Page 3 of She Who Was Severed (The Ashen Chain Trilogy #1)

The Severing Chamber lies beneath the Grove. Buried under Selvarra’s golden bones. The Grove sits at the heart of Virelle—the capital city carved into Selvarra’s cliffs, gilded in lies and templelight. They built the chamber beneath it like a secret no one wanted to bury too deep.

You don’t walk to it. You descend. Step by step, into quiet so thick it feels deliberate. There are no torches here. No glowing stones or firelight. The air itself glows—faintly, sickly, like something once sacred was drained and forced to keep illuminating the shame it couldn’t stop.

I count the steps. Not because it helps, but because it keeps me from noticing the way the priest’s fingers tighten around my elbow like I might bolt.

Like I haven’t already failed too hard and too publicly to run.

He doesn’t speak to me. None of them do.

Not since the altar. Not since the Bonding failed.

I’m a form to be completed. A danger to be resolved.

When we reach the bottom, the room opens around me like a mouth. Smooth stone walls, curved inward. No edges. No corners. No escape.

At the center is the Severing table. That’s what they call it. A table. As if it’s for study or discussion. It’s a slab of iron-bound wood scarred with too many names no one dares speak. Straps hang loose at the sides, softened by age and use. Everything in this room is polished. Maintained. Ready.

They do not tell me to lie down. They just wait.

So I do.

Because I refuse to scream when they make me. I will not give them a thing they can use to say she was weak .

The Severed don’t get tombstones. They get silence. Most don’t wake up. Those who do... well. They learn how fast the world forgets their name.

The silk binds my wrists to the cold of the table. My ankles next. Then the cord for my throat—not to choke. Just to hold still. To keep me steady while they cleanse me . That’s the word they use. Cleansing. As if magic is filth and Severed are rot that needs scraping.

They press the first sigil to my skin and it burns. Not flame. Something deeper. Something like truth being branded over bone. My spine arches. My teeth crack together. My voice doesn’t break—but the noise I make isn’t human. It’s something scraped raw from the space between breath and scream.

I see nothing. But I feel everything.

They are pulling at something inside me. Not power. Not essence. Just self . Memory. Shape. The connective tissue that tells the world: here is Freya. Here is the girl who wanted too much and got nothing.

They try to cut that out.

The pain is not steady. It pulses. It interrogates. It demands: What did you think you were? Who let you hope?

I bite my cheek until I taste blood. I let it drip. I imagine it staining the white-robed priest’s hands and wonder if he’ll scrub it off or wear it back to his temple.

At some point, I stop feeling the straps. My body stops trying to rise. I’m still here, but only just. Floating somewhere just below survival. I am cold from the inside out. Not like ice. Not like winter. Like removal .

Then something else moves.

Not in the room.

In me.

Beneath the scar the sigils have carved, under the empty space where magic was meant to live and die—something shifts. Something that did not come from the paths. Not Flameborn, not Stormbound, not Tidewalker, not Veilmarked, not Stonecalled. Something deeper. Something that waited for this moment.

I feel it curl. Slow. Curious.

And awake .

The priests flinch.

One of them drops the final sigil. The metal clatters to the floor and rings like a funeral bell. The sound does not stop.

They whisper. They don’t look at me anymore. They look at each other. One makes a warding sign in the air. Another stumbles back like distance will fix it.

They unbind me with shaking hands.

I don’t move.

I can’t.

But I’m breathing.

They didn’t expect that.

They leave. All but one.

A priestess in dusk robes. No insignia. No gold. Just gray and shadow. She kneels beside me. Doesn’t speak.

She puts a hand on my forehead, and for the first time since I touched the altar, someone touches me like I might still be human.

“You lived,” she says.

I laugh. Just once. Hoarse and hollow.

“Unfortunately.”

She studies me for a long moment. Her eyes are strange. Pale. Not afraid. Not kind. Just knowing.

“You felt it, didn’t you? The thing that watched.”

I want to ask what she means. But I’m so tired of asking. So I just nod.

She places something in my palm. A glass bead. Dark. Heavy. Too warm.

