A Gathering Storm

The Weight of Staying

The Shadow Tower did not feel the same without her father’s presence anchoring it.

Wren noticed it most in the silences. Not the peaceful kind that had once settled into the stones at night, but the hollow gaps between sounds, the places where his steady breath, his low murmured prayers to the wards, should have been. Even the tower bell seemed reluctant to ring again, as though it knew it had already said too much.

Emma received a summons from Reed Town two days after the storm, urging her to advance her arrival. With the wards weakened, the healers there were overwhelmed by strange cases; lingering fevers, wounds that refused to close, magic-sickness that left patients shaking and lightless. Reed Town always bore the first cost of the marshes stirring.

Emma had not been subtle in her preparations. Her room looked half-emptied already, healer’s satchel laid out on the bed, bandages folded with obsessive care, jars of salve wrapped in cloth and tied with twine. Reed Town waited for her, perched on stilts above black water and reed-choked channels, its sick and wounded in constant need of steady hands and stronger stomachs.

“I’ll come back,” Emma said as she fastened the clasp of her green cloak, fingers fumbling slightly. “Once things… settle.”

They both knew it was a lie they needed to tell each other.

Before she left, Emma closed and locked the door, turning back with an expression that made Wren’s stomach tighten. From beneath her bed, she pulled out the small leather pouch.

“I want to test them,” Emma said quietly.

The reed pens lay warm in her palm, their wax seals dull and unassuming. Nothing about them suggested blood magic. That was the danger of it.

Wren hesitated. The image of her grandmother’s charm flashed through her mind; Aer Maud’s steady hands, her warning voice. And beneath that, hidden deeper still, the weight of the black book pressed like a second heartbeat under her ribs.

Emma had taken one of Maud’s books without asking. An old one, obscure and dangerous enough to teach this spell.

That was how Wren justified it.

“Just… carefully,” Wren said at last.

They sat cross-legged on the floor, knees nearly touching. Emma unsealed one pen and pressed it into Wren’s hand. The reed was smooth, faintly warm, as though it remembered the blood that filled it.

“Write something simple,” Emma murmured. “My name.”

Wren swallowed and bent over the scrap of parchment between them. The moment the reed touched the page, the ink flowed; not dark red as she feared, but a deep, pulsing black that shimmered faintly in the candlelight.

Emma inhaled sharply.

“Emma,” Wren whispered as she wrote.

The ink sank into the page, then flared softly. A faint warmth brushed Wren’s chest, like a distant echo of a heartbeat.

Emma took the second pen, hands steady despite the tension in her shoulders. “Wren.”

This time the warmth was stronger.

The magic settled. The ink dried. The room returned to stillness.

Emma took out two note books and set a pen on each of them. She picked up hers and wrote, I’m leaving in two days. The other pen shuddered for a moment and then raised on its own and wrote the words in Emma’s handwriting before falling still. Emma put down her pen. Wren wrote back, We will keep in touch, no matter what. And dutifully Emma’s pen copied out the words into her notebook.

“It worked,” Emma said, wonder and fear tangled together. “No delay. No channeling light. Just… connection.”

Wren nodded, forcing a smile. Guilt gnawed at her, sharp and insistent. Emma had trusted her with this. Trusted her enough to share something forbidden.

And Wren had not told her about the book.

Not yet.

She told herself it was different. The book felt personal somehow. Like her Gran had chosen it for her.

Still, when Emma packed up the pens for each of them, Wren could not meet her eyes.

“I’ll need to go see what the healers have packed to send with me.” Emma’s smile didn’t reach her eyes. Light magic was unpredictable in the marshes and few Aer’s ventures to even visit Reed Town. Healing was a rare profession in central Calreands but on the outskirts where the dragon change was stronger it was essential. Especially close to the dark dragon buried in the swamps.

…

Later, Wren climbed to the tower top; the place she had always gone when the walls pressed too close.

The wind was stronger here, carrying the damp breath of the marshes and the clean bite of chalk dust from the plains. From this height, she could see everything: the walls stretching east and west to the smaller towers, the broken stones scattered like the bones of old fortifications, the Carved City gleaming faintly in the distance, white and unreachable.

This was where she spent most of her time now.

This was where she felt unseen.

