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NORA

T he silence after battle is never truly silent.

It thrums in the bones. It whispers at the edges of the mind like breath against the nape of your neck, uninvited and intimate. That’s where she speaks from—Medea.

It starts as a hum. A tremor threading through the base of my spine as I lie on the cold, cracked stone of what’s left of the shelter Rhaegar built. My body is still mending. The magic I gave him hasn’t come back to me. I’m a shell of heat and bone and fluttering breath.

But she is whole.

“You don’t have to be weak.”

Her voice curls around me like smoke from a ruined altar. Familiar. Ancient. Mine.

“You could have destroyed them. All of them. They would’ve knelt to you if you just let me in.”

I clutch the blanket tighter around myself. It smells of him—ash and dark earth and something distinctly Rhaegar. I focus on that scent, willing it to anchor me to the now. To who I am. Who I’m trying to stay.

He’s not far. I feel him before I see him, pacing just beyond the ruined archway, his footsteps heavy, his presence louder than any noise. He hasn’t said much since the last attack. I know why. I see the guilt every time his gaze catches on me and lingers too long. He thinks he took too much. He thinks I gave too much.

But he doesn’t understand— it was mine to give.

When I finally stir, pushing myself upright with a grimace, he’s there.

“You shouldn’t be moving yet,” he says, crouching beside me.

His voice is raw, and there's something in his eyes—something fraying at the edges.

“I’m fine,” I lie. My limbs feel like lead. My head pulses with magic that’s not entirely mine.

Rhaegar looks at me for a long beat, then finally says, “She spoke to me.”

My blood stills.

I already know who he means. Medea.

“What did she say?” My voice barely carries, but the words cut through the cold like knives.

He hesitates.

“Rhaegar.”

He meets my gaze, and something in his expression cracks. “She offered me freedom. Power. A life beyond the ruins. Beyond all this.”

“And…?”

“She said I could have it all,” he murmurs. “If I surrendered you.”

The world narrows to a sharp, burning point. “Did you… consider it?”

“No,” he says immediately, the word laced with something savage. “Gods, no.”

I want to believe him. I do.

But the way his jaw clenches says he’s still bleeding from the offer. That it wasn’t easy to reject.

“Why did she speak to you?” I whisper.

“Because we’re bound,” he replies. “Not just by the pact. Not just by blood. Something deeper. She sees it. She’s always seen it. I think… I think she remembers us both.”

A shiver runs down my spine.

We are shadows stitched into history. Wounds that never healed.

“She showed me a vision,” I admit. “Of what I could become. If I took the artifact for myself.”

He stiffens.

“I saw fire,” I say. “And thrones. And you, beside me. But not as you are. You were changed. Bound to me.”

“And you?”

I look away. “I didn’t look like me anymore.”

We’re quiet for a long time. The kind of silence that breathes between two people who might be about to destroy each other. Or save each other.

Finally, he draws the map from his cloak.

“She’s waiting for us,” he says. “But we’re not going for her. We’re going for the artifact.”

“And what happens when we find it?”

He doesn’t answer.

We travel in silence.

The Wastes part like an old wound, revealing a path we didn’t see before. The map guides us through ravines where the wind screams like a chorus of the damned, over broken stone bridges barely holding together, and through temples swallowed by time.

And then we find it.

A ruin half-buried in the earth, older than any I’ve seen. The air around it thrums with power—oppressive, cloying, seductive. My magic writhes inside me, half in pain, half in longing.

We step inside.

It’s not empty.

The Wraithborn wait within the shadows. Dozens of them. Their eyes glowing like blue flame, their bodies motionless, but alert.

And behind them… the artifact.

It floats above a stone altar etched with runes I can’t read but somehow understand. Blood has been spilled here. Oaths have been made here.

Rhaegar growls beside me. “This place… it’s their tether.”

“Their what?”

“It’s what binds them to the world. The artifact feeds them. Controls them. Or frees them.”

“And me?”

He looks at me like I’m the blade and the wound.

“I don’t know what it will do to you.”

We don’t move.

The Wraithborn don’t either.

The standoff stretches until the air feels brittle.

And in the silence…

“All you have to do,” Medea whispers, “is reach for it.”