POV: Rena Vale
Heat rips up my spine like a fuse finally finding the powder.
“Kai,” I manage, except it isn’t a word so much as a gasp that melts on my tongue. Something inside me surges—no, surges isn’t big enough. A tide breaks loose where my bones should be, hot and silver, turning marrow to light. Knees give. Palm smacks stone. Head spins so hard the corridor doubles, triples, then blurs into a smear of moon and shadow.
“Rena?” Auren drops into my field of vision, eyes blown wide, red bleeding at the edges. “Hey—focus on me. Rena—Rena—stay with us.”
“You’re safe,” Kai says at my back, voice threaded and steady, hands hovering like he’s holding a live coil and not afraid of the burn. “Breathe with me. Slow. We have you.”
Air refuses the request. Chest won’t expand. Another wave slams through, brighter, heavier. Every vein lights up; every nerve sings too loud. My vision whites out. Pupils stop belonging to me.
Lyria surges forward and takes the wheel without asking.
Mine, she growls through me, not at them, at the world. Let go.
“I don’t—” My voice breaks in the middle. Fingertips blaze so intensely I expect skin to split. White threads race under my arms, across my collarbone, weaving a map I don’t recognize. “I can’t—”
“Look at me,” Kai begs, closer now, urgency caged so it doesn’t spook me. “Rena, eyes. Take me in. Anchor here.”
“Grab her hands,” Auren snaps, already wrapping his around mine, thumbs pressing the pulse points like he can push the ocean back through tiny gates. “Ground. You hear me? Ground.”
“Too hot,” I choke, as heat rolls outward from my chest, shaking loose a sound I don’t know I can make until it leaves me—half-sob, half-snarl. “I’ll burn you.”
“Burn me, then,” Auren says without hesitation. “I’m still here.”
“Always here,” Kai whispers at my ear, and the words settle across the panic like a weighted blanket. “I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.”
Lyria howls inside the cage of my ribs. Not panic—recognition. Walls don’t just tremble; they listen. Floor groans beneath my knees, stone cracking in spider-silk lines that skitter away under the runner like startled snakes. Somewhere far and near, glass sings—the thinnest note a building can make before it decides to break.
Riven’s voice curses from the end of the hall. Guards bark orders into the dark. Boots stagger and steady. Wards hum louder, then louder, then too loud, like tone itself is trying to contain me.
“Rena.” Kai’s breath warms the shell of my ear. He kneels behind me now, chest to my spine, thighs bracketing my hips, arms coming around my middle with slow, deliberate care. He’s a wall that decided to be soft. “Let it move through, not at. Think river, not explosion.”
“River,” I echo, but a shockwave builds anyway, irresistible, a storm inflating its lungs. “I can’t—”
“You can,” he insists, voice dropping into the place that talks to wolves and fear without anger. “I’ve seen you decide things that should have decided you. Take this too.”
Auren squeezes tighter, palm to palm, blunt and warm. “Breathe in on my count,” he says, rough. “One—two—three—hold—now out. Again. Again.”
Light pulses under my skin like a heartbeat learning a new rhythm—too fast, too bright, then catching the edge of his counting, then almost matching. I cling to that fraction of control with every torn raw bit of me.
Another surge rolls up from the base of my spine, brighter than the last. It isn’t anger. It isn’t fear. It is memory knocking on the wrong door. Eyes flood white; pupils dissolve into it; world switches channels.
Glass in the windows shivers. Chandeliers in the distant hall strain their chains, crystals clicking together like teeth. Stone beneath the runner splits further, hairline fractures branching to meet each other like old friends. Wards flare and flicker, then flare again, hissing around the edges of whatever I’m becoming.
Pain unfurls—not sharp, not cutting. Pressure. The unbearable kind that insists on making room inside bones that weren’t designed to hold it.
“Let it expand,” Kai murmurs, mouth at my temple, voice a tether. “I’m not moving. I take the overflow. Give it to me.”
“I can’t—”
“You can.” Arms tighten around me, chest pressed to my back, heartbeat against my spine like a drum the storm can set itself to. “I want it. Give it.”
