Page 76 of Marked By the Enemy
The rain came without warning. I stood beneath the lintel at the southern wall, gazing at the path vanish into mist. The edges of the courtyard blurred first. Then the trees. Then the hills. The sky sealed its eyes. My mark warmed. The corridor pulsed as it recalled.
Behind me, Darian was dressed for travel in a black coat.
“We don’t have to go yet,” I said.
He fastened the last strap and turned to me.
“We do.”
He was right. The corridor hadn’t closed. Some wandered too deep. Most returned. A few were fractured. One path differed from the rest, circling back—to the person it remembered. It had showed me the blade, remembered it, and wanted me to carry it.
“What if it’s a trap?” I asked.
“It probablyis.”
“And if it’s not?”
“We come back changed.”
We walked to the foot of the foot of the hill.
He peered at me with those gray-blue eyes. “Are you certain this is the right path?”
“No.”
“But we’re still walking it?”
“Yes.”
The link blinked between us and went still. We tramped up the hill, past the outer wall, and toward the trees. The path opened like a scar, and although the air turned cold, after hours of walking, we were hot from the exertion.
It took us half a day of climbing hills and descending ravines until we entered a place where the trees grew differently. Closer together, limbs twisted in ways that didn’t match the rest of the valley’s rhythm. The leaves were pale and out-of-season, out-of-time. Darian slowed behind me.
His breath changed. “This isn’t natural.”
“It’s not meant to be.”
The bond between us flexed once. Every root beneath our feet seemed to lean toward the silence between our words. The quiet had weight. Even the air held its breath. Up ahead, a break in the undergrowth revealed a worn stone arch. It was cracked down one side and swallowed in moss.
“A bond-site,” Darian said.
I nodded.
The air inside the arch tasted like copper and memory, deep and untouched. We crossed into it. The change was instant. The world shrank to stone and shadow. The trees fell away. The tether stayed with us, steady as breath, but everything else became a chamber of shadow and dust.
Stone lined the walls now. Old, smooth, worn by feet that had passed here long before we were born. At the end of the hall, something flickered and waited. A long table carved from dark rock stood beneath a ring of open sky. A single shaft of misted light cut down to the blade at its center.
The blade was simple. Iron. Plain. Forgettable—except to the vow. The hilt was wrapped in faded cloth, the sort of thing you’d expect to find in a soldier’s belt.
Darian stood beside me. “Is it yours?”
“No,” I said. “But it knows me.”
The moment my fingers brushed the hilt, the vow-magic roared. It wasn’t invasive. It felt like a page turning. The air shimmered with a visionary retelling.
There was a town. Old. Spires and colleges, stone streets baked pale by the sun. A fountain stood in the square. A statue of a woman, arms raised. Inside a high-walled ring, men and women danced. Painted drums, smoke-streaked faces, gold stitched in hem and eye. Smoke rising from a bowl on the altar—resin, sandalwood, frankincense.
A young woman danced hollow-eyed, something blue burning beneath her skin. Cropped hair. Closed eyes. When she opened them, she was still the same woman. But something had risen inside. Blue light. A fae woman curled in her skin, faint as mist. The others didn’t notice. They kept dancing. Then it vanished.