She settled against the stone parapet and drew the black book from beneath her cloak. The cover drank in the fading light, matte and featureless, giving nothing away. It was bigger than she expected and when she placed her hand over the cover for a moment it felt like scales. Wren opened it carefully.

The symbols shifted as before, rearranging themselves as though responding to her attention. This time, when she traced one with her finger, the page warmed beneath her touch.

A pressure built behind her eyes; not pain, but awareness. Threads seemed to unfurl in her mind, not instructions exactly, but possibilities. Ways of seeing. Ways of listening.

“This isn’t light,” she whispered.

The book did not answer. It did not need to.

She turned the pages slowly, studying the intricate geometric patterns and the notes written in symbols she could not quite decipher. Some of the shapes repeated, folding back on themselves in careful balance, while others seemed to resist symmetry altogether. When she lingered too long on one, the ink dimmed, as if withdrawing. When she relaxed her focus, it brightened again.

The book was not teaching her.

It was watching.

Wren became aware of her breathing, of the steady thrum of her pulse beneath her skin. The pressure behind her eyes eased when she stopped trying to understand and simply let the shapes exist. For a brief, startling moment, the tower itself seemed to align with the page beneath her fingers, stone and symbol resonating together.

Her breath caught.

She closed the book at once, heart racing. Whatever this magic was, it did not respond to effort or force. It listened. It waited.

That frightened her more than darkness ever had.

Footsteps sounded on the stairs.

Wren snapped the book shut, heart leaping, and slid it beneath her cloak just as Drew emerged onto the tower top.

He looked even more worn than he had earlier; robes creased, ink staining his cuffs, exhaustion etched deep around his eyes. His golden hair had escaped its tie entirely now, curling damply against his neck. But when he saw her, something in his expression softened.

“I thought I might find you here,” he said.

“You needed me?” Wren asked, too quickly.

“No.” He shook his head. “I just… wanted to check on you.”

She nodded, turning back toward the horizon. Drew joined her at the parapet, resting his hands on the stone.

“They’re sending a delegation from the Carved City,” he said after a moment. “For your father’s funeral. Andra will arrive with them.”

Wren’s stomach tightened.

“So soon.”

“He left the capital the moment word reached him.” Drew hesitated. “They expect you to meet him. To stand beside him during the rites.”

Of course they did.

Andra; carefully chosen, perfectly aligned, already stepping into a role meant to stabilize the tower and reassure the Aetherlight. The marriage had never been framed as a question. With her father gone, it would become expectation hardened into law.

“There must be some other way…” Wren said quietly.

“I know this is hard, but this tower is more dependant on bloodlines than the others, and light is not as strong here as it should be…” Drew replied.

He glanced at her then and did not look away at once. There was something careful in his expression, as though he were measuring every word before allowing it to exist.

“This tower needs you,” he said. “Your father believed that. So do I.”

Wren swallowed. “maybe…I need something else.”

Drew’s jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. He turned his gaze back toward the horizon, toward the long stretch of land and the faint gleam of the Carved City beyond it.

“I believe,” he said slowly, “that wanting something does not always make it the right path to take.”

The words were controlled, deliberate, but they cost him something. Wren could hear it in the way his breath caught afterward.

Silence settled between them, thick and heavy. The wind tugged at his loose hair, and brushed against Wren’s cloak. He kept his hands on the stone, as though anchoring himself there.

“It is not my place,” he went on. “To point you down a different path, I am your tutor and I am here to guide you to take your place as an Aer of this Tower… more than that would be… improper.”

He did not say impossible.

Wren’s fingers curled instinctively around the hidden book, its presence suddenly sharper, more aware. She wondered if Drew could feel it too, the quiet hum beneath her skin, the sense that something in her was already stepping beyond the boundaries he was trying so carefully to respect.

Wren kept her gaze on the clouds, “What if there’s no light in me to guide? I think I’m something else and trying to walk a path that not meant for me… Maybe its not meant for either…”

Behind them, the plains lay bathed in gold, deceptively calm. To the south, clouds gathered low over the marshes, dark and patient.

Staying felt like suffocation.

Leaving felt like loss.

And deep within her chest, something old and restless stirred, awake and listening, waiting for the moment when choice would finally outweigh duty.