Page 58 of The Blood Rites

I glance quickly over my shoulder. Kael sits there with the other Shadowborn—Nyxen and Vaelis. All three sit statue-still, only moving to place food in their mouths. Kael is watching me, his face cold and expressionless.

“He keeps looking over here,” Marissa whispers.

I want to tell her she’s being ridiculous, but the memory of his body pressed to mine, his voice in my ear, is too vivid. My face betrays me immediately and I focus hard on my soup instead.

Lyssandra picks at her bread without looking up, and for the first time I notice rings of tiny silver scars around her fingers. Beautiful, but haunting, somehow.

“He does act differently towards you,” she says quietly, just for me. “As though he’s orbiting around you. His darkness seems to wrap around you but never quite touches. I cannot quite understand why, though.”

Morwen finally glances up, pinning me with her deep blue stare. She signs something—five short, sharp gestures with her hands—and Lyssandra translates: “She says your fate is bound with his.”

Marissa giggles in a way that reveals her true age, placing a hand over her heart as she mimics a swoon.

I suddenly become very interested in my bread.

Our conversation is not as quiet as we think, because Fen leans forward, voice severe. “It hardly matters. Only one person survives this. Sounds to me like fate intends to kill you both.”

Alaris lets out a harsh sigh. “Mother help us, sorry about him, Luceris. He can be a bit depressing sometimes. It’s not like anything the Waterborn say is true anyway; no offence.”

He lifts his hand in a half-hearted wave of apology.

“The currents speak a language you couldn’t dream of understanding,” Theon says.

“Right...” Alaris responds, rolling his eyes.

The conversation meanders along, but all I can think about are Theon’s words.

The darkness hungers for the light.

It takes all my willpower not to look behind me, to see if he’s looking at me still.

The Waterborn excuse themselves to pray, and Marissa, Callen, and I stand to leave.

“We should rest,” I say. “We only have one more day to prepare.”

Marissa gives me a hug before we go.

“Try and get some sleep tonight,” she whispers. “Don’t let the monsters in.”

I squeeze her back, hard. “Only if you promise to do the same.”

Her grin grows into a smirk.

I walk the halls alone as Theon’s prophecy plays on my mind. In the quiet, I let myself think about Kael. I wonder what lives beneath all that cold restraint.

I wonder if everyone here feels this untethered, like something vast has already decided how this ends.

And despite every sensible instinct screaming otherwise, I find myself wondering what he sees when he looks at me.

That night, sleep does not come gently. It drags me under.

The sensation reminds me of standing on the Mana Bridge and looking down into the sea below: the certainty that if I fell, the water would not simply swallow me whole, but pull me deeper and deeper until even the light disappeared.

Kael is waiting for me.

Not with the sharp hunger from the Dome or the quiet threat of our first meeting in the corridor, but with something far more unsettling: stillness.

He stands in a place that cannot possibly be real. Crystal stretches endlessly in every direction, smooth and reflective beneath our feet like frozen water. Above us, the sky churns with white and black, the colours folding together slowly, like oil stirred through cream.