Page 3

Chapter Two

SACHA

“There is dignity in repetition. It keeps the soul from vanishing.”

Reflections on Captivity—Sacha Torran’s Journals

Heel to toe. Pivot through the ball of the foot.

Weight transfers cleanly across my stance. Knees aligned. Core braced.

Guard held at centerline. Elbows tucked. Shoulders still.

The blade isn’t real, but my body honors its form. Each motion cuts through air that hasn’t changed in twenty-seven years. My muscles remember what the mind has lost—the weight of the blade, the balance point, the perfect arc.

I’ve repeated this drill four thousand, eight hundred and twelve times.

The routine preserves what remains of my sanity. In a place where nothing changes, discipline becomes invention. I’ve memorized the stonework beneath my feet, the placement of every volume on the shelves, each frayed thread in the faded tapestries they permitted me.

The eighth form requires a full extension. A twist at the waist and a reverse grip. My knuckles whiten around nothing. My breath remains steady. Hips anchored. My shoulder rotates with the false momentum of a downward strike. The form ends in stillness, but it must be earned.

I count silently, measuring the cadence of my movements against words I’ve repeated in my head so many times they’ve lost all meaning. My throat hasn’t shaped sounds in years. There’s no point. The tower doesn’t answer, and the walls don’t care.

Still, I complete it. If I stop, something essential will break. Something I won’t be able to repair.

When it’s done, my hand drops. I stand, motionless in the center of the chamber, and breathe.

In. Hold. Out.

In. Hold. Out.

Once my heart rate settles, I cross to my desk and pick up the quill. It’s another ritual I keep. One just as essential as the combat forms. I dip the quill and drag it across the blank page. The motion is automatic. The words don’t matter. I record them anyway.

Day 9,855. The boundary holds. The tower does not change. Does anyone still exist beyond these walls?

Meaningless record-keeping. Pointless defiance. But I do it. Every day. The alternative is surrender. And then my time here would be measured only by the way the invisible boundary tightens. Hour by hour. Night after night.

The tower provides everything I need. Food, water, books, furniture, ink, and parchment, but never freedom.

A book lies open beside my writing hand. I’ve memorized every word, every sentence, every crease in the page. I could recite it backward if the silence became too loud.

I used to. But I stopped when the sound of my own voice became another form of loneliness.

I stare at the words I’m writing, pretending they still matter. But it’s only another ritual way to mark the hours. The same way I monitor the change in the air when dusk approaches. Or how the invisible boundary draws inward from the walls.

When they first sealed me inside this chamber, I wondered why they didn’t kill me.

I understand now.

They didn’t want me dead. They wanted me erased.

Forgotten. Buried beneath silence and dust until even my name faded from memory.

I have lived in that silence for so long, it’s become a part of me. I know its shape, its weight.

So when something changes, when the air moves in a way it hasn’t in decades, I notice.

At first, I dismiss it as a trick of memory. One more hallucination born of years alone. But then I hear it.

Footsteps.

I stop breathing. My body locks.

A figure steps through the archway, not imagined or remembered, but real. Walking into my chamber as if they’d only stepped out for a moment.

I don’t move. I don’t even blink. My mind stalls, trying to make sense of what I’m seeing .

How? Why? Who?

But all I can do is stare.

Their head turns, gaze darting around the room, passing over me without pause.

There’s confusion in the way they move, slow and uncertain.

Layers of clothing hang awkwardly off their frame, heavy and ill-suited for the desert.

Sand clings to the fabric. Sweat stains it dark in uneven patches.

Their hands shake as they reach toward the shelves and brush the spine of one of my books.

I stare at the trail of sand they leave behind. The first disruption this floor has seen in decades. And it breaks the paralysis holding me in place. I push back from the desk and stand, just as the figure turns.

The light touches her face. Female. Young. Perhaps a few years younger than I was when I was locked away. She stares at me, frozen mid-step.

The impact of her eyes meeting mine is disorienting. My pulse thuds in my ears. My fingers twitch at my sides. My legs stay rooted to the floor.

I haven’t looked at another soul in twenty-seven years … and now one stands here, looking back at me. I’d forgotten what it felt like to be seen, to exist in someone else’s gaze.

I should do something. But what?

Speak … I should speak.

