Page 184 of Shifting Hearts 1
The broken necklace lay between us. One of the baby teeth was still whole — milk-white, soft-edged, stained with a sliver of blood from where it had nicked my thumb as it fell.
“A shard of me,” I whispered. “Of who I was. Before the oath.”
He didn’t speak. Just held me tighter.
“I’ll forget them,” I said, quieter now. “The pieces those teeth held. My mother’s face. The sound of my name before I was Eris the Knife.”
“Then I’ll remember for you.”
I broke.
Right there in his arms, with the magic bleeding out of me and the cathedral still echoing with old ghosts, I broke.
Because that was the cruelest part of all.
I had chosen him. Again. Despite everything.
And in doing so, I had carved another scar into the only story I had ever known.
One not written in blood.
But in choice.
EIGHT
Brannan
The air shifted before they arrived. One moment, the cathedral still held the quiet aftermath of battle — of love, of survival, of all the things we weren’t saying. The dust hung in the air like smoke that refused to rise. Candle stubs smouldered in pools of wax, sending up thin spirals of smoke that curled around the broken pillars. The echoes of our own voices, our own heartbeat, lingered against the stone, ghostly and soft. The next, it was choked with shadow. Cold swept through like a second heartbeat, heavy and unnatural, curling around the edges of my skin and making my teeth chatter. The floor beneath me darkened, turning slick, as though blood had soaked through from some deeper realm. Old blood. Old magic. The cathedral itself seemed to inhale, and the shadows deepened, growing denser with every heartbeat.
I felt them before I saw them — twin weights in the Weave. Pressure built behind my eyes and in my chest, it felt like my skull was about to crack open. Monarchs of something older than kingdoms, older than oaths, older than memory, came intofocus, as they stepped through the broken archway like dust made flesh. The Queen of Blooms and Decay and the King of Ash and Bone. I’d never met them before, but even still I knew them, clear as I knew my own name.
She was clothed in the colour of pomegranates—spring’s fruit ripened to shadow, each seed a promise of both life and death. It was the garb of a queen who reigned where blossoms withered, where the first green shoots pressed against the bones of winter. Her skin shimmering like volcanic glass, her features shifted just enough to make your brain itch trying to define them. Around her neck, a necklace of teeth and thread — not the dreambone, not exactly, but something crueller. The remains of promises devoured. Her eyes burned, twin moons eclipsed by shadow, and when she looked at you, it felt like your bones were being counted, judged, weighed.
He walked beside her in silence. Antlers curled from his brow like twisted branches slick with hoarfrost. His face was a ruin, carved with cracks that leaked thin, silver light. Where his shadow fell, the moss shrivelled, the stone cracked, the air seemed to pull inward. Time itself recoiled from him, and the cathedral seemed to hum in recognition, in fear.
And still — still — the cathedral remembered breath and fire and want. The magic we’d summoned with our bodies was fading, but not yet gone. It shivered under my skin, not ready to die, whispering secrets I no longer trusted.
The Queen stopped ten paces from us and raised her hand.
Eris gasped, a sharp sound torn from her ribs. Her spine bent forward as if struck, and I saw it — the tether, invisible but unmistakable, pulled taut from her heart to the Queen’s palm. Her magic flared in panic, a thing half-wild, splintered, and volatile. Sparks of light, like shattered stars, flickered across the floor around her.
“You broke the terms,” the Queen said, her voice like bells rung for a funeral, echoing through the cathedral with unnatural resonance. “The oath was blood-sworn. You owe us his life.”
The King’s empty gaze found mine, hollow and burning. “Or your soul.”
I stepped between them without thinking, planting myself between Eris and their reach.
“Take me, then.”
Behind me, I heard her choke on a sound — protest, rage, heartbreak. I didn’t turn around. I couldn’t.
The Queen tilted her head, mock-curious. “Such gallantry. But martyrdom is not payment. It is only failure dressed in poetry.”
The tether snapped tighter. Eris cried out again, collapsing to her knees. Magic flared around her like a solar flare — too much, too fast, trying to defend her and being turned inward. Sparks of light and shards of shadow raced along the floor, bouncing off broken pews and scattered stone.
I felt helpless. Furious. My own magic, dulled for years, surged awake like a living, breathing thing, screaming against the old laws of restraint.
“Stop,” I snarled, voice cracking with something raw.
