Page 19 of She Who Was Severed (The Ashen Chain Trilogy #1)

Bram barks a laugh—but it stumbles halfway out. He shifts his grip on the axe.

“Gods, Vale. You always did have a mouth like a back-alley whore.”

He grins, but his eyes flick to her blade.

Another shape steps forward—female, wiry, blades already drawn. Her voice cuts cleaner than her knives.

“Vale.” A nod. Not friendly. Not surprised. “You left with half the take. And both route maps.”

She stops just short of striking distance.

“You don’t disappear with our payday and stroll back through like it’s a reunion.”

Vale shifts her stance, finally letting her hand rest on her blade. “Didn’t come back for you.”

“No,” Bram says, stepping closer, “but you’re still on our path. And this time, we outnumber you.”

They move fast.

I don’t wait. My breath drops low. Cycle Three. Not perfect, but clean. Compression in the gut, exhale slow. The Chain stirs—not a lash, not yet, but a hum like tension ready to snap.

The first attacker hits Vale and finds nothing but steel and elbow. She flips his weight and buries her knee in his ribs before he finishes the first swing.

Two more split toward me.

The Chain doesn’t wait for instruction. The first one grabs my arm and yelps—his skin sizzles where it touches mine. I yank back, pivot on the heel, and drive my shoulder into the second.

Not enough. He’s bigger. I drop low and let the Chain take the slack. It lashes, silent and quick, and sweeps his feet clean off the ground. He lands wrong. Doesn’t rise.

Across the clearing, Vale’s already on her second opponent—fast, tight movements, one blade held backhanded, the other catching steel mid-air. She’s not just fighting. She’s choosing which parts to damage.

Bram comes in slower, heavier. His axe swings wide. Vale blocks it clean, but it forces her two steps back. The woman behind him smiles and moves for Vale’s flank.

I shift to intercept, but I’m late .

The Chain doesn’t need me.

It lashes without a flare. A tight spiral of barbed links whips from my wrist and wraps the woman’s forearm just before her blade reaches Vale’s back. She screams and stumbles away, blood slick on her hand.

Vale finishes Bram with an elbow to the jaw and a knee to the gut. He collapses.

One of the others breaks and runs.

Nobody follows.

Silence stretches out. Not peace. Just aftermath.

Vale crouches beside Bram’s body. Checks his pulse like it’s habit, not hope. Then she slides a ring from his finger, pockets it, and wipes her hand on his tunic without blinking.

“You’re full of surprises,” I say.

She straightens slowly. Breath tight, but controlled. “So are you.”

I glance at the bodies, the spatter, the drag marks in the dust. “You knew they might be out here.”

“I knew they were still breathing. That’s not the same thing.”

“You didn’t warn me.”

She shrugs. “In my defense—”

I lift a hand. “Don’t even.”

That gets a grin. Not smug. Just honest. She nods once, then turns back toward the ridge to collect her pack.

The Chain hums low—not agitated, not neutral. Just… aware.

I follow.

- x -

Ashmere waits like it remembers how to bleed.

There’s no gate, no threshold. Just the end of the Wanehold trail and a sudden drop into a valley of shattered stone, blackened towers, and pathways too narrow for carts. The wind doesn’t carry birdsong. It scrapes against the ruined arches like it’s trying to forget the sound of a city.

Vale doesn’t say a word as we cross the edge. Her boots shift silent in the gravel, shoulders squared, chin tilted like she’s walked into places like this before and made it out worse. Her coat’s open again, loose at the arms, blades barely visible—just enough for the message to land.

I follow because I’m too tired not to. My pack drags against the sore spot on my shoulder. The Chain’s been quiet since the fog thinned, but now it starts again—faint pressure behind my ribs. Not humming. Not warning. Just a low, pointed attention. Like it knows something I don’t.

The market appears slowly—more structure than stall.

Old stone bones form a half-ring of shelters, walls reinforced with scrap iron, tarpcloth, and rusted sigil posts.

No signage. Just presence. Fires burn low in brasiers repurposed from temple censers.

The smoke’s oily, with a metallic bite that sticks to the tongue.

Someone passes me with a tray of cracked bone fragments tied in cords. They don’t look at my face.

No one here speaks unless they have to.

Vale veers left toward a stall with blade hilts hanging from rusted nails.

I scan the crowd. The people aren’t bonded.

Not anymore. Some wear the scarring openly—sever marks burnt clean across their shoulders or sigil ink faded and bleeding into veins.

Others move like they still expect to fight.

One has his entire face covered in veilcloth stitched with binding thread. I don’t ask.

