Page 1 of Stormvein (The Veinbound Trilogy #2)

Chapter One

ELLIE

The world remakes itself around survivors. Not all survive the remaking.

Reflections on Captivity—Sacha Torran’s Journals

The storm tears through me. Not around me, or over me, but straight through my chest, nerve-deep and breath stealing. It’s peeling me open from the inside, an extension of my skin. My grief. My rage.

Each lightning strike doesn’t just hit the earth, it breaks it.

Shattering the sky and scorching the ground until the surrounding trees are blackened and smoking.

Wind screams across the hilltop, ripping shrubbery loose, while rain hammers down in sheets so thick I can’t tell where the sky ends and the ground begins.

Water slices cold across the backs of my hands, steam rising where it touches the heat of my skin. I’m surrounded by motion and smoke and light. I can taste metal on my tongue, and static burns the back of my throat.

The mud beneath my knees sucks at my body, slick and cold, grounding only in how hard it wants to pull me under, as if the earth itself is trying to claim what’s left of me.

There is no separation between me and the storm anymore. It lives inside me. It moves through my lungs instead of breath, pulses through my veins instead of blood, and screams from my throat instead of my voice.

Mira and Mishak are on their knees on either side of me, their faces twisted with terror and awe as they stare at me. The expression in their eyes is the same as when they saw him returned from the tower.

Him. I can’t say his name. I won’t .

They don’t see a girl who’s lost everything, but a myth whose rise they’re witnessing in real time.

My vision blurs at the edges, silver-white bleeding into everything I see. The Authority uniform I’m still wearing clings to my skin, the fabric rough with disgust and soaked through with memory.

Every thread, every seam is a mockery of what I’ve lost.

A reminder of what they’ve taken from me.

How completely everything has broken.

My skin feels paper thin, power threading through nerves that were never meant to hold it. Veins holding silver, storm, and violence.

Every breath smells like ozone and tastes like blood. There’s a high-pitched hum vibrating through my bones. The air around me crackles and distorts, warping my perception of distances and shapes.

And still, they kneel and watch. Waiting.

I don’t know what they see, what they think I am—weapon, omen, salvation, destruction—but I know what I am not.

I’m not what they want. I’m not what they need. I’m all that is left.

A hollow space where he should be standing. Where he should be breathing. Where he should be living.

He was the storm’s anchor. I’m just the backlash.

“From the ashes of shadow …” Mira’s voice cuts through the noise, and my head snaps toward her. “The storm shall rise.”

Blood trickles in thin, crimson lines from her temple as she struggles to stay upright, her eyes wide and fixed on me, not the battlefield.

On the other side of me, Mishak completes the phrase. “When shadows lengthen and dawn falters, the Vein will flow once more.”

They bow their heads.

“Where shadow leads, storm will follow.” They speak the final line together.

The words cut deeper than the power tearing through me, from the pain threatening to shut me down. They’re reciting prophecy when all I want is to scream until there’s nothing left inside. Until it drowns out the memory of Sacha being unmade before my eyes.

Until it rips his name from my bones.

My fingertips burn as metallic light cracks through my skin, spilling into lines that race their way across the backs of my hands.

The shadows of Sacha’s familiar, the last piece of him that reached me, twist into the brilliance, curling through it, merging with the silver in ways that feel both wrong and inevitable.

Two powers never meant to coexist, forced together in my body.

I am being unmade with each ragged breath, remade with each thundering heartbeat.

I throw my head back, a raw, animal sound tearing from my throat.

Not quite a scream, not quite a sob, but the sound of something coming apart.

The storm answers my cry, lightning splitting the sky, hitting the earth in jagged lines, each bolt closer to the few Authority soldiers still standing below.

Movement on the ground attracts my attention, and I focus on the splash of crimson at the bottom of the hill.

The remaining soldiers are regrouping around Sereven, the man who took everything from me in a single moment.

Even from this distance, I can see his face, twisted in fury.

He lifts the crystal again, and its unnatural blue light pulses outward, tracking the energy trying to take me over.

“They killed him.” The words fall from my lips like stones into the abyss opening inside me. “They killed him, and now he’s gone.”

