Page 95 of Marked By the Enemy
A man appeared from behind Abigail. Bald, robed in grey, ultraviolet light pulsed at the seams of his clock like silent threads of lightning. His eyes were ultraviolet, too. They were nearly impossible to look at.
I froze. My blood turned to ice. This was not the Bone Seat of the Moon Court. The face was different. Older. More worn. Yet somehow familiar.
He raised his palm. Two sigils burned across his skin: the skull of the Bone Seat… and beneath it, a cracked urn ringed in soot. “I was once the Bone Seat of the Ash Court.” His voice scraped like weathered stone. “You met me in the forest when you first arrived at the ruined Keep, young Talia of Tarnwick. I may have frightened you. My form outside the corridor is… less than palatable.”
My mouth went dry. “The creature in the forest?”
He inclined his head. “Yes. I made a pact with a hermit warlock long ago. He was one of the few mixed-bloods I could reach from the Fissured Realm—more human than fae. He lives near the Keep. He helped me through the veil.”
I stared. “So you’re in the Fissured Realm now?”
“I was banished there,” he said simply. “For refusing to bind with the demons. For refusing to join the ten Bone Seats who did. I resisted. So they exiled me, just like they did Abigail.”
He looked past me, toward the torches guttering along the corridor walls. Abigail looked calm as she gazed at me, her hands nearly folded in front of her womb.
“The Bone Seats of Ash, Flower, and Glass never wanted control. We tried to end it—with the help of the Royals and their original Elemental Seats. But fae magic is weak on planet Caldaen. We failed. My warlock friend used ancient human magic. That’s what allowed me to appear before you.”
Darian stood beside me, silent. His face had turned ashen white—his pallor almost ghostly.
I looked back at the man. “How did you become that creature?”
“It’s the form my soul has taken in the Fissured Realm. Grotesque. Fragile. The warlock sacrificed two fish to the stream’s edge to anchor me through a mirror. It was the only way.”
He paused. “If I crossed fully into Caldaen—through a red gateway—I would bring spirits with me. Spirits that don’t belong in your world.”
A soft voice spoke beside us. “Excuse me, sir.” A teenage girl stepped forward, her silver-gray braids catching the corridor light—an unusual color, streaked as if with forge-ash and blade-dust. Slowly, she raised her hand, revealing a familiar mark seared into her skin. The cracked urn, ringed in soot, burned across her palm. “I’m from your line. I thought it was just… a burn.”
The man’s face didn’t change. But his second hand lifted, slowly, toward her. A gesture not of kinship.
A sound rose behind us like stones scraping soil. Another man appeared from the trees behind the Wind Seat. He wore no crown. No gems. His cloak was spun from nettle and flax, dyed with ash and root. Vines twisted at his belt. His beard was streaked with green. The hem of his robe dragged moss as he walked. Bare feet. Weathered hands.
He stopped before Willow and Rainer. “I am of the King of the Dawn Court. Even before the Elemental Seats, we chose the old ways. Those were the ways of the humans. We served the five elements. Perhaps we were guided by the folk of Faerieland in ritual and song. But the vow-magic was our library, passed down from our ancestors’ memory cores.”
A mark bloomed across Willow’s collarbone—amber, shaped like a low sun rising over a hill. Fine roots curled beneath it, spreading outward in delicate lines. Rainer lifted her hand, and the same amber sigil lit up once before settling into her skin.
“You are my great-granddaughter, Rainer. And you, Willow, are my great-great-granddaughter,” the druid king said, voicefull of warmth. “You’re both beautiful. And you’ll never believe who you’re related to on your mother’s side.”
Willow bounced on her toes, hands clasped to her chest. “Who, Grandfather? Who?”
He smiled and pressed a finger to his lips. “It’s a secret I’ll share only if the time ever comes. But let’s hope it never will.”
He turned, raising one palm toward the corridor. One by one, everyone followed—wolves, falcons, queens, smugglers. The air didn’t spark. It breathed. Warmth unfurled beneath us, and the stones remembered. The corridor fell away.
But we remained. And so did the circle of memory stones.
Chapter twenty-seven
The Break Between
Frost arrived early. To preserve wood, we kept fires low inside the keep and around the camp. But no one complained. Those marked spoke less, even though they had been kept busy in the cellars storing grains from Lord Fen’s carriages the previous day.
Astrid found ancient hieroglyphs in the basements and became obsessed with mine and Darian’s vision of geoglyphs. She proposed that the fae, or the humans before, had erected the Keep on top of one.
She thought the Keep may have been a burial site or a place of worship for those more ancient than the ancestors in the Corridor, and that there would be ley lines running through the land to other important sites marked out by temples, castles, stone circles—built on top of geoglyphs.
But despite the elders’ excitement, most marked ones remained quiet at meals and gatherings. Their bond resided in stolen glances, the quietude of shared silence, and the shared truth of the Fifth mark, now runes linking them to their ancestors.
I walked the perimeter before first light while everyone else slept. The ridge remained empty after the skiffs had vanished the night before. But the absencepressed. I stood at the edge of the rise, with the vow-magic curling low in my chest. I closed my eyes.
