Page 57 of Claimed By the Vykan
Kyrax held her gaze. “Yes.”
Selharyn’s laugh was short and humorless. “Have you lost your mind, or are you trying to force us to kill you?”
“Do not pretend concern for my survival now,” Kyrax said softly. The quiet in his voice made several of their masks turn slightly—unease, or caution. “If you meant to end me, you would have attempted it long ago.”
Vaelor’s fingers tightened on the arms of his throne. “We all know what is at stake,” he said. “This is not only about you. A failed attunement with your kind does not end at death.”
Kyrax said nothing. He wanted to hear it from their own mouths.
Orath obliged. “When a Vykan bond collapses, the venom cycle ruptures. Power discharges. The Mist destabilizes. Saelori bodies convulse. Ships fall from the sky. You were not yet formed when the last failure burned through our world.”
Images rose unbidden in Kyrax’s memory—not lived, but inherited from records and visions: seas boiling at the edges, mist going wild and black-veined, Saelori screaming under waves of pain they could not escape.
“The last Vykan who tried to bind himself to a human nearly took the planet with him,” Selharyn said. “We killed him at the brink. It was the only way to stop the cascade.”
“And now you walk the same path,” Drava added quietly.
Kyrax let their warnings settle, heavy but not unexpected. “The circumstances differ,” he said. “That attempt was abrupt. Forced. The human was unprepared, unshielded. My bond is not.”
“You say that,” Selharyn hissed, “because you do not yet see the fracture.”
“I see her,” Kyrax answered, patience thinning. “I feel her. She is more than halfway through the attunement and shows no signs of distortion. Her mind holds. Her body is adapting. You want to speak of risk—speak accurately.”
Vaelor regarded him from behind the horned helm. “No human in our history has reached midway without breaking.”
“Then our history has been altered,” Kyrax said. “You will have to adjust.”
A murmur circled the ring, some of it annoyed, some of it—he thought—reluctantly impressed. Irritation prickled at the edge of the bond from far away, like an echo. Morgan shifted in her sleep, sensing his agitation even at this distance.
He tempered it.
“You will sever it,” Orath said. “Now. Before it stabilizes further. Let her live if you must, keep her as pet or envoy or curiosity, but the bond cannot remain.”
“Break it,” Selharyn added. “We will assist the unbinding. It will hurt you, but you will survive.”
Kyrax let the suggestion hang for several heartbeats.
“No.”
The single word landed like falling stone.
“You misjudge the scope of your choice,” Vaelor said, voice sharpening. “If you refuse, and the bond fails, we will not wait for you to lose control. We will end you before the cascade reaches the Mist.”
“So you would kill one of your own,” Kyrax said, “because I succeeded where you once failed.”
“You have not succeeded yet,” Selharyn bit out. “You have only increased the potential cost of your eventual failure.”
Kyrax’s hands flexed once on the arms of his throne. When he spoke again, his tone was flat, measured.
“Then we change the cost.”
The other masks shifted minutely.
“I propose this,” he said. “You will stop attempting to interfere. You will censure Isshyr formally for his violation of my bastion. He will render restitution in resources and fleets and will not set foot in my domain again without invitation. The rest of you will keep your hands away from what is mine.”
“And in return?” Drava asked, though he suspected she already knew.
“In return,” Kyrax said, “I will complete the attunement.”
