Page 140 of Bound to the Dreadlord

I am no longer his.

52

VEYLAN

The battlefield is still.

Not with peace. With emptiness.

The sky hangs low, choked with the last remnants of smoke and magic, the stench of death thick enough to rot the air itself. The bodies of fallen warriors are scattered across the bloodstained ruins, their lifeless eyes reflecting the eerie glow of dying embers.

But none of that matters.

Not to me. Not when she is walking away.

Sera moves like a shadow, her steps eerily silent as she drifts through the carnage, her figure barely touched by the war she helped end. She should be dead.

She was dead.

Yet here she is, alive.

And she will not look at me.

I should say something. I should stop her. But the words do not come. I have nothing left to offer.

The wound I left in her was deeper than any blade, worse than any spell.

I killed her. With my own hands.

Her blood stained my palms, her body crumpled beneath me, her last breath stolen because I made a choice.

A choice I thought would save us.

A choice that destroyed her instead.

The brothers stand nearby, silent as everything settles over them.

None of them dare speak. None of them meet my gaze.

Drathis runs a hand through his bloodied hair, exhaling sharply. "We should… move the dead," he says, voice gruff, but his focus never wavers from where she is fading into the distance.

I don’t respond to him, as Sera shove me away and leaves.

After moving the bodies, I find her later.

Not in the remnants of the battlefield. Not in the ruined fortress.

But in the quiet.

She stands at the edge of a cliff, the wind pulling at the remains of her torn cloak, her silver hair too white under the moon’s cold light.

She is different.

Not just in power, not just in the way magic now coils beneath her skin like something breathing—waiting.

She is different in the way she holds herself. In the way she does not react to my presence.

Once, she would have tensed. Braced herself. She would have prepared for my words, for my touch, for whatever cruelty I had planned next.

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