Chapter 102
*Nathaniel
The leyline wasn’t visible to the human eye–but I could feel it pulsing beneath the forest floor like a buried artery, a steady rhythm that thrummed against the soles of my boots and clawed through the soles of my feet. It hummed louder the deeper I walked, tugging like it had teeth and purpose. Like it knew where it wanted to take me,
I hadn’t felt her magic in weeks.
Not properly. Not cleanly.
There had been echoes, yes. Whispers caught in half–sleep, the occasional sting along the tether that once bound us. But those were memories. Phantoms.
This was different.
This was alive.
The leyline curled through the valley like a forgotten vein, etched into the earth by forces older than war. I tracked it with Bastain’s map in one hand and my heartbeat in the other, following it past the ridges and broken stones of what had once been the Council’s southern watchposts.
They were gone now. Just ruins and ivy.
Like everything else they’d built.
The air changed around me the farther I followed the current–thicker, charged. The kind of pressure that made your bones itch and your instincts scream. Magic lived here. Raw and coiled and untamed. It was the kind of magic that didn’t obey unless it chose to.
And somehow, I knew… she was here.
Not physically.
Not yet.
But her magic–Jiselle’s flame–had touched this leyline. Bled into it. Branded it.
The mate bond was gone, broken weeks ago in the split–second she’d vanished through the portal. But the scar was still there. A tether not of fate, but of memory. A burn across the soul that hadn’t healed.
I stopped at the edge of a clearing that hummed with residual power. My breath caught.
The trees surrounding it were blackened at the roots. Not from wildfire. From intention. As if someone had drawn a circle of restraint in fire and dared the forest to move.
I stepped into the center.
And the world shifted.
The wind dropped. The forest stilled. And for a moment, I wasn’t in the glade anymore.
I was inside the fire.
Flames curled around me, not hot, not scalding–just present. A heat that reached inside instead of burning outside. It wrapped around my ribs and slipped beneath my skin.
And then–her voice.
Soft. Fractured. Distant.
But hers.
“Nathaniel…”
I spun, but she wasn’t there.
Not in body.
Just in flame.
I saw her face in the flickering sparks–gold and silver light woven into the shape of her, her hair caught in an invisible wind, her eyes glowing with a sadness so deep it cracked something inside me.
She raised a hand toward me.
And I raised mine.
We didn’t touch.
We couldn’t.
But I felt it anyway.
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Chapter 102
The spark. The anchor.
The proof that not all of her had been consumed.
And then she spoke again–clearer this time,
“Don’t forget me”
The fire surged.
And the vision broke.
I was on my knees in the clearing, the trees whispering again around me, my breath ragged.
Bastain’s voice crackled in through the rune–link we’d kept activated for emergencies.
“Nate. Report. Are you alright?”
I didn’t answer immediately.
I touched the center of my chest, where the tether had once been, expecting to find the void I’d grown used to.
But something pulsed there now.
Faint.
Flickering.
But real.
“I found her,” I said into the link.
“You saw her?”
“No. Not her body. Her magic. Her voice.”
Static filled the channel for a moment. Then, quietly, “You’re sure?”
“She hasn’t been lost,” I said. “Not all the way.”
Another pause.
Then Bastain’s voice, careful now. “And if she doesn’t want to be found?”
I stood slowly, staring out over the glade.
The fire had left no ash. No sign it had ever burned.
But I still felt the heat in my bones.
“She does,” I said. “Somewhere in there, she’s still reaching for me.”
Bastain didn’t argue. He knew better.
I turned away from the center of the clearing, the wind colder now. The leyline stretched ahead, curling toward the mountains.
Toward her.
The ground was soft with moss and old leaves, but each step forward felt like a march toward war. Not with her. Not yet. But with whatever–or whoever–was trying to twist her flame into something the world would kneel for instead of fight beside. And in the spaces between my thoughts, I remembered the look in her eyes from the vision. Not hatred. Not malice.
Loss.
As if even she wasn’t sure who she’d become.
There was no hate in her eyes–no cruelty, no triumph. Just a distant ache, like someone who had been walking through fire for too long and no longer remembered what cool air felt like. Her magic didn’t just burn–it mourned. It flickered like memory trying to hold its shape. And in that look, in the way her hand lifted toward me without reaching, I saw something that shattered me more than the fire ever could.
She was slipping.
Not into darkness.
But into emptiness.
Like the girl I loved was still somewhere inside, screaming behind a wall of flame she didn’t know how to tear down. “I’m going after her,” I said.
Not to Bastain. Not to the gods. To the world.
To myself.
There was no bravado in my voice. Just clarity. A stillness carved from everything we’d lost and everything I hadn’t yet surrendered. It wasn’t a declaration of war. It was a promise.
Chapter 102
Even if she didn’t remember me.
Even if Kael had twisted her heart into something unrecognizable, wrapped her in prophecy and made here she was
born to rule instead of feel.
Even if the next time I saw her, she raised a hand not in greeting–but in destruction.
I would still walk through the fire.
Not to pull her back.
But to remind her who she’d been before the world tried to rewrite her.
And if she was gone…
If there was nothing left but flame and silence and power too sharp to name…
Then I would burn beside her.
Because she had once walked through my storms without flinching.
And now it was my turn.
“I’ll find her,” I whispered. “Whatever she becomes. Even if it kills me.”
Because love doesn’t end when the bond snaps.
Not when the scar still burns.
And not when the flame still whispers your name through smoke.
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