Page 14 of The Shattered Rite (The Sightless Prophecy Trilogy #1)
“Tools don’t need purpose. They need edge.” —The Sovereign of Vireth
Malric was still crouched in the stonework high above the Hall of Holding, wedged into a slit of shadow where the stone was cold and dust hung like breath.
No one ever looked up.
They should have.
He had orders, so he waited. Watched.
Below, the chosen shifted, armor rasping, eyes hollowed out by the trials. Torches spit resin and smoke. Iron rings sank into the flagstones like old teeth. The room remembered what it had been built to do.
He counted breaths, not faces. The loud ones die early. The quiet ones live longer. The useful learn to forget to breathe at all.
He’d already taken four. Two the beasts could keep. Two were his. No one had asked where they’d gone. That was the point: when cruelty fits the pattern, it goes unseen.
His attention kept returning to the rider.
He didn’t know her name. He didn’t need it. Names made graves in a man’s head. Better to call her what she was: the girl, the rider, the myth the court was already pretending not to whisper about.
She moved like judgment. Calm. Lethal. Unbound.
The marks on her skin hooked him. Not because they were magic—he’d seen magic seared into flesh before—but because they answered her.
The lines shifted when she flexed. The script even brightened when the pendant at her throat pulsed.
Not power pressed on from the outside; power that was waking up from within her very being.
She was becoming a waking legend.
And the sovereign had no room left in his kingdom for legends.
Orders were clear. If she still breathes at the end, she dies. His blade. His hand.
His knuckles pressed into grit until skin complained. He let the ache sit. He’d had worse teachers.
The dragonrider moved wrong. Not broken-wrong. Unpredictable-wrong. She wore death like a second skin and called it a change of clothes.
He should have looked away.
He didn’t.
He told himself it was strategy. Necessary observation.
He didn’t believe it.
He remembered her before the marks. The village. His borrowed uniform. Her braid too tight, armor that didn’t fit, dried blood under her nails. She’d looked straight at him. Not with challenge. With clarity. As if she already knew what it meant when silence paid attention.
Even then, she’d been intriguing.
“Dragonrider,” the guard called.
The word hit the room like hot iron dropped in water. The young guard didn't even reach for the magical cuffs. He didn’t bother pretending.
Heat moved across Malric’s mind—not warmth. Presence. A weight that tested the air and tapped one claw against glass.
The dragon.
Malric drew deeper into the stone. Something older than the castle was taking his measure and filing him under watch.
He thought about the dragonrider, and about the unrest that bubbled up from the deep wells of the citadel. The two things happening at once were not coincidence.
Her survival wasn’t just dangerous. It was instructive.
The sovereign’s voice slid back into his ear, silk over a blade:
“Let her be the last. Let her watch the others fall. Let her heart burn before her body does. That is how you end rebellion.”
Malric filed the words and refocused.
The rider moved. Each step was chosen, as if she expected the floor to argue and intended to win.
He slipped from his niche. Invisibility slid over him like a habit. Even without it, he knew how not to be seen. The charm only taught the world to forget where to look.
He followed closer than most would dare.
Torchlight wrote broken lines along rune-cut pillars. The enchantments below the flagstones hummed like old blood. Some halls smelled of oil and iron; this one breathed lichen and stone after rain. He kept to the seam between light and dark. Boots quiet. Breath quieter.
Ahead, he watched as his fixation cradled the pendant at her throat. Her touch was answered with a small pulse. She tilted her head a fraction, not enough for anyone else to notice.
She must feel me.
Not with her eyes. With whatever listens when the eyes begin to fail.
They reached a door heavy with wards. Glyphs cut deep, inlaid with metal that refused to shine. Privacy. Protection. Sovereign claim. And something threaded throughout that felt like comfort.
The trial guard stood aside and tried not to ponder. The rider paused—a heartbeat too long—reading the cuts and seams of her surroundings with her face turned just enough to make Malric’s pulse change. Then she stepped forward and the door took her in without a sound.
The air tightened. Light sharpened to a thinner edge. His invisibility wrinkled along its margin as the room's ward tasted him and decided he was not to its liking.
Living chambers set into the castle’s spine. No key. No window. No posted guard. The room learned its occupant and gave back what it decided they needed. Warmth, light, food, safety.
She had one now.
