BLOOD OF THE LAST KINGDOM

Chapter 5: The Voice That Knows My

The light didn't stop at his forearm.

It crawled higher, past his elbow, veins of pale fire spreading beneath his skin like something mapping a path toward his heart.

Gad staggered back a step, chain still locked in his glowing fist, and the guards near the platform scattered rather than approach him.

"Everyone back!" Rennick shouted, sword still drawn but pointed at no one, unsure what enemy he was even facing.

Doran descended the platform steps fast, alarm breaking through every careful line of his composure. "Gad. Listen to me. You need to breathe through it, slow your pulse—"

"You said you controlled this." Gad's voice came out strange, layered, like something else was speaking underneath his own words. "You said keeping me contained kept it quiet."

"It's not supposed to move this fast."

"Then what changed?"

Doran's eyes flicked to Kestrel, still standing frozen where Gad had pulled him free, then back to the crowd of slaves standing very close to the yard's edges, watching in silence.

"You protected someone without being forced to," Doran said. "You chose it freely. It's not used to that."

The light reached Gad's chest, and the pressure behind his ribs became unbearable, a held breath that refused to release.

He dropped to one knee in the dirt, chain finally slipping from his fingers, hands placed flat against the ground as the yard around him seemed to dim in his vision.

‘You held it back once.’

The voice arrived inside his skull, not through his ears, cutting through everything else like it had always been there, waiting for a door to open.

‘You will not hold it back again.’

"Who's there," Gad said aloud, and half the yard flinched, though nobody else had heard anything.

‘You know who I am. Doran has spent years hiding what I am.’

"Then show yourself."

‘I already have.’ The voice said

The light beneath his skin flared bright enough that guards shielded their eyes, and for one long second, Gad's vision split.

The courtyard still visible, but overlaid with something else entirely, a memory that wasn't his own.

A battlefield at night. Doran, younger, kneeling in mud, whispering a bargain to something that had no shape, only presence, only hunger.

‘He gave me his retreat. I gave him his survival. Now his debt has passed to you, carried in every wound this household has given you since.’

"I never agreed to anything."

‘You didn't have to. You bled. That was enough.’

The image shattered, and Gad was back in the courtyard, on both knees now.

The light no longer confined beneath his skin but visibly leaking from his eyes, his mouth, pale and cold despite the heat radiating off him in waves that made the nearest guards stumble back further.

"Gad!" Mira's voice, closer now, though someone held her back before she could reach him.

Doran stood frozen several feet away, and for the first time, Gad saw something other than calculation on his face. Real fear. The kind that came from watching a mistake finally arrive at its cost.

‘He knew this day would come,’ the voice said, quieter now, almost intimate. ‘He has spent every day since Solenne managing how much pain you absorbed, hoping to delay this. He failed.’

"Then finish it," Gad said through gritted teeth. "Whatever you want from me, say it."

‘I want what he owes. Abandon them the way he abandoned you. Walk away from this yard, from these people, and the pain stops. The power is yours completely, unchained, unmanaged. All you have to do is leave them exactly as he did.’

Gad's eyes found Kestrel, still standing in the dirt where he'd pulled him from the chains.

Found Mira straining against the guard holding her back. Found the slave quarters beyond the yard, dozens of faces watching him with the same desperate hope they'd carried since the day Solenne fell.

"No," Gad said.

‘You will die fighting this.’

"Then I die fighting it."

The light surged one final time, violent and total, and Gad felt something inside his chest tear loose, not painfully, but like a weight finally releasing its grip.

The pale fire beneath his skin dimmed rapidly, retreating from his arms, his chest, pulling back into some deeper place he couldn't name, leaving him gasping in the dirt, drained but entirely himself again.

Doran moved first, heading towards Gad. He knelt down beside him without regards for the guards watching. "You said no."

"I said no."

"Nobody has ever said no to it." Doran's voice shook, disbelief cutting through years of careful control. "Not once. Not in all the years I've carried this."

Gad forced himself upright, legs shaking, staring at the man who had enslaved him, lied to him, and doomed his kingdom in a single retreat years ago.

"You're going to tell me everything," Gad said. "Right now. In front of everyone."

Doran's facial expression changed, glancing at the crowd still watching, at Rennick standing rigid near the platform, at Kestrel who hadn't moved an inch since the chains fell from his wrists.

"If I tell them," Doran said quietly, "this household ends today."

"It should have ended years ago."

Doran looked at him for a long moment, something breaking behind his eyes that had held firm since the war.

He straightened, turned to face the yard full of people he had owned, and opened his mouth to speak.

The ground shook, revealing cracks beneath them before a single word left him, a low tremor rolling through the courtyard hard enough to knock guards off balance.

Dust sliding from the manor's outer walls as something deep beneath the estate answered the noise Gad's power had made.