Chapter 18: The Weight of Breath
The earth's pulse did not fade when it chose me.
It grew louder.
Each throb rattled my bones, but it no longer threatened to break me. Instead, the rhythm wove through my veins, steady and sure, until I could no longer tell where my heartbeat ended and the world's began.
The watchers still knelt, their burning eyes locked on me. Carrow staggered in the snow, sword sagging. He stared as though I were a stranger—no, worse, as though I were already lost.
"You… what have you done?" His voice cracked like a man cursing a friend's grave.
"I stood," I said, though my voice carried deeper than speech, threaded with the earth's own breath.
Carrow shook his head, lips curling in anger or grief. "Then you've damned us."
Before I could answer, the girl slipped from my arms. She stood barefoot in the snow, though the frost did not bite her. She looked up at me with those pale, unblinking eyes. Yet in them now there was something softer—something almost human.
"You breathe as it breathes," she whispered. "But it does not own you. Not yet."
Not yet. The words coiled around me like smoke.
Her hand brushed mine—small, fragile, impossibly warm. For an instant, the storm of shadow and fire fell away, and there was only her touch. Her gaze softened, no longer a vessel, but a girl with fear hiding behind her calm.
"Will you carry it?" she asked, voice trembling in a way I had never heard. "Or will it carry you?"
I should have pulled away. I should have turned to Carrow, to my men, to the war breaking all around us. Instead, I let my hand close around hers. A strange warmth surged between us, not the devouring heat of the pit, but something gentler—like spring hidden beneath winter.
Her lips parted, as if to speak more, but the shadows stirred. The watchers rose to their feet. Their blades lifted in unison, black steel dripping with frost and fire.
Carrow found his voice again. "You see? It bends to him! He is no longer ours." He pointed his sword at me, though his arm quivered. "If it has chosen you, then cut it out before it devours us all!"
I should have felt his words like a wound. Instead, I felt… sorrow. He had been my captain, my brother in war. Now he was a man fighting ghosts while the world moved past him.
"Carrow," I said quietly, "I am not the enemy."
His laugh was broken, bitter. "Not yet."
The girl stepped closer, her hand still in mine. "He fears what he cannot see," she murmured, her breath brushing my cheek. "But you and I… we already see."
Her nearness unsettled me more than the heartbeat, more than the shadows. For a heartbeat, I wanted to believe her. To believe I was not prey, not pawn, but partner in something vast.
But mystery lingered in her words, in her eyes. Did she guide me… or chain me?
The watchers advanced, slow and deliberate, their steps sinking deep into the snow. Not to attack, but to encircle. A ring of fire-eyed sentinels, waiting.
The girl turned to me, her voice low, intimate. "They wait for your command. Breathe, and they will move. Name, and they will kneel."
Carrow's shout split the air. "Do not listen! That is no girl—it is the mouth of the pit!"
For a moment, torn between them, I felt the weight of choice pressing like a blade against my throat.
Her hand tightened in mine. Her eyes, pale as ice, glistened with something dangerously close to tears. "Please," she whispered, and in that whisper was both plea and promise. "Don't leave me alone in this."
The heartbeat thundered again, stronger than ever. Shadows writhed at my feet, curling like hounds awaiting their master.
I raised my head. The sky bent lower. The watchers bowed.
And for the first time since the earth had breathed, I knew the truth:
This was not only a burden.
It was a bond.
Between the earth.
Between the child.
Between myself.
But bond or chain, I could not yet tell.
"— To Be Continued —"
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