Page 69 of Golden Bond

The rite was spoken, the wine consumed, and still—I lay there waiting for the weight in my chest to lift. For a feeling of lightness, of clarity. Completion.

But there was none. Only the unbearable stillness of an empty chamber and the certainty that something had been peeled from me.

As though I had left one of my own limbs behind.

Eventually I sat up. My joints ached. My skin felt tight.

I moved like someone not used to moving. As if the bond, now unbraided, had taken with it the ease of being in my body. Even my breath felt unfamiliar. A thing to measure and tame.

At the basin, I splashed water on my face and braced myself against the sunstone rim. My reflection blinked back at me—drained, colorless, mouth slightly parted as if expecting someone to speak my name.

Then it happened.

The bond flared.

It didn’t burn. Not at first. It ignited—a burst of gold in my chest so sudden, so startling, I gasped aloud and staggered back.

Callis.

I felt him. Not a memory. Not a longing. A presence.

Pain.

Grief.

And something more fragile beneath it. A question. A trembling thread.

My knees almost buckled. The basin caught me.

The bond wasn’t gone.

It was fighting.

Wounded, yes—frayed and unsteady—but alive. It pulsed between us like something terrified of vanishing, and I could do nothing but feel it as it howled across the space between our hearts.

And then—it dulled. Slowly. Receding like a tide. Leaving salt in its wake.

I didn’t cry. I didn’t speak.

I wiped my face dry and moved through my day.

Or tried to.

I dressed without care, left my hair unbound. In the scriptorium, I sat before a folio of hymns and triedto transcribe the sacred stanzas I had once known by heart.

But the ink bled into the page. My hand shook. Lines of verse blurred. I read them five, six, seven times. Still they said nothing. My mind circled like a dying flame.

Why does it still feel like he’s here?

Why does it still hurt like this?

The ache wasn’t lessening. It was learning me. Nesting in my ribs. Taking up residence in the part of me I used to call devotion.

A soft knock came at the door, then the creak of hinges.

“Leave it,” I called, barely above a whisper.

But it was Corin.