Corin’s gaze softened. “So don’t chase. But don’t vanish, either.”
I said nothing.
He reached out and brushed his knuckles lightly against my sleeve. “You’re not wrong about Ilvaran. But you can’t hold back the tide with fury. If you want this bond to hold, don’t waste your first days trying to shore up the island.”
“A bond is the island,” I murmured. “Each one. That’s what they forget.”
“Then show them what it means.”
A bell rang in the distance, high and silvery—the midmorning call to devotion. Corin stepped back toward the colonnade.
“You know where to find me,” he said with a faint smirk. “If you need another argument.”
I let out a long breath. “I’ll look forward to it.”
“Then feed the bond,” he called over his shoulder. “Or the gods will know you didn’t try.”
I watched him vanish behind the vines, then stood for a long moment beneath the dappled leaves, feeling the weight of the day settle on my shoulders.
Somewhere beyond the cloisters, in the scriptorium halls, Callis was likely bent over a scroll, fingers stained faintly with ink, lost in the shape of old letters and forgotten names. He was near, in air and stone and prayer.
But he still felt like someone I hadn’t yet reached.
Let this time be different, I thought.
Then I turned toward the cloister, where morning light spilled across the carved floor and the smell of sun-warmed marble rose sweet and clean.
Toward him.
Chapter
Eight
CALLIS
The ink caught the edge of the vellum like a breath held too long, then spilled in clean, obedient lines across the page. I worked slowly. Reverently. The scriptorium was quiet but not silent—quills scratching, parchment whispering, sandals shifting against tiled floors. Light from the high eastern windows poured over the curved desks in golden shafts, illuminating dust and prayer alike.
I sat hunched over the third volume of The Refractions of Order, a thick, cloth-bound tome of compiled records and monastic glosses. The parchment beneath my hands was a fresh, pale sheet. The reference lay to my left, a cracked spine propped open with carved stone weights. To my right: my inkpot, half-full, and a slice of fig I hadn’t touched.
I wasn’t hungry.
Somewhere in this same temple—perhaps a floor above, perhaps across the cloister—Auren walked. I hadn’t seen him since morning, but the bond tuggedlightly every now and then, like the slack pull of a silken thread tied between us. It wasn’t strong. Not yet. But it came in pulses: a warmth behind the ribs, a gentle buzz at the base of my throat. Sometimes it quieted. Sometimes it flared. Once, when I caught the scent of sandalwood as a priest passed me, it spiked hard and sudden enough that I nearly dipped my quill too deep.
I shook it off.
Focus.
The passage I was copying pulled me deeper into its current with each line:
“…and in the fourth century of unbroken devotion, the palace at Eletheria faced dissolution not from without but from within. The Ascendant Order, having claimed the allegiance of the fleet, the garrisons of Halvar, and even the remote mountain towers of Cindros, moved to eclipse the Harmonist Councils. Under Thorion’s banner, the virtues of dominion, discipline, and divine conquest were elevated above the older tenets of balance.”
Thorion. I’d read his name before. A knight-turned-priest-turned-strategist. The historian—Enric of Calethis—clearly hated him.
“His decrees demanded an escalation of tribute from the outer islands. His lieutenants interpreted this with brutal fidelity. Three minor shrines were burned for delay. Entire trade fleets were seized. What followed was a century of philosophical fragmentation—some islands lifting war as a sacred virtue, others retreating into the preservation ofpeace. Even now, their customs bear the stamp of those years.”
I paused, brushing excess ink from the corner of the line, and sat back slightly.
So that was how the rift began.
