Page 185 of Shifting Hearts 1
Something in me broke open. Not like a wound — more like a lock turned from the inside. My thread twisted sharply, violently — the one the Wyrd had gifted me at birth, the one I’d kept hidden since I cut it once before. It burned now, molten and blinding, dragging me into magic I no longer trusted, into power I had feared for the longest time, but I reached for it anyway.
The power that answered wasn’t soft or golden. It was severance. Cold and sharp and final. Not prophecy. Nor protection. A blade.
And I saw the truth of it — the threads binding Eris to them. Thin as spider silk, soaked in blood. Hooks dug into her soul,deeper than any charm or curse. The oath wasn’t just magic. It was ownership. A brand pressed to the marrow. And she was breaking under it.
The King struck first. He didn’t move, he didn’t have to. His magic came like frost, sudden and invasive. The cathedral iced over, stone crackling under the pressure of rot, ice creeping along the shattered floor and climbing up the walls, the smell of iron sharp in my nose.
I barely dodged, flinging a sliver of severance across the room. The spell cleaved the air, cracking the Weave itself where it passed. My body screamed with the cost of it. My thread frayed further, burning bright at both ends, a living thing threatening to consume me.
And still — I didn’t stop.
Eris rose to her feet like a revenant. Swaying. Bleeding. Radiant with fury and resolve. Her hair stuck to her cheeks in wet strands, ash dusting her shoulders. She met my eyes — wild, desperate, determined — and dropped to her knees beside the scattered teeth. The fragments of her broken necklace littered the cathedral, glinting with memory. I saw her hand shake as she sifted through the dust and shards. Then she found it.
One molar.
Not crushed. Not lost. Blackened. Jagged. Blood already smeared across its root. A curse in waiting.
She didn’t look back. She stood — then ran.
The Queen raised her hand too late. Eris drove the tooth into the Queen’s chest with a cry of rage and grief and defiance. The scream that followed wasn’t mortal. It cracked the cathedral’s foundation. Split the stones beneath us. The Queen’s glamour burned away — not like cloth but like a soul unravelling. Beneath the beauty: bone. Hollow. Endless. And screaming. Until all that was left was the guise of a bone witch.
The King surged forward, howling. I had nothing left — no spell, no strength, no shield.
But I had the thread, and I severed it again. My hand flared gold-white as I cut through fate itself — through the bond he had tried to claim, through the claim he had laid on Eris’s soul. He collapsed in on himself with a noise like a collapsing cathedral — wind and stone and anguish.
Then they were gone.
Just like that — the tether snapped. The silence was apocalyptic. The cathedral groaned. The magic echoing through the stones trembled, then fell still. My own breath stuttered in my lungs, and then I collapsed.
The edges of the world frayed at the corners, and I felt it — my thread, the one I’d already cut once, now unravelling beyond repair. No guardian’s mark. No Wyrd’s favour. Just frayed, flickering remnants. I was falling away.
Eris caught me before I hit the ground. Her arms locked around me. Her hands were shaking, slick with blood and ash and something else — something more precious than both. Her whole body trembled as she cradled me against her chest, holding me like she could keep the world from tearing me apart.
“Brannan—” Her voice broke. Tears glistened on her eyelids, threatening to fall. “No. No. Stay. You stay.”
I tried to smile. My body ached, not from pain, but from absence.
“It had to break,” I whispered.
“It didn’t have to break you.” Her tears hit my skin. Hot. Furious. Refusing to be meaningless.
My eyelids fluttered. It took too much to keep them open.
“You’re not allowed to go,” she said. “Not after everything. Not after I chose you.”
And she had. I’d seen it in the cathedral — when we’d touched, when the magic had raged between us. She’d chosen me. Over the oath. Over fate. Over death.
And that choice had consequences. Just like mine did.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“For what?”
“For making you love a man already fading.”
She shook her head. “Don’t. You don’t talk like that, don’t you dare.”
But I was already slipping. Part of me unmoored, drifting from the world like fog rising off a lake.
