We lay on the bed, listening to each other’s breathing. For a moment, it felt safe to ease into his arms. To feel them around me. As the afternoon wore on and the sun hung low in the sky, shouting rose outside our door.
Castor.
I was at the door in a flash. Castor stood in the corridor, sword drawn, staring straight at Gart. “I will not let you disturb them until tomorrow.”
Gart laughed, low and dark. “I am not coming for him. We want her.”
“Well, you can’t have her.” Castor lifted his chin slightly, ready for the fight.
I stepped into the corridor, bare feet against cold stone.
Oliver stood in the doorway, still swaying slightly.
“What do you want with me?” I asked.
“The third trial has begun. You are to stand trial.” His wicked smile told me all I needed to know.
I took a deep breath, steadying myself.
Inside, I felt Kathera stirring. I can end all of this if you want, she told me softly.
No. I will comply. We need the life stone, and Oliver only wants it if it is given, not taken. Even as I thought the words, everything in me screamed to end it.
Very well, she replied.
“Then I will stand trial.” My mouth curved into a soft smile. Forced, but there.
This is not your battle, Oliver sent through the bond.
I paused and looked at him. From the moment I told you I trusted you, it became my battle just as much as it is yours.
I stepped forward and followed Gart down the dark corridor. Oliver and Castor followed behind me.
We entered the ritual chamber. The same people who had watched us endure the other trials surrounded us again.
At the front of the room stood a large statue of a woman holding a jar filled with blue powder.
I felt Oliver tense through the bond.
What is it? I asked him.
That is the statue of Coraium, the Goddess of Memory. That powder extracts the memories that built a person into who they are. For all to see.
My heart dropped into my stomach. It was my past they wanted.
I held my head high as I walked to the middle of the room.
Oliver came to stand beside me and slid his hand into mine. I am here, he sent.
I know, I told him.
His father’s voice echoed throughout the chamber. “You stand accused of consorting with forces beyond our control.” He sat at the front of the room, his eyes locked on our hands.
I steadied myself with the cold stone beneath my feet. “I stand accused.”
His eyes narrowed. “We would like to know what led you down the path of consortment.”
I met his gaze. “I was brought here from my own realm. I have been told to bring Kathera back to lift the freeze on Celentra.”
He leaned in slightly. “We know that.” He lifted his hand, and Gart pressed closer, moving to push me toward the statue. “What we don’t know is who you were before that.”
“Very well. Ask.” Gart’s hands closed around my arm. It took everything in me not to react. Not to strike.
I let him pull me to the statue.
“Kneel before the Goddess Coraium, so your past may be judged.” His voice carried throughout the room.
I knelt and stared at the blue powder. Its scent was slightly floral as it filled my nose.
Dizziness hit hard. My body felt heavier than it ever had.
I was grateful to already be on my knees. I closed my eyes, trying to fight the feelings rising in me, but it was too late.
When I opened my eyes, I was no longer in the ritual chamber.
I stood in a wide room that smelled of incense and old parchment. Tall pillars rose around me, the same ones I used to run around as a child. The halls were dim, filled with people humming hymns that now haunted every dream.
“Sahora,” said a familiar voice.
I turned, and a chill ran down my spine.
There I was. A little girl sitting before a long table lit by fifty candles. Portraits of long-gone monks were drawn on parchment and laid out like ghosts.
A man stepped up beside me.
Master Fynar, the one who raised me.
Through the vision, I could hear gasps from the crowd.
“You got in a fight again,” he said simply, taking my hands. Wraps lay nearby, ready to care for my wounds.
“They said that you weren’t actually meant to be Abbot. That you were weak. I couldn’t let them talk about you like that,” I told him.
He wrapped my hands gently, my knuckles still bleeding. “This wild nature of yours is dangerous, Sahora.” I looked up at him, my face wet with tears. “You must learn to contain it. Control it.”
I nodded slowly and looked away. “I will try, Master Fynar. It’s just… sometimes it overtakes me.” I paused. “I don’t understand it, but it feels like something inside of me is restless.”
“The most wild things in this world are restless,” Master Fynar said. “It’s what we do with our restless hands that leads us to who we are.” He patted my shoulder.
The vision faded.
I stood outside the monastery walls. I swallowed, knowing what would come next.
