It is far too quiet here.
Like something is waiting. Listening.
The kind of quiet that makes my skin crawl in ways I know too well.
“Wait.”
My voice barely rises above a whisper, but everyone stops and turns.
I listen, really listen, to the world around us.
The dirt. The moss. The faint hum of stillness.
Through the ground, I feel something walking up behind me.
“Something—”
Steel flashes.
Pain explodes across my face as I am thrown backward into the mud.
Someone lands on top of me, heavy and snarling.
“Celentra must stay frozen!”
Another one. Another fanatic.
I throw a punch, roll left, and fire shoots through my arm, lightning crawling beneath my skin—his touch crackles with power. Electric. Wrong.
He stumbles back, eyes wild. “Why? What… you?!”
I am already on my feet, dagger drawn. I go to run at him, and he dodges my attack quickly,
Something pulled on my chest like it was going to drag me into the earth itself so that deep I could feel it in my bones.
The ground beneath me shifts, as if the earth itself is stirring from sleep.
Leaves shiver on a nearby tree, reaching toward the soil as though they long to remember what motion feels like.
Time has been stolen, but the world wants to move again.
Before I can act, a vine bursts from the marsh and coils around him like a serpent.
He thrashes helplessly, suspended in the air.
Briar stands beside me, calm as ever. “I promise it will hurt more for you if you kill him.”
“He tried to kill me first,” I snapped, wiping blood from my lip.
“Only because you carry Kathera’s soul,” the man spits, twisting against the vine. “And I was sent to make sure you never bring her back.”
The group gathers beneath him. His dark curls hang low over gray eyes.
The vine tightens at his waist, dark green and faintly glowing.
“Who gave you that task?” Castor’s voice cuts like steel. His face is unyielding as stone.
“I can’t say.”
“Why not?”
“I was sworn to take that name to my grave.”
“Well,” I mutter, “that can be arranged.”
Briar’s voice slices through the tension, calm and steady. “Sahora, did you feel the lightning?”
“Well, yeah,” I shot back. “He shocked the hell out of me.”
The burn still flares along my arm, pulsing, a heartbeat that is not mine.
The man exhales, shoulders slumping. “That shock means we can’t kill each other.”
I blink. “What?”
Can’t kill each other? That is not something I have ever heard before.
It is kill or be killed.
He meets my gaze, defiant and resigned. “It means we are Soulfated.”
I stare. “We are what now?”
He swallows hard. “Bound by the gods. Soulfated complete one another, in this realm and the one beyond.”
The world tilts. A pull deep in my chest tightens until I can hardly breathe.
“Fantastic,” I mutter. “Out of everyone in Celentra, the gods chose this for me. My cosmic joke.”
I laugh, bitter and breathless. “A man sent to kill me. Because of course it is.”
He groans softly. “It is a joke on both of us. I cannot fulfill my oath. My god will cast me out.”
“But if the gods made us Soulfated,” I snarl, heat rising in my chest, “why would yours abandon you? Sounds like you need a better god.”
My voice rumbles, trembling from somewhere deeper than sound.
Not now. Not here.
His eyes narrow. “What can’t happen now?”
My blood runs cold.
“How do you know what I just thought?”
“Soulfated can hear each other,” he says quietly. “Thoughts. Feelings. Everything.”
The ground hums beneath me.
No. Not now.
But the storm does not ask permission.
Emotion surges, fear and anger and confusion, and the sky answers.
Rain falls for the first time in years.
“No!” I shout, trying to hold it back, but lightning splits the air.
A tree erupts in flame.
Briar and Castor race toward it. The man drops to the mud with a heavy thud.
Rain turns the ground slick and red.
“Sahora, what are you doing?” Ami screams.
“I don’t know!” My voice breaks, swallowed by thunder.
The storm fights me, alive and merciless.
It wants to tear the world apart.
Then, through the chaos—
“Sahora.”
His voice. Calm. Certain.
The man walks through the rain, golden light cupped in his palm.
“You can feel it,” he says softly. “You do not have to run from what you are.”
“What am I?” My voice is small. Lost.
“A Stormcaller.”
He raises his hand, light flaring between us. “Let it breathe.”
The golden glow pushes back my tempest, step by step, until he stands within reach.
I let go.
The emotions crash through me, confusion and fury and fear, and something else.
For the first time in my life, I do not feel alone.
I do not know how to live with someone beside me. I think
I know, his voice answers, quiet and specific inside my head. But we will figure it out. Together.
The lightning fades.
The rain softens to a whisper.
I fall to my knees in the mud, trembling.
He kneels beside me.
“What is your name?” I ask, barely breathing.
“Oliver.”
His crooked smile flickers, like dawn breaking through storm clouds.