Page 33 of Marked By the Enemy
The mystical creature’s silver eyes stayed fixed on mine, and I finally gasped in a breath.
“You called,”he gurgled. The voice didn’t come from its mouth but from the inside of my skull.
The vow-magic trembled in recognition low beneath my ribs.
I took a single step closer. “Who are you?”
“A voice they silenced. A tether they tried to cut.”Its limbs flexed, and the silk that hung from its torso like unraveled burial cloth swayed. He raised one hand slowly. A circle was carved into his palm.
My gaze bounced between its palm and head.
Darian’s words echoed in my mind:“The broken fifth circle.”
I kneeled close enough now to see the seams running beneath its wax-like skin. Its joints were rimmed with threadlike lines of spellwork, pale and glimmering faintly in the shadows under the canopy. They were dark like veins too old to bleed. Muscle lay under the surface, but it wasn’t smooth. It was patchworked.
My voice cracked. “Are you alive?”
“I remember being.”Its head turned slowly, the silver eyes never blinking.“I wanted to keep my memories and the memories of my ancestors. Most of us did, except those promised immortality. I refused to let the demons in.”
“Did you create the bond?”
“No.”The word landed heavily.“I refused to be part of its corruption.”
The trees around the clearing dipped their branches inward.
“You resist. You reshape.”
“I never meant to be chosen.”
“Which is why it chose you.”
“Did the Bone Seat choose me?”
The creature cackled like an old woman in my mind until he started coughing and spluttering. “The Bone Seats only wish they possessed the power to select you for the bond. No. They wanted to prevent you from bonding with the prince.”
He pressed his palm with the circle against the ground. The soil cracked in lines, and a shape emerged—thirteen rings, etched faintly into the earth like star maps. Ten formed the inner wheel. Three more circled farther out, rimmed in silver and slightly raised, like they resisted burial.
“See those three forgotten ones? One of those is me,” he said in my mind, its watery voice unclear.
One of the outer rings was gray and difficult to hold in the eye, but clear when the wind shifted the creature’s silk: a skull standing tall on a cracked urn, ringed in falling ash-feathers.
I froze. Upon examining the book of runes, none had formed that sigil. The skull meant the Bone Seat or death, but none of the courts used the other rune of the urn. It felt... old. Unwritten. Forbidden. And yet the bond seemed to recognize something I wasn’t supposed to.
I swallowed. “Why show me this? Why now?”
“Because I’m unable to enter again. But you can open it. You can choose.”
“Choose what?”
“Whatever comes after.”
I studied its body again. The bone-pale silk. The stitched sinew. The strange fourth circle on its head which looked to be filled with sticky water. “Are you... what’s left of someone?”
“I am what remains when the bond forgets.”It began to fold in on itself, like a page turned too many times, until its remains were nothing but silk, ash, and bone. Gone.
Just before he dissolved, his voice came one last time.“Choose carefully what survives you.”
The tether in my chest coiled and uncoiled. I walked back the way I came. The forest stopped leaning away, and brambles caught my sleeves. The bond became quiet again—as if whatever test the vow-magic had set was done.
