Elara's POV
My feet moved on their own.
Past the marble columns where Father used to tell me I was an embarrassment. Past the fountain where Aldric first kissed me and lied about forever. Past everything.
A servant gasped when she saw me. My silver dress was torn at the hem. My hair hung in wet tangles around my face. I looked like a ghost.
Maybe I was one.
"Miss Elara!" The head butler stepped forward, worried. "You shouldn't be out here alone. Let me call—"
"Don't." The word came out flat and cold. Not my voice at all.
He stepped back, scared of something in my eyes.
Good. He should be scared. Everyone should be.
I kept walking. Through the gates. Past the stone walls that trapped me my whole life. The guards watched me go but didn't stop me. Why would they? The worthless daughter wasn't worth guarding.
Rain started falling. Cold drops that soaked through my dress and made me shiver. I didn't care.
Behind me, thunder rumbled. Not normal thunder—the deep, angry kind that makes your bones shake. The kind that warns people to run inside and hide.
I walked faster.
The fields stretched out ahead of me, empty and dark. During the day, they were beautiful—green grass and flowers everywhere. Now they looked dead. Just empty space under a black sky.
Lightning flashed so bright it hurt my eyes. For a second, everything turned white.
One. Two. Three—
Thunder crashed so loud I felt it in my chest.
The storm was close. Really close.
"The forbidden storm," I whispered. That's what everyone called it. The massive lightning storm that had been raging over the fields for three days. Storm-callers from the Sky Citadel tried to push it away, but it wouldn't move.
Storms like this killed people. Regular humans got hit by one bolt and turned to ash.
My feet kept moving toward it.
I should stop. Turn around. Go back to the manor and apologize like everyone expected. Beg Father for forgiveness. Tell Cassian I understood. Tell Aldric I hoped he'd be happy.
Be invisible again. Be nothing again.
No.
I ran.
The rain got heavier, pounding down so hard I could barely see. Wind tore at my dress and hair. Lightning struck somewhere close—close enough to feel the heat.
I didn't slow down.
My chest burned. Not from running—from something else. Something hot and angry pushing against my ribs like it wanted out.
I reached the center of the field and stopped. Just stopped, standing there in the rain with lightning dancing all around me.
"I have nothing!" I screamed at the sky. My voice cracked but I didn't care. "No magic! No family! Nobody wants me!"
The storm roared back like it heard me.
"You all said I was worthless!" Tears mixed with rain on my face. "You were right! So what am I even for? Why did you make me like this?"
Lightning struck so close I smelled something burning. The ground where it hit turned black.
"If I'm so useless, then why am I still here?" I spread my arms wide, facing the storm. Daring it. "What's the point?"
The sky went quiet.
Not peaceful quiet—the scary kind. The kind that happens right before something terrible.
I looked up.
The clouds were spinning. Faster and faster, forming a giant circle directly above me. Wind howled so loud it hurt my ears.
And then the lightning came down.
It didn't strike near me. It struck me.
The bolt hit my chest dead center and the world exploded into white light and pain and something else—something that felt like waking up after being asleep my whole life.
I should be dead. I should be ash.
But the lightning didn't burn me. It poured into me like water filling an empty cup.
And the cup shattered.
Power erupted from inside my body in waves of silver-white light. Not normal light—light that made the storm itself freeze in the sky like it was scared.
The seal. The thing holding my magic down my whole life. I felt it crack. Then break. Then explode into a million pieces.
Magic flooded through me—huge and ancient and terrifying. My magic. The power that should have been there all along.
The ground beneath my feet cracked. The rain reversed direction, flying upward instead of down. Lightning danced across my skin but didn't hurt.
Above me, the storm clouds spun faster, tearing a hole in the sky itself.
Through that hole, something looked at me.
Not with eyes—with something bigger. Something that made every cell in my body scream danger.
The clouds pulled apart like curtains opening, and I saw beyond them. Saw another place—a place of endless storms and lightning that never stopped, where the sky was alive and angry.
And something in that place saw me back.
It was huge. Too huge to understand. Like trying to count all the stars at once. Made of wind and lightning and fury so old it remembered when the world was born.
It moved. Started coming through the hole I'd torn in the sky.
The voice hit my mind like thunder.
"FINALLY."
Not words. Feeling. Rage and relief and something else mixed together.
"AFTER EIGHT HUNDRED YEARS... SOMEONE CALLED ME."
The storm descended. Clouds spiraled down toward me like a tornado made of lightning. The thing from beyond the sky was coming. Coming for me.
I tried to run but my legs wouldn't move. Tried to scream but no sound came out.
The storm touched down twenty feet away and started taking shape—
A man.
No. Not a man. Something wearing the shape of a man.
He was tall. So tall I had to crane my neck to see his face. His hair moved like living lightning—silver-white and glowing. His skin had patterns on it that pulsed with power. His eyes...
His eyes were the color of the heart of a hurricane. Silver-blue and ancient and absolutely not human.
When he looked at me, I felt it in my soul.
"You," he said, and his voice made the ground shake. "What did you do?"
I looked down at my chest and gasped.
A mark was burning itself into my skin right over my heart. A storm symbol drawn in silver light. It hurt but also felt right, like it belonged there.
The man had the same mark on his chest. Glowing. Pulsing in time with mine.
"No," he whispered. His eyes went wide—the first human expression I'd seen on his face. "No. Not a bond. Not after all this time—"
He vanished in a burst of lightning and reappeared right in front of me. His hand shot out and grabbed my wrist, and where he touched me, power exploded between us.
Images flooded my mind. Eight hundred years of imprisonment. Rage. Loneliness. Being trapped in the storm forever, screaming with no one to hear.
And underneath it all: relief so strong it made my knees weak.
"What are you?" I gasped.
His grip tightened. Not enough to hurt, but enough to feel how strong he was. Strong enough to crush me without even trying.
"I am Zephyrion," he said. "Guardian of the Tempest Veil. Warden of the Storm. And you, little fool—" his eyes blazed, "—just bound your soul to mine."
The mark on my chest burned hotter.
"What does that mean?" My voice shook.
He leaned down until his face was inches from mine. Until I could see the storm swirling in his eyes. Until I could feel his breath—cold like winter wind.
"It means," he said with something like fury, something like despair, "that you can never be free of me. And I—" his jaw clenched, "—can never be free of you."
Thunder roared overhead. The sky tore open wider. And through it, I saw them coming.
More storms. More lightning. More creatures like Zephyrion, ancient and terrible and waking up.
"They felt it," Zephyrion said quietly. "They felt you break the seal. They're coming to see what fool broke the chains."
He looked at me, and for the first time, I saw something that looked almost like pity in those inhuman eyes.
"Run," he said.
"What?"
"RUN!"
The sky screamed. Reality cracked. And something far worse than lightning started coming through.