Page 9 of She Who Was Severed

My fingers twitch. Something snakes around them. Thin. Silver-black. A chain.

Alive.

I don’t command it. It moves anyway.

Outside the vault, I hear something howl. Not a beast. Not a person.

Something in-between. Something that just noticed a door open.

I don’t stay to listen.

I rise. My knees are shaking. My voice is gone. My hunger is not.

This wasn’t a gift.

It was an inheritance.

And I intend to use it.

Let them whisper about the Severed.

Let them sing songs about beasts and bonds and blessed fire.

I found something older than all of them.

And it found me first.

Chapter 2

I wake alone. Not in the tower, not in a bed, but somewhere half-eaten by root and ruin. The air tastes like salt and old fire. My skin doesn’t belong to me anymore.

The chain has settled just beneath the surface—threaded through my collarbone like it grew there. Not pain. Not power. Something in between. My pulse jumps every time I move, not because I’m afraid, but because I expect it to respond.

It doesn’t burn. It watches.

I sit up slow. My head throbs like a second heartbeat trying to tune itself. The world isn’t spinning—but something under it is. I remember the vial. The way the blood shattered in my throat. The voice that whispered Link One: Claimed.

I half-hoped it was a hallucination.

But the chain is still here. A silver-black filament etched around my wrist like jewelry for the condemned. When I flex my hand, it shifts slightly, not tightening—just reminding.

I rise to my feet. My knees almost buckle. Not from injury. From contradiction. My body’s caught between two languages: one human, one inherited. I walk anyway.

No one should be near the Ash Tower. But I hear footsteps up the hill, near the high path that overlooks the grove. A pair of Tidewalkers. One of them sees me. She freezes.

“Is that—?”

I don’t wait to hear the rest.

I cut into the trees, keeping to the side roads that only the Severed are allowed to rot in. The temple spires glint in the distance, all gold filigree and illusion light. If I focus, I can still remember what it felt like to belong there. To believe I might walk out of that grove with a beast at my side and fire braided into my name.

Instead, I walk with something no one will name.

A priest crossing the eastern corridor sees me and falters mid-step. He doesn’t say anything. Just clasps his hands too fast and mutters a protective phrase I haven’t heard since funerals. His beast—a winged panther-shadow thing—growls low. Then vanishes into smoke.

Even the bonded are scared.

Good.