Page 51 of She Who Was Severed (The Ashen Chain Trilogy #1)

The harness strains. My hands go numb. Doesn’t matter.

We have to close the distance. I have to get to her before the lines collide. Before someone sees her standing alone and decides to silence the girl who speaks too clearly.

My dragon roars once—not loud. Not wild.

Controlled. Precise.

But it burns in the air like a vow.

The first ranks of soldiers raise their shields. The tempo changes. They know something’s coming. Good.

Let them feel it.

Let them wonder what fire tastes like when it’s not merciful.

But my eyes stay locked on her.

I don’t pray. Haven’t in years. Don’t believe in mercy, or myth, or fate.

But I whisper her name like it’s all three.

“Freya…”

The wind almost carries it forward.

The Chain moves.

Not toward me. Just upward—flicking once like a serpent testing the air.

I think, for one impossible second, it felt me coming.

Or maybe she did.

Maybe she knows I’m near, even if I’m not close enough.

Not yet .

The dragon banks, wings angling downward now—fast, too fast. The pressure spikes in my chest and my bones scream as we tilt.

I grit my teeth.

Another thirty seconds. Maybe less.

But the front line is moving too.

And I already know—

I’m not going to reach her in time.

- x -

Freya

The alley narrows behind me like a throat closing.

Blood soaks my left sleeve, but I can’t tell if it’s mine or someone else’s.

Doesn’t matter. I don’t stop. Can’t. The Chain isn’t leading anymore—it’s just bracing.

Holding itself taut inside my ribs like it knows I’ll ask too much from it before this is over.

A bolt cracks against the wall beside me, flinging shards of stone across my shoulder. I stumble, slam my hip into a rusted archway, teeth clenching hard enough to rattle. Pain flares. Dust coats my throat.

But then—heat.

Not fire.

Him.

A streak of flame cleaves the sky overhead, gold threaded with the kind of power only one dragon in Aetherra carries—Kiroth. The wind shifts as the dragon passes, pressure folding down like a hand between my shoulder blades.

I lift my eyes.

Kellen is here.

The breath I’ve been holding punches out of me, ragged and full and too much all at once. The Chain jolts awake—links dragging taut toward the sky like it recognizes him on instinct.

He’s not close enough to reach me.

But he came.

I keep running.

The alley narrows, then drops without warning. My boots catch on a seam in the stone and skid—gravel sliding out from under me—as the path gives way into an open ruin. I lurch forward, one hand thrown out, the other gripping the Chain just to stay upright.

Dust kicks up around me, dry and fine, hanging in the air like ash that never settled. The temperature shifts. The light gets strange—sharp lines slicing through the roof where it’s been torn open to sky. The whole sanctum is cracked open like a chest cavity, ribs of stone bared and broken.

I stagger into the center. The floor is uneven—half-cleared, like someone prepared it but didn’t finish. My arm brushes something. It skitters across the floor.

I look down.

A matchstick. Perfectly placed. Tip angled outward.

The Chain coils once. Not in alarm—recognition.

I crouch slowly. Pick up the match. Feel the weight of a joke I didn’t hear but still understand. “Owen,” I whisper.

Of course it’s him. He’s been here. He prepared this.

I rise. Take one step toward the center platform and feel the shift underfoot.

The stone hums .

Pressure threads up from the floor like a wire pulled tight. The air thickens with intent. I glance down—my boot’s landed on a glyph. One I recognize from the Ash Tower, it’s deeply scored, half-buried.

Then—something shifts.

Not above. Below.

The ground under my boots presses back like I just triggered something. A pulse rolls out from the center, wide and low—not light, not force. Something older. Heavier. A pressure that knows where to go.

The air thickens. My vision blurs at the edges. Not from pain. From recognition. The ruin exhales something it’s been holding for a very long time.

A click—faint, felt more than heard—snaps through the stone.

I stagger back half a step, pulse spiking. Somewhere beneath the floor, something responds. A ring of weight moves through the ruin like the ground itself just woke up.

Whatever this is… it was waiting for me.

The Chain tightens against my spine. Not lashing. Not striking.

Aligning.

Then it begins.

The pressure multiplies. Breath catches in my throat. The Chain tugs at my spine—forward, toward the platform like it’s being drawn back into what it was born for.

My foot crosses the center line.

The ruin responds.

