Page 47 of She Who Was Severed (The Ashen Chain Trilogy #1)
Unlit. Waiting.
Because when she chooses?
It won’t look like rebellion. It won’t sound like a spell.
It’ll burn like inevitability.
“Judgment never died. It just stopped asking permission.”
I flip a coin into the dust. It lands sigil-up.
Of course it does.
Then I vanish into Ashmere like a polite heretic.
- x -
Freya
The training yard isn’t really a yard at all.
It’s a half-buried courtyard wedged between the back wall of a burned chapel and what used to be a butcher’s row.
One side’s open to the sun, but the rest is boxed in by ruin—walls scorched black, the stone beneath them cracked from old explosive glyphs no one ever cleaned up.
There’s still a boot lodged in the rafters from some long-forgotten fight.
Now, though, the space breathes.
Children with soot-lined cheeks hammer rusted nails into barricade planks.
A one-armed smith curses into the wind while reshaping broken spearheads on an open firebrick.
Three ex-priests drag iron scrap into defensive rings while a blind Severed kneels in the dust, weaving tension thread between spikes and pressure stones with fingertips worn shiny from the work.
This is what resistance looks like.
Ugly. Uneven. Alive.
I walk the length of the yard slowly, not speaking. There’s no need. They’re already moving.
Vale’s voice cuts through the din. “Drop your shield again and I’ll use it as your coffin lid, I swear to flame.”
She stomps a line into the dust, boots dragging like she’s marking a grave. Seven fighters stagger into a half-ring around her. One’s limping. Another looks like she might cry.
Then Vale spots me. Grins. Doesn’t stop moving. “She lives! Come take this one—” she jerks her chin toward the blinking girl—“keeps flinching like she’s never seen blood before.”
I raise a brow. “That’s because you keep threatening to make her see her own.”
“I’m nothing if not motivational.”
I don’t stop. Just keep walking.
Someone passes me a chipped waterskin. I drink, then toss it back. A group of teenagers are rigging crossbows from what looks like old stair railings and wire. Their hands are clumsy, but they’re laughing. Half their bolts won’t fire — but half might. And that’s all we’ve got .
I pause near the fire where the smith is working.
His stump is wrapped in black leather, and his good hand moves with brutal grace as he strikes metal into form.
I watch him work for a moment before I crouch and help a girl sort iron nails into length piles.
She doesn’t look up. Just slides the bent ones to the side with silent judgment.
I stay until my knees ache, then stand, stretch, and join the sparring ring.
The woman opposite me is fast. Taller than me by a head, with ash-gray eyes and a broken nose. She doesn’t hold back.
Good.
Her first strike slams into my shoulder—bruising but clean. The next cuts across my ribs. I stagger, correct, step into the third, and manage to deflect it with the flat of my blade.
Around us, others start watching.
I find my rhythm in the fourth pass. Not graceful, but practiced. I drive her back a step, then another. We circle. She goes low—I feint high, then sweep.
She stumbles.
I don’t press the advantage.
Instead, I drop my blade, offer a hand.
She takes it.
“I like you,” she says, winded.
“You nearly cracked my collarbone.”
“Exactly.”
We both laugh.
Someone calls for water. Another curses as a shield strap snaps.
And then I feel it—not in the room, not in my skin, but beneath everything. A faint hum at the base of my spine, curling along the edge of my ribs. The Chain.
It’s not warning .
It’s… present. Not fully awake. Just aware. Like it recognizes the shape of what’s happening here. Like it approves.
I step back out of the ring. My arms ache. My legs feel like lead. Sweat slicks every inch of me, and the cut on my shoulder will need salve by nightfall.
But I’m still standing.
That’s something.
Vale finds me perched on a broken wall near the edge of the yard, bandaging my own wrist with a strip of someone else’s shirt. She drops beside me like a falling branch, all sharp angles and zero grace.
“You know,” she says, swigging from a dented flask, “you’re going to ruin your mystique if you keep getting your ass kicked in public.”
“I thought I didn’t have mystique.”
“Exactly. Which is why it’s so fragile.”
I shake my head, but take the flask anyway. It’s cheap firewine—so watered-down it might be juice—but it tastes like heat and cracked hope.
Across the yard, someone’s hammering a wheel into what looks like a ballista rig. The wheel wobbles, falls off. Three people curse in unison.
“They’re trying,” I murmur.
Vale nods. “Harder than they ever tried for anyone else.”
“That’s not true.”
“It is. And you know it. This place?” She gestures at the yard, the fire, the smoke-streaked sky. “This is Ashmere giving a shit. First time in years.”
“It’s not enough.”
“Never is,” she agrees.
We sit there a while. The sun’s starting to drop, casting the courtyard in long shadows that don’t look entirely natural. The Chain shifts again—not movement exactly, but resonance. The way breath catches when the wind changes.
I whisper, mostly to myself: “Maybe it’ll hold. ”
Vale nudges her shoulder into mine. “That’s the spirit. Bleeding and lying at the same time.”
I laugh. She doesn’t.
Across the yard, someone strikes a hammer too hard, and a metal plate screams against stone. A dog barks. Someone yells about rope tension. Two kids run past, covered in dust and beaming like it’s a game.
I close my eyes for a moment.
This isn’t a fortress. It’s a bruise.
But it’s ours.
And when the thunder comes and the Path-bound descend with their polished armor and blessed weapons, they’ll find this place waiting—scarred, sweating, half-collapsed.
And standing anyway.
They won’t remember our weapons. Just whether we stood.