“If you survive the next three days,” she says, “find the vault below the ash tower. Break the floor. Don’t wait for permission. ”

Then she stands. Fades into the dark.

I sit there a long time.

Breathing.

Burning.

Becoming.

Above me, the world continues without interruption. Another Bonding. Another beast chosen. Another Severing prepared.

They’ll say I’m one of the lucky few. That I was cleansed.

They won’t say something watched them fail.

They won’t say it wanted me empty.

But I will.

Let them pray.

I’m still here.

- x -

The days after the Severing are quieter than death.

No one exiles the Severed in Virelle. They just let the city’s golden courtyards swallow you whole and pretend it’s mercy.

No one tells me where to go. No one tells me to leave, either.

I think they assume I’ll fade on my own, like fog, like shame.

Maybe they’re right. But I’m still here, and the world doesn’t know what to do with me.

Bonded initiates pass me in the inner courtyard, swathed in silk and sanctimony.

Their beasts are always close: a Tidewalker with ocean-braid hair and salt-coiled tattoos leans into her leviathan’s shadow; a Veilmarked boy vanishes mid-step and reappears grinning like secrets.

Stormbound twins dance with lightning like it’s flirtation.

A Flameborn swings a practice sword, arcs of fire snapping off his shoulders with every lunge.

Not Kellen. A different one. Smaller. Less dangerous. Less golden.

They don’t look at me. Not directly. But when they think I’m not watching, they flinch. Like surviving made me contagious.

I pass the training green. My old spot—second row left, just behind the statue of Aros the Boundless—is occupied now. A younger girl kneels where I used to kneel. Her bonded mark is fresh and red. A priest adjusts the drape of her ceremonial sash.

She doesn’t look at me. But she must feel it. That weight. The ghost of the girl who used to belong.

I keep walking.

Kellen finds me. Or maybe I find him. Doesn’t matter.

He’s standing at the edge of the sparring field in his full Flameborn silks, hair pulled back in the Ravellan style now—sharper jaw, tighter collar, heat like a pulse leaking from his skin.

He’s talking to an elder. Listening, really.

That intense way he has of going still when the stakes are high.

I remember how that used to feel when it was turned on me.

He looks up.

And sees me.

The elder keeps speaking. Kellen doesn’t. He watches me like he’s not supposed to. Like it’s habit. Like he’s trying not to mean it.

I hold his gaze. Just long enough to hurt.

Then I turn.

I don’t call, I don’t say his name.

But gods, I want him to say mine.

I sit beneath the arc tree near the edge of the temple walk. It’s a good spot—quiet, shielded, half in shadow. The bonded never linger here. Maybe because it feels like an ending. Maybe because it smells like ash.

A few minutes pass. Then footsteps .

“You’re not supposed to be here,” Kellen says, low.

“I died, remember?” I reply. “No rules apply.”

He doesn’t laugh. Doesn’t leave.

He stands just close enough for his heat to reach me.

“They could still make you leave,” he says.

I turn to look at him. Just once. Just enough to cut. “Then maybe you should stop standing so close.”

His jaw tightens. His fire hums higher. I feel it bloom off him—not like control, but like emotion.

“You think I wanted this?” he asks.

“You didn’t stop it.”

“You think I could have?”

“You looked at me like you almost would.”

That lands. He takes half a step forward. Stops.

I hate how much I want him to keep going.

“Freya…”

“Don’t say my name if it’s not to choose me.”

I turn. I walk.

But his voice follows.

“You felt it. When you touched the altar. Something answered.”

I don’t look back.

“Maybe. But it wasn’t you.”

And I’m gone before he can deny it.

Because he’s right. And I hate him for it.

Because I wanted it to be him. And I hate myself more for that.

I keep walking. The Ash Tower waits. They forgot what waits in the dark. If they wanted a monster, they should’ve left me dead.

They don’t get to act surprised now.

- x -

The tower is half-collapsed, hollowed by fire and left to rot.

They still call it the Ash Tower—because no one wants to name what came after.

