Page 4 of She Who Was Severed

Tomorrow they’ll bring me back here and cut the last thread of magic out of my spine. They’ll say it’s mercy. They’ll say I’ll be cleansed. They’ll say nothing at all.

But I’m still here.

And if I survive it, I’m going to set this entire system on fire—one forgotten truth at a time.

- x -

They don’t bind my hands with chains. They bind them with silk. Clean. Ceremonial. So when the pain starts, it won’t look like cruelty.

The Severing Chamber lies beneath the Grove. Buried under Selvarra’s golden bones. The Grove sits at the heart of Virelle—the capital city carved into Selvarra’s cliffs, gilded in lies and templelight. They built the chamber beneath it like a secret no one wanted to bury too deep.

You don’t walk to it. You descend. Step by step, into quiet so thick it feels deliberate. There are no torches here. No glowing stones or firelight. The air itself glows—faintly, sickly, like something once sacred was drained and forced to keep illuminating the shame it couldn’t stop.

I count the steps. Not because it helps, but because it keeps me from noticing the way the priest’s fingers tighten around my elbow like I might bolt. Like I haven’t already failed too hard and too publicly to run. He doesn’t speak to me. None of them do. Not since the altar. Not since the Bonding failed. I’m a form to be completed. A danger to be resolved.

When we reach the bottom, the room opens around me like a mouth. Smooth stone walls, curved inward. No edges. No corners. No escape.

At the center is the Severing table. That’s what they call it. A table. As if it’s for study or discussion. It’s a slab of iron-bound wood scarred with too many names no one dares speak. Straps hang loose at the sides, softened by age and use. Everything in this room is polished. Maintained. Ready.

They do not tell me to lie down. They just wait.

So I do.

Because I refuse to scream when they make me. I will not give them a thing they can use to say she was weak.

The Severed don’t get tombstones. They get silence. Most don’t wake up. Those who do... well. They learn how fast the world forgets their name.

The silk binds my wrists to the cold of the table. My ankles next. Then the cord for my throat—not to choke. Just to hold still. To keep me steady while they cleanse me. That’s the word they use. Cleansing. As if magic is filth and Severed are rot that needs scraping.

They press the first sigil to my skin and it burns. Not flame. Something deeper. Something like truth being branded over bone. My spine arches. My teeth crack together. My voice doesn’t break—but the noise I make isn’t human. It’s something scraped raw from the space between breath and scream.

I see nothing. But I feel everything.

They are pulling at something inside me. Not power. Not essence. Just self. Memory. Shape. The connective tissue that tells the world: here is Freya. Here is the girl who wanted too much and got nothing.

They try to cut that out.

The pain is not steady. It pulses. It interrogates. It demands: What did you think you were? Who let you hope?

I bite my cheek until I taste blood. I let it drip. I imagine it staining the white-robed priest’s hands and wonder if he’ll scrub it off or wear it back to his temple.

At some point, I stop feeling the straps. My body stops trying to rise. I’m still here, but only just. Floating somewhere just below survival. I am cold from the inside out. Not like ice. Not like winter. Like removal.

Then something else moves.

Not in the room.

In me.

Beneath the scar the sigils have carved, under the empty space where magic was meant to live and die—something shifts. Something that did not come from the paths. Not Flameborn, not Stormbound, not Tidewalker, not Veilmarked, not Stonecalled. Something deeper. Something that waited for this moment.

I feel it curl. Slow. Curious.

And awake.

The priests flinch.

One of them drops the final sigil. The metal clatters to the floor and rings like a funeral bell. The sound does not stop.