Page 27 of Stormvein (The Veinbound Trilogy #2)

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.

A victory . 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 itself defies 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.

And then I feel something I never expected to ever feel again.

The return of my shadows.

The feeling transcends language. It’s beyond agony, beyond pleasure.

It’s a reunion so profound I have no reference for it.

In the tower, I was bound but never truly separated from them.

Even when Sereven’s crystal broke my connection, I could feel them even though they were out of reach.

But the restraints completed what the crystal began.

Total severance. Absolute isolation. A hollowing out of everything that made me who I am.

And now, what was torn away floods back. Now the void fills. What defines me returns.

They pour into me like a river breaking through a dam.

But they’re not the same as they once were.

They’ve changed, evolved by their journey through Ellie, by their time spent intertwined with her awakening power.

Silver threads weave through darkness that was once absolute.

Lightning cracks where only shadow-silence existed before.

Where shadow leads, storm will follow.

I’m unable to dismiss the prophecy manifesting within my own flesh. The dreams and omens are now taking physical form within me.

I gasp. The first true breath I’ve taken since capture.

Shadows race through my body with a wild, desperate hunger, seeking every wound, every broken place.

They remember these paths, these vessels, these chambers of muscle, bone, and blood.

They reclaim territories surrendered to infection and death with a single-minded fury.

The corruption in the sword wound doesn’t stand a chance.

Shadows tear into it with cold violence, with righteous rage at what was done to their host. The infection that has been slowly poisoning my blood shudders under their assault, death’s advance faltering for the first time in days.

The wound that has festered since Ashenvale, when Sereven’s guard drove his blade between my ribs, begins to knit together at its edges.

My lungs clear in a rush that makes me cough up blood, leaving a black splash on Ellie’s shoulder.

Shadows find fluid where only air should be, and they absorb it, pushing it out, clearing pathways for breath that feels sweet and sharp and necessary again.

Every cough brings pain but also life, a reclamation of what was being stolen.

Oxygen floods my blood, reaches my brain, and brings a new clarity that cuts through fever’s fog with the sharpness of a blade.

The second restraint fights back, the metal turning painfully cold against my damaged wrist, then burning hot, the temperature fluctuating wildly, as it refuses to surrender.

The runes burned into its surface pulse with unnatural blue light, the same as Sereven’s crystal, while it fights to maintain its hold on me.

Inside me, pressure builds against the weakening barrier.

The freed shadows collide with the restraint from within while another force, one filled with Ellie’s presence, pushes from the outside.

The sensation is unlike anything I’ve ever felt before.

Power fighting against the binding from both sides, in a perfectly balanced battle.

When it shatters, the release is cataclysmic.

Where the first restraint’s breaking was a river, this one is the ocean itself crashing through.

Shadows surge into me with such force that my back arches despite broken ribs, despite flayed skin, despite wounds that should make movement impossible.

A sound tears from my throat. Not quite a scream, but something primal, and broken, and relieved beyond measure.

Silver light joins the shadows, dancing through me, twining together in patterns I can feel but cannot see.

They race along nerve pathways, reestablishing connections severed through torture.

They flow through my blood, burning away infection with cold fire.

They spread beneath my skin, seeking every injury carved into my flesh.

I feel it all. Every single moment of their return, their work, their fury at what was done to me. It borders on too much, too intense, too immediate after days of fading. It’s like being drowned and rescued, unmade and reborn in the same moment.

When they find the brand on my chest, their rage is palpable.

They target dying tissue, separate it from living, pour into the wound’s edges, forcing it to knit together.

The Authority symbol that Sereven pressed into my flesh with such satisfaction begins to lose its hold on me.

The shadows attack it as if it’s a living thing, erasing the claim he tried to stamp upon my body.

They reach my back, where the whip laid flesh open to bone in some places.

Their touch here changes, becomes gentler, almost sorrowful.

They can’t heal this quickly. The damage is too extensive, but they begin the work that will take weeks to complete.

I can feel them binding together what the torturer tore apart, creating paths for healing where there was only raw meat before.

Through it all, I can feel Ellie. Not only her physical presence, but her essence .

Her silver light moves with my shadows, strengthening them, guiding them to places most damaged.

Where they touch, where silver and shadow meet, something forms between us.

A connection beyond physical, a resonance like nothing I’ve experienced before.

It’s different from Stonehaven, different from Ashenvale.

This is deeper, as if our very natures are intertwining.