Page 1 of Veinblood
Chapter One
ELLIE
“What is severed from its source seeks always to return.”
The Healer's Codex, ancient Tidevein manuscript
Darkness surrounds me.It isn’t the same as the shadows Sacha wraps around us, the ones that pulse with his heartbeat. Iknowthose shadows.Theydon’t scare me. This darkness is hungrier.Colder. It swallows sound and space alike, and presses in on me from every side, like it’s trying to crush me into nothing.
I reach inward, searching for that bright thread of power that became part of me before River Crossing. When I find the place it lives, there’s nothing there. The energy is gone. The connection is gone. It’s almost like it was never real to begin with.
I keep searching, refusing to accept the absence, but it’sstillnot there.
Panic surges through me, fast and hard, dragging memories I don’t want to remember with it. I don’t want to see them, but closing my eyes won’t block them out.
Thornspire Keep.
Those final seconds before everything went dark. The moment when everything came undone.
Sereven’s face forms in my mind, contempt melting into fear, as our combined power flowed into the crystal. Light breaking outward in waves that made the air around us shimmer and bend. And the pressure … the pressure built so fast I was sure my ribs were going to snap. Every breath turned to fire. My hands shook with the strain, willing the power to ease, to stop, tobend.
But it didn’t. No matter what I tried, I couldn’t stop it.
I remember Sacha’s hand tight around mine, the tension in his body as he battled to hold his shadows in place. The crystal’s whine kept climbing, growing higher … louder, until it was all I could hear. The sound cut through everything—my thoughts, my fear, even the pain—until it was an endless, rising shriek.
Sereven’s face twisted, his mouth moving as he tried to prise the crystal away from his palm. Blood dripped from his nose, his ears, his eyes. He was saying something, shouting maybe, but I couldn’t hear him over the crystal’s scream.
The crystal pulsed brighter.Brighter. The light became so intense I could see it through my closed eyes. And then the sound changed, until it was no longer a whine, but something deeper. Something …wrong.
And then …
Oblivion.
For a long moment, there was nothing. No light. No sound. No thought. Just a vast, aching silence.
That’s when the darkness surrounded me.
I float inside it, lost in the emptiness. Then images start to form. They flash through my mind like fever dreams, showing different versions of me.
Ellie Bennet, dressed in winter clothes and stumbling through a desert, drawn toward a silver tower.
Elowen, with silver-streaked hair and eyes like mercury, the vessel Sereven claimed to create, filled with stolen power.
The Varel et’Arvath, storm that follows shadow, arms raised and calling down lightning, fulfilling prophecy despite all efforts to prevent it.
Each version feels both real and wrong. The woman who first stepped into that tower seems impossibly naive now, unaware of the actions her appearance set into motion. She thought her biggest problem was being estranged in a strange place.
The woman who commands the storm feels more real, more like who I’m supposed to be. That version understands what it means to have power, to use it, to accept the responsibility that comes with it.
But Elowen, the name Sereven spoke with such recognition and fear, remains a mystery still unfolding. A history I lived, but don’t remember. A childhood stolen from me twice. Once by the Authority, once by the people who saved me from them.
The images fade, and a voice whispers the words that have haunted me since River Crossing.
Where shadow leads, storm will follow.
I didn’t understand them at first. I resisted the way peoplelinked the prophecy to me, certain they were trying to force me into becoming something I wasn’t ready to be. But now, those words are woven through everything. What happened in the tower, and every step Sacha and I have taken since. Every choice we’ve made. Every battle we’ve fought.
Was the connection between us ever just coincidence? Or was it always meant to happen, written into the veins of this world long before I ever returned to it?
