Page 8 of Shadowvein

The impact of her eyes meeting mine is disorienting. My pulse thuds in my ears. My fingers twitch at my sides. My legs stay rooted to the floor.

I haven’t looked at another soul in twenty-seven years … and now one stands here, looking back at me. I’d forgotten what it felt like to be seen, to exist in someone else’s gaze.

I should do something. But what?

Speak… I should speak.

But I haven’t spoken in years. I don’t remember the last time I even tried. My lips part, and nothing comes out. My throat tightens around the effort, like it’s forgotten how to shape the sound, how to make language real.

I try again. My breath catches, then my senses fire to life.

“Well.” My tongue stumbles over the word. I push forward. “This is unexpected.”

Her mouth opens, then closes again. Her eyes stay locked on mine.

The sound of my voice fills the space between us—low, unused, too loud in a room built on breath, movement, and silence. Not a thought but a sound.

Spoken. Shaped. Released.

I can’t place the last time I heard it. The grain feels wrong in my ears. But it was mine, and now it’s in the air, beyond recall.

It forces me to recognize how absolute the silence has become.

She doesn’t respond. She doesn’t even move. And I begin to wonder whether she’s real or if I’ve finally crossed into madness. I force myself to speak again.

“You managed to open the tower door.”

She doesn’t disappear. Which means she isn’t a hallucination. But if sheisreal, if the silence is broken, that means the door opened.

It should be impossible. Once the tower was sealed, no one could enter. Not in all the time I’ve been here. There must be another explanation.

But the magic here doesn’t bend. It never has.

She shouldn’t be here. Not standing in front of me. Not casting a shadow across the floor.

A dazed, sun-scorched creature with cracked lips, and clothing heavy with sand. One who stares at me as though she expects me to vanish, while all I can do is look back at her and try to remember how to breathe.

And then I remember.

A spell.

One casting. Just one. The last thing I managed to do before the tower closed around me and sealed my magic away. I shaped it in the dark with what power I had left. Poured it into the cracks of the world and sent it into the void.

A summoning.

I haven’t let myself think about it for years. Not because I forgot about it, but because it was easier to believe it failed. That it was swallowed and destroyed, like everything else.

But now … she’s here. Standing where no one should stand. Breathing air that hasn’t been shared in half a lifetime.

And the towerlet her in.

It doesn’t prove anything. It could still be a coincidence. A cruel trick of fate. History warns me not to trust hope.

But I remember the shape of the magic. I remember the way it left my hands. How it burned through what was left of me. I remember what I asked for.

Freedom.

Her head tilts, as though something has caught her attention, and her gaze moves from me to the table. Her eyes fix on the pitcher, and every bit of caution drains from her expression, replaced by need.

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