Chapter 13 – The Wall and the Window
1215 Words
The world narrowed to pain and breath.
Maelis’s voice was a low, steady river in the dark, words threading through smoke and memory. Coren’s hand on my shoulder was the only fixed point—hot, solid, fingers digging in just enough to anchor without caging.
The cold filament inside me writhed.
It wasn’t a thing so much as an absence—a line of less running through the place the old bond had been torn. When Maelis’s power brushed it, it flexed like a trapped nerve. Images shuddered loose.
The ritual circle, years ago. My knees on stone. Coren’s face white with strain. My own voice, raw: Break it. While it’s still our choice.
The backlash of the bond shattering. His “I reject you” like a blade. The blankness after.
My fingers spasmed around Maelis’s. She held fast.
“Breathe,” she murmured. “Don’t chase it. Let it show and pass.”
Easier said than done.
The cold thread twitched again, testing. This time, I felt the tug from two directions—somewhere far away, faint and probing, and right here, where Maelis’s working pressed against it.
“Someone’s touching it,” I gasped. “Now.”
“I know,” Maelis said through clenched teeth. Sweat beaded along her hairline. “This is why we do it quickly.”
Coren’s grip tightened. Through the living bond, he poured everything in—love, steadiness, stubborn refusal to let this thing have more of me.
“Stay with me,” he said, voice rough. I couldn’t tell if he’d spoken aloud or directly into the bond. Maybe both.
Something shifted.
For a heartbeat, I wasn’t in Maelis’s workroom. I was standing in the clinic exam room again, red light strobing, Rian’s eyes too bright.
We can graze the edges of what you share, he’d said. Tug. Amplify. Twist.
A pressure curled around the cold filament, pushing toward Coren. Toward the bond. The wrongness of it made my stomach churn.
“No,” I snarled, more instinct than thought. I clamped down—not on the thread itself, but on everything around it. The living bond flared in answer, bright and hot, wrapping that scar like molten metal.
Maelis hissed. “Good,” she said. “Again.”
She drove her will into the gap—layering wards, weaving protection not as a barrier pushing the scar away, but as a cushion around it. Each pass burned. Memories fluttered up like singed pages: flashes of the cell I’d been kept in, Varik’s voice, the moment I’d realized I was more useful as bait than as a hostage.
Every time I started to get pulled into one, Coren yanked me back.
“Look at me,” he ordered once, when I flinched at the sight of myself bound to that old stone. I forced my eyes open.
He was close enough that I could see every fleck of gold in his irises, the tension in his jaw, the flare of his nostrils as he scented my fear. The room around us was a blur of smoke and candlelight.
“This is now,” he said. “We’re here. Together. They don’t get this.”
I latched on to that—now—like a lifeline and let Maelis work.
Slowly, agonizingly, the sensation of exposure lessened. Where there had been open air around that cold filament, there was now resistance—a buffer humming with Maelis’s strange, bone-deep magic and the steady pulse of our new bond.
The distant probing pressure jabbed once more, harder, as if irritated.
Then… dulled. Blunted.
I sucked in a ragged breath. The grinding ache began to ease, leaving behind a soreness that felt almost… clean, in a brutal way. Like muscle after a hard run.
Maelis’s chant dropped to a murmur, then to silence.
For a moment, no one moved.
Then she let go of my hands.
The room snapped into focus: the dim walls, the flicker of the single candle near the bowl of extinguished herbs, the tremor in Coren’s fingers where they still dug into my shoulder.
“How bad?” I asked, my voice a cracked whisper.
Maelis wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist and leaned back, exhaling. “The scar is still there,” she said. “That much we can’t change. But there’s more between it and the outside than there was. A lot more.”
“Can they still… touch it?” Coren’s voice was sandpaper.
“Yes,” she said, brutally honest. “But they’ll hurt themselves doing it. And they won’t be able to yank on it without hitting what we just wrapped around it.”
“Which is?” I asked.
“Your new bond,” she said simply. “And my wards. And every stubborn, stupid piece of will the two of you just threw at me.”
A shaky laugh escaped me, halfway to a sob. “So if they try to use me to break him, they have to go through both of us.”
“Yes.” Maelis’s eyes softened. “And through me. And, if I have anything to say about it, through half a dozen other people who owe you their lives.”
The idea of being the center of that much protection made my skin itch. I’d spent so long thinking of myself as the weak point, the crack in the wall. The idea that I might actually be… reinforced now was almost as scary as the alternative.
I reached for the cold thread again, cautiously. It was still there, an absence humming under the scar. But where earlier it had felt like an open vein, now it was insulated—dulled, harder to find. When I focused too sharply on it, the living bond pulsed in warning, like a hand squeezing my shoulder: Not alone.
I let go.
“How do you feel?” Coren asked quietly.
“Like someone took sandpaper to my soul,” I said. “And then hugged it.”
His mouth twitched. Relief, fierce and bright, shuddered through the bond.
Maelis pushed herself to her feet with a small groan. “This will need tending,” she said. “Meditation. Wards renewed. You’ll likely have more dreams for a while—good and bad. Don’t ignore them.”
“Great,” I muttered. “Can’t wait.”
She gave me a look that was almost fond. “You chose this,” she said. “Both times. Remember that. The next time some snake walks into your clinic and tells you you’re only a victim of bigger games.”
Heat pricked behind my eyes. I blinked it away.
Coren’s thumb traced a small, grounding arc on my shoulder. “What about him?” he asked. “Rian. The people behind him. Can we track that thread back to them?”
Maelis’s expression went flinty. “Given time,” she said. “If they insist on tugging our wounds, they might find we can tug back.”
A slow, savage satisfaction uncurled in my chest.
“Good,” I said. “Because I’m done being the door. If they want to play with scars, they can learn what it feels like from the other side.”
- Writer
