POV: Mara
The first jolt is not light.
It’s weight.
The weight of a door I have to lift alone. A door I did not build, a door I never asked to open, but one that groans awake the moment my palm meets Cael’s skin.
“Breathe,” Aster says, voice a calm hand pressed against the inside of my ribs.
So I breathe.
Once, twice, until the air stops trembling in my chest.
White-gold wakes in my bones like it never slept. It rises slow at first, a shimmer under my skin, then all at once—flooding my palms in a fierce, steady burn. It isn’t heat. It isn’t fire. It’s truth, old and bright and merciless. The light crawls through me, under my fingernails, into the scars I pretend not to have. Then it spills from my hand into him.
Cael bows off the table with a rough sound, a torn breath dragged out of a drowning man. His mouth shapes a name, raw and cracked—mine.
“Hold him!” the healer barks, sharp enough to slice the fog. Hands clamp down—shoulders, hips, ankle. Jax braces his forearm across Cael’s ribs with a curse that sounds like prayer in bad clothing. The Regent stands very still, like she’s afraid moving will break something sacred.
The room narrows to one point: where my palm meets his sternum. The world is a funnel, drawing everything toward that touch. White-gold threads spill into him, lace with iron—his iron, that stubborn, disciplined strength he built from twelve years old onward. The lines resist, strain, grind like two blades scraping.
Then they surrender.
And the surrender destroys me.
“Anchor me to her,” Rhun pours through—not a growl now, but a plea. He is every storm I’ve stood under, every shadow that ever made me flinch, every quiet after that made me breathe again.
“Yes,” I whisper, and I mean it with every fracture I’ve ever tried to hide.
Light arcs—the smallest bridge, but a bridge all the same. Not a vow. Not the full bond. Just a seal. A little piece of forever. The kind stories warn about. The kind desperate people choose anyway.
My eyes burn. I blink and the room becomes a wash of gold and gray and breath and sweat. My pulse stutters. My knees shake. The table under Cael trembles with the force of him.
He convulses once, then again, the light catching in his throat like a swallowed sun. Then something deep inside him stops fighting. The light stops clawing and starts wrapping. It coils around his heart like a shield woven from rain. I feel his pulse find a rhythm—shaky, stubborn, furious, like him. Like Rhun. Like every part of him that refuses to die on command.
Heat leaves his fevered skin and climbs into mine, blooming sharp and clean along my bones, a quiet brand that feels older than this room.
Pain scalds my spine, then vanishes. In its place: him.
Not thoughts. Not words. Shapes. Fragments.
A shore he hates to leave.
A gate he keeps standing in.
Snow on a night he was twelve and swore he would become stone.
My laugh two days ago, touching him like a hand on the back of his neck.
The fear of losing me before he ever gets to keep me.
My breath breaks. Tears slip down into my hairline without sound.
A mark flares between us—not visible to eyes, only to bones—but I feel it, half-made and painfully honest. It hums in my ribs and in his like matching beats of a drum line no one else can hear. Aster sighs through me, soft and tired, like a tide coming home.
The ward lights along the arch calm. The sigils soften from harsh gold to warm embers. My legs begin to shake so violently I have to brace both hands on the table to stay upright.
He is breathing.
He is here.
The room expands again, returning to size and sound and shape. The air tastes like metal, sweat, and the end of fear.
The healer sags onto a stool and pushes hair off her forehead, breathing like she just outran a horse. “Well,” she says, half laughing, half terrified. “That was illegal.”
“Later,” I whisper, dizzy. The world tilts hard and rights itself. “You can scold later.”
Cael’s lashes flutter like ash shaken loose by wind. He tries to sit up—stupid, reckless—and fails. His chest jerks. His fingers twitch. His eyes search the room, wild with panic, like he woke in the dark and couldn’t find his way out.
He looks for me.
It guts me.
It absolutely ruins me.
I touch his shoulder—light, steady, the same way he touches me when he wants me calm. “I’m here,” I say, for the third time in two hours. Each time feels more like a promise. He exhales so hard it looks like collapsing and relief in the same breath.
The Regent steps closer to the table, her face stripped bare of strategy. She looks at Cael, then at me, and I see something crack: fear, sharp and brief and real. She takes in the glow still lingering on my fingers, the strange, soft quiet in the air, the hum between our chests like an invisible tether.
“What did you do?” she asks, voice unsteady for the first time since this war began.
“Something half,” I say. “A seal, not a vow.” My throat aches. “It will hold him. For now.”
Her throat works. Shock flickers. Then something softer takes its place—not approval, but gratitude, private and painful, like a candle lit for someone you swore not to mourn.
I know she doesn’t fancy me.
I know she’d prefer distance.
I know she has every reason.
But it’s a start.
“Thank you,” she says, barely sound.
I nod because if I bow, I will fall.
Jax clears his throat roughly. It sounds like someone trying not to cry and failing with style. “If anyone asks,” he says gruffly, “we’re calling it stubbornness.”
Pia pokes her head in through the door, hair wild, eyes wide. She takes one look at Cael—still glowing faintly where my hand was—and squeaks. “He’s glowing,” she whispers, horrified and amazed.
“He’s living,” I correct, and the word feels like a hand closing around my heart and pulling it back where it belongs.