It squats just outside Virelle’s southern rise, beyond the last prayer gate—close enough to Virelle to see the spires, far enough to pretend it doesn’t count.

Gray stone, black ribs of once-sacred wood, iron braces eaten by rust and time. It leans like it’s tired of holding up all the history no one wants to remember.

I get why it was left alone. It feels like a wound the land decided not to close.

I wait until nightfall. No one follows. No one watches. The Severed don’t warrant surveillance. We’re ghosts with pulses.

The door doesn’t creak when I push it open. It just exhales.

Inside, it’s colder than outside, but not in a way that comes from wind or shade.

It’s a bone-deep kind of cold, the kind you feel in the teeth behind your heart.

The floor’s cracked tile, worn down to blunt nubs.

There are scorch marks on the ceiling that don’t match any flame I know.

And the air—it hums. Like something here remembers a song but can’t bear to sing it.

I don’t hesitate. I follow the spiral stair down until it ends in a wall of packed stone and dead roots. The instructions weren’t vague. Break the floor. Don’t wait for permission.

The bead the priestess gave me is still in my pocket. I press it to the stone and whisper nothing. Just let it happen .

The wall cracks. The floor splits.

Something sighs below .

I fall the last few feet into the vault.

The air is thicker here. Not just with dust or time. With intent . Like this place was built to be forgotten, not because it held nothing, but because it held too much.

Roots hang from the ceiling, dripping sap that smells wrong. Not rot. Not life. Something else. The walls are etched in clawed script, but none I recognize. The kind of marks made when someone needed to speak but didn’t have the right tools. Or throat.

There’s only one object in the room.

A pedestal. Stone. Cracked.

And on it, a vial.

The glass is thick, banded in iron. The liquid inside looks black. Then gold. Then red. Then something that has no name at all. It moves like it wants out. Like it knows someone finally remembered where it was.

My hands shake.

Not from fear.

From need.

I don’t know what this is. But I know it was never meant for the Chosen. It wasn’t offered. It was hidden. Buried.

I pick it up.

The instant my fingers close around the glass, something inside it pulses. The air snaps. The roots shiver. The blood—because it is blood—flares with a heat that doesn’t burn, just recognizes .

I see flashes. Not memories. Premonitions. Or maybe someone else's dying dreams.

Chains around a burning god.

A city drowned in silence.

A girl with my face, screaming with someone else’s voice.

My knees hit the ground. The vial presses harder into my palm like it wants to sink in. I know I shouldn’t drink it .

But I was never trained to obey the rules of people who erased me.

I uncork it.

The scent is copper, ruin, wildfire, salt. It stings my eyes. I lift it to my lips. I don’t pray. I don’t breathe.

I drink.

The first drop tastes like metal and memory. The second—like every lie I ever swallowed. The third never reaches my throat. It explodes.

Fire. Not outside. Inside.

No—deeper. Not fire... Chains.

They wrap through my spine, thread through my ribs, sink into my lungs. I convulse. I scream. The sound doesn’t echo—it hammers the walls and shakes loose something that was waiting to break.

Visions flood me.

A manticore with eyes like broken suns.

A voice saying my name from inside my own mouth.

A battlefield of bones and burning feathers.

And beneath it all, a whisper:

Link One: Claimed.

I don’t know what it means.

But the moment the whisper stops, the pain does too. Not gone. Just caged. Held.

I’m curled on the stone, gasping. My skin is slick with sweat and blood and something that shimmers wrong in the light. I don’t feel broken. I feel stretched. Like there is more of me now, and it does not fit in the same skin.

My fingers twitch. Something snakes around them. Thin. Silver-black. A chain.

Alive.

I don’t command it. It moves anyway.

Outside the vault, I hear something howl. Not a beast. Not a person.

Something in-between. Something that just noticed a door open.

I don’t stay to listen.

I rise. My knees are shaking. My voice is gone. My hunger is not.

This wasn’t a gift.

It was an inheritance.

And I intend to use it.

Let them whisper about the Severed.

Let them sing songs about beasts and bonds and blessed fire.

I found something older than all of them.

And it found me first.