Page 20 of She Who Was Severed (The Ashen Chain Trilogy #1)

Ashmere feels wrong today. Not in a screaming, blood-on-the-walls way. Just… off. Like the air’s holding its breath and waiting for something ugly to move.

The streets don’t run straight. They double back on themselves like they’re lost too. One turn spits you into a dead end. The next drops you where you started—only now you’re probably missing something. A coin. A weapon. Your nerve.

I don’t know what time it is. Doesn’t feel like morning, but the light’s trying. Fog crawls down the stone and puddles where stairs used to be. We slept in a burned-out room above a shuttered vendor stall. I barely closed my eyes. The floor was wet. The Chain never went quiet.

Vale moves ahead without saying much. She’s got that walk again—the one where every step sounds casual but her hand stays near the hidden knife strapped behind her coat.

“Going to get us water,” she mutters. “Don’t do anything stupid, okay?”

I nod. She’s already gone .

I settle near a half-buried foundation stone and loosen the wrap around my wrist. It sticks. My skin’s raw underneath, warm even in the chill. The Chain’s not humming—it’s… aware. Like it’s listening to something in the ground that I can’t hear.

Ashmere breathes differently than Virelle. People here don’t hide their scars. They wear them like proof of survival. No badges. No ranks. Just consequences.

A man walks past with a broken sigil dangling from his belt. Another leans against a beam with path burn across his throat, healed ugly and uneven. No one looks twice at me.

Until one does.

He’s not close. Just… present. Like the air rearranges itself around him. He’s tall, lean, skin stretched taut over bone. Marks all over him—sigils half-burned, overlapping, ruined. One arm hangs crooked. His eyes don’t match. One is milk-white. The other sharp, scanning.

He doesn’t blink when he stops in front of me.

“You’re carrying it,” he says.

I blink. “Sorry—what?”

“Ashenborn.” He says it like a curse. Like it tastes bad in his mouth.

My throat tightens. “I’m not looking for a fight.”

He draws in a long breath through his nose. Not to steady himself. Like he’s dragging up something old.

“Don’t need to be looking,” he mutters. “That thing you’ve got? It finds its own fights.”

I lift my hands, slow. Palms out. “You don’t want this. I don’t want this. Just… walk away.”

His eyes don’t move. “You lit it.”

“What?”

“The glyph. In the square. That wasn’t a sigil. It was a call.”

My stomach turns. “I didn’t know what it was. ”

He laughs, sharp and joyless. “Doesn’t matter. The Chain did.”

He steps forward. I stand. My hands are still open. I really don’t want this.

He snarls something half-mad, half-prayer. “You brought it back. We buried it. And you’re walking around like it won’t eat you.”

He lunges.

I don’t yell. Don’t summon. I barely move.

The Chain does it for me.

Power slams out from my ribs before I think to stop it. It coils like a whip, a bolt, a pulse. No light. Just pressure. The man’s chest glows, then burns—faint, sharp, surgical.

He crumples sideways without a scream.

Dust scatters. A fruit basket crashes behind me. Someone gasps. But no one runs to help.

I stare down at him. He’s breathing, but only just. The mark seared into him is Ashen. Not metaphorical. Not symbolic. It’s real. I’ve seen it before. On the Path Manual’s torn page.

My chest aches. The Chain pulses hard once beneath my ribs, just enough to knock the breath sideways.

Then—

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

“Now that was entertaining,” someone says, voice light, delighted—like he’s just watched a play and wants to congratulate the cast.

I spin toward the sound.

He’s leaning against what used to be a support beam, though it’s mostly splinters now.

His robes are tattered but once-fine, sleeves rolled to the elbow, boots mud-stained.

No weapon. No sigils showing. Just a matchstick spinning across his knuckles and a smile that lands somewhere between pleased and inevitable.

Not cruel.

Worse.

Confident.

Sickeningly confident. The kind of smile you wear when you’ve already read the end of the book and just want to see how the others figure it out.

“Not panic,” he says, stepping off the beam like the ground was waiting for him. “Judgment. Big difference. The Chain didn’t react. It ruled.”

He gestures vaguely at the man still twitching on the ground, as if they’re talking about spilled soup and not someone barely breathing.

“Though I will say, lovely form on that reaction. Precise. Elegant. Rare, honestly.”

I don’t move. The Chain hasn’t settled. Neither have I.

“Who are you?” I ask.

He tilts his head. “Mm. Depends. Would you prefer something respectable, mysterious, or deeply unsettling? I do all three, depending on mood.”

That grin again—sharp at the edges, too polished to be kind.

