Page 65 of Stormvein
Cells split and realign. Destruction and creation happening at the same time. My body becoming a battlefield between what was and what will be. Between the broken prisoner andthe reborn Shadowvein Lord, the Vareth’el. Between Sereven’s victim and his potential executioner.
I want to scream, but my voice is locked in my throat. My lungs convulse. This is not repair. This isn’t healing. It’s reformation. Transformation on a level I’ve never experienced or heard of.
The merged current spirals deeper. Silver and shadow intertwined. They reach broken ribs that shift beneath my skin, finding their proper alignment with a painful accuracy that stops the breath in my lungs. I hear the whisper of bone against bone as shards that had been floating free reconnect. I feel the rush of heat as marrow regenerates at impossible speed. The sword wound in my side that’s been festering since my capture burns cold, infectiondyingbeneath this new power that consumes everything in its path.
Through it all, Ellie sleeps beside me, unaware of what is happening, of the way her body has become a channel for this inexplicable energy. The silver current continues to move from her skin to mine. The connection between us strengthens with each passing moment.
The boundary between us thins, and I catch fleeting impressions of her dreams. Glimpses of her world. Echoes of emotions not my own. A city shrouded in winter. Tall structures of glass that catch the sun. Loneliness that echoes my own, but with different origins. A persistent feeling of not belonging. Fear mingled with determination. And beneath it all, a fierce protectiveness directed at me that I’ve done nothing to deserve.
My hands, shattered to ensure I could never hold a weapon again or perform intricate spells using voidcraft, rebuild themselves, bone by bone. Each finger that Sereven personally broke heals. Tendons reattach themselves, nerves reconnect, sending shocks through me that nearly blind me with their intensity. Nails regrow where they tore them from their beds.The sensation is both excruciating and exhilarating. Death and rebirth sharing the same breath. Months of healing compressed into moments.
It reaches my face next. The cheekbones shift, reforming from misaligned pieces into their proper structure. My swollen eye, damaged beyond repair according to Lysa’s grim assessment, throbs. The pressure decreases as tissues regenerate, nerve endings reconnecting with shocking speed. For the first time since capture, I can feel my eyelid respond when I try to open it, vision flooding back where there was only darkness.
Down my legs, across my back, into extremities nearly forgotten after days of agony, the silver-shadow energy flows relentlessly, bringing regeneration wherever it touches.
The whip marks on my back, Sereven’s favorite method of breaking resistance, knit together as muscle and skin reform. Each lash, each wound, heals from the inside out, leaving no trace of his cruelty.
Throughout this violent rebirth, memories surface.
Sereven standing over me with the heated iron, watching as they pressed the Authority symbol into my flesh.
The destruction of my body over days that stretched into eternity.
The crystal at River Crossing, tearing my shadows apart, scattering them like leaves in a storm.
Each memory brings fresh waves of hatred so intense they burn hotter than the fever. Hatred for Sereven who orchestrated every moment of suffering. Hatred for the Authority that sanctioned purges while preaching righteousness. Hatred for the hypocrisy of those who condemned magic while harvesting it for their own purposes.
The silver-shadow energy responds to this emotion, weaving it into the regenerating tissues, making it part of thetransformation itself. Hatred is woven into muscle fiber, into bone, into blood. Not consuming me, but fueling me. Not destroying, but focusing.
When I emerge from this, I will no longer be the Shadowvein Lord who escaped their tower. I will be something new. Forged in torture, tempered in suffering, reborn with a purpose sharper than a blade’s edge.
The process is not gentle. It is not kind. It is a rebirth through fire and shadow, every cell dying and remaking itself in sequence. I taste blood and silver and darkness as my insides rearrange—lungs sealing, infections burned away. Even my broken teeth reform in my mouth, a feeling so strange and intimate that I nearly choke on the unexpected wholeness.
Throughout this process, I hover between awareness and oblivion. Anyone witnessing such a thing would recoil in horror. It violates every known boundary of healing, of magic. It carries the precision of voidcraft yet operates at a scale I’ve never seen.
As dawn approaches, my transformation reaches its crescendo. The silver force coursing through Ellie blazes with unbearable brightness, while my shadows rise to the surface, no longer content to work from within. They meet in the space between us, twisting together in a double helix that encompasses my entire body, veins of shadow and silver winding as one.
For one suspended moment, I exist in neither form nor function. Neither flesh nor shadow, but in between. For a second, I glimpse something vast and terrible and beautiful—the chasm Ellie must have been pulled across from her world into mine.
I see patterns within patterns. Prophecies written in the language of stars. Celestial bodies that have never known names move in configurations that speak of purpose instead of chance. The darkness between them pulsates with intelligence, with awareness. I sense rather than see the countless worldssuspended in this void, each with its own destiny, its own powers. For an instant, I understand how small Meridian is, how fragile, and yet how significant in ways I cannot fully comprehend.
I see Ellie’s world, too. A place without magic yet filled with wonders of its own making. I see thin veils where our worlds nearly touch, where crossing becomes possible.
Then reality crashes back with stomach-churning suddenness.
Where once was devastation, now there is wholeness. Where torture wrote its story on my flesh, now only power remains. The miracle is complete. Total regeneration of a body that leaves nothing of the broken man who lay dying hours before.
But the memory remains.
The hatred remains.
The purpose remains.
The camp sleeps on as dawn’s first light filters over the ravine’s towering cliffs. Only the two fighters on watch are awake, sitting some distance away, their backs to me, unaware of what I’ve been through. Their attention is focused outward for signs of Authority patrol, not inward for miraculous magic happening behind them. I untangle myself from the stretcher, and rise silently, testing my newly healed body.
There is no pain, no stiffness, no reminder of the broken man I was. The blanket falls away, and I remove the blood-soaked bandages that no longer serve any purpose. Straightening to my full height, I stretch, luxuriating in the strength returning to muscles that hours ago were atrophied and failing. I flex my fingers, rotate my wrists, testing the integrity of bones and tendons remade. My breathing comes easy and deep. Thewholenessof my body is disorienting after days of compartmentalizing pain.
My ring catches the first light of dawn, the dark stone absorbing rather than reflecting it. I lift my hand to study it. The familiar weight of it on my finger curves my lips up. Sereven stole it from me while I bled out at Thornreave. I stole it back at Ashenvale, and sent it to Ellie with what I thought were my dying breaths. But now it’s back where it belongs. The final boundary between me and my magic. Between who I was, who I am, and what I will now become.