I don’t cast a spell. I don’t say a word. I exist in the right place—and that’s enough.

Then memory shatters out across the battlefield.

A priest clutches his chest mid-step, gasping words that aren’t his. A soldier drops her weapon and stumbles. Someone screams. One by one, the enemy buckles—not from wounds. From weight .

They’re not being attacked.

They’re being mirrored.

Grief, guilt, fury—none of it theirs—all of it mine. My echoes. My reflections. My judgment.

And I stand at the center of it all.

The match in my hand.

Still unlit.

Still waiting.

The chain pulls tighter around my arm, not punishing—protecting.

Like it wants to be sure I don’t step back.

Like I’m part of something bigger, more important now.

Somewhere above, I hear dragonfire ripple against the clouds. But it feels impossibly far away.

Kellen should be closer.

He should have seen this.

Felt it.

The ache behind my ribs sharpens. No time for it. No breath to carry it.

Instead, I stand. Blood dripping down my arm. Chain alive against my skin. The stone behind me still humming.

A room that remembers too much, and a girl who touched it.

And now?

The Chain doesn’t just follow me.

It watches.

- x -

Kellen

I see the pulse before I feel it.

It radiates from the center of Ashmere like a breath held too long finally exhaling. The Chain doesn’t lash into the sky or set the earth on fire. It doesn’t have to. It hums low and wide, like the ground is remembering what it used to be.

And the world flinches.

Stormbound falter in the air. A priest drops his staff in the street and starts screaming. Even Kiroth grunts low in her chest, flaring her wings as if she just flew into something she didn’t see coming.

I tighten my grip on the reins. Focus.

I know what this is.

Freya.

I don’t know what she did, but the air has turned thick with it. Judgment—not as law, but as presence. The kind that stops people from pretending they’re safe.

We bank lower. Ashmere stretches below us, smoke and sun slicing the streets into shards. Soldiers scatter. Defenders dig in. Some are just standing, stunned, like they’ve already lost and haven’t figured out why.

And then—

I see her.

Just for a second.

She stumbles out of a crumbling ruin, bloodied, breathing hard, the Chain coiled around her like it belongs there. Her hand trails the stone like she just woke something that was waiting for her specifically.

My body pulls forward with the instinct to drop.

But I don’t get the chance.

Because Vale is about to die .

She’s pinned at the edge of the western wall—two soldiers closing in fast. Her blades are out, but her left arm’s hanging wrong. Dislocated, maybe worse. She’s smiling—of course she’s smiling—but there’s blood on her teeth and no good way out.

I drop without a thought.

The dragon folds hard. We descend too fast. I brace my knees, hand to harness, breath locked.

The timing is stupid. Reckless.

I do it anyway.

We hit low, scraping the edge of a broken archway. My shoulder tears sideways in the harness. The dragon flares her wings just in time to slow us, but not enough. I slide free mid-air and hit the cobblestones like a thrown weapon—rolled, not broken, but it’s close.

I see Vale’s eyes flick up just as one soldier swings.

I don’t call flame.

I am flame.

It erupts from my chest like a command too old for words. Not wide. Not wild. A blade of heat that cuts clean between Vale and her attacker. The soldier screams—drops his weapon, arm scorched and useless.

The other one charges. I intercept.

Steel meets my shoulder before I can deflect. The edge bites deep.

Pain doesn’t register. Not yet.

I drop him anyway.

Vale curses behind me. “He was mine.”

“You’re welcome,” I mutter.

Then I fall.

Not from impact. From blood loss. From momentum. From trying to be faster than the world again and losing.

My legs give. My knees hit stone.

The dragon lands hard behind me—rattled but whole .

I press one palm to the ground. Keep myself upright by force of will. “Burn them.” I say, and she launches with a roar in her throat.

Then I look up.

Freya is collapsing.

Not in pain. In transformation.

Her hands curl against the dirt. The Chain wraps her chest, her spine, her ribs. Sigils burn under her skin like memory made visible.

She doesn’t cry out.

She just breaks.

And the world lets her.

I try to stand.

The wound in my shoulder pulses wrong.

The dragon shifts behind me, flame venting through her teeth like grief.

Freya glows.

But it’s not light.

It’s judgment.

And gods help us—

it’s just beginning.

- x -

Freya

I feel him fall.

Not with my eyes.

With my ribs.

With the sudden gap behind my lungs where the world usually holds steady.

