Page 11 of Bonded By Stone & Blood

I dry my hands.

"Tovian." Her voice cracks slightly on my name and she hates it—I see her hate it. "I am asking you to let me go. I have a brother in that village. I have a life that existed before I fell through your ceiling. Just—break it. Break whatever spell this is."

I turn to face her fully and watch her chin come up. She holds my gaze. She always holds my gaze, even when every piece of her survival instinct must be screaming at her not to.

It should not affect me but it does.

"It is not a spell," I say.

"Then what is it?"

I cross the chamber toward her. She doesn't back away, which is either the bravest thing I have ever witnessed or the most reckless. I stop close enough that my shadow swallows her whole. She has to tilt her head back to keep looking at me. I let her.

"The First Blood Bond is older than your cathedral," I say. My voice comes out low, rougher than I meant for it to be. The stone beneath our feet carries the vibration of it. "Older than this mountain. When your blood touched my skin as I woke, the earth magic recognized it as an offering. It does not ask permission or negotiate, it completed."

She stares at me. "Completed?"

"The bond is permanent. Your life force and mine are tethered now at the root. I can’t sever it. No one can. There is no door back to the life you had before you fell into my stronghold, Sabine. That life is gone."

The silence that follows is absolute. She just stands there in the torchlight with her eyes moving through rage, then grief, then a third thing darker than both. Then she stares up at me like she is trying to find the edges of a truth too large to hold.

"Until one of us dies," she says slowly. Not a question this time either.

"Yes."

7

SABINE

My ankle cooperates, finally. Not fully, but there's still a pull when I step wrong, a sharp reminder that the mountain almost kept me but I can move. I can explore. And after three days trapped inside the same torch-lit chamber while Tovian loomed over me like a very large, very brooding weather system, the need to move feels almost violent in its urgency.

I take the outer corridor slowly, trailing my fingers along the cave wall for balance more than comfort. The torch in my free hand throws wild orange shapes across stone pillars that twist upward like frozen smoke.

Every chamber in this place has the same quality, the ceilings too high, the columns too organic, every surface bearing the impression of architects far older and far larger than anything human hands built. It doesn't feel abandoned so much as it feels held. Like the mountain itself is waiting to exhale.

I hear movement deeper in the stronghold. The low percussion of massive bodies working, Tovian and Vorgrym clearing debris, or at least that's what I assume. The sounds have been constant since dawn. I ignore them and keep walking.

The mural stops me cold.

I nearly miss it. The torchlight skips across the far wall of the wide outer chamber and I'm a few steps past the threshold before my brain registers what my eyes caught. I turn back.

Oh.

It spans the entire wall, floor to ceiling, which vaults so high above me the top edge dissolves into darkness I can't reach with firelight alone. It isn't carved. It's painted. Sweeping, deliberate strokes in pigment that haven't faded in however many centuries lie between that moment and this one. Blues and ochres and deep, aching red. Gold leaf pressed into the stone in thin, painstaking veins that catch my torchlight and throw it back in fragments.

I step closer.

Humans. Real, small, cloth-wearing humans, and they are standing shoulder to shoulder with gargoyles twice their size. Not cowering or kneeling. Standing with weapons raised against an enormous and shapeless creature on the opposing edge of the mural, something that has no name I recognize but radiates threat from the sheer mass of black pigment pressed into the stone to create it.

The human figures' faces are rendered in careful detail. I can see expressions. Determination. Fear that hasn't won yet. Beside them, the gargoyle forms are familiar, the swept horns, the vast wings, the stone-heavy bodies, but they are not turned toward the humans. They are turned outward, toward the threat, wings spread to cover the smaller figures behind them.

Protecting them.

I don't want this. I want the history to be simple. I want the gargoyles to have always been monsters and the humans to have always been sensible and afraid, and I want the story of this mountain to be uncomplicated and finished and sealed beneath the rubble where it has lived for centuries. What I don't want is gold leaf and carefully painted faces and two species that look, inthis breathtaking, preserved snapshot of some ancient moment, like they actually chose each other.

"You shouldn't be here."

The voice arrives like cold water trickling down my neck. I spin, and Vorgrym fills the corridor entrance. He is enormous, broader than I remembered from the first time he nearly gave me a seizure appearing from the dark. The ruined left eye catches my torchlight in a way the good one doesn't, an absence where there should be life. He doesn't move toward me.