He hovered a hand near the door's seam. The air there had a clean bite, the sort of heat that doesn’t make smoke. A ward for melting. Quiet. Efficient. He approved of the craftsmanship. He did not approve of what it did to his hand when he imagined pushing through.
He pictured what the room might give her. Not sentiment. Utility. Heat that didn’t scorch. Water that ran clear. A bed that let the body unclench without turning soft. The fantasy offended him. It also did something else he didn’t want to name.
He’d killed kings on their thrones. Priests at their altars. Heirs before their voices changed. He knew how to end a problem before it learned to breathe properly. He had no room in him for wanting.
And yet.
He wanted to see her again.
Not the spectacle—the title, the flinch of guards, the way the air thinned around her. He wanted the unguarded. How she slept. Whether the marks dulled in rest or burned brighter when she laughed.
The dragon brushed him again. A low note. A weight shifting somewhere inside the walls and inside his skull at the same time. Not quite warning. Maybe amusement. Predators recognize each other.
You don’t own her, he thought toward the weight. He didn’t decide whether he was speaking to beast or king.
He let his hand fall. His palm tingled as if he’d offered it to a forge and changed his mind at the last sane moment.
He moved back into the corridor. The castle adjusted around him, the way old buildings do when they decide you’re a piece of furniture that won’t leave.
He passed two guards who pretended they weren’t afraid and a steward with a new scar that hadn’t been there yesterday.
Three banners had been replaced since last night; the stitching showed temper.
The kingdom was rearranging itself without the courtesy of a warning.
He liked patterns when they held. He liked them better when they broke in ways he could use.
He found a slit window, and leaned till the night put cold fingers on his eyes.
The city lay quiet in the way of places that have learned to lower their voices.
Beyond the walls, campfires studded the dark.
Pilgrims, profiteers, the devout, the curious, the wolves in cloaks.
The trials would end when everyone gathered; the sovereign meant to give them a show to watch. He meant that show to be her .
The thought didn’t sit right.
He went back to the door. He didn’t mean to, but he found himself there all the same.
The corridor wasn’t the same corridor anymore.
Torches had moved by an inch. The air had the fit of a room that sits with its hands in its lap and pretends not to listen.
He stood before the seam again and let his palm hover to the edge of burning.
He could die here without sound. The knowledge didn’t scare him.
It made something else turn over in his chest.
“Later,” he breathed. The ward made a sound too small for ears, like glass deciding not to crack.
He pictured her again, the way thieves catalog what they mean to take.
The tilt of her chin when she pretended she wasn't afraid.
The cadence of her walk. The cut on her forearm she held closed by force of will, not cloth.
The heat that lifted from her skin when the pendant throbbed.
The way people looked at her, away, and then back as if wanting to be punished by their own curiosity.
Malric wasn't one to pray. He did, however, for the first time in a long time, hope . For clarity.
The dragon’s presence feathered through him one last time.
He flexed his hand, shook the ward out of his bones, and let the castle swallow him.
By the time he reached an outer hall where wind found arrow slits and hunted his face, the night had thinned to bruise-blue. Somewhere a bell tried for the hour and quit. He leaned his head to the stone.
He hadn’t planned for her. He had planned for beasts, for fools, for royals with brave mouths and cowards with brave clothes. For trials that let men pretend they earned what gods assigned. Not for a girl who refused to be ordinary when the world demanded she be useful and quiet.
He did not know her name. He did not want it.
But he would learn it anyway.
From a guard’s careless mouth.
From a steward’s ledger.
From a man begging for his life who thought gossip could buy him breath.
If he had to, he’d take it from the air itself.
He would decide how long she lived. How close she came to breaking. How much the sovereign would get of what he wanted. How much Malric would keep for himself.
He’d been sent to be her ending.
Watching the dark bleed toward morning, Malric accepted something he shouldn’t: he didn’t want to be her ending. He wanted to be the knife she chose. Or the hand that taught her how to sharpen.
He pushed off the wall and moved into the hour when men sleep poorly and lies sound most like truths. The sovereign would ask for a report. Malric would give him one—with all the pieces, except the ones that mattered.
He had time now. Time to watch. Time to decide.
He wasn't used to wanting things.
But he wanted to see her again.
He wanted to know what came next.
Even if it was her death.
Especially if it was by his hand.
Because someone like her… couldn't belong to anyone else.
Not even herself.
And as he melted back into the shadows of the castle's spine, Malric finally understood:
She wasn't a threat.
She was a temptation.
And that was far deadlier.