Page 47 of Stormvein
We’re isolated, cut off from resources, surrounded by enemies on all sides, with a potential traitor waiting at Stonehaven to undermine what little security we have.
How can we possibly come back from this?
And yet …
I look at his face. I watch his chest rise and fall with stubborn determination despite broken ribs and infected burns. I look at his hands—those elegant, powerful hands that once commanded shadows and gave me pleasure beyond imagining—now bearing evidence of vicious, violent cruelty.
They tried to break him. To unmake everything he is.
And everything inside me says that they have failed.
I refuse to give up. I won’t let him die. I won’t let what was done to him go unanswered, even if I have to tear apart the Authority with my bare hands.
The woman I was three months ago—the Chicago waitress who worried about rent and tips, who knew the world had hard edges but had never seen true cruelty—wouldn’t recognize me now. That version of Ellie Bennett feels like a character in a story I read long ago. She never witnessed torture. Never felt power surge through her veins or watched a storm bend to her will.
Chicago seems impossibly distant now, a soft-focus memory compared to the sharp reality of Meridian. I once desperately wanted to go home. Now I’m not sure where home is anymore,except maybe wherever Sacha is. The realization should frighten me, but instead, it feels right.
Sacha’s pulse beneath my fingertips is threadlike, irregular. One moment strong enough to feel, the next so faint I have to press harder, terrified it’s stopped altogether. His breathing follows no pattern I can discern. Sometimes it’s quick and shallow, other times they’re so far apart I count the agonizing seconds between each rise of his chest.
The night stretches ahead like a test of endurance.
Will he make it until dawn? Until Mira and Tarn return? Until we can somehow get him back to Stonehaven’s more substantial medical supplies?
I find myself bargaining with whatever forces might be listening. Just let him survive this night. Just one more hour. Just one more breath.
Every hour he survives brings not only hope, but conviction. This can’t be where his story ends. This isnotwhere our story ends.
The shadows in the corners of the cave seem to deepen, to lean closer, as if listening. Watching over their master. I think of the prophecy—where shadow leads, storm will follow—and wonder if it meant this moment. If I was always meant to be here, beside him, when he needed someone most.
Unable to help myself, I reach out and carefully cover one of his hands with mine, avoiding the raw wounds where his fingernails once were. The moment our skin connects, a silver current ignites at the point of contact, spilling through my fingers to cast delicate illumination across our joined hands. The shadows around us stir in response, and a moan escapes his lips. I snatch my hand back, worried I’m hurting him.
Instead, I lower my head until my lips are beside his ear.
“Stay with me,” I whisper. A plea, a prayer, a command. “Please, stay with me. I’m not letting you go.”
Chapter Eleven
SACHA
Trust is not a bridge. It is a thread. And threads fray.
Love Songs of the Mountain Provinces
I’m drifting through darkness.Not the comfortable shadows I once commanded, but something else—a space without form or substance. Pain exists here as a distant memory, like thunder beyond the horizon. A remembered feeling, but displaced and out of reach. My body feels far away, tethered to me by the thinnest of threads, fraying with each labored heartbeat, taking me ever closer to the void.
Is this death?The final surrender of consciousness after what they did to me?
No. I think death would be simpler.
This is something else. A liminal space between existence and oblivion. Here, thought persists while my body fails. Memories reassemble in ways that defy logic or chronology.
The tower forms around me. But this isn’t the prison that held me for decades. The walls are translucent, revealing stars beyond. Constellations I don’t recognize swirling in constant motion, ancient configurations that seem to whisper meaningsI almost grasp before they slip away. Within the stone of the wall itself, dim shapes move with purpose, forming imprints that almost make sense before scattering again.
I reach out, trying to touch the shadows I once controlled, but my hand passes through the walls without any resistance. These aren’t any shadows I recognize. They don’t acknowledge my call. These are something older,different,and more aware. They don’t respond to my presence. They simply observe it.
“The binding is broken,” says a voice that isn’t a voice. It’s more vibration than sound, felt rather than heard.
I turn, searching for its source, but only find darkness gathering in the center of the room, coalescing into something that defies definition. Not solid, but present. A void within a void, an absence more substantial than presence.
