Page 91 of Shifting Hearts

EIGHT

Brannan

T he air shifted before they arrived. One moment, the cathedral still held the quiet aftermath of battle — of love, of survival, of all the things we weren’t saying.

The dust hung in the air like smoke that refused to rise.

Candle stubs smouldered in pools of wax, sending up thin spirals of smoke that curled around the broken pillars.

The echoes of our own voices, our own heartbeat, lingered against the stone, ghostly and soft.

The next, it was choked with shadow. Cold swept through like a second heartbeat, heavy and unnatural, curling around the edges of my skin and making my teeth chatter.

The floor beneath me darkened, turning slick, as though blood had soaked through from some deeper realm.

Old blood. Old magic. The cathedral itself seemed to inhale, and the shadows deepened, growing denser with every heartbeat.

I felt them before I saw them — twin weights in the Weave.

Pressure built behind my eyes and in my chest, it felt like my skull was about to crack open.

Monarchs of something older than kingdoms, older than oaths, older than memory, came into focus, as they stepped through the broken archway like dust made flesh.

The Queen of Blooms and Decay and the King of Ash and Bone.

I’d never met them before, but even still I knew them, clear as I knew my own name.

She was clothed in the colour of pomegranates—spring’s fruit ripened to shadow, each seed a promise of both life and death.

It was the garb of a queen who reigned where blossoms withered, where the first green shoots pressed against the bones of winter.

Her skin shimmering like volcanic glass, her features shifted just enough to make your brain itch trying to define them.

Around her neck, a necklace of teeth and thread — not the dreambone, not exactly, but something crueller.

The remains of promises devoured. Her eyes burned, twin moons eclipsed by shadow, and when she looked at you, it felt like your bones were being counted, judged, weighed.

He walked beside her in silence. Antlers curled from his brow like twisted branches slick with hoarfrost. His face was a ruin, carved with cracks that leaked thin, silver light.

Where his shadow fell, the moss shrivelled, the stone cracked, the air seemed to pull inward.

Time itself recoiled from him, and the cathedral seemed to hum in recognition, in fear.

And still — still — the cathedral remembered breath and fire and want. The magic we’d summoned with our bodies was fading, but not yet gone. It shivered under my skin, not ready to die, whispering secrets I no longer trusted.

The Queen stopped ten paces from us and raised her hand.

Eris gasped, a sharp sound torn from her ribs.

Her spine bent forward as if struck, and I saw it — the tether, invisible but unmistakable, pulled taut from her heart to the Queen’s palm.

Her magic flared in panic, a thing half-wild, splintered, and volatile.

Sparks of light, like shattered stars, flickered across the floor around her.

“You broke the terms,” the Queen said, her voice like bells rung for a funeral, echoing through the cathedral with unnatural resonance. “The oath was blood-sworn. You owe us his life.”

The King’s empty gaze found mine, hollow and burning. “Or your soul.”

I stepped between them without thinking, planting myself between Eris and their reach.

“Take me, then.”

Behind me, I heard her choke on a sound — protest, rage, heartbreak. I didn’t turn around. I couldn’t.

The Queen tilted her head, mock-curious. “Such gallantry. But martyrdom is not payment. It is only failure dressed in poetry.”

The tether snapped tighter. Eris cried out again, collapsing to her knees. Magic flared around her like a solar flare — too much, too fast, trying to defend her and being turned inward. Sparks of light and shards of shadow raced along the floor, bouncing off broken pews and scattered stone.

I felt helpless. Furious. My own magic, dulled for years, surged awake like a living, breathing thing, screaming against the old laws of restraint.

“Stop,” I snarled, voice cracking with something raw.

Something in me broke open. Not like a wound — more like a lock turned from the inside.

My thread twisted sharply, violently — the one the Wyrd had gifted me at birth, the one I’d kept hidden since I cut it once before.

It burned now, molten and blinding, dragging me into magic I no longer trusted, into power I had feared for the longest time, but I reached for it anyway.

