Page 45 of The Shattered Rite
The room held her silence, warm and quiet andwhole. For the first time in days, there was no fear.
Just steam.
And the quiet, burning promise of what she had become.
Interlude 2: Malric
“Tools don’t need purpose. They need edge.”—The Sovereign of Vireth
Malric was still crouched in the stonework high above the Hall of Holding, wedged into a slit of shadow where the stone was cold and dust hung like breath.
No one ever looked up.
They should have.
He had orders, so he waited. Watched.
Below, the chosen shifted, armor rasping, eyes hollowed out by the trials. Torches spit resin and smoke. Iron rings sank into the flagstones like old teeth. The room remembered what it had been built to do.
He counted breaths, not faces. The loud ones die early. The quiet ones live longer. The useful learn to forget to breathe at all.
He’d already taken four. Two the beasts could keep. Two were his. No one had asked where they’d gone. That was the point: when cruelty fits the pattern, it goes unseen.
His attention kept returning to the rider.
He didn’t know her name. He didn’t need it. Names made graves in a man’s head. Better to call her what she was: the girl, the rider, the myth the court was already pretending not to whisper about.
She moved like judgment. Calm. Lethal. Unbound.
The marks on her skin hooked him. Not because they were magic—he’d seen magic seared into flesh before—but because theyansweredher. The lines shifted when she flexed. The script even brightened when the pendant at her throat pulsed. Not power pressed on from the outside; power that was waking up from within her very being.
She was becoming a waking legend.
And the sovereign had no room left in his kingdom for legends.
Orders were clear. If she still breathes at the end, she dies. His blade. His hand.
His knuckles pressed into grit until skin complained. He let the ache sit. He’d had worse teachers.
The dragonrider moved wrong. Not broken-wrong. Unpredictable-wrong. She wore death like a second skin and called it a change of clothes.
He should have looked away.
He didn’t.
He told himself it was strategy. Necessary observation.
He didn’t believe it.
He remembered her before the marks. The village. His borrowed uniform. Her braid too tight, armor that didn’t fit, dried blood under her nails. She’d looked straight at him. Notwith challenge. With clarity. As if she already knew what it meant when silence paid attention.
Even then, she’d been intriguing.
“Dragonrider,” the guard called.
The word hit the room like hot iron dropped in water. The young guard didn't even reach for the magical cuffs. He didn’t bother pretending.
Heat moved across Malric’s mind—not warmth. Presence. A weight that tested the air and tapped one claw against glass.
