Page 15 of Bound to the Dreadlord

It isn’t real.

It can’t be real.

I press my forehead against the glass, inhaling carefully, as if I might breathe in something that is not this place. As if I might drink in the memory of the ocean that has never been mine.

The air is overflowing with incense, the smoldering remnants of firewood, the phantom trace of him.

Veylan.

His presence lingers even when he is not here.

I do not understand him.

I do not understand why I am still alive.

His silence is worse than his cruelty, worse than his eyes tracking my every movement. I have spent days in this room, untouched yet imprisoned, ignored yet studied.

A game of restraint, of patience.

I don’t have any clue as to who will lose first.

The floor beneath my feet is cool as I unfold my legs, standing slowly, stretching out the stiffness of sitting too long. The fire in the hearth has burned low, its embers pulsing with the slow heartbeat of dying warmth.

I am alone.

My pulse is steady, but something coils beneath it, something restless, a thread of tension that doesn’t belong.

It started after the first night.

A sensation. A shift.

A change in the room itself when I breathe too deeply.

At first, I thought it was nothing—an illusion born from exhaustion, from the oppressive silence of these walls pressing in too tightly. But then, I felt it.

The way the candle flames flicker when I exhale. The way the shadows stretch in places they shouldn’t.

But it happens when I hum.

Not even words.

Just a breath of sound.

A vibration in my chest, slipping into the air like something alive.

I haven’t dared to test it. Not with him so near. Not with his silver gaze stripping me down to something fragile, something waiting to be unraveled.

But now…

Now, the silence hums louder than my fear.

So, I try.

A single note. Barely a whisper.

The walls do not shake. The floor does not crack beneath my feet. The world does not change.

But the air, it moves.

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