I woke up screaming.

Not the quiet kind of waking. The full, tearing kind, the kind that rips you out of sleep with your heart slamming so hard you can feel it in your head.

I sat straight up in bed at three in the morning with my hands pressed to my neck and for two seconds I did not know where I was.

The dream was already dissolving the way they always did - edges first, then the middle but what stayed was my father's face.

My father's face? Why? How was that possible?

And it was close. Too close. The way it had never been in real life because he couldn't look at me directly.

In the dream he had looked at me. Full, direct, nothing averted. And he had been smiling.

I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes and breathed and told myself it was over but my hands were still shaking so I pressed them flat on the mattress and breathed harder.

The connecting door creaked opened.

I spun around and saw Caius standing in the doorway in dark clothes, no boots, the curse markings livid in the dim light, and he was looking at me with an intensity that said he had been awake already - or that the mark had woken him the same way it had jolted me.

"What is the matter?" He asked in a deep voice.

"I'm fine, it's nothing" I replied immediately.

"You were screaming," he said.

"I said I'm fine don't worry about it.

"He didn't leave. He still stood in the doorway with his arms at his sides while I sat on the bed with my shaking hands pressed to the mattress and we looked at each other and neither of us said anything for long enough that the silence became its own kind of conversation.

Then he fully entered the room and crossed over closer to me, pulled the chair from the corner, and sat in it three feet from the bed.

He didn't say a word. He did not touch me neither did he offer comfort in words because I think he understood, somehow, that I would refuse it and we would both feel worse.

He just sat there and looked me dead in the eye with zero emotion.

I just sat on the bed, swearing and starinh at the wall wondering why I had this nightmare. My breathing slowed. The shaking in my hands eased.

"He tested me when I was four," I finally said.

I hadn't planned to say it. It just came out raw, no preparation. "He held a cursed candle near my crib and when it went out, he spent fifteen years after that making sure I thought I was worthless."

Caius said nothing. He just kept mute glancing at me.

"I used to think he just didn't care," I continued. "That would have been easier. If he just didn't care. But he was afraid. He looked at his four-year-old daughter and felt afraid. And that is- "

My voice broke.

I hated that. I pressed my lips together and refused to let anything else out and stared at

the wall until the burn behind my eyes receded.

"That is worse," Caius finally said quietly.

"You're right. It's worse."

That was all. He didn't try to fix it or frame it or make it mean something bearable. He

just confirmed it was as bad as it felt.

I don't know why that helped. But it did. He stayed in the chair with his head up and arms folded into each other until I fell back asleep.

When I eventually woke up at dawn, the chair was empty and the connecting door was closed.

But on the small table beside my bed - placed quietly, sometime in the dark was a cup of water and a lit candle.

Not a cursed one. Just light. Just the ordinary kind, burning steady and calm.

I stared at it for some time trying to bury myself in the flame before I got up.

On the twenty-third day of training, Aldric placed something new on the floor between us.

Not iron this time. A glass vial, stoppered with black wax, containing something that moved inside it even though it was sealed - a dark liquid that shifted and pressed against the glass like it was looking for a way out.

"What is that?" I asked.

"Concentrated dark magic," Aldric said. "Extracted from a cursed object three years ago. This is the same class, same generation, same structure as what is in Caius. Not diluted. Not contained in metal. Pure."

I stared at it and swallowed my saliva.The current in my blood reacted immediately. It was not the gentle hum of the candle sessions, it was something more urgent. A pulling sensation, like the ability recognized what was in the vial and was leaning toward it without my permission.

"I'm not ready for that," I snapped.

"No, you definitely are not" Aldric agreed. "But you need to know what it feels like before you encounter the real thing. Knowing and encountering are two different speeds of shock."

I looked at the vial for a long moment. Then I reached.

The contact was nothing like the iron.

