Chapter
One
CALLIS
The sea stretched endless and cold beneath a bleached sky, its surface broken only by the wake of the ship and the wheeling cries of gulls far behind us. I stood at the prow, both hands curled tight around the worn rail, the salt stinging my face. I hadn’t spoken since dawn. There was nothing to say.
The sailors gave me a wide berth. Perhaps it was the robes, still ink-stained from my days in the temple scriptorium, though I hadn’t held a quill in days. Or perhaps it was my silence. There’s a kind of quiet that makes people uncomfortable, the kind that feels like it’s hiding something. I’d learned to wear it like armor.
I wasn’t one of them. Not truly. Not anymore.
Below me, the carved figurehead dipped and rose with the waves: a beautiful young god, face serene, arms outstretched, as if offering himself to the sea. Elyon. I’d copied his likeness more times than I could count on scrolls, in border designs, etched into altarcloths that few would ever touch. I recalled the three tenets of his cult: beauty, light, and poetry.
I stared past him now, eyes locked on the shifting line of the horizon. The wind tugged strands of my hair loose and made my eyes sting, but I didn’t blink.
Eletheria.
When I was a boy, the older scribes spoke of it in half-whispers, like a place that wasn’t real. They said the island hung between earth and sky, cloaked in mist, its shores kissed by gods. A sacred place, untouched by time, ruled by rites too old to name. They said it could see into your soul. The island itself could watch you. They said no one returned the same. Some didn’t return at all.
You didn’t sail to Eletheria, they told me.You were called.
No one explained what that meant. Not really.
The stories changed depending on who was telling them. Some whispered of lovers bound in silk and moonlight. Others spoke of men who wept with joy or terror, or both, the moment they set foot on the shore. There were tales of transformation, of ecstasy, of surrender. Of judgment.
No one ever called it punishment, though. Never that. It was a privilege. An honor.
That was the word my mother had used when the summons came.
An honor.
Her hands had trembled as she packed my things. She didn’t cry. Not then.
But she wouldn’t look me in the eye.
I didn’t know what I had been chosen for. Onlythat once the scroll bearing the island’s seal was unrolled, there had been no more questions. Not from the priest. Not from her. Not from me.
Obedience was easier than grief.
I thought of the last page I had copied before I was taken from the temple. A line from a sacred text I no longer believed in, though the words still rose up unbidden:
To be claimed is to be seen. To be seen is to be changed.
I didn’t want to be seen. And I didn’t want to be changed.
But that choice was no longer mine.
I shifted my weight against the railing, jaw clenched. My stomach churned—not from the motion of the ship, but from something deeper. Something older. A kind of dread that had followed me since I boarded five days ago.
A month. That’s what they said the Bond lasted. One full cycle of the moon.
But what came after?
The sailors never looked me in the eye for long. Perhaps they feared the same thing I did.
That the stories were true.
That the island was watching already.