The power that answered wasn’t soft or golden. It was severance. Cold and sharp and final. Not prophecy. Nor protection. A blade.

And I saw the truth of it — the threads binding Eris to them. Thin as spider silk, soaked in blood. Hooks dug into her soul, deeper than any charm or curse. The oath wasn’t just magic. It was ownership. A brand pressed to the marrow. And she was breaking under it.

The King struck first. He didn’t move, he didn’t have to. His magic came like frost, sudden and invasive. The cathedral iced over, stone crackling under the pressure of rot, ice creeping along the shattered floor and climbing up the walls, the smell of iron sharp in my nose.

I barely dodged, flinging a sliver of severance across the room. The spell cleaved the air, cracking the Weave itself where it passed. My body screamed with the cost of it. My thread frayed further, burning bright at both ends, a living thing threatening to consume me.

And still — I didn’t stop.

Eris rose to her feet like a revenant. Swaying.

Bleeding. Radiant with fury and resolve.

Her hair stuck to her cheeks in wet strands, ash dusting her shoulders.

She met my eyes — wild, desperate, determined — and dropped to her knees beside the scattered teeth.

The fragments of her broken necklace littered the cathedral, glinting with memory.

I saw her hand shake as she sifted through the dust and shards. Then she found it.

One molar.

Not crushed. Not lost. Blackened. Jagged. Blood already smeared across its root. A curse in waiting.

She didn’t look back. She stood — then ran.

The Queen raised her hand too late. Eris drove the tooth into the Queen’s chest with a cry of rage and grief and defiance.

The scream that followed wasn’t mortal. It cracked the cathedral’s foundation.

Split the stones beneath us. The Queen’s glamour burned away — not like cloth but like a soul unravelling.

Beneath the beauty: bone. Hollow. Endless.

And screaming. Until all that was left was the guise of a bone witch.

The King surged forward, howling. I had nothing left — no spell, no strength, no shield.

But I had the thread, and I severed it again. My hand flared gold-white as I cut through fate itself — through the bond he had tried to claim, through the claim he had laid on Eris’s soul. He collapsed in on himself with a noise like a collapsing cathedral — wind and stone and anguish.

Then they were gone.

Just like that — the tether snapped. The silence was apocalyptic. The cathedral groaned. The magic echoing through the stones trembled, then fell still. My own breath stuttered in my lungs, and then I collapsed.

The edges of the world frayed at the corners, and I felt it — my thread, the one I’d already cut once, now unravelling beyond repair. No guardian’s mark. No Wyrd’s favour. Just frayed, flickering remnants. I was falling away.

Eris caught me before I hit the ground. Her arms locked around me. Her hands were shaking, slick with blood and ash and something else — something more precious than both. Her whole body trembled as she cradled me against her chest, holding me like she could keep the world from tearing me apart.

“Brannan—” Her voice broke. Tears glistened on her eyelids, threatening to fall. “No. No. Stay. You stay.”

I tried to smile. My body ached, not from pain, but from absence.

“It had to break,” I whispered.

“It didn’t have to break you.” Her tears hit my skin. Hot. Furious. Refusing to be meaningless.

My eyelids fluttered. It took too much to keep them open.

“You’re not allowed to go,” she said. “Not after everything. Not after I chose you.”

And she had. I’d seen it in the cathedral — when we’d touched, when the magic had raged between us. She’d chosen me. Over the oath. Over fate. Over death.

And that choice had consequences. Just like mine did.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“For what?”

“For making you love a man already fading.”

She shook her head. “Don’t. You don’t talk like that, don’t you dare.”

But I was already slipping. Part of me unmoored, drifting from the world like fog rising off a lake.

I felt her arms tighten, like she could stitch me back together with touch alone. Her magic surged again — burning, wild — looking for a way to hold me here, only I wasn’t sure it could.

Because the oath hadn’t just been a bond. It had been a cage. A bargain. A price carved into the roots of the world.

And fate always collects.