The world was a violent, roaring blur. Wind tore at Elara's hair and the thin white sacrifice gown as Valerius moved with impossible speed through the choking darkness of the Blackwood. His tail was a vise around her waist, holding her tight against the cool, powerful scales of his lower body. She wasn't sure if it was to protect her or to ensure his prize couldn't escape. The scent of him—ozone, cold stone, and something ancient and wild—filled her nostrils, a constant reminder of the terrifying power that now carried her.
They crashed through ancient, thicketed groves, the thorns that could flay a man's skin to ribbons scraping harmlessly against his god-forged hide. The forest, which had always been a place of whispered dread for her, was now just a smudge of shadows and terror. She squeezed her eyes shut, focusing on the one solid point in the chaos: the thrumming, furious connection in her chest that was him. It was a live wire, humming with his anger and her own stark terror.
Finally, the dizzying, brutal motion ceased.
Elara dared to open her eyes. They stood in a small, silent clearing where the trees grew so close and twisted they formed a gnarled canopy, blocking out any glimpse of the moon or sky. The air was still and cold, a deep, penetrating chill that felt more spiritual than physical. In the center of the clearing was a massive, dark stone, worn smooth by time and elements, looking like an altar waiting for an offering. Valerius uncoiled his tail from her waist, letting her drop unceremoniously onto the damp, leaf-strewn ground.
She scrambled back, putting a few precious feet between them, her breath coming in ragged, painful gasps. He didn't look at her. He was staring at his own hands, flexing his fingers as if relearning them. He stretched his arms wide, his head thrown back, and drew in a deep, shuddering breath—his first truly free breath in centuries. The simple act was filled with such profound, terrifying power that the very leaves on the trees seemed to shiver in response.
"The air tastes the same," he murmured, his voice a low rumble that was part wonder, part bitter disappointment. "I thought it would taste of vengeance. It tastes only of rot and forgotten things."
He finally turned his gaze to her, and the full weight of it was like a physical blow. Unbound, he was more… everything. More real, more present, more dangerous. The molten gold of his eyes glowed in the profound dark, pinning her in place.
"You are still here," he observed, his tone flat, as if he'd expected her to have evaporated during the journey, a problem that had simply resolved itself.
"Where else would I be?" Elara snapped, the fear sharpening her tongue into a weapon. "You were the one carrying me."
A slow, cruel smile touched his lips, a flash of white in the gloom. "A temporary necessity. The bond has a limited range before it becomes… acutely uncomfortable for us both. I required your presence to put sufficient distance between myself and that accursed temple." He took a step toward her, and the forest itself seemed to lean in with him, the shadows deepening. "The necessity has passed."
Elara's blood ran cold. She pushed herself to her feet, her legs trembling beneath her. "The pact still holds." She forced the words out, a statement of fact, a shield.
"Does it?" he purred, taking another deliberate step, closing the distance. He was toying with her, a cat with a mouse it had no intention of eating quickly. "I feel my power again. The true depth of it. Not the leaking trickle you tapped into to play your little game." He raised a hand, and the shadows around them coalesced, swirling like living smoke around his fingers, taking the shape of sharp, glittering shards. "Shall we test the limits of your marital vows? See how much punishment they can absorb before they snap?"
Panic, pure and undiluted, seized her. She threw up her hands, not in surrender, but in a frantic, instinctual command. Stop!
The power answered. It ripped from her, not as a controlled wave like in the temple, but as a raw, panicked burst of pure survival instinct. It wasn't directed at him. It hit the clearing itself.
The earth beneath their feet groaned and shuddered. The roots of the great twisted trees erupted from the soil like black serpents, lashing through the air with a sound like cracking whips. Thorns grew at an impossible, terrifying rate, weaving together into a thick, impenetrable wall of razor-sharp brambles between her and Valerius. Vines, thick as her arm, shot down from the canopy, slamming into the earth around him, not to bind him, but to cage him, to create a barrier of pure, aggressive life. It was a defensive explosion, a fortress of wood and thorn built from her terror.
The display lasted only a moment before the power receded, leaving Elara panting, her arms stinging with the recoil. The clearing was now a jagged, chaotic mess of upheaved earth and violently new-grown vegetation.