But I haven’t spoken in years. I don’t remember the last time I even tried. My lips part, and nothing comes out. My throat tightens around the effort, like it’s forgotten how to shape the sound, how to make language real.

I try again. My breath catches, then my senses fire to life .

“Well.” My tongue stumbles over the word. I push forward. “This is unexpected.”

Her mouth opens, then closes again. Her eyes stay locked on mine.

The sound of my voice fills the space between us—low, unused, too loud in a room built on breath, movement, and silence. Not a thought but a sound.

Spoken. Shaped. Released.

I can’t place the last time I heard it. The grain feels wrong in my ears. But it was mine, and now it’s in the air, beyond recall.

It forces me to recognize how absolute the silence has become.

She doesn’t respond. She doesn’t even move. And I begin to wonder whether she’s real or if I’ve finally crossed into madness. I force myself to speak again.

“You managed to open the tower door.”

She doesn’t disappear. Which means she isn’t a hallucination. But if she is real, if the silence is broken, that means the door opened.

It should be impossible. Once the tower was sealed, no one could enter. Not in all the time I’ve been here. There must be another explanation.

But the magic here doesn’t bend. It never has.

She shouldn’t be here. Not standing in front of me. Not casting a shadow across the floor.

A dazed, sun-scorched creature with cracked lips, and clothing heavy with sand. One who stares at me as though she expects me to vanish, while all I can do is look back at her and try to remember how to breathe .

And then I remember.

A spell.

One casting. Just one. The last thing I managed to do before the tower closed around me and sealed my magic away. I shaped it in the dark with what power I had left. Poured it into the cracks of the world and sent it into the void.

A summoning.

I haven’t let myself think about it for years. Not because I forgot about it, but because it was easier to believe it failed. That it was swallowed and destroyed, like everything else.

But now … she’s here. Standing where no one should stand. Breathing air that hasn’t been shared in half a lifetime.

And the tower let her in.

It doesn’t prove anything. It could still be a coincidence. A cruel trick of fate. History warns me not to trust hope.

But I remember the shape of the magic. I remember the way it left my hands. How it burned through what was left of me. I remember what I asked for.

Freedom.

Her head tilts, as though something has caught her attention, and her gaze moves from me to the table. Her eyes fix on the pitcher, and every bit of caution drains from her expression, replaced by need.

The kind of need that overrides common sense.

She moves, staggering slightly. I don’t stop her, curious to see what she does. Not that I could if I wanted to. The binding holds me back, half the room already cut off from me. So I stay where I am and watch her cross into the space I won’t be able to reach until morning .

She makes it to the table and braces herself against the edge with both hands. For a moment, she sways, as if just standing upright might undo her. Then she grabs the pitcher. Ignoring the cup beside it, she lifts it to her lips like the world might end before she drinks.

Water spills down her chin, soaking into the already sweat-drenched fabric of her clothes.

She gulps it down without stopping, without breathing, without even looking up to see if I’ve moved.

The sounds she makes—low, guttural gasps between swallows—don’t belong to someone thinking clearly.

They belong to someone who came close to dying.

I watch her drink like my life depends on it.

Not because I fear what she might do next. I have no concerns over that. But I need her alive. Because if the tower let her in, if I’m right and my summoning really did bring her here, then her presence here isn’t an accident.

And she might be my way out of here.

The pitcher is half-empty by the time she begins to slow. Her hands are still shaking. Her mouth opens like she’s thinking about taking another gulp, but she doesn’t. She lowers the pitcher clumsily, her grip unsteady. The base knocks unevenly against the table as she sets it down.

Then she turns toward me. Her gaze lifts first, unsure and searching. It takes longer for her body to follow. She straightens slowly, like every movement costs her something, and her eyes meet mine again.

There’s clarity in them now. The haze of heat and thirst hasn’t left her entirely, but it’s thinned. Just enough for the panic to start pushing through.

Her lips part.

“What …”

One word, and it changes the air around me. I don’t move, but everything contracts at the sound. It’s the pitch, the texture. The difference it makes to the silence of the room.

I haven’t heard another voice in so long, my body doesn’t know what to do with it. Every sense sharpens—hearing, sight, touch, breath—from the simple fact that someone else is speaking in my presence.