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Then the one who brings me meals.

It could be Tris, maybe Eamon—though he doesn’t knock when he does this—or even Aleana, but I doubt she could carry the weight of the meal trays every phase. I would hear the rattle and clatter of the dishes as she tried to lower the tray to the floor.

But that’s what my unannounced visitor does, twice each phase: Brings a tray stacked with hot cooked meals, coffees and sweet desserts, pitchers of fresh springwater and bowls of freshly cut fruits.

They don’t knock.

They just leave the tray on the floor at the door.

Then leave.

I only know it’s there when the door starts to shift colour, as though telling me with the swirls of a rainbow to get up from this mattress I belong to. Those warped paint-stroked signals haven’t been wrong yet. There’s a meal out there in the corridor for me each time.

And still, I don’t answer the door for anyone, because I have a hollow realization that it’s a lonely existence to beg everyone around me to love me.

17

DAXEEL

††††††

The warlord prowls through the crowd that floods the courtyard. Darkness wisps around the ankles of his boots, parting for the very one responsible for the scars that mangle Daxeel’s back.

Ocean eyes burn through the dark.

Daxeel watches his father move through the thickened blackness, seeing more than any litalf ever could in the Cursed Shadows.

The pallor of General Agnar’s skin is unlike the pale complexion of the dark male walking beside him. Agnar’s second keeps the complexion of sun-bleached stone, but the general’s pallor is translucent—enough that from a distance, the inky stain of his veins presses against his skin. Those veins seem darker around the billowing black spiral that rushes up into the skies. The same veins Daxeel watched deepen into fresh tendrils of ink on a twisted face each time the general took a whip to him.

The only kindness he ever received from him father was to never once bring down the whip on his front. He kept the lashings to his back.

Now, as he thinks of them, those warped scars that prick at his flesh, a new thought flitters through his mind.

Nari.

Her fingertips grazing over the puckered ridges, a tender caress he would have once gotten to his knees for. But that tender touch is stained with deceit.

She tries so hard to regain a grip on his affections, his trust. But what is once broken can never fully be whole again. A warning he must remind himself of around her, those flickering moments of weakness that must be banished.

There is something in Daxeel; a shield that erects around those who have wronged him.

Now, it shoots into place and shuts down every hint of emotion the moment his father’s familiar pale blue eyes spear into him from across the courtyard. As it always has, the stare feels like being speared by frozen knitting needles.

“You understand that, no matter the outcome of the Sacrament, your offered position in my unit remains,” General Caspan’s rough accent shatters his thoughts.

Daxeel tugs his gaze from his father’s stare.

He turns his chin to the warlord he stands with.

Beside him, Rune nods, a single gesture of understanding, low enough to be considered respectful.

General Caspan adds, “You should expect your papers a month after the close of the Sacrament. I will call all my warriors to the base the phase that follows the Sabbat.”

So soon.

It is a premature summons, earlier than most other units will be ordered to congregate before the invasion, but Caspan is a somewhat new warlord, and his ways are different.

He keeps a strong unit for many reasons.