Page 23 of Stormvein (The Veinbound Trilogy #2)

Chapter Eleven

SACHA

Trust is not a bridge. It is a thread. And threads fray.

Love Songs of the Mountain Provinces

I’m drifting through darkness. Not the comfortable shadows I once commanded, but something else—a space without form or substance.

Pain exists here as a distant memory, like thunder beyond the horizon.

A remembered feeling, but displaced and out of reach.

My body feels far away, tethered to me by the thinnest of threads, fraying with each labored heartbeat, taking me ever closer to the void.

Is this death? The final surrender of consciousness after what they did to me?

No. I think death would be simpler.

This is something else. A liminal space between existence and oblivion. Here, thought persists while my body fails. Memories reassemble in ways that defy logic or chronology.

The tower forms around me. But this isn’t the prison that held me for decades.

The walls are translucent, revealing stars beyond.

Constellations I don’t recognize swirling in constant motion, ancient configurations that seem to whisper meanings I almost grasp before they slip away.

Within the stone of the wall itself, dim shapes move with purpose, forming imprints that almost make sense before scattering again.

I reach out, trying to touch the shadows I once controlled, but my hand passes through the walls without any resistance.

These aren’t any shadows I recognize. They don’t acknowledge my call.

These are something older, different, and more aware.

They don’t respond to my presence. They simply observe it.

“The binding is broken,” says a voice that isn’t a voice. It’s more vibration than sound, felt rather than heard.

I turn, searching for its source, but only find darkness gathering in the center of the room, coalescing into something that defies definition. Not solid, but present. A void within a void, an absence more substantial than presence.

“What binding?” My lips don’t move, my voice doesn’t sound, but the question is heard.

“All of them,” it replies. “The ones you knew about. The ones you didn’t. The ones that were placed upon you. The ones you placed upon yourself.”

The darkness shifts, expanding, then contracting. There’s nothing threatening about it, but it’s not benevolent either. It’s just … there.

“What are you?”

“Memory. Warning. Possibility.” Each word ripples through the space, leaving impressions rather than sound. “Echo. Oracle. Mirror.”

The tower dissolves around me, replaced by a circular chamber I’ve never seen before. Ancient stone, worn smooth by centuries of use, rises in the center in the form of a pedestal. At the top sits a crystal, spilling out a blue-white glow. The same crystal Sereven used against me at River Crossing.

Its radiance spills across the chamber, illuminating carvings that shift and distort at the edges of my vision. Symbols that retreat from direct attention, yet remain on the periphery.

Figures kneel around the base of the pedestal, heads bowed in what could be worship or fear.

“They found it in the ruins,” the voice continues. “Where the old ones fell. Where power tore the world apart and remade it. Before memory. Before history. Before division.”

The chamber changes, aging backward through time.

The pedestal shrinks, disappears and is replaced by a raised dais.

The crystal remains, but now it isn’t a weapon but a focal point of communion.

Hands touch it with reverence, drawing from its energy.

The hands belong to people in dark robes adorned with silver threads.

Their faces are obscured by hoods, embroidered with symbols I almost recognize.

Their movements create patterns in the air. Gestures that leave glowing trails that linger, forming shapes that echo the discipline of shadow-casting. The crystal responds to each motion, its tone shifting in color, rhythm, and weight.

“Before the Authority,” the voice says. “Before Shadowvein. Before the division of power. When magic flowed as one current through all who could channel it.”

The scene shifts violently, the same chamber now desecrated by bloodshed.

Bodies lie scattered around the crystal.

They’ve been deliberately arranged, their limbs positioned with ritual precision.

The crystal flickers with unstable energy, its once-harmonious glow replaced by hungry pulsations.

It’s been altered, its purpose corrupted from communion to consumption.

Blood stains the stone floor, flowing in channels that form a new pattern …

Horror washes over me when I recognize it as the same symbol now branded into my skin. The marks burn in response to the vision, a phantom blaze threading up my spine, connecting me to this atrocity.

The copper tang of blood fills my senses, so vivid I can taste it on my tongue.

