ELARA POV
"This isn't what you think it is."
I looked at Silas across the room. "Then explain what it is."
He didn't answer right away. He was standing near the window … the tall one in the ritual chamber they'd walked me to twenty minutes ago without really explaining why … and he was looking at the floor like it had personally offended him.
The room itself was something else. Round. Stone walls with markings carved all the way up to the ceiling, thin lines and shapes I couldn't read but felt the second I walked in. Like they were reading me back. There were candles everywhere. Not normal candles … these ones burned black at the tips, little dark flames that didn't flicker even though there were two of us breathing in here and the air had to be moving somewhere. A stone altar in the center. Low and flat and old-looking. On top of it, a bowl. Dark metal. Already filled with something that wasn't water.
I didn't ask what it was. I wasn't sure I wanted to know yet.
"It's called the Void-Bond," Silas said finally. "It's a ritual. Old one. It's how the heir is … how the conception happens. For our bloodline."
"Okay." I kept my voice even. "And what does it involve."
He looked up then. "Blood. And intent."
"Intent," I repeated.
"Both parties have to mean it." He said it like the words tasted bad. "The Void doesn't respond to force. It has to be chosen. Both sides."
I stared at him. "So you need me to … choose this."
"Yes."
"Even though I was sold here."
His jaw tightened. "Yes."
I turned away from him and looked at the altar. The bowl. The black candles burning their strange dark flames. The carvings on the walls pressing their shapes into the edges of my vision.
This was not how I imagined my life going. Obviously. But there was something about standing in this specific room, in this specific moment, that made the whole thing feel incredibly, horribly real in a way that even the Chamber hadn't. The Chamber was fear and shock and moving too fast to think. This was slow. This was lit by candlelight. This was being asked to mean it.
"And if I don't," I said. "Choose it. What happens."
"The ritual fails."
"And then?"
Silence.
"Silas." I turned back around. "And then what."
"The contract still stands," he said. "You stay. We try again. Every month until it works or until…" He stopped.
"Until what."
He looked at me straight. "Until the Void decides it's not going to happen."
"And then?"
"Then the Council gets involved." He said it quiet. "And their solution is less … ceremonial."
I didn't ask what that meant. The way he said it told me enough.
I walked toward the altar. Stopped in front of it. The bowl was close now and I could see the surface of the liquid in it … dark and still and catching the candlelight in a way that made it look almost like it was moving underneath. Breathing.
"Alright," I said. "Tell me what to do."
Silas came to stand on the other side of the altar. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a small blade. Thin. Dark handle. He set it on the edge of the stone between us.
"Your hand first," he said. "Palm up. A cut across the center. Then mine. Then we let them mix in the bowl and we…" He stopped again.
"And we what."
"Hold eye contact." He said it like it was the worst part. Maybe it was. "While we say the words. The Void needs to see the intent. It reads it through the eyes."
I picked up the blade.
It was lighter than I expected. I turned my left hand palm up and looked at the center of it for a second. Just a second.
I cut.
It stung. Sharp and quick. Blood welled up fast, dark in the candlelight, and I held my hand over the bowl and watched it drip in. It hit the surface and the liquid moved … rippled outward in a circle from the point where my blood landed, slow and deliberate, the way water moves when something drops into it but wrong somehow. Like it was interested.
Silas picked up the blade after me.
He cut his palm without flinching. Didn't even blink. He held it over the bowl and his blood fell in and the liquid moved again … differently this time. The ripples from mine and the ripples from his traveled toward each other across the surface and when they met in the middle the whole bowl went still.
Then it started to glow.
Faint. Dark gold. Like light trying to come through something very thick.
"Now," Silas said. "Look at me."
I looked up.
His eyes were doing the thing again. That grey with the smoke behind it, that something-moving-in-there that wasn't quite him and wasn't quite not him. Up close they were worse. Or better. I couldn't decide which.
He started speaking. Words I didn't know, low and even, and I felt them more than heard them … felt them in my chest, in the cut on my palm, in the back of my teeth. Old words. The kind that had weight.
And then I saw it.
Not with my eyes. Behind them. Like someone pressed a memory against the inside of my skull and I had no choice but to watch it.
A boy. Small. Maybe eight years old. Standing in a room that looked like this one, same carvings, same candles, but everything was warmer then, more color in the walls. An older man standing in front of him … tall, severe, not unkind but not gentle either. And the boy's hands were shaking.
Then the shadows came for him. Right there, in the memory, I watched it happen. Watched the darkness pour into a child who was too small for it. Watched his face go from scared to…
Gone. Something behind his eyes just … switched off. And when it came back on it was different.
I felt the pain of it. Actually felt it. Like it was happening to me, in my chest, this cracking open feeling that didn't have a name. I made a sound without meaning to.
Silas's voice stopped.
"What…" he started.
"I saw you," I said. My voice came out strange. "When you were little. The shadows … someone … they put them into you when you were just a kid."
His face went absolutely blank.
"That's not possible," he said. Very quiet. "The ritual doesn't show…"
"A small room. A man standing in front of you. You were shaking." I held his eyes. I couldn't look away even if I wanted to. "You were so small and they just … put all of that into you. Like it didn't matter."
Something moved in his expression that I'd never seen from him before. Something cracked open and then shut again so fast I almost missed it.
"Finish the words," he said. Rough. "Say them after me."
"Silas…"
"Say them." His jaw was tight. His eyes were bright with something that wasn't the ritual glow. "Please."
I said them. I don't know what they meant. But I meant them … whatever they were, whatever I was agreeing to, I meant the meaning underneath the words because I'd just seen what this had cost him and I couldn't not mean them after that.
The bowl flared.
The dark gold light shot up and the room felt like it dropped ten degrees and then spiked back up all in the same second. The candle flames bent sideways. The carvings on the walls lit up one by one, quick and sequential, traveling all the way up to the ceiling.
And then something moved inside me.
Not pain. Not quite. More like … recognition. Like something had been sitting very quietly in a dark corner somewhere deep and the ritual had walked up and turned the light on and it looked up and went. Oh. There you are.
It moved through me fast. Warm and enormous and so much older than anything in this room. It filled every space it found and it didn't ask permission and I couldn't breathe around it.
My knees started going.
"Elara…" Silas's voice came from far away.
The room tilted. The candles blurred. I felt the stone floor coming up toward me and then I felt nothing at all.
But right before the nothing … right in that last thin slice of a second before everything went dark … I heard it.
A voice. Not Silas's. Not anyone in the room. It came from inside. From that warm enormous thing that had just made itself at home in me.
Soft. Curious. Like a child finding something it had been looking for.
"Finally," it whispered. "A mother who tastes like starlight."
And then the dark took me.