Caelum - Gravel

The gravel beneath my boots is screaming.

It’s in the tiny fractures, the way each stone cracks and shifts as if it knows I’m one breath away from unleashing something unworldly. From reducing this entire plane to Val and cinder. My jaw is locked so tightly my gums bleed copper, my fists are trembling from the exquisite effort it takes not to punch straight through the ground and keep falling.

Because she’s gone.

I didn’t just miss it. I felt it.

The second she crossed the perimeter of my estate, it was like someone reached inside my ribcage and yanked something loose. Something vital. I felt the shift in the air, the splinter in the thread between us, the wrongness that sliced through me like a scream.

Not figuratively, nothing fucking poetic. This was real, tangible.

Undeniable.

I’ve killed men for less than a whisper of disobedience, I’ve burned kingdoms because I woke up in a mood. And now, here I am, grinding my molars to dust while my lungs work overtime to contain a scream that could fracture the mountains.

Because she left me.

And I let her.

Only for a heartbeat in the grand timeline of existence. But that’s all it took.

I’d torn open a gate to the Archives the second Zarek took watch, my mind clawing for answers while my gut told me I was already too late. The Vaults yielded little. Dust and ink, scrolls that crumbled in my hands.

I pried open ancient ledgers, dragged my fingers across pages inked in dead men’s blood, and still, I found nothing real for what she was.

Falling back on the one worn tome that thrummed when I touched it. The problem is, after the first few pages that give basic knowledge on the Null, the rest? Glyphs I don’t recognize, not even in Old Tongue or Godscript, some language older than the first Realm, older than time.

I ran it through the translator mesh. Nothing.

In desperation, I went to a seer. One of the oldest left uncorrupted by plane-sickness. She bled from the eyes the moment I showed her the sigil burned into the back of the book. All she said was, You were warned.

Then she passed out cold.

Useless. Every one of them. These worlds are filled with charlatans wrapped in prophecy, and not one of them could tell me what she is, what I took.

And now she’s taken. Because I gave her sunlight and rest. Because I hesitated in making her mine.

I clench my eyes shut before I do something regrettable, like obliterate the nearest building, or worse, one of my own men. I need to pull it back, reel it in. There are too many eyes, and I can already feel them, taste their fear soaking into the silence around me, as the whole city holds its breath.

Someone behind me coughs.

I don’t move.

Another one shifts their weight.

My fingers twitch.

It’s Zarek who steps forward, as he always does, arrogant, unafraid, brash as hell but too competent for me to rip apart. He’s smarter than most, and faster, but even he treads carefully now, his boots crunching softly on the gravel as he approaches.

“She slipped past me,” he says.

Not an excuse, a truth. One he hates saying out loud almost as much as I hate hearing it. I breathe in slowly. My ribs creak like they might break from the effort. 

“Why?”

“I didn’t think she’d make it past the threshold,” he says, voice low. “I was toying with her. Thought she’d panic, maybe double back. I was behind her the whole way.”

I open my eyes.

He flinches.

Good.

“She was pretending,” I say. “The entire time.”

Zarek runs a hand down his face, blood smears across his cheek, training camp leftovers.

“Fuck me.”

“That’s not off the table,” I say flatly, “if you keep talking.”

He exhales, short and sharp.

“Look, I didn’t think-”

“No, you didn’t,” I cut in, voice velvet-wrapped steel. “You thought she was some skittish pet, fragile little thing fumbling her way through a house of wolves. You thought she was playing scared.”

He nods, cautious.

“She wasn’t playing,” I growl. “She studied us, memorised the architecture, tracked the exits, timed my comings and goings. She faked sleep for hours, Zarek. Lay there without even a muscle twitch or a mistimed breath. Just to get the edge.”

Another pause.

Then Zarek says,

“You admire her for it.”

I bare my teeth.

“I want to tear her fucking throat out for it.”

He lifts a brow.

“Same difference.”

He’s not wrong, that’s the problem.

I do admire her for it. I admire the way her mind works like a weapon, the way she never lost her fire, even when I dressed her and handed her comfort on a silver fucking platter. She was never soothed, never broken. She was biding her time.

And now, she’s gone.

I turn slowly to face the city spread beneath us. The place is calm, but it won’t be for long, not if I lose the last thread of restraint coiled inside my spine.

Zarek speaks again.

“You’re not going to find her by ripping this place apart.”

“I know.”

“We’ve got teams out. The scent trail goes cold by the first warding line. They stored her, probably in something old-school. Cursed wood or lead or iron.”

“How long ago?”

“Two hours. Maybe more.”

Fuck.

That tether I felt snap, it’s been two fucking hours.

And she’s still alive. I’d know if she wasn’t. The Thread would recoil, snap back and collapse into rot. But it hasn’t.

She’s still burning, somewhere out there, dimming, but burning.

I inhale again, and the rage that rolls through me is quieter now, smoke just before the fire takes everything.

Time to work.

“Get every operative, in every realm on alert,” I say. “I want sigil trackers, heartbeat catches, echo relics. Anything that can trace movement across veils.”

Zarek nods, already moving.

I don’t watch him go.

I stay right there, in the middle of the gravel, letting the wind slap my face and the cold bite my skin. Because this is the price of underestimation. This is what happens when you forget that caged things don’t always stay caged.

Sometimes they wait. Watch. Learn.

Then they bare their teeth, and fucking run.

Val ran.

And now?

Now I will tear down every veil, every border, every safehouse and sanctuary in this realm and the next, until I have her back.

And this time?

This time, the cage won’t have a door.