The iron had pushed back; aggressive, awake, fighting. This was worse. This was seductive. The dark magic in the vial reached back toward me with the particular pull of something that wanted to be touched, that had been waiting to be touched, that was actively pleased to find something it recognized on the other end of the contact.

It felt like drowning in warm water.

I yanked back hard physically flinching, my whole body jerking like I'd grabbed a live wire and the contact broke and I was on my feet without knowing I'd stood up, backing against the wall, breathing in short hard pulls.

"Sera- "

"It pulled," I said. My voice was not steady. "It wasn't like the iron. It wasn't fighting me. It wanted contact. It was pulling me toward it."

"Yes," Aldric said. He set the vial down carefully. "That is the nature of old dark magic when it encounters a Bloodanchor. It recognizes what you are. It wants to be near you because proximity to your blood is comforting to it. The way a flame is drawn to oxygen."

"Comforting," I repeated. I laughed - sharp and short and not funny. "That's - that's horrifying."

"It is also the mechanism by which you can break it," he said. "It leans toward you. That's not a weakness. That is a door."

I pressed my back against the cold stone wall and felt the residue of the contact buzzing in my hands like pins and needles and thought about Caius. About the curse markings that pulsed like a second heartbeat. About three years of being eaten alive by something that apparently found him comfortable to inhabit.

My stomach turned. I sighed.

"Try again," Aldric said.

"I just told you it pulled me in, won't that- "

"And you pulled out," Aldric said. "You recognized what was happening and you broke contact. That is the skill. Not avoiding the pull - managing it. Now try again."

I stared at him. Sixty seconds of genuine internal argument. I was hesitant. Then I pushed off the wall and sat back down.

I reached for it again.

The pull came immediately. Warm. Seductive. Familiar now, which made it both easier and more frightening. I held the contact and felt it lean toward me and instead of yanking back I pushed my awareness into the structure of it - the architecture of the dark magic, its logic, the way it was built.

It was like learning to read in a language made of pain.

I held the contact for forty seconds before I released it deliberately, not yanking, releasing, the way you set something down instead of dropping it.

When I opened my eyes my nose was bleeding. It felt intense.

I touched my upper lip and looked at my fingers and felt a bolt of genuine fear shoot through me not for myself but for what it meant. If a sealed vial did this to me, what would direct contact with an active living curse do?

"Don't," Aldric said. "Don't go to that conclusion yet. Your vessels are adjusting to the contact. It will stop happening within the week."

"And if it doesn't?" I asked.

"Then we adjust the approach," he said. "But it will. Your mother had the same response in her early sessions. She grew out of it in six days."

My mother. Who had been here before me, in some form. Whose blood had been preparing this for a generation.

I wiped the blood off my nose. Looked at the vial.

"Again,"

Aldric blinked. Then he nodded.

✦ ✦ ✦

 We had soon finished and I came up from the training room an hour later with dried blood on my lip and the buzzing in my hands and ran directly into Caius in the corridor. It was not an accident this time, I realized. He had been waiting.

He saw the blood immediately. His eyes was drawn to it and something flared in his face. It was sharp and urgent, the expression of a man seeing something that cost him something to see.

"What happened?" He asked.

"Training," I said. "But I'm fine. Aldric said it's an adjustment response."

"You're bleeding from your face, Sera." Trying to touch my face.

"I know where I'm bleeding from," I said and pulled back a bit. Not that I didn't want him to but I was just overwhelmed from all that.

He grabbed my wrist suddenly - enough to stop me and when I looked up at him the urgency in his face was so raw and unguarded I went completely still.

"Tell me it's not getting worse," he said. Low. Direct. Not a command. Something closer to a plea.

I had never heard that from him before. That edge in his voice that had nothing to do with authority.

"It's an adjustment response," I said again, softer this time. "Aldric said my mother had the same thing. Six days and it stops."

He held my wrist for another second. Then released it.

"Six days." he repeated.

"Six days." I said.

