Page 47 of Elemental Becoming

“Thane,” I whisper, my voice soft but unwavering. “Breathe. Just breathe.”

I draw in a slow breath, exhaling just as steadily, willing him to follow. To feel me. To come back to me. He tries. But it comes out sharp, uneven. His head tilts back, his eyes wild and unmoored.

“All these years,” he rasps, voice breaking. “I resented him. I thought he was weak.”

The words break something open between us.

Thane swallows hard. His hands fall to his lap, palms up—as if there’s nothing left to hold onto. As if he is finally seeing it.

The shadows shift over his wrists, pooling around our knees like dark water.

I curl my fingers around his, offering him something solid, something real.

“You didn’t know,” I whisper. “None of you did. Because it didn’t look like magics. Not the kind you were taught to see.”

His throat bobs, breath shuddering.

“But I should have.”

His head drops.

I squeeze his hands, refusing to let him slip further into the wreckage.

“No,” I say, sharper now. “You couldn’t have. The only reason I could see this differently is because of the bond. How could anyone know?”

Thane’s shoulders shake beneath the weight of it.

We stay there, knee to knee, in the dark. I release his hands and reach for his face, cupping it between my palms. Behind him, the shadows shift. They move like dark mist, rippling, restless—like the grief and regret etched into every line of his face.

I lift his head, forcing his gaze to meet mine. His eyes are devastated, searching for answers. I won’t let him break. Not like this.

Not alone.

His hands curl into fists against his lap, his jaw clenching.

“He just . . . disappeared. We needed him, and he wasn’t there. My mother—” His voice cuts off sharply, his throat working as he tries to force the words out.

I hold him close, waiting, giving him the space to say it or to leave it buried. But he doesn’t leave it buried.

“My mother was fighting something too,” he says, voice hoarse. “And we thought—we thought it was madness. We tried everything. I sat beside her while she whispered to things that weren’t there. She scratched symbols into the walls—symbols no one understood.”

His breath falters.

“We thought it was killing her.”

A single tear slips down his cheek, catching the moonlight. Then another.

“And what if we were wrong?”

My chest tightens, my own eyes burning. “Thane how could—”

“What if she wasn’t sick?” His voice fractures. “What if she was trying to stop it? Trying to warn us? And we—” He exhales sharply, his hands flexing open, then curling shut again. “We let her die thinking she was lost.”

The shadows stay close, curling at his shoulders like they were made to hold grief.

And through the bond, I feel something deeper than pain. A weight pressed into him long ago. A burden shaped like silence. Thane has always believed the curse was his. That it had been waiting for him.

The bond thrums.