Page 30 of Steeling Light (Shadowed Debts #3)

Rhion Rahn was a warrior. He was a Prince. He was loved by the soldiers and generals under him. He was many, many things, but there was one part very few people ever truly understood.

He was an enchanter. He had learned to infuse objects with power. His father had forced him to become a warrior. He had forced him to train with the sword and with formations. He had forced him to become a leader and the commander of the Steel army.

But Rhion had chosen to hone his skills with enchanting, and that made all the difference.

It was something his father was never particularly skilled at, and he could embrace it without comparing himself to anyone.

He could be a scholar, exploring his own path.

He could be an innovator with no one to judge his experiments. He could be himself.

That freedom drove him. He surpassed every teacher he ever had. He brought the enchanting discipline to new heights, though few of the scholars truly understood how he did the things he had done.

When Gethin gave his son the order to find the relics of the Great Houses, he’d been working on something unheard of: enchanting steel. Only one being had ever successfully done this. Sidon the Strong. The creator of the Steel Gauntlet.

On this day, Rhion didn’t enchant steel, though.

As he sat in his workshop, he held a piece of hematite.

Silvery gray stone with lines of blood-red running through it.

He knew hematite was rarely used in enchanting work because of the iron it was made of.

It was not quite steel, so it could be worked, but it was a difficult medium, to say the least.

Rhion was not daunted by the task. He held the spellstone beside the burin, a hair-thin piece of silver that is used to draw power from one of the tiny beads. He could feel the power of the undine inside it. It yearned to touch his emotions, to feed on them as the undines do.

Without hesitation, he gave the power what it wanted—a piece of him, a fragment of his emotions that he would never get back. He focused on the kiss in the Moonlit Pools, bringing every piece of the memory to the surface of his mind in sharp detail, and he fed it to the power.

But there was no undine to consume it. The power could not grow, could not feed on it, could not change the memory and all the emotions surrounding it. Instead, it encircled it, desperate to be near such a potent set of emotions.

It was his most powerful memory, and now it is gone.

Everything has a price, and the price for this particular piece of enchanting was the happiest moment in his life.

He couldn’t dwell on the loss, though, for if he lost concentration for even a moment, the price would be paid, while the enchantment would fail.

With the burin, he drew the essence of the undine to the hematite. The iron tried to siphon off the power, but Rhion quickly gave a stabilizing command, forcing the iron to ignore the undine’s essence and the emotions that the essence was holding so tightly.

These are all things that many enchanters could have done, but Rhion is no typical enchanter. The power of Sidon flows through his veins, and using the burin as an extension of himself, he followed the memory and power into the hematite.

And he shifted it. For the briefest of moments, he was part of that stone.

And he felt all those emotions and experienced his happiest moment one more time.

A tear threatened to run down his cheek as he said goodbye to the memory forever.

Then he sealed the piece of hematite, hiding the emotion, memory, and power inside it.

Then it was done. He looked down at the stone that he had collected so many years ago, a treasure he’d held dear. Even though he’d given up the happiest moment of his life to create this, he smiled because it was exactly what he set out to make.

It was a sacrifice that he’d make a million times over. Not to save the world. Not to become more powerful. Not even to save a life.

But to be the mirror that will let someone see how wonderful she truly is.