I turned and saw myself again; older now. Seventeen. Still a kid.
“We can find lost things.” His voice was cold, calculated. Gidion. “We of the Ancient Circle live by different rules than the rest of the world.” He paused, pressing a long dagger into my hand. “We will find your parents, by any means necessary.”
I hesitated, remembering that Master Fynar had offered for me to stay. To become a monk. To live within those walls for the rest of my days.
My hand closed around the dagger.
“All I want,” I said, “is to know who I belong to.”
Gidion smiled. Even in my memory, it made my stomach crawl. “Then we will find them.”
Then began the years of what he called training.
My body bled in places that never healed right again.
Not once did I break.
Not once did I give up.
Every time a hit fell, I rose to meet it.
Until one day.
“Pain is what will release what you carry,” he said.
The lash struck.
“Pain is what will make you strong.”
Again.
“Pain will allow you to harness the wild inside of you.”
I didn’t cry out when the next blow landed.
Instead, I answered him, my voice steadier than it should have been.
“I am ready,” I said, “to release my wildness on this world.”
“Good,” he replied, and walked away.
That was when it began.
The blood.
The money passing hands.
The many faces that took their last breath.
Faces that blurred into each other until I stopped trying to remember them.
Through the bond, I could feel Oliver.
He wasn’t afraid.
Anger pulsed through him, not at me, not at what I had become,
But at the person who made me that way.
“Stop this.” Oliver’s voice echoed somewhere in the distance.
“We must see the truth about her,” his father replied, dismissing him. “If you can live with it.”
The vision shifted.
My heart sank before it even fully formed. The words were already in my head, old and sharp as broken glass.
You must kill a simple monk who once mattered to you.
I was on my knees.
Not in the ritual chamber.
Not in Gyra.
In a dim room that smelled of incense and age, the air was heavy with sacred things that had once made me feel safe.
Master Fynar knelt in front of me.
Older now. Smaller. His beard had gone gray and long, his hands thin but steady. His eyes were still the same, gentle, patient, unafraid of me.
My dagger was in my hands.
I couldn’t remember lifting it.
I only remembered the shaking.
“Please,” I begged, my voice breaking as if it could split the world open and let me escape. “If you don’t… if I don’t do this… I’ll never be free.”
I swallowed hard, forcing the next words out like poison.
“Gidion demanded it,” I whispered. “He said… in order for me to be free of the Circle…”
Master Fynar’s gaze didn’t waver.
“You must kill me,” he finished for me, saving me from saying it aloud.
My hands trembled so hard I could barely hold the hilt.
“Please,” I breathed. “I just want to be free.”
I would have traded my life for his without hesitation. I would have given anything. Everything.
Master Fynar lifted his hands and gently wrapped my fingers more firmly around the dagger, like he was teaching me how to hold a quill.
“You have always been my daughter, Sahora.”
The words struck deeper than any blade.
Tears slid down my face. I couldn’t wipe them away. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe.
“If my blood is what will heal your restless hands…” He swallowed, and for the first time, something like grief flickered in his eyes. “Then you may have it.”
I shook my head, frantic. “I can’t. I can’t do it, Master Fynar.”
“Promise me one thing,” he said softly.
My throat tightened. “Anything.”
His hand covered mine, warm, steady, unbearably gentle.
“Promise me you will find a home that will hold you,” he murmured, “when you are restless.”
I choked on a sound that wasn’t a word. “Fynar—”
He pulled my hand forward.
Not violently.
Not suddenly.
Like a man choosing his own end, so I wouldn’t have to carry the weight of choosing it.
“No!” I screamed, the sound tearing out of me as the world lurched.
I caught him as he fell, my hands pressing to him like pressure could undo fate.
“Please,” I sobbed. “Please don’t leave me.”
His breath shuddered once.
Then again, smaller.
His eyes stayed on mine, forgiving to the end.
And then there was nothing left for him to give.
The room went silent.
Somewhere beyond the memory, I heard someone in the crowd gasp.
But inside the vision, all I could hear was the last echo of his words:
A home that will hold you when you are restless.
My breaths were shallow as I opened my eyes.
Oliver stood by my side, offering his hand to help me up. I’m so sorry they made you relive that. His thought hit me like a knife.
I already relive it every day. It’s my truth to hold. Not theirs, I told him through the bond.
