“You will never be free. You are a weapon I will wield until my last breath.”
The voice is familiar, cold, and calculating.
Gidion.
My wrists burn under the weight of the shackles he locked on me.
The man who used to be my mentor.
My guide.
My ruin.
“I just want to live,” I choke out, twisting against the chains. “I am tired, tired of hurting people. Tired of spilling blood for a cause that is not mine.”
He studies me like I am something small beneath his boot.
“Well then, tell me, Sahora… why are you smiling while you do it?”
The words hit harder than iron.
Something inside me cracks wide open.
A scream tears from my throat before I can stop it.
I was trapped.
Trapped with the very people who taught me to fight.
Trapped in a world that hated me for what it made me.
I had to get out.
I had to survive.
And something wild inside me rose, something even more caged than I was.
“What will it cost for me to leave this place?” I whisper, voice shaking and raw.
Gidion steps closer. His breath ghosts my ear.
“I will let you leave… if you do one more job for me.
A small one.
A single person who needs to be discarded.”
My stomach twists.
But freedom hangs just a breath away.
“I will do whatever you ask. Just let me leave.”
He smiles then, slow and cruel.
“You must kill a simple monk who once mattered to you.”
A pause.
“That should not be a problem… right?”
I wake with a gasp, sweat cold on my skin.
My breath refuses to come.
The memory digs in its claws, and no matter how hard I try to bury it, it refuses to release me.
Suddenly, Oliver is at my side.
“What is wrong?” he asks as I rock back and forth, shaking, barely aware of my own body.
Tears streamed down my cheeks, tears I did not realize were falling.
“It is just a memory,” I mutter, more to myself than to him, hugging my knees to my chest.
“It is just a memory,” he echoes softly as he wraps a blanket around me. “But memories can sting more than we expect.”
He sits with me then, in silence, until my breath steadies and the trembling slows.
Above us, the stars burn bright, uncaring and endless.
And for a moment, I wish I could go back.
Back before the chains.
Before the choices.
Before the blood on my hands.
I wish I could undo it all, even if it meant losing the freedom I bled for.
“When memories like that come for me,” Oliver says quietly,
“I try actually to feel them. They show up strongest when we refuse to look at them. Even though the memory still hurts, what happened cannot hurt you anymore, Sahora. It is up to us to choose whether the memory decides our next steps, or whether we move forward from the chaos it brings.”
His words ring in my ears as they have always been waiting there.
“Oliver…” My voice breaks. “I have hurt so many people. I have killed more than I can count. I do not understand why Kathara’s soul is choosing me. Why am I the one meant to save Celentra?”
He looks at me gently, troubled but gentle.
“Why did you kill people, Sahora?”
I swallow hard.
“I was told to,” I whisper. “I worked with a mercenary group in Serlane. We got paid to kill anyone with a price on their head. It did not matter why. I just… did it.”
“Do you regret it?” he asks softly, but not in judgment.
My breath catches. I stare up at the stars, wishing the sky would swallow me whole.
“Sometimes I regret it. Sometimes I tell myself it was what I needed to do to survive. And then I remember they just wanted to survive too.”
Silence hangs between us while the stars above stay stagnant in their constellations.
“I can still see his face,” I whisper. “The monk who raised me. I can still feel the way his hands shook when he tried to teach me to pray. When I was a child, he taught me that my emotions were too wild for this world. He taught me grounding techniques to control not only my emotions but also what happens when I let them take over. He told me they were wrong, that they were something to be wary of. When I left the monastery, I left with Gidion. He was the leader of the Ancient Circle. They taught me my emotions were wild because they were meant to be used. They taught me how to use my wildness to hurt people. “The most frightening thing about it is that I did enjoy it sometimes.”
“Though you have blood on your hands you will never be able to erase, you get to decide what you do with your hands now, how they hurt, how they heal. You are your own. You decide how to wield yourself,” Oliver says, his voice strong.
“I do not know how to wield myself,” I whisper. It hurts to admit it.
“You will learn.”
The strength in his voice shakes me to my core.
Almost like he already knows the outcome.