Chapter 142
*Maximus
I was the first one awake.
OF
maybe I’d never actually slept.
The weight in my bones said I had. The ache in my knuckles said I hadn’t.
Dawn hadn’t broken yet. The trees stood as jagged silhouettes against a sky of bruised gray. The makeshift training post behind the last tent hadn’t sent use in days, and that was precisely why I came. No crowd. No stares. No whispers about what I’d done.
Just cold air and steel.
I gripped the training blade Bastain had reforged after the last collapse and braced myself against the chill. It wasn’t the kind of cold you shook off with breath. It was marrow–deep. Like the kind that settled after you lost something important–and never found a way to hold onto anything again.
My strikes started slow.
Measured.
Mechanical.
One for the day I marked her.
Two for the moment I lost her.
Three for every time I convinced myself I’d be fine.
By the fifth, my shoulder screamed. I didn’t stop.
By the tenth, the skin between my knuckles split. I still didn’t stop.
“Is it guilt,” came a voice behind me, low, even, “or punishment?”
I didn’t look back. Didn’t need to.
Ethan’s footsteps were unmistakable–too soft for a wolf his size, tob careful not to spook a sister still made of lightning.
I exhaled through my teeth and set the blade down on the nearest log. “Does it matter?”
“No,” Ethan said. “But you should know the difference.”
He came to stand beside me. We didn’t speak again for a long time. Only the rhythmic thump of fists meeting wood broke the silence. That, and the distant sound of Jiselle’s aura humming through the camp–gentler now, but still impossible to ignore.
“She’s stronger than she was,” he said after a while.
I nodded.
“She still scares you?”
I looked at him. “No.”
He met my gaze evenly. “Good. Because we’re gonna need her.”
“I know.”
Ethan didn’t linger after that. He clapped me once on the shoulder and disappeared back toward the tents. Not another word. Not a single dig about the
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past.
And somehow, that made it worse.
Because the less he hated me, the more I had to live with myself.
The day passed slow. We stayed alert for the Gatekeeper’s next move. Bastain sent a scout to shadow their perimeter, and Hate kept fiselle close–but not too close. Not possessive. Just ready.
It was Eva who told me Jiselle had asked for me.
I found her at the edge of the plateau, sitting on the stone that looked out over the ravine. Her violet aura was muted, drawn in close like a second skin.
She didn’t look back when I approached. Just said, “You don’t have to say anything.”
But I did.
So I walked forward anyway and sat a few paces away.
The silence between us was different than before. Not tight with tension. Not brittle with anger.
Just… wary.
“Do you remember the cave in the south ridge?” I asked.
She blinked. “Where we used to go after the Trials?”
“Yeah. You told me once that it was the only place you felt like you could hear yourself think.”
Jiselle looked down at her palms. “It still is. Except now, the voice I hear isn’t mine half the time.”
I nodded. “You hear Eira?”
She hesitated. “Sometimes. Not like before. It’s… deeper now. Like she’s not a voice. Just a root.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, finally. The words weren’t soft. They weren’t meant to be.
She looked at me.
I held her gaze.
“I’m not asking you to forgive me,” I added. “I wouldn’t, if I were you. But I need you to know–I knew the moment I marked you that it was a violation. I knew, and I did it anyway.”
“Why?” she asked. Not with venom. Just exhaustion.
“Because I thought I’d already lost you. And I thought… if I couldn’t have your love, at least I’d have your bond.” I looked away, jaw tight. “It was selfish. And I would take it back if I could.”
Jiselle didn’t answer for a while. Her fingers were tracing something in the dirt, slow and absent.
When I looked down, I froze,
A rune. Simple. Curved. Old.
Too old.
“You’ve drawn this before,” I said.
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u vidy
Her brows furrowed. “What?”
76%
I pointed. “That mark. You etched it once–months before the Trial. In the old library on a scrap of parchment. I only remembered it because you said you’d dreamed it.”
She stared at the mark like it was foreign.
“I don’t remember that,” she whispered.
“Maybe you weren’t meant to,” I said. “Maybe Serina was.”
Jiselle looked up at me. And for the first time since the flame took her, her eyes held something raw. Something open.
Fear.
“Do you still love me?” she asked, voice barely audible.
I didn’t flinch.
“Yes,” I said. “But I won’t ask you to return it.”
She nodded slowly, as if the honesty hurt worse than any lie.
“I need you to know,” she said, “that I’m not that girl anymore.”
“I know,” I replied. “But she’s still part of you.”
We sat in silence again, this time different than any before.
This time, it felt like a truce.
Jiselle drew her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. Her aura flickered softly, casting faint reflections across the stone.
“You were my first,” she said. “In more ways than one. And I hate that the way we ended will always be tangled in that.”
I swallowed hard.
“But I also know,” she continued, “that in the final war, if I fall, you’ll be the one to catch me. Even if you hate me by then.”
I turned to her, throat tight.
“I don’t think I’ll ever hate you,” I said. “I think hating you would mean cutting out the part of me that still wants to be better.”
She gave a small, sad smile.
“Then maybe,” she whispered, “we’ll survive this. Not as what we were. But as something new.”
The wind picked up around us, and somewhere deep beneath the mountain, the leyline pulsed again–faint, like a distant heartbeat.
And still, I watched her.
Because even if I never touched her again, even if Nate was the one she gave herself to, I knew this truth like I knew the feel of a blade in my hand:
I would burn the world before I let her burn alone.
Even if she never looked at me that way again.
Even if she only remembered the worst of me.
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