He pulled me into his side as I stood. I let him. He glared up at his father. “Do you have what you need?”
“Is this a truth you are willing to live with? That she is a murderer?” His voice held no warmth.
Oliver moved to respond, but I stopped him. I stepped away from his side and closer to where his father sat.
“It is a truth I carry with me.” I straightened my shoulders and looked him in the eye. “I will not apologize for the scars I hold, even when they are ugly to look at.”
Oliver slid his hand into mine.
“Banthys teaches us that to survive is to grow beyond what built us.” He looked at me, then turned to the villagers, priests, and priestesses around us. His gaze passed his father. “If our teachings hold true, survivors like Sahora should be our strength. Not our damned.”
We walked away. Hand in hand. Castor followed close behind.
As we walked out of the chamber, a man in the crowd stood up. He was covered in dirt from working in fields. He looked directly at Oliver and formed the symbol with his hands, two curves meeting in an S-shape. He looked me in the eye and then bowed his head.
Oliver’s father shouted for the first time since we were here. “What are you doing? He is an oathbreaker! She is a murderer.”
More villagers stood throughout the crowd and made the same motion.
Through the bond, I asked Oliver, What are they doing?
Out loud, he said, "It's the sigil of Banthys. A sign of respect.” The chamber behind us erupted, not in chaos, not with outrage, but in something far more dangerous.
Doubt.
The sigils kept rising, one pair of hands after another, dirt‑stained palms forming the curves of Banthys’s mark. Some slowly lifted their hands, as if afraid to be seen. Others did it boldly, defiantly, like they had been waiting for someone to give them permission to breathe.
Oliver’s father stood, face red with fury, voice cracking like a whip.
“Sit down! All of you! Do you understand what you’re doing?”
But they didn’t sit.
More hands rose.
More heads bowed.
The air shifted — not with magic, but with choice.
Oliver’s grip tightened around mine. Through the bond, I felt the shock hit him like a wave. Not pride. Not triumph.
Something quieter.
Something like grief.
They never did this for me, he sent, the thought slipping out before he could stop it.
I squeezed his hand. They’re doing it now.
Castor stepped closer, his eyes scanning the crowd with the sharpness of a man who had seen revolutions begin with less. His jaw tightened, but not in fear.
In recognition.
Oliver’s father slammed his hand against the railing.
“Banthys does not honor murderers! He does not honor oathbreakers! He does not honor—”
A woman in the crowd cut him off.
Her voice was soft, but it carried.
“Banthys honors life.”
Silence rippled outward like a stone dropped in still water.
She stepped forward, hands forming the sigil.
“And she,” the woman said, nodding toward me, “has lived more life than any of us.”
Another voice rose.
“And he,” a man said, pointing at Oliver, “has shown more mercy than our leaders.”
Oliver’s father’s face twisted, but the room was no longer his.
The villagers weren’t looking at him.
They were looking at us.
At Oliver.
At me.
At the bond between us.
At the truth they had just witnessed, not the curated truth Gyra had fed them, but the raw, unfiltered truth of who we were.
Oliver swallowed hard. I felt the tremor in him, the disbelief, the ache of a boy who had never been seen by his own people until this moment.
They’re choosing you, I sent.
They’re choosing us, he corrected.
We turned toward the exit. Castor moved with us, one hand on his sword, the other hovering near my back like he was ready to catch either of us if we fell.
Behind us, Oliver’s father shouted again, voice cracking under the weight of a crowd that no longer listened.
“You will regret this! All of you! Banthys will not—”
But his words were swallowed by the sound of villagers rising to their feet.
Not chanting.
Not shouting.
Just standing.
A quiet, unified refusal.
A shift in the world.
We stepped into the corridor, the heavy doors closing behind us with a final, echoing thud.
Oliver exhaled shakily.
“That wasn’t supposed to happen,” he whispered.
I looked at him, at the way the torchlight caught the gray in his eyes, at the way his shoulders trembled with something too big to name.
“It did,” I said softly. “Because you showed them what life looks like.”
He looked at me like he didn’t know whether to fall apart or fall into me.
Through the bond, I felt the truth settle in him like a heartbeat.
For the first time… I think they saw me.
“They did,” I told him, tightening my hand around his.
And for the first time since we entered Gyra, the air around us felt like it belonged to us again.