They don’t look at me outright. But some glance long enough to tell me they notice something off. It’s not my posture. It’s not my pack. It’s the thing inside me, humming at a frequency this place remembers.

I keep moving .

A raised platform sits near the center—charred black, ringed in fractured sigils, and deeply cracked through the floor like something exploded from beneath it. It’s not in use now, but the stone remembers weight. Judgments, maybe. Executions. It doesn’t matter. My skin crawls just walking past it.

That’s when I see it.

A half-covered slab, off to the side beneath a lopsided vendor canopy, dusted in soot and market ash. No sign. No price. No attempt to sell it. But the lines catch my eye—carved deep, faded with time but not gone.

A manticore.

Not sketched, not styled—carved. Jaw open. Wings arched in mid-beat. Tail curved and barbed, mid-strike. Whoever etched it knew what they were drawing. The stone around it has been scraped down, like someone tried to erase the image and couldn’t finish. It’s old. Too old to be random.

The Chain tightens.

I crouch beside it, keeping half an eye on the vendor. He’s talking to a barter pair and hasn’t seen me yet. Good. My fingers hover near the carving. I can see a glyph etched beneath one claw—subtle, smaller than a coin.

It matches a fragment from the torn page in my manual.

I don’t think. I touch it.

The sigil answers.

A pulse of red light rolls outward from the manticore’s chest. Not flame.

Not aura. Something internal, like heat from deep rock, dull and steady.

It runs along the carved tail, flashes across the wings, and kicks outward in a ring of pressure that lifts the dust from the ground and sends it drifting around my boots.

The Chain ignites in my chest.

Not violently. Not pain. Recognition—deep, cellular, threaded through scar and marrow. My wrist burns. My back arches from the sudden hum vibrating down my spine. I stagger to one knee. Catch myself on the edge of the slab.

Then I hear the crowd.

Someone swears. A blade drops. A crate overturns—its contents scatter and roll across the stone.

A woman stares openly, steps back twice, then turns and runs.

Another mutters “ghostblood” like it’s a curse.

Two more Severed vanish into the alley without a sound.

The entire space changes shape without anyone shouting. Just motion. Fear. Retreat.

No one touches me.

No one needs to.

I push back up. My breath’s uneven. The Chain is quiet again now, but the mark on my wrist still glows faintly. I don’t know what I triggered, but everyone here knows it wasn’t normal.

Vale reappears at my shoulder.

She doesn’t ask what I did.

“You touched something,” she says.

I nod.

“It lit up.”

“Yeah,” she says. “Half the square looks like they want to crawl out of their own skin.”

I breathe in through my nose. “It responded to the Chain.”

“Clearly.”

We stand there while the dust settles. The glow fades. No one moves closer. No one calls guards. Which tells me everything I need to know about this place.

Then I see him.

Across the square, half-shadowed beneath a collapsed arch, stands a man draped in tattered priest robes.

The cloth used to be council grade—you can tell by the collar and the sleeve trim, or what’s left of it.

Now it’s scorched, torn, dust-dulled, and hanging too loose over shoulders that carry no weight of station.

His cowl hides most of his face, but I can still make out the line of his jaw, the stillness in how he breathes.

His left hand is wrapped in stained linen, tucked tight against his chest. But his right arm hangs uncovered—marked from wrist to elbow in sigils I recognize instantly.

Council chain-oaths, etched deep. Only these aren’t glowing.

They’re charred at the edges, lines buckled and blackened, like something inside them was burned out. Not ink. Not rejection. Severing.

I’ve seen those scars before. Not many. Not often. But when you survive your own ritual, you start learning what the end looks like in other people.

He’s Severed. Still standing.

And he doesn’t flinch.

Not like the others, who step back or vanish into the alleys. He just watches me, steady, unmoving. Like he knows what the Chain feels like when it stirs awake and starts remembering what it was.

The Chain hums again, low and deep, like it knows him too.

He nods.

Once.

Then turns and walks away into a cracked corridor that used to be a shrine. Doesn’t look back.

I keep staring after him, breath uneven, wrist still tingling where the sigil burned hot.

Vale shifts beside me. “Well,” she says. “That’s subtle.”

I don’t answer right away. My mouth tastes like dust.

“I think that carving was an anchor,” I murmur.

“For the Chain?”

“For something it wants me to remember.”

Vale eyes the edge of the square, where no one’s dared return. “You want to go touching any more holy symbols today, or are we done making friends?”

“We’re done. ”

We walk. No one stops us. But the air feels different now—thinner, stretched tight, like the city just took a breath and hasn’t let it out yet.

The Chain doesn’t hum again for the rest of the walk.

It pulses once—low, warm, steady.

And I don’t stop it.