The man who taught me how to live in this world. The man whose touch reached through everything I was and woke something new.

Mira lifts her head slowly, her eyes meeting mine. Her lips move, forming a word. A whisper . But somehow it carries through the howling wind like a death knell. A christening. A prophecy fulfilled.

“Stormvein.”

It isn’t just a name. It lands too deep for that. It changes how I breathe. It cuts a space inside me and marks me from within.

Written in lightning. Anchored in grief. Claimed by fury.

The Authority has taken Sacha from me. They have stolen the future we might have had together. For that alone, they will pay. Their blood for his. Their screams for mine.

I lift my hands to the sky, and the storm answers my call.

Lightning forms a blinding bridge between heaven and earth.

Between the girl who fell through worlds and the woman standing here now.

I try to shape it, aim it at the men below.

But the force flowing through me in chaotic waves doesn’t obey my demands.

It flares painfully bright, then dims without warning, leaving me gasping and disoriented. The storm above mimics this instability, lightning striking wild and wide, the pattern breaking down.

“My Lord …” Mishak says, uncertainty replacing reverence. He rises halfway, hand outstretched. But he doesn’t touch me. His hand hovers, caught between duty and fear.

The title strikes harder than the lightning.

It doesn’t belong to me.

It belongs to him .

Below us, the Authority soldiers begin advancing up the hill, their red uniforms stark against the mud.

Sereven walks in the center of them, holding the crystal high above his head.

That awful blue glow pulses with sickening regularity.

The same light that tore Sacha’s shadows apart.

That erased him before our eyes while I could do nothing but watch.

“We need to get her out of here.” Mira pushes to her feet.

I try to stand, to prove I’m still capable of moving on my own, but my body fails me. My legs buckle. The sky lurches. The ground tilts sideways.

“Easy.” Mira moves closer, despite her apparent fear. Her hand reaches for my arm, but doesn’t make contact. “Your power is new. Unstable.”

The light flowing through me flickers erratically. Pain follows each new surge, burning, then freezing, then back to burning. My nerves can’t keep up, my body slowly falling into shock, and I can do nothing to stop it.

“We have to move away from here.” Mishak’s gaze is fixed on the approaching soldiers, his hand dropping to rest on his blade. “They’re not retreating, and we won’t survive facing them.”

I try to focus on the storm again, willing the lightning to strike the advancing soldiers the way it did when Sacha was taken. Nothing happens. No spark. No charge. The elements ignore my call, the storm softening into ordinary rainfall, mocking my attempt to command it.

“I can’t—” The power surges again, a violent arc that burns like fire up my spine, and I collapse forward, palms sinking into the mud. “I can’t control it.” The words come out between gasps.

What good is this ability if I can’t use it to stop this? To change any of it?

“She’s still changing.” Mira’s voice cuts through the rain, sharpened now with urgency.

She takes a breath, and her hand moves those final inches to grasp my arm.

She flinches as sparks of energy race up her fingers, but to her credit, she doesn’t let go.

“We need to get her to safety. If they capture her now?—”

She doesn’t need to finish the sentence. I know what the Authority does to those with power. I saw what they did to Sacha. How they trapped him for half his life. I witnessed how they used that crystal to tear him apart.

Another wave of grief threatens to choke me, but before it can overwhelm me, a soft sound draws my attention—part growl, part purr.

I turn my head to find the mist stalker has shifted closer, its elongated body tense, moonlight-colored fur rippling over powerful muscles.

Its eyes, amber ringed with silver, lock on mine with unnerving focus, and full of intelligence.

It’s solid, physical, and real . Unlike Mira and Mishak, it doesn’t seem to fear what is happening to me. It doesn’t step back. It just watches me.

“Where did that come from?” Mishak reaches for his weapon.

“It’s with me,” I tell him through gritted teeth as another wave of energy floods through my veins, hard enough to drive the breath from my lungs.

“It arrived with the storm,” Mira says. “When Lord Torran fell, and his raven—” She presses her lips together.

The creature shifts its weight beside me, and its head turns to fix its gaze on the soldiers coming closer to the base of the hill. Tension ripples down its spine, muscles bunching beneath its skin. I’m almost positive it’s waiting for something. Waiting for me to do something.