Page 1 of Stormvein
Chapter One
ELLIE
The world remakes itself around survivors. Not all survive the remaking.
Reflections on Captivity—Sacha Torran’s Journals
The storm tears through me.Not around me, or over me, but straightthroughmy chest, nerve-deep and breath stealing. It’s peeling me open from the inside, an extension of my skin. My grief. My rage.
Each lightning strike doesn’t just hit the earth, it breaks it. Shattering the sky and scorching the ground until the surrounding trees are blackened and smoking. Wind screams across the hilltop, ripping shrubbery loose, while rain hammers down in sheets so thick I can’t tell where the sky ends and the ground begins.
Water slices cold across the backs of my hands, steam rising where it touches the heat of my skin. I’m surrounded by motion and smoke and light. I can taste metal on my tongue, and static burns the back of my throat.
The mud beneath my knees sucks at my body, slick and cold, grounding only in how hard it wants to pull me under, as if the earth itself is trying to claim what’s left of me.
There is no separation between me and the storm anymore. It lives inside me. It moves through my lungs instead of breath, pulses through my veins instead of blood, and screams from my throat instead of my voice.
Mira and Mishak are on their knees on either side of me, their faces twisted with terror and awe as they stare at me. The expression in their eyes is the same as when they sawhimreturned from the tower.
Him.I can’t say his name. Iwon’t.
They don’t see a girl who’s lost everything, but a myth whose rise they’re witnessing in real time.
My vision blurs at the edges, silver-white bleeding into everything I see. The Authority uniform I’m still wearing clings to my skin, the fabric rough with disgust and soaked through with memory.
Every thread, every seam is a mockery of what I’ve lost.
A reminder of what they’ve taken from me.
How completely everything has broken.
My skin feels paper thin, power threading through nerves that were never meant to hold it. Veins holding silver, storm, and violence.
Every breath smells like ozone and tastes like blood. There’s a high-pitched hum vibrating through my bones. The air around me crackles and distorts, warping my perception of distances and shapes.
And still, they kneel and watch. Waiting.
I don’t know what they see, what they think I am—weapon, omen, salvation, destruction—but I know what I am not.
I’m not what they want. I’m not what they need. I’m all that is left.
A hollow space whereheshould be standing. Whereheshould be breathing. Whereheshould be living.
He was the storm’s anchor. I’m just the backlash.
“From the ashes of shadow …” Mira’s voice cuts through the noise, and my head snaps toward her. “The storm shall rise.”
Blood trickles in thin, crimson lines from her temple as she struggles to stay upright, her eyes wide and fixed on me, not the battlefield.
On the other side of me, Mishak completes the phrase. “When shadows lengthen and dawn falters, the Vein will flow once more.”
They bow their heads.
“Where shadow leads, storm will follow.” They speak the final line together.
The words cut deeper than the power tearing through me, from the pain threatening to shut me down. They’re reciting prophecy when all I want is to scream until there’s nothing left inside. Until it drowns out the memory of Sacha being unmade before my eyes.
Until it rips his name from my bones.
