.

It leaves, eventually. But not without leaving something behind.

I turn my head toward him.

He’s already watching.

And somehow—gods help me—I think he heard it too.

- x -

The Ash Tower doesn’t wake. It remembers.

It remembers flame on stone. It remembers the sound people make when they’re too far gone to scream. It remembers what happens when power slips the leash.

The light this morning doesn’t cleanse anything. It just exposes what never healed. Dust glints in the air like ash too old to burn. My breath clouds and fades. Kellen’s heat radiates steady behind me, even in sleep. But I don’t turn.

Every part of me aches, but not from battle. Not from bruises I earned swinging a blade. It’s a different kind of sore—deeper. My thighs, my back, the arch of my spine where he pressed his hand to hold me steady. My neck is raw where his mouth lingered, and I swear I can still feel the scrape of his teeth when I breathe too hard. He didn’t mark me in the way people can see, but gods, he left something behind. The chain hummed through it all, quiet and knowing, like it could feel every inch of him inside me. Like it approved. And now—I’m still me. Just more. More his. More mine. More than I was before I let him touch me like that.

I sit up slow. The stone’s cold against my bare feet. There’s no ceremony to it—just the way my body moves when it’s survived something it wasn’t meant to.

Kellen shifts behind me but doesn’t wake. I watch him breathe. Watch the rise and fall of his chest, the furrow still caught between his brows. There’s a scar low on his ribs, half-hidden in shadow. Not clean. Not surgical. A wound someone gave him close and deliberate. I’ve never seen it before. But it feels familiar anyway.

I don’t touch him.

Because if I do, I might soften. And if I soften, I might forget what tomorrow is.

I pull my tunic on without sound. The cloth chafes in places where the bruises haven’t settled. My boots are still damp from the stone, and the chain around my wrist presses like it’s counting the seconds I take.

The manual’s never left my side.

I crouch to the bedroll and pull it from beneath my cloak—still wrapped in the same sun-bleached cloth I used the night I took it. It smells like old ink and heat. The corners are curling now. The spine’s cracked from being opened too much, too fast.

It’s not just a book anymore.

It’s the record of everything I’ve become since the chain claimed me. It’s the part of me that still believes in knowing over fearing. And I’m about to hand it to someone else.

The chain doesn’t pulse. But it tightens, faint and warning.