Page 17 of Stormvein (The Veinbound Trilogy #2)

“The infection is too advanced,” he says to someone I can’t see. “He needs treatment or he’ll die before he gets close to the purging chamber.”

“Sereven’s orders were clear. Alive, but suffering.”

“Then I need to intervene. Just enough to keep him breathing. The fever is approaching lethal levels.”

The cage opens and hands reach in. I couldn’t resist if I wanted to. I can’t even lift my head to see what they’re doing. They drag me forward, the spikes sending fire through the wounds on my back, stopping so my legs are hanging out, and they can access the festering sword wound in my side.

The healer cuts away bandages, exposing the infection to air. The stench is immediate. Putrid, sickly sweet. The mark of dying flesh.

“Hold him,” the healer orders, though the command is unnecessary. I don’t have the strength to fight.

Something stings the wound, burning liquid poured directly into infected flesh. My body convulses, a weak spasm that’s all my depleted strength can manage.

“This won’t heal it. It will slow the blood poisoning long enough to keep him alive until Blackvault. He has another day or two at most.” He applies a poultice of herbs, their sharp scent cutting through the miasma of infection. The guard stops him when he prepares fresh bandages.

“Leave it.”

The healer shakes his head but doesn’t argue.

“Pain is part of his sentence.”

They push me back into the cage, the impact sending fresh agony through every injury. The wagon lurches forward, and each jolt strikes a new faultline in my body.

The next settlement we pass brings the most dangerous reaction of all. Greenvale sits in a valley where Authority presence has always been light, where memories run deeper, and fear hasn’t yet silenced every voice.

As the convoy enters the village square, the crowd that waits is silent. There are no cheers. No thrown stones. Just a heavy quiet that makes the guards nervous, their hands drifting closer to weapons.

A woman pushes to the front, her walking stick tapping against the cobblestones. She’s old enough to remember the war, old enough to have lived through the early purges. When our eyes meet through the bars, recognition passes across her face.

“ Meshavan ,” she whispers, so quietly only I hear it. The old title, the old respect, spoken like a prayer.

The younger woman with her tugs at her arm, fear bright in her eyes. “Grandmother, please?—”

But the old woman doesn’t retreat. Instead, she raises her voice. “This is not justice. This is savagery.” The words cut through the silence.

Her words have been chosen with care. She’s not defending a Veinblood in her phrasing, though. She’s speaking against cruelty itself, giving others permission to question what they see.

Several villagers nod in agreement. A blacksmith, recognizable by the apron and burn marks on his burly arms, steps forward. “I’ve seen what real monsters do,” he says loudly. “This isn’t justice. This is revenge.”

Other voices join in.

“No one deserves this treatment.”

“Where’s the mercy in torturing a dying man?”

“What kind of order requires such cruelty?”

The convoy captain’s face reddens, but he’s trapped. These people aren’t defending the Shadowvein Lord directly, they’re questioning the Authority’s methods. Attacking them would only prove the point they’re making.

“Move out!” he barks instead. “Now!”

As the convoy moves through the square, I see tears on more than one face. One man raises his hand in a traditional gesture of farewell to a fallen warrior. Others see it and do the same, the gesture following us out of the village.

The mountains grow closer, looming over the convoy like silent sentinels. The air is thinner, colder. Breathing is hard, with broken ribs and fever burning through my lungs.

Rain falls when afternoon fades toward evening, cold drops sliding through the cage’s bars, adding bone-deep cold to the ledger of suffering. I have no shelter. No relief. Just more misery layered atop existing torment.

The road steepens, climbing into the foothills of the southern range. The convoy moves more slowly now, wagons struggling against the incline. Each time a wheel catches on rocks, it sends fresh spasms of pain through me.

We make camp in a sheltered valley, the convoy forming a defensive circle with the cage wagon at its center. Guards establish their watch rotations, and torches are lit.

Around midnight, movement in the shadows catches my attention.

A figure creeps between the wagons, moving with the careful steps of someone trying not to wake the dead.

One of the villagers from Greenvale, I realize, when he gets closer.

The blacksmith who spoke out in the square.

He must have followed the convoy into the mountains.

He reaches my cage and pulls a small bundle from beneath his coat. Bread. A skin of water. Clean cloth that might serve as bandages.

“Vareth’el,” he whispers. “I can’t stand to see this. You saved my family during the early purges, thirty-five years past. My father told me. You helped hide the children when the Authority first came for the Veinbloods.”

His hands shake as he pushes the items through the bars. “We thought you were dead. We mourned you. But seeing you like this …” His voice breaks. “This isn’t justice for crimes committed. This is revenge for hope.”

I try to speak, to warn him, but only a croak emerges from my damaged throat. The food is beyond my ability to eat anyway, my mouth is too swollen, my throat is too raw. But the gesture itself is a balm to wounds deeper than flesh.

“No one should die like this,” he continues. “No one who fought for us should?—”

A guard’s shout shatters the night. “Intruder!”

Torches flare as soldiers converge on my cage. The blacksmith tries to run, but he stumbles, falling heavily to his knees as the soldiers surround him.