Auren leans in until our foreheads almost touch, breath mingling with my ragged, hot pulls. “Look at me,” he says again, and this time the command threads with something like home. “Don’t look at the light. Look at me.”
My eyes are white glass; I can’t see him. Still, something inside me turns toward the sound like a flower to sun. Fingers unclench; his hands catch mine before I can flail. He holds without pinning, firm enough to remind me I am not untethered, gentle enough to let me think I chose.
Another wave. Bigger. The building groans—bones disliking being asked to remember earthquakes. Somewhere, a maid cries out and bites off the sound. Somewhere else, Riven barks, “Hold positions,” in a voice that can pin chaos to the floor.
“Kai,” I whisper, because if I say his name I can locate his shape, and if I can locate his shape I can locate myself. “Don’t—”
“Leave?” His mouth brushes my hairline; his grip pulls me tighter into him. “No.”
Light surges with that word, expands past skin, past body, past breath—outward, outward—then detonates in a white ring that races down the corridor and around us, a shockwave like a bell struck by god. Air slams into stone. Hair whips my face. Guards stagger, then plant. The tied attacker down the hall laughs once, too delighted, then chokes on his own blood.
Silence comes back too fast, brittle and breathless.
Then the aftershocks. Smaller flares, less violent, more insistent, like little fists banging on a door inside my head—remember me, remember me, remember me.
“It’s okay,” Auren mutters, thumbs circling my knuckles. “You’re doing it. You’re holding it.”
“You’re not alone,” Kai says into my hair. “Never alone.”
Heat stutters. Light threads thin. Sight returns slowly, edges first, then color, then depth. I blink and get shapes: Auren’s face tight with worry and awe; Kai’s chin near my cheek, jaw bruised by restraint; the corridor scarred by new cracks, glittering with tiny, unfallen shards.
“Hurts,” I breathe.
“I know,” Kai says. “You’re still here.”
“Still here,” Auren echoes, like maybe he needs to hear it as much as I do.
Hands loosen a fraction. Arms don’t. Kai’s palms splay over my stomach and sternum, guarding the places that lit. I tip back against him and let my head find his shoulder. Exhaustion drops down from the ceiling and sits on my back with too much weight.
“I don’t want this,” I whisper. “I never wanted any of this.”
“I know,” he says again, which is apparently the only honest answer to most sentences in my life. “You’re doing it anyway.”
“Look at me,” Auren says—softer now, less command, more plea. “What do you need.”
“Don’t let go,” I admit, tiny and ugly and true.
“We won’t,” he says, and squeezes my hands like he intends to keep lying to fate as long as he needs to.
“We won’t,” Kai repeats, and his voice threatens to break, then doesn’t, then softens enough to stitch my ribcage back to itself. “I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.”
Breathing finds a path through the rubble. Heat ebbs to something near livable. The white in my eyes recedes in a slow tide, leaving a faint glow stealing along the edges of my vision like sunrise sneaking into a stubborn night.
The aftershocks keep knocking.
Not random now. Rhythmic. Familiar in a way that makes my skin go cold and my heart go hot at the same time. A door inside my head unlatches—one hinge, then the next, then the bar sliding free with the long scrape of a thing that hasn’t moved in years.
Images punch through. Not memory like photographs. Memory like drowning.
Moonlight on marble floors polished with ash. A woman in a white cloak turning her head as wolves bow—all silver eyes, all scarred hands. A crest carved above a throne—crescent split by a river of light, stars hammered into the stone with reverent rage. A man’s voice chanting old words as if words are bridges over war. Blood on steps. A door wreathed in frost. My mother’s mouth saying my name in a language I didn’t know I knew. Lyria’s howl doubled by another voice that sounds like mine but older, stronger.
“Rena?” Auren whispers, because I’ve gone still and weird beneath his hands. “Hey. Stay with us.”
“Talk to me,” Kai murmurs, mouth near my ear, a plea dressed as command. “What is it.”
Everything.
I open my eyes fully. Light flickers once in the whites, then settles like it found where to live. My throat feels scraped. Words taste like old iron and new snow.
“I remember…” Breath hitches. The hallway waits. Their faces wait harder. The door in my head swings wide.
“Everything.”