Page 2 of Veinblood
If itwasfate, then none of it was accidental. The thought chills me more than the darkness does. What if I never had a choice in any of this? What if every decision I made was just another step along a path someone else had already carved out?
Falling between worlds. Finding the tower. The way his shadows weave around my silver. Even Sereven, with his obsession and his hatred and his desperate need to control what he created.
But then I remember the moments when choice felt real. The first time I reached for Sacha's hand in the tower. Being part of the rescue mission at Glassfall Gap. Healing Sacha. Standing against Sereven at Thornspire, knowing I might die.
Is that what he fears most? What we might become together rather than the power we each hold separately. What we already became for those few minutes in Thornspire Keep before everything went wrong?
Sereven.
There’s something about him that I need to remember. Something important. It hovers at the edge of my thoughts.What he said, or what I saw in his face in those final moments before everything exploded. A piece of information that matters, but my mind keeps sliding away from it like it’s too slippery to hold.
My thoughts scatter, pulled in a different direction by names I can’t forget.
Kalliss. Meren. Nyassa. Vorith.
Wielders of flame, earth, tide, and wind. Four Veinblood Masters. People who gave up everything to hide me from the Authority’s reach.
What kind of power could I have carried as a child, that four Masters would die to protect me?
I try to picture their final moments. Did they stand together, all four of them, their powers woven into something vast enough to break through the boundaries of their world? Did the air around them crack and burn as their powers collided?
They must have known it would kill them. Must have weighed the cost of their lives against the possibility that I might survive, might grow up to be someone worth saving.
The idea that they looked at a three-year-old and saw hope worth dying for is almost too much to bear.
I was just a child. I don’t remember their faces. I never knew their names. But they gave up everything for me anyway.
But why would it take four of them to achieve what Sacha did alone, with a single summons? A single desperate act, cast out seconds before they sealed him away.
My thoughts shift again, Sereven’s voice echoing through my mind.
You’re a vessel, Elowen. The most perfect vessel ever created.
Pride and rage were tangled in every word. As though I was his creation, his greatest achievement, and by claiming my own power, I’d betrayed him.
That revelation still makes me sick.
The Authority didn’t just take power. They tookchildren. Used them as containers to strip Veinbloods of their gifts. Temporary vessels. Each one died the second the magic was finished with them.
ButIdidn’t.
I didn’t just hold the power. I kept it. Something in me didn’t break the way they expected.
I bonded with it.
And now I can’t stop thinking about the ones who didn’t. The ones who died.
How many children were taken from their families? How many names have been scrubbed from history? How many died before they even understood what was happening to them?
What kind of person uses children like that? Knowing each one would die, but doing it anyway? The casual way Sereven talked about it, like it was just another tool in the Authority’s arsenal. Like those children were materials to be used up, rather than people with lives and dreams and families who loved them. How do you convince yourself that’s acceptable? How do you look at a child and see only what they can give you?
The worst part is knowing that I survived where they didn't. That whatever quality made me different, whatever accident of biology or magic, it allowed me to bond with stolen power instead of being consumed by it.
I think about all the families who lost children to the Authority. Parents who had held their sons and daughters close one moment, and had them ripped away the next. Did they search? Did they hope? Or did they know, somehow, that their children were never coming home?
The space around me shifts. It’s still empty, still silent, but the tension in the air sharpens. The fine hairs on my arms lift seconds before the silver-haired woman’s voice whispers through my mind.
“Remember what lies beneath. Remember the bracelet. Remember the storm.”