He stepped back. Let me pass. But I felt his eyes on me all the way down the corridor and the mark on my neck burned so hot I had to stop twice and breathe.

He was afraid for me.

Caius Dravhen who had spent three years making peace with his own destruction was afraid for me.

I didn't know what to do with that. So I kept walking and filed it with all the other things I didn't know what to do with yet.

That collection was getting very full.

The heavy oak door of the war room didn't just close; it buckled against the stone frame, snuffed a nearby wall torch, and left the scent of charred wick hanging in the sudden gloom.

Kael was usually the anchor - the one man at Ironveil who moved as if the world weren't ending. Seeing him like this, chest heaving, palms slammed flat against the map-strewn table, made the air in the room feel thin.

"Zoran has the border," Kael rasped. "Halvenmere. He moved forty wolves in under the cover of the shift change. No declaration. No warning. The headman is already in a Greyveil cell."

The silence that followed was a physical weight. Then Caius surged upward, his chair skittering back and clattering against the masonry. "How?"

"He played the diplomat," Kael said, the words bitter. "He kept us busy with letters while he repositioned. He knew exactly when our eastern scouts rotated out."

"He knew because of Vex," I said. My voice sounded strange to my own ears - sharper, colder.

Both men turned to me.

"The enchanted parchment. Vex wasn't just documenting me during those two weeks. He was mapping us. Every patrol, every gap, every habit. He saw it all." I added.

Caius's fist hit the table with a dull, bone-deep thud. Maps slid; a water carafe tipped, shattering on the floor in a spray of glass and silver. No one blinked.

"Halvenmere has four hundred souls," Caius said, his voice dropping into that gutteral register that usually preceded blood. "Families. Children."

"He hasn't touched them. Not yet." Kael's jaw was tight enough to crack. "It's a demonstration. A ransom note written in lives."

"And the price?"

"You, Sera. He wants you delivered to Greyveil, or Halvenmere burns."

The room went still - the kind of stillness that happens right before a storm breaks.

I waited for the fear to come, but it didn't. Instead, I felt that thing inside me stir. It was a hard, condensed knot of every slight I'd ever endured - the carriage, the servant duties, the invisible years, the blood on Pip's arm. It all fused into a single, jagged point of resolve. Four hundred strangers were now tethered to my heartbeat.

"How long does he give us?" I asked.

"Three days," Kael said.

Caius turned his back to us, leaning his weight against the cold stone wall. I watched the back of his neck. The black veins of the curse weren't static anymore; they were crawling, ink-dark lines pulsing in time with his heartbeat, fueled by the sheer pressure of his fury.

"Caius," I said. He didn't move. "Caius. Look at me."

When he finally turned, the mask was gone. This wasn't the Alpha of Ironveil; it was a man coming apart at the seams. Three years of holding a crumbling territory together had finally fractured, revealing a raw landscape of grief and helpless rage.

"I won't send you to him," he said, the words jagged. "I'll level every forest between here and the border before I let him touch you."

"I know," I said softly.

"Four hundred people- "

"I know. Stop. Listen." I stepped into his space, forcing him to focus. "Get Aldric. Now. Because if there is any chance - any shadow of a hope that I can bridge the gap to that curse before the clock runs out, Zoran's leverage vanishes. A cured Alpha isn't a target. A dead curse isn't a weapon."

Kael was already at the door, his boots echoing down the hall before I'd even finished the sentence.

Caius searched my face, his eyes dark and desperate. "Aldric said six weeks, Sera. At your best."

"Then we find a new 'best,'" I told him. "We don't have six weeks. We have seventy-two hours."

He leaned in, his voice a ghost of a whisper. "If the connection snaps... if something goes wrong in that circle..."

"Then it goes wrong," I said, my voice steady. "But those four hundred people don't have a choice, Caius. I do."

He didn't answer. He didn't have to. The air between us tasted like ozone and old hunger, and for the first time, the monster under his skin felt less like a threat and more like an invitation...