“But if names help you sleep,” he says, with a mockingly sincere tilt of the head, “you may call me Owen. Owen Serevan, if formality makes it easier to pretend this isn’t strange.”

He bows low, one hand behind his back like this is a court presentation and not a broken alley littered with threat. The motion is fluid. Practiced. The kind of grace that says I’ve done this before, and no one stopped me.

The wind kicks a thread of ash across the ground.

He straightens slowly, expression unchanged. “A pleasure,” he adds—like he means it. Like he’s been waiting for this moment longer than I’ve been alive .

And then, like it’s an afterthought: “When the sky turns black, follow the Chain. If it likes you enough, it’ll bring you to me.”

And just like that, he’s walking away.

Not in a rush. Not looking back.

Like he knows I’ll follow.

Eventually.

Then he’s gone.

I don’t chase him.

Vale steps up beside me, tension still high.

“That the priest from yesterday?”

“I don’t know what that was,” I murmur.

But the Chain does.

And it hasn’t stopped humming since he spoke.

- x -

The floor’s still wet. Not from rain—just the kind of seep that finds its way into stone when buildings forget they used to be homes.

My back’s stiff from where I curled wrong against the broken frame of a door, and my knees ache like I earned it.

I shift slow, careful. Vale doesn’t move, but I know better than to think she’s asleep.

The Chain hums before I move. It wants something. I feel it in the bones of my wrist, in the pull behind my ribs. No hesitation. Just a quiet kind of urgency, like it’s already chosen a direction and expects me to follow.

Outside, the city folds in on itself. Fog curls low across stone and ash-choked gutters.

Alleyways look different than they did hours ago.

Narrower. Meaner. Ashmere has moods, and this one’s lean and restless.

I let the Chain lead—one tug east, another down a stair I swear didn’t exist yesterday, then a sharp pull just beneath my ribs when I pass a crumbling wall scratched with something older than ink.

My spine itches. My palms sweat. I keep walking.

The Chain never drags. It beckons. And I follow—right to the mouth of a half-collapsed corridor that leans inward like it’s waiting to eat someone. No glyph on the arch. Just a charred indent in the stone, like something used to be there. Something that got burned off, but not quite gone.

It’s colder inside. The kind of cold that gets into your fingertips.

I step quietly, but not quietly enough to cover the scrape of ash beneath my boots.

There’s no light, except the sharp flare of a match rasping to life.

The flame catches low, casting a flickering orange halo around the edges of a ruined column.

Then—his voice, casual and far too pleased with itself, drifts out of the dark like we’ve interrupted his afternoon nap.

“I was beginning to think you’d gotten lost. Or distracted. Or eaten. Honestly, I had a whole theory about wild magic causing short-term directional memory loss—very tragic, very poetic.”

A pause.

“But no. Here you are. Intact. Mostly. Hm.”

Owen Serevan is seated like the place was built for him—a cracked column doubling as a throne, tattered robes doing a poor job pretending they’re still priestly.

A small lantern orb hovers near his shoulder, casting light in ways that make it hard to tell where the shadows end and he begins.

He’s rolling a matchstick between his fingers, lazy, precise, like time owes him interest and he’s just waiting for the moment it catches fire.

“I didn’t think you’d actually follow the call,” he says, like it’s a punchline to a joke I didn’t hear. “Points for curiosity. None for subtlety. ”

I don’t respond right away. The Chain is too loud. Not in volume—just presence. Like it’s pressing against the back of my teeth, daring me to open my mouth.

Owen doesn’t seem to mind silence. He stands, easy and slow. His feet don’t make a sound. The kind of movement that makes you forget to reach for a weapon, because you don’t realize you need one until it’s too late.

He lifts a hand like he’s gesturing to a half-forgotten painting.

“Answers. Of course. That’s usually the bit where people start shouting or crying or threatening to stab me. Sometimes all three. Very messy.”

He strolls forward, matchstick spinning between his fingers like it has nowhere better to be. His eyes drift to the Chain wrapped quiet at my wrist, and he studies it like it’s a scar he remembers putting there.

“But you’re different. You’re still pretending you have questions.”

His smile lands—clean, bright, and sharp at the edges.

“You already know what it does. You just haven’t admitted it to yourself yet.”

The match spins once more. He catches it flat, like it told him something he already knew.

“The Chain doesn’t comfort. Doesn’t warn. It recognizes. And when it does…”

He flicks his fingers toward a scorch mark on the far wall.

“Well. Things tend to stop being things.”

I don’t speak. Can’t.

Then he says—too casually, like we’re still making small talk: