Page 55 of Stormvein

For him. For us.

For whatever we’re becoming.

Chapter Thirteen

SACHA

To act without understanding is dangerous. To wait too long is worse.

Sayings of the Earthvein Sages

I am dissolving.

The cold begins in my extremities and spreads inward with each faltering heartbeat. My blood congeals in my veins, turning sluggish and thick. Even the fever that’s been burning through me for days has surrendered to this advancing freeze. My body no longer has the strength to fight its own destruction.

The pain has faded. It hasn’t gone, but it’s distant. More like a memory rather than a reality. The wound in my side no longer throbs with each pulse. The Authority’s brands no longer burn. The flayed skin covering my body no longer pulls with each shallow breath I fight to take.

Instead … numbness.

Beautiful, terrible numbness making its way toward my heart. The heart that skips beats, fights to recover, then skips again.

My lungs can’t draw in enough air, and each inhale takes in less than the last. The spaces between breaths grow longer. Death approaches with patient inevitability, a shadow darker than any I’ve ever commanded.

But I’m not afraid of dying.

After decades imprisoned, after days of torture, death will be a release. Avictory. They failed to break my mind. They failed to make me beg for mercy despite everything they did—the symbol of the Authority burned into my flesh, the whip that laid my back open to the bone, Sereven’s face as he watched me suffer.

In death, I win. A final triumph they can’t take from me.

Then something changes.

There’s movement beside me. Something settles alongside my failing body. Heat presses against my side, startling after days of cold. The feeling is almost unbearable. A violent contrast to the numbness that has been claiming me minute by minute, second by second. My nerves, already retreating into death’s embrace, blaze into sudden, painful life.

A weight rests across my chest, somehow finding the unmarked spaces between the wounds that map it. Warm air brushes my neck—regular breath, alive in ways I’m rapidly ceasing to be. The rhythm of it pulls at something buried deep inside me, refusing to let go, refusing to let me slip away.

“I’m here.”

Ellie’s voice penetrates the void closing around me. Two simple words that somehow reach beyond physical sensation, beyond failing organs, becoming more essential than surrendering to the inevitable. It burrows into the part of me that fought against the binding in the tower. The part that refuses to give in.

“I’ve got you.”

Her body aligns with mine, warmth bleeding into cold. Where we touch, sensations return, as if her presence itselfdefies death. The numbness retreats where fingers brush mine. The ice in my chest thaws where a palm rests above my faltering heart.

“Take it back.”

The words vibrate against my throat, carrying a meaning I can barely grasp through death’s approaching fog.

Take what back?

There’s nothing left to reclaim. The crystal tore my shadows apart at River Crossing. I can still feel the moment when Sereven raised it high, the blue light cutting into me like knives, severing the connection that had been with me since childhood. The restraints at my wrists maintain that separation, keeping empty what should be filled with power and purpose.

And yet …

Heat radiates from her skin to mine, following pathways I thought destroyed forever. The restraints at my wrists turn heavy and cold against my flesh. A bone-deep chill moves up my arms from the metal bands, as though they’re trying to suck away the warmth spreading through my body in a desperate resistance.

The restraint on my right wrist feels different. It tightens, then loosens, then tightens again. The cold intensifies to burning, then stops.

There’s one final flash of pain as it contracts around my wrist so tight it almost crushes bone to dust, like something in the restraint is desperately clawing at my insides, and then it shatters. The weight falls away. The pressure that’s been constant since they locked in place vanishes.