First-Person: Nyra
The world returns in fragments — heat, stone, the metallic taste of blood on my tongue.
For a moment, I can't tell where my body ends and the earth begins. The mark is a living thing beneath my skin, pulsing with its own heartbeat, dragging me somewhere between agony and desire.
I open my eyes to darkness streaked with light. Red veins crawl up the chamber walls like roots, pulsing in rhythm with me. The air crackles. I can feel it — the magic alive, feeding.
Kael lies beside me, still. His chest rises and falls, barely.
I push myself up on trembling arms, the mark burning along my ribs, over my shoulder, curling up my throat. The pain isn't clean — it's deep and molten, like something being rewritten inside me.
When I touch it, my fingertips spark. The glow follows me, tracing lines across my skin before fading again.
"Kael…" My voice breaks. No response.
I crawl toward him, each movement heavier than the last. The heat intensifies the closer I get, and then I realize — it isn't the ruins that are pulsing. It's me.
The mark responds to him.
I press my hand to his chest, and the glow flares, red-gold and furious. His body arches with the force of it, and for one dizzy second I feel everything — his heartbeat, his breath, the echo of fear and something deeper beneath it.
Then the light fades, leaving only silence.
He's breathing again. Barely, but he is.
I slump beside him, the air thick with smoke and magic. The ruins groan around us, shifting as if alive. The mark hums under my skin — restless, demanding.
Choose.
The whisper is there again, threading through my mind like silk. I press my palms to my temples, trying to silence it.
"I didn't choose this," I whisper. "I never did."
But the mark answers in sensation — heat unfurling through my veins, coiling low in my stomach, the same wild surge that first ignited when Kael touched me.
It's not just power. It's hunger.
The memory of his touch lingers on my skin, electric and dangerous. Every part of me aches, not just from the blast but from the bond that refuses to let go. I want to fight it — but part of me doesn't.
For the first time, I wonder if freedom was ever what I wanted.
Maybe what I've been running from all along is myself.
I look down at Kael — at the quiet strength even in his stillness, the faint glow of his own mark flickering against his collarbone.
One carries the mark. The other carries the end.
If the prophecy is true, every beat of his heart now belongs to me.
And that thought terrifies me more than death ever could.