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The lock encounter
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2025-08-11 17:28:13
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Her Enemy, His Curse The lock encounter
LucianThe wind was wrong again.I’d grown up learning to read it—the way it carried the scent of rain or blood or the dust from a trail ahead—but this wasn’t anything natural. It moved against itself, coming from two directions at once, curling between my ribs like it was trying to map me from the inside.Arielle felt it too. Her steps shortened. The threads under her skin stirred, twitching in brief glints like lightning trapped in veins.Theron’s voice was low. “Tell me we’re close.”“We’re close,” Arielle said. Then, after a beat: “But not close enough.”We crested the jagged rise. What lay ahead wasn’t on any map.The ground sloped into a basin carved into concentric rings of stone, each one fractured, each fracture leaking a faint shimmer of air like the skin of the world had been torn and badly stitched. In the center was nothing. Not a lock. Not a seal. Just absence—a perfectly black circle swallowing the ground.“That’s not right,” Theron muttered.“No,” Arielle said. “It’s n
Her Enemy, His Curse What’s hiding in the dark?
LucianThe fire had burned low.Theron’s silhouette was a fixed shape against the stone wall, head tilted just enough that I knew he was listening for more than the wind. Arielle hadn’t moved since she’d taken that last sip of water—still crouched near the edge of the firelight, her hood shadowing her face.Her stillness bothered me more than the shadow creature had.Judges always came at you like a storm—you braced for impact, maybe got cut in half, maybe didn’t. This… door… she claimed to have seen? It had been nothing like that. It had chosen to leave, and things that choose to leave can choose to come back.I shifted closer to the fire, keeping my voice low. “You sleeping with your eyes open now?”Her gaze lifted from the flames, slow, like drawing something back from somewhere far away. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”“Like what?”“For me to close my eyes first.”I didn’t answer. She wasn’t wrong.Something in her tone made me check the edges of the firelight. The cliff face at
Her Enemy, His Curse Of Judges and Doors
LucianThe thing was gone.Not dead.Not destroyed.Just… gone, like a shadow slipping off the edge of sight.Arielle wouldn’t look at me.Not right away.Theron stood a few paces back, blades still in his hands. His knuckles were white, his shoulders high, ready to cut at anything that moved wrong. I couldn’t tell if that was caution… or the fact he didn’t trust what had just happened.“I’ll ask again,” I said. “What just happened?”Arielle didn’t answer. She kept staring at the patch of grass where the shadow had sunk, like she could still see it.I stepped closer, lowering my voice. “Arielle—”She cut me off without turning. “It wasn’t here for us.”That wasn’t enough. Not for me. Not for Theron.“Then what was it here for?”Her eyes flicked toward me finally—brief, sharp, and unwilling. “To listen.”That was worse.Theron barked a humorless laugh. “Listen to what, exactly?”She didn’t answer him either.The silence between us pressed in. The kind that fills itself with what you th
Her Enemy, His Curse The watcher
ArielleThe ridge broke behind us, but the air didn’t ease.It clung.Heavy. Damp. Waiting.Lucian walked ahead, his back rigid, shoulders squared like the fight was still happening.Theron trailed, limping but pretending not to. He didn’t hide the blood at the corner of his mouth—he never did.I kept to the middle.Not because I wanted safety.Because the threads demanded it.They whispered in the space between heartbeats.Frayed silk on bone.Counting down in a language older than voices.Five.Five names.Five locks in a tapestry that no longer held its own weight.Lucian thinks he hides it well, but I felt his words inside the seal. The Judge had almost remembered. Almost.If it had chosen differently…If it had decided that oath no longer bound it…We wouldn’t be walking away.The threads tugged harder. I stumbled once—just once—but it was enough for Theron to glance back.“You’re pale,” he said. Not softly. Never softly.“I’m fine.”He kept staring. “Your hands are shaking.”“St
Her Enemy, His Curse The clock is ticking
LucianI barely raised my blade in time.The Judge moved like a verdict—no hesitation, no pause, no mercy.Steel rang against fractured air, and I staggered back, boots skidding across the brittle ash. The ground hated us. Every step felt like a trespass.Theron flanked right. No war cry. No witty remark. Just a blur of motion and fury, blades dancing through the failing light.He struck fast.He struck true.The Judge didn’t block.Didn’t need to.The moment Theron’s blades touched its form, they sang—not with metal, but memory. Something ancient and wrong surged from the Judge’s body like a breath pulled from the lungs of a dying god.Theron was thrown back. Hard. He hit the earth with a sound that would’ve broken a weaker man.“Arielle!” I shouted, dodging left as the Judge’s blade came down where I’d stood.She stood just outside the spiral’s center, arms lifted, threads dancing at her fingertips—fraying, burning, trying to weave against judgment. She wasn’t attacking. She was anc
Her Enemy, His Curse A map beneath the skin
LucianWe didn’t return to the others right away.The clearing around the well felt thinner now, like the world hadn’t fully healed from what we’d done — or maybe it had never been whole to begin with. The stones still pulsed faintly underfoot, warm like coals gone to ash.Theron leaned against the twisted stump of a tree, breathing shallow. His wounds were closed, but not healed. Not really. Arielle had stopped the bleeding, but what that thing had done — it wasn’t just to his body.It had seen him.And some part of him had seen it back.I tried not to think about what it meant, what unwoven really was. I wasn’t sure if I’d understand even if I asked. And something told me asking came with a price.Arielle crouched beside the well, hands in her lap, eyes unfocused. She looked like someone listening to music only she could hear. Not relaxed. Not calm.Waiting.“Six more,” I said, breaking the silence.Her gaze flicked toward me. Tired. Sharp.“That we know of.”I felt the cold return
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