Four bonds. Three cycles broken.
Each had ended differently. One with kindness, another in quiet disappointment, the last without a word. But the feeling that followed was always the same. Like an itch beneath the sternum. A splinter that refused to dislodge. Then pressure. Then pain. A slow-burning ache that rooted itself deep and made even ritual unbearable. It twisted the bond into something poisonous.
Callis didn’t know that yet. And gods willing, he wouldn’t have to.
He had looked up at me this morning—barefoot, fresh from washing his face, a light robe clinging to one shoulder—and asked if he could return to the Temple of Aerius for scribing work. He’d sounded tentative, hopeful. Said he liked old myths. Liked the stories from the Old Cycle. His voice was steady, but there was a tension beneath it. A need to be useful. A need to be seen as more than someone who had been taken into a bond.
I’d said yes.
I told him I would speak to the scribes. That he could use the copying chambers between devotions.
I hadn’t told him that I knew those myths by heart. That I’d once dreamed of writing treatises on the Cycle’s lost parables. That I still memorized ancient prayers on cold nights when sleep refused to come.
Because if I had told him—if I’d spoken too eagerly, too warmly—he might have looked at me theway they always did. Like I wanted too much. So I hadn’t said it. I’d only nodded.
The scent of incense thickened as I stepped into the inner sanctum. Here, within the temple’s half-circle of stone, other Thorns had gathered. Our robes brushed the floor like water. No one spoke. We didn’t need to. The rite was beginning.
At the center of the chamber lay the altar: a massive block of sunstone veined in living gold. Its surface was warm even before the rays of the sun reached it, as if it remembered the heat of all the mornings before. A ring of shallow channels surrounded it, carved with the names of the gods and filled with dark incense.
The brazier was lit. The smoke rose.
One by one, we pressed our palms to the sunstone.
I felt it then.
Callis.
His presence trembled like a note held too long, like breath caught behind the ribs. The bond had taken root. Not deep—not yet—but enough to feel. A pulse at the base of my spine. A line of warmth strung through the hollow places.
I saw him again in my mind, curled beneath the silk canopy, chest rising gently in sleep. I had watched him longer than I meant to. The space between us hadn’t been crossed, not after the ritual, not even with our bodies so near. And yet something had shifted.
The chant began.
Low at first. Just breath and vibration.
The wine was poured, dark and steaming, into awide ceremonial bowl. It passed from hand to hand. Each Thorn sipped in turn. When it reached me, I paused, held it close, and inhaled.
Let this bond hold. Let me not ruin it. Let me be enough.
I drank.
The chant faded into silence. The air stilled. And as the rite ended, I bowed low and stepped back into the temple’s gardens. The light had changed. Warmer now, painted in streaks across the stone path.
Somewhere back in the apartments, Callis was likely preparing for the day’s work.
The garden path shimmered again beneath my steps, damp with dew that had yet to lift. Beyond the arch of the Temple’s outer cloister, vines braided up the columns and stretched lazily across the lattice overhead. I let my fingers skim the petals of a trailing bloom—velvety white, perfumed faintly with clove—and then stepped out onto the broader terrace.
“Your face says the rite worked,” came a familiar voice. “Your shoulders say otherwise.”
I turned, unsurprised.
Corin leaned against the carved railing, his posture loose, one sandal braced against the stone. His robes were open at the collar, sleeves rolled to the elbows, exposing forearms inked faintly with devotion lines—old blessings from a rite long passed. His hair—darker than mine, always unruly—was still damp from the bathhouse. He looked as he always had in the mornings: casual, sharp-eyed, too perceptive for comfort.
He arched a brow. “Well?”
“It worked,” I said. “The bond is… formed.”
“That’s what they all say at first.” He pushed off the railing and fell into step beside me as I moved toward the inner garden wall. “Then comes the waiting. The unraveling. The clinging. The madness.”