Residual heat clings to the stone, radiating upward through bone and breath, as if the violence occurred seconds ago.

The crystal’s behavior has changed, its function reversed.

It no longer emanates outward, but draws inward.

It pulls essence from the arranged dead as if completing the ritual they began.

“Witness the first purge,” the voice continues. “When knowledge became forbidden. When power became sin. When those who feared magic learned they could not destroy it, only steal it.”

Another shift. I’m back in the tower again.

But it’s not as I knew it. This version is older.

Its purpose is not to confine, but to channel.

It’s a conduit instead of a cage. It was never designed to restrain.

It was built to conduct. Power threads through its walls, directed by those same hooded figures, their fingers tracing patterns in the air that leave trails of light and shadow.

Something important is happening here.

“The veil was thinner then. The boundaries were far more permeable.”

The walls of the tower resonate with energy, the current moving through paths carved into the stone. The hooded figures orchestrate this flow with careful movements.

I watch, transfixed, as the power is drawn toward something at the tower’s center. I strain to discern its form, but the light is too intense to look upon directly. Whatever occupies that central point moves, casting shadows over the walls.

“What are they doing?”

“Containing. Preserving. Protecting.” Each word lands with separate significance. “Bridging. Balancing. Binding what must remain bound.”

A blinding flash erupts, and whatever occupied the center vanishes. The hooded figures collapse to the ground, life-energy drained, their purpose fulfilled at terrible cost.

The scene dissolves and reforms as the tower I knew.

Now I see it differently, noticing details I never perceived before.

The silver walls aren’t solid but layered, with spaces between where energy might flow.

The binding wasn’t restraining me, it was feeding on me, drawing essence from me with each desperate attempt to reach my shadows.

I watch myself as I was then. Physically unchanged but fiercer, wilder, endlessly pacing the confines of my prison like a captured predator.

My past self constantly tests boundaries, stretches toward power, unaware that each attempt feeds the very system that imprisons him.

With each shadow I tried to form, with each attempt to extend my awareness beyond the silver walls, my power was siphoned away, harvested like a resource.

Rage builds within me, hot and clarifying, cutting through the fog of pain and delirium. I wasn’t merely imprisoned, I was farmed. The confirmation of Sereven’s words reshapes everything I believed about my captivity, my enemy, and my purpose.

“They took it from me. For all these years.” My voice, or the dream echo of it, vibrates with fury. “Every moment I fought to escape strengthened what held me.”

“And used it,” the voice confirms. “While preaching against its evil. While executing those who wielded what they secretly coveted.”

The hypocrisy is almost beautiful in its completeness. The Authority’s entire foundation, their moral standing, and their stance against magic. It’s all built on a lie . They didn’t destroy Veinblood power, they stole it. They didn’t protect the world from magic. They monopolized it.

I see Sereven as he was then, younger, rising through Authority ranks after he betrayed me.

He visits the tower. Always at night, always alone, but he never tries to enter.

Instead, he paces around the outside. Blue light spills from between his hands as he holds the crystal against the wall, his movements echoing the ritualistic gestures of those hooded figures. My shadows flow from the walls into it.

My power. My essence. My birthright .

His expression as he watches is rapt, lustful. He’s not looking at taboo magic with the disgust he performs for his followers, but with naked, consuming desire. Each time he comes, he stays longer. Takes more.

I see clearly now what I couldn’t before.

The man who hunted Veinbloods across Meridian was secretly coveting the very power he condemned.

Sanctified theft disguised as a righteous purge.

His rise to High Commander of the Authority itself was built upon the systematic destruction of people like me, my power feeding his ascension.

The vision shifts with disorienting suddenness.

I’m standing on a mountain path, looking down at Ashenvale far below.

The city appears as it was before my capture.

Her towers gleaming in sunlight, the Veinwarden banners still flying above Lirien Spire.

Beside me stands a woman, dark hair streaked with silver, her posture regal but weary.

Something about her feels intimately familiar, but I can’t place her face in my memories.

“They’re still looking.” Her voice carries a note of warning. “Still searching.”