The convoy captain emerges from his tent, fully armed despite the late hour. His face hardens when he recognizes the man.

“You!” he snarls. “The troublemaker from the square.”

The blacksmith struggles to his feet. “I did nothing wrong.”

“Attempting to aid this enemy of the Authority is treason.” The captain’s voice is cold.

“He’s no enemy.” The blacksmith’s voice carries clearly across the camp. “He fought for us. Bled for us. He was once?—”

The sword falls before he can finish the sentence. The blacksmith’s words are cut short along with his life, blood spattering the ground beside my cage in dark pools that reflect the torchlight like accusation.

His eyes, still open in death, stare toward my cage. His face burns its way into my brain. Another loss to be added to the others. Another death I carry responsibility for. Another payment to be extracted from Sereven’s flesh.

“Dispose of the body,” the captain orders. “And double the watch. Anyone else who approaches dies.”

They drag the corpse away, leaving dark stains on the ground that remind me of the cost of compassion. Another life lost because someone saw suffering and couldn’t ignore it.

Quiet falls across the camp again, while I face another night without sleep. Another cycle of guards ensuring I remain conscious through every moment of suffering.

The fever ebbs slightly, bringing unwanted clarity. I would welcome delirium now. Anything to separate my mind from the relentless assault on my body.

Instead, I drift in a state of hyper awareness, each pain distinct and brilliant in its intensity.

The broken ribs that make every breath an exercise in agony.

The dislocated shoulder, swollen and throbbing.

The brands on my chest and cheek, weeping clear fluid that stings when it meets open wounds.

The whip marks. The missing fingernails. The burns. The bruises.

A symphony of suffering played across the instrument of my body.

Morning comes again. How many days now? Two? Three? Four?

The fever makes time slippery, unreliable. We’re deep in the mountains, following roads few travelers use. The convoy moves with increased caution, aware of the tactical disadvantage of these narrow passages.

“Blackvault by nightfall,” someone says.

Relief wars with dread at the words. Relief that this journey might finally be at its end. Dread at what awaits me at its conclusion. The purging chamber. Sereven watching as they strip away what remains of my power … of me.

Fever brings visions, more vivid than the reality surrounding me. The tower’s silver walls dissolving like mist under Ellie’s touch. Her face when she first found me there. Suspicion giving way to determination.

I see her again at Ashenvale, the way she looked back at me before we separated.

That moment of understanding passing between us, trust still new and fragile.

Then the ambush. The crystal tearing through my shadows, fracturing my power.

My familiar circling me, refusing to leave even as Authority soldiers closed in.

“Go,” I’d commanded it with the last of my strength. “Find her.”

Did it reach her? Did my familiar take my ring and find Ellie before the Authority found me?

The questions surface through delirium, then sink again beneath waves of pain.

Even now, separated by distance and fate, she remains the one fixed point in my thoughts. The one who saw me at my most manipulative and still chose to remain. The one who broke chains that had bound me for twenty-seven years.

If anyone can survive what is coming, it will be her.

The wagon slows. Even through fever and the limitation of my one functioning eye, I see sheer cliff walls rising on either side of the narrowing path.

Glassfall Gap.

Named for the crystalline formations embedded in the stone that catch the light like shattered glass.

“Single file through the narrow sections. Keep alert.”

The wagon enters the gap, wheels grinding against stone as the path constricts. My cage rattles with every jolt. The pain is a constant companion.

Through the bars, I watch the cliff walls rise higher and higher, hemming us in. The shadow of the mountain falls across my cage, and with it comes the cold. The temperature drops rapidly in the shade, chill seeping into bones already brittle with fever and exhaustion.

Even these shadows—once my domain, my weapon, my sanctuary—offer no comfort now. They fall across me like strangers, indifferent to my suffering.

My thoughts turn to Blackvault. To the purging chamber that awaits me there. To Sereven and his years of planning this moment. To the smile that will cross his face when he watches what remains of me destroyed. And hatred stirs.

For the Authority. For Sereven. For what they stole. My power. Years of my life. My purpose. The future I imagined for Meridian.

All of it has been twisted into a weapon against us.

Hatred is all that remains. The last fire burning in a body that’s surrendered to pain.

And yet, something else flickers. Faint. Barely there.

Hope.

Not for myself. I’m a dead man breathing. But hope that what I started continues beyond me. That my ring found Ellie. That the Veinwardens see in her what I saw. Power, strength, and will.

Maybe my failure will teach them what my success never could.

Maybe breaking me won’t break what we started.

Maybe the girl from another world finishes what the Vareth’el could not.

If I am to be destroyed, let it not be for nothing.

Let it be the spark that ignites something new.

The blacksmith’s blood is a stain in my mind, a reminder that even in my captivity, my presence demands a price from others. But perhaps that price won’t be paid in vain. Perhaps his death, like mine, will become fuel for something larger.

Maybe courage, once kindled, cannot be entirely extinguished.

And that thought, close to the end of my life, brings something that might almost be called peace.