Fated to Die together

The power she posses

The hall didn't go quiet.

Chairs scraped back all at once. Someone's breath caught hard enough to hear from across the room. The priest's voice cracked apart mid-word, and I heard him stumble backward before I even understood why.

"Your Majesty." He was shaking. "I don't — I don't understand what just happened."

"Explain it," the King said. Flat. Not a question anymore.

I couldn't see clearly yet. Everything was blurred at the edges, sound arriving before shapes did. Chairs scraping. Feet shuffling backward across stone. A woman somewhere near the front whispering fast to whoever stood beside her.

Guards along the wall stepped back from where I lay. Not toward me. I felt it more than saw it, space opening up around my body like I'd become something with an edge nobody wanted to cross.

"Stay back," one of the guards said, low, urgent.

"Don't touch her," said another, further away.

I forced my eyes open.

Torchlight first, Then stone ceiling. Then faces, a whole ring of them looking down at me, and every single one pulled a full step back, like I might catch fire if they got too close.

Grown men, Trained fighters. The same guards who'd dragged me through these halls twice already without a second thought, and now none of them would come near me.

Me.

Five years of being the thing everyone looked past, walked around, pretended not to see. And now I couldn't get a single person in this room to look away.

I pushed myself upright, slow, my arm shaking under my own weight. The cut on my wrist throbbed with a heat that didn't feel like healing and didn't feel like pain either, something that made the skin feel like it wasn't fully mine anymore. My whole body felt borrowed, unfamiliar, like I'd woken up wearing someone else's.

"What did you do to her," the King said, rounding on the priest.

"I did nothing, Your Majesty. The oath did." The priest crossed toward me on unsteady legs and knelt, but he didn't reach for my wrist right away. He hesitated, his eyes moving over the mark first, like he needed a moment to convince himself it was really there. Only then did he lift my arm, careful, almost reluctant, and turn it toward the torchlight.

He went still.

"This pattern," he murmured, more to himself than to anyone listening. "I have only ever seen it drawn in the old texts. I never believed it was real."

"Speak clearly," the King snapped.

The priest swallowed hard. "The bond in this mark," he said, "was not created tonight."

The hall held its breath.

"It already existed," he said. "The oath only woke it."

Whispers broke out across the crowd, I didn't understand what he meant. I don't think most of the hall fully did either, but the priest looked more frightened than confused, and that frightened me more than the words themselves.

The King crouched beside me and took my wrist straight from the priest's shaking hands. I braced myself for disgust, for him to drop it like something diseased. It didn't come. He smiled instead, not the bored cruelty from earlier, something sharper.

"There's more," the King said, not looking away from my arm. "Tell me the rest."

The priest hesitated so long I thought he might refuse outright. His eyes flicked to me once, almost like an apology, before he made himself speak.

"By what I know of this mark," he finally said, "she should have died years ago. Whatever kept her alive until now, it isn't natural."

The words landed somewhere deep in my chest and stayed there, heavy, refusing to make sense. Died years ago. I thought of my parents, of the night nobody could explain, of five years spent being blamed for a tragedy no one would name out loud. If he was right, that night hadn't just taken them. It had been meant to take me too.

Nobody moved for one long second.

Then the whole hall moved at once.

"Kill her now, before whatever this is spreads," a man shouted from somewhere near the back.

"You don't even know what it is," another voice snapped back. "Harm her wrong and you might unleash something far worse than a curse."

"She's cursed," a woman said, loud enough to carry. "She's always been cursed. Everyone knew it. This only proves it."

"Or chosen," someone else said, quieter, almost reverent, like the word scared them to say out loud. "The old bloodlines don't wake for nothing."

"Whatever she is," an older man called out, "she doesn't belong among us anymore. Cursed or chosen, she was never one of ours to begin with."

Nobody argued with that one. Nobody defended me either. I sat in the middle of it, my wrist still caught in the King's hand, and understood that not one person in that hall was actually asking me anything. They were deciding what I was without once looking at my face, the same way they'd decided what I was five years ago, on the night I lost everyone who might have spoken for me.

The King stood, finally releasing me, and for the first time since I'd been dragged into this hall, he didn't look fully in control of the room he owned. "Silence," he said. Nobody listened right away. Something tightened in his jaw at that, small, but I caught it.

Xavier moved before I understood he had moved at all.

He crossed the space between us in a few fast strides and stood over me, not touching, just there, a wall between my body and everyone still shouting around us.

"Enough," he said.

He didn't raise his voice. He didn't need to. The noise in the hall dropped fast.

The King's eyes narrowed at his brother. "You don't give orders here."

"No," Xavier said. "But they still listen when I speak. You've noticed that too, haven't you. That's why you needed a spectacle to remind them who's actually in charge."

The King's expression flickered, and for a moment I thought he might strike him. Instead he laughed, short and humorless. "Careful, brother. You're supposed to be dying quietly, remember. Not making speeches in my hall."

"Then stop giving me reasons to speak."

Something passed between the two of them, fast and old, a history I had no access to and desperately wanted. The King's smile faltered, just barely, before he pulled it back into place like a mask readjusted.

"She stays in the palace," the King said at last, straightening, reasserting himself in front of a hall that had just watched him hesitate for the first time. "Under guard. I want to know exactly what she is before anyone decides what's to be done with her."

Nobody argued. Nobody ever did with him, except, apparently, the one man standing beside me.

The crowd thinned slowly, nobles pulled away by guards, whispers trailing out through the doors behind them, until the hall had emptied enough that the noise finally dropped to almost nothing. Just the two of us left, and a handful of guards keeping their careful distance near the walls.

My legs gave out the moment I tried to stand on my own. I reached for the nearest steady thing without thinking, Xavier's arm.

The instant my hand closed around it, something else happened.

A flash. Not mine. Fire, the smell of it thick and choking. Blood on stone. Xavier's voice, younger, screaming something I couldn't make out through the noise of it. A woman's voice underneath all of it, cold and certain.

They're both cursed.

Then it was gone, and I was standing in the empty hall again, my hand still locked around his arm, my whole body shaking harder than it had all night.

Xavier went rigid under my grip. He looked at me like I'd spoken out loud, though I hadn't said a single word.

Neither of us spoke at first. I tried to make sense of what I'd just seen, tried to fit fire and blood and a stranger's voice into anything that resembled a memory of my own, and couldn't. It hadn't felt like imagination. It had felt like something borrowed, the same way my own body had felt borrowed since I woke.

I looked down. The mark on my wrist had spread further, a thin black line climbing higher up my arm than it had been an hour ago.

"What is happening to me," I whispered.

Xavier didn't answer right away. When he finally did, his voice was low enough that only I could hear it.

"The worst mistake I ever made," he said, "was letting our blood touch."

I stared at him, waiting for him to explain. He didn't

He only looked at me, and whatever was hidden behind his eyes frightened me more than the King’s threats ever had.

I looked down at the black mark climbing slowly beneath my skin.

For the first time since the blood oath, I realized something that stole the air from my lungs.

Whatever had happened in that hall…

…hadn’t happened to him alone.

It had happened to me too.