One second I’m stumbling out of the ruins, breath ragged, the Chain wrapped tight around my wrist. The next, something inside me caves inward.

The fire above goes silent.

I lift my head just in time to see the dragon spiral through smoke—wings stiff, off-kilter. Kellen drops from the saddle like a broken thread. Flame whips sideways. He crashes behind the outer wall. Hard. Final.

I don’t see him rise.

I don’t hear him call my name.

He’s just… gone.

And it unhooks something inside me I didn’t know was tethered.

My legs stop listening.

I collapse to one knee, palm slamming the cracked stone, breath caught behind my tongue like it’s trying to kill me from the inside.

The Chain doesn’t defend me.

It accepts me.

Not as warrior. Not as wielder.

As consequence.

It wraps my chest.

Coils up my back.

Burns cold across the arch of my ribs like it’s sealing something shut.

The sigils spiral outward from my sternum in slow, deliberate rings—silver-black, pulsing deep into the bone, not light but weight.

My mouth opens, but no scream comes.

The world is too quiet for that now.

Link Four doesn’t arrive like power.

It arrives like a reckoning.

The Chain completes its circle .

And the battlefield stops breathing.

No spell. No roar.

Just awareness.

Across the stones, soldiers falter mid-step. One drops his blade and kneels without knowing why. Another backs away from me with his hand on his chest like his heart doesn’t trust him anymore.

Even the Severed are still.

Some of them cry. Some laugh. Some just whisper.

And all of them look at me.

Not like I’m a threat.

Like I’m the answer to a question they didn’t know they’d been asking.

My hands are trembling.

I’m know I’m not in control.

The Chain is.

But it isn’t violent.

It’s clear.

I shift my gaze toward the ridge.

Toward the smoke.

Toward the place where Kellen vanished from the sky like someone ripped a name off my skin.

I need to move.

Need to see him. Touch him. Fix this.

But the Chain won’t let me.

It holds my spine like a commandment. Like it’s still rewriting me while the ink is wet.

I clench my teeth. Not in defiance.

In fear.

Because this isn’t awakening.

It’s exposure.

And I don’t know who I am now that nothing’s hidden .

Link Four doesn’t make me stronger.

It makes me seen.

And now the world doesn’t just know I exist.

It remembers me.

- x -

The silence holds.

I should move. Gods, I need to. My whole body’s screaming for it—lungs caught mid-breath, knees locked, every part of me still anchored to the ground where I broke. Where the link completed.

But I can’t. Not yet.

The Chain isn’t pulling anymore. It’s just… holding. Settled into my bones like it belongs there. Like it always belonged there. The weight hasn’t lessened. It’s just become familiar.

I press my palm to the stone again. Not to command. To confirm I’m still here.

The world doesn’t flinch. But it doesn’t look away either.

Then—slowly—I lift my head.

The battlefield doesn’t cheer.

It waits.

Stone doesn’t remember names. Not really. But it remembers pressure. It remembers what it means to bend without breaking. And right now, the street beneath my knees is holding still like it’s afraid of what happens if it moves before I do.

I don’t rise .

Not yet.

My ribs ache like they’ve been written over. My back feels cored out and rewired. My hands won’t stop shaking.

But everyone is watching.

I know it without turning.

A Severed man kneels behind a rusted shield two paces to my right. Doesn’t speak. Just stays there, head bowed, like if he says anything too loud the moment might unmake itself.

The soldier I saw drop his weapon is still standing ten paces out, barefoot now. His eyes locked on mine. His blade on the ground where he left it.

He doesn’t move.

Neither do I.

Somewhere, someone whispers, “Mother of Chains.”

I don’t flinch.

Because it doesn’t sound like mockery.

It sounds like truth.

The Chain shifts slightly. Not to bind. Just to remind me it’s there. Like a hand resting on the curve of my ribs—not gripping. Just present.

The link is complete.

But the cost hasn’t finished settling.

I breathe, shallow and slow, and finally push myself upright.

My knees argue. My back burns. The Chain holds me in place like scaffolding—like I’d collapse without it and it knows it.

I turn toward the ridge.

The smoke is thinning. The fire’s cooled. But I don’t see Kellen.

Not yet.

I step once.

The soldier doesn’t stop me.

I step again.

The stone doesn’t shift .

I’m not asking for permission.

And no one is giving it.

But the world makes space anyway.