Valerius hadn't moved. A single, whip-like vine had stopped a hair's breadth from his face. He looked at it, then at the wall of thorns, then at her through the gaps. The mocking smile was gone. In its place was a look of intense, bewildered calculation. He seemed not afraid, but… fascinated. And infuriated.
"You see?" Elara said, her voice shaking with adrenaline and spent power. She wiped a trickle of blood from her nose. "You can't touch me."
"Can't I?" he replied, his voice dangerously soft. He reached out and, with a contemptuous flick of his finger, touched the menacing vine. It shattered into a thousand dry, brittle splinters, dissolving into dust. "I could reduce this entire pathetic thicket to ash. I could scorch this earth until it glazes to black glass." He took a step forward, the thorns at his feet withering and turning to dust at his mere proximity, his divine aura rejecting her clumsy creation. "Your control is that of a child swinging a smith's hammer. You might break something you value, but you will never hit the nail."
He was right. She had immense power, but no skill. She was a bottleneck for his divinity, a chaotic conduit, and they both knew it. The wall of thorns was already beginning to droop and brown, its energy spent.
"Then it seems we are at an impasse," she said, forcing a bravado she didn't feel, her mind racing. "You can't break the bond, and I can't use it properly. And that… pull… is still there." She pointed a trembling hand to her chest, where the silken cord of the bond now tugged with a renewed, insistent urgency toward the east. "It's stronger now that we're out. It wants us to follow it."
Valerius's eyes narrowed. He could feel it too; she saw the acknowledgement in the slight tilt of his head, the flicker of annoyance in his gaze. "The bond seeks a nexus. A place where its power can be grounded, made stable. Made permanent." The last word was a curse. He wanted the bond broken, not reinforced, not legitimized by a place of power.
"Maybe it's a place where we can find answers," Elara countered, seizing the idea. It was their only path forward that didn't end with him immediately trying to kill her. "A place where we can learn how to properly sever this thing. A library, a temple… something from the time of your binding. Or…" She let the alternative hang in the air, a silent threat of its own.
"Or where it will become an unbreakable chain," he finished for her, his voice a low growl. He was silent for a long moment, the only sound the creaking of the dying trees and her own frantic heartbeat. He was weighing his hatred for her against his hatred for the bond. His desire for immediate vengeance against his desire for true, absolute freedom.
The calculation in his eyes was clear. If he killed her now, the bond might snap, and he would be free. Or it might backlash, crippling him, or tethering her lifeless soul to his for all eternity. It was an unknown. A risk. Valerius, for all his power, was not a gambler. He was a strategist of the highest order, and she had just presented a variable he could not immediately control.
A cruel, new light dawned in his gaze. A plan. A terrible, meticulous one.
"Very well, wife," he said, the word now dripping with sinister promise. "We will follow your little pull. We will find this nexus." He began to circle her slowly, a shark around a lifeboat, his tail leaving a smooth trail in the loam. "And while we travel, you will learn. You will learn to control the power you stole. You will learn to wield it with precision. You will learn to become a proper vessel for it."
Elara frowned, deeply suspicious. "Why would you want that? Why would you make me stronger?"
He stopped directly in front of her, leaning down until his face was inches from hers. His beauty was a weapon, sharp and cold and utterly merciless.
"Because, my darling sacrifice," he whispered, his breath like frost against her skin, "when we finally reach a place powerful enough to break a divine pact, I will not have you dying in the process from sheer incompetence. I will not have our bond snapping back on me like a poorly cut rope because you were too weak to handle the strain." His hand came up, and this time, he did touch her, a single, ice-cold finger tracing a line down her cheek. It was not a caress. It was a claim. "Your death," he promised, his molten eyes burning into hers, "will be my masterpiece. A perfect, clean severing. And I do not work with flawed materials. I will make you perfect, just so I can have the satisfaction of being the one to personally, exquisitely, destroy you."
The threat was a living thing in the space between them, more binding than any vow. He wasn't just going to kill her. He was going to remake her, to help her become powerful, magnificent, a true goddess of their joined might—just so he could have the supreme satisfaction of being the one to perfectly, irrevocably, break her.
The silken cord in her chest gave another insistent tug, pulling them east, toward a destiny that promised either salvation or a perfectly engineered doom.