Chapter Six - Echoes and Shadows

Sierra’s POV

The door clicked shut behind her, and suddenly the corridor felt impossibly vast—and terrifyingly silent. The air pressed heavy, as if the walls themselves held their breath. Her heart was still pounding, each beat echoing too loud in her ears, drowning out even the whispers clawing at the edges of her mind.

That thing with Elara wasn’t about her.

It was about me.

The words rattled around inside her skull, sharp and certain.

Why did they feel like a verdict? Like a warning? Like a truth too big to face?

Her back hit the cold locker wall, the metal biting through her thin shirt. She sank against it, struggling to steady her breath. Her hand rose on instinct, fingers brushing her sleeve where the faint glyph pulsed, dim but insistent beneath her skin. The mark that had flared when their shadows touched. It was alive now, no matter how much she wished it would fade.

It felt like a tether.

A call.

A promise.

Or a curse.

Her chest tightened as fragments of memory stirred, rising unbidden from where she’d buried them. Her mother’s voice, cracked and broken but steady as stone, whispering words she hadn’t dared repeat in years. The burning fortress—walls collapsing in fire and smoke. The bloodied halls where screams echoed, thick with loss and fear.

And now this boy.

Malick.

The way he’d looked at her in the corridor—eyes cutting through everything she hid, like he could see the pieces of her she thought long buried. There had been something in them. Recognition, maybe. Or fear. Or worse—hope.

Her throat burned. She had spent years hiding who she was, shoving her truth deep into the dark where no one could touch it. Layers of silence, walls of pain. But now… now the shadows weren’t just hers anymore. They had tangled with his. Wrapped around him as if they belonged to him too.

And that meant everything was about to change.

She drew her knees up slightly, pressing her forehead against them for a breath before shoving herself upright. No. She couldn’t let this consume her. Not here. Not in the middle of a corridor where anyone could see her falter. Still, as she pushed away from the lockers, her hand lingered over the glyph again. The pulse inside it was faint but steady, like a second heartbeat that wasn’t hers alone anymore.

And that terrified her most of all.

Malick’s POV

He watched her go.

Her retreating figure framed by the doorway, fragile and fierce all at once. The sharp set of her shoulders, the way she tried to hold herself together even as the weight of something unseen pressed against her—it carved into him. He tried to shake it, tried to ignore the way his gaze lingered, but he couldn’t.

His heart pounded, hard and fast, each beat laced with that strange warmth twisting in his gut like wildfire. The moment they’d shared—the shadows, the touch, the pulse—had rattled something loose deep inside him. Something ancient. Something he had spent years pretending wasn’t there.

He couldn’t explain it. Couldn’t even name it. But it screamed of fate, of blood, of promises etched in magic so old it hummed in his very bones.

And it terrified him almost as much as it exhilarated him.

He closed his eyes. And then, like always when he was weakest, his mother’s voice returned to him.

“Ix vel’ara zha. Kai thrak’eth nex ix, ix-lir kharuun.”

The words were sharp, burning on his tongue, though he hadn’t spoken them aloud in years. The memory was a ghost, but it clung with claws. He could still see her, pale and trembling, clutching his small hand in hers as she forced the words out one last time.

Be strong for me, my little warrior.

Back then, he hadn’t understood. He hadn’t known what strength she’d meant. He had been a boy with shadows gnawing under his skin, terrified of himself, terrified of what he might become. But now—watching Sierra, remembering the way her shadows curled and clung to his like they recognized him—he thought he finally understood.

She was the reason.

The reminder.

The link.

The shadows inside him had always been restless, a caged beast waiting to tear him apart. But when hers had touched his, the chaos had shifted. Not silenced. But changed. For the first time in years, the darkness hadn’t felt like a curse. It had felt like… belonging.

His jaw tightened as he flexed his hands, knuckles whitening. The magic stirred beneath his skin, rippling through him, aching to be free. He clenched his fists to hold it back, to keep control. He could not lose control again. Not here. Not with her so close.

Still, the thought pressed hard in his mind: they were bound. Whether he wanted it or not. Whether she wanted it or not.

He opened his eyes, staring at the space she had just stood in. The air still carried her presence, sharp and stubborn and fragile. And it struck him then how dangerous this was—because fate had just chosen its battlefield, and he wasn’t sure either of them was ready for the war it promised.

But for the first time in years, Malick wasn’t afraid.

No, fear was gone. Something else had taken its place—something hungrier, sharper, unstoppable.

Resolve.

Sierra’s POV

She didn’t move for a long time. The hum of students beyond the door bled into the silence of the corridor, distant laughter and footsteps, as if the world hadn’t just shifted beneath her feet. She dug her nails into her palms, trying to anchor herself.

Her mother had once told her that magic always demanded a price. That nothing in their bloodline came without sacrifice. Sierra had always thought the price was solitude—loneliness pressed against her ribs until it was all she knew. But now, staring at the door where Malick had vanished, she wasn’t so sure.

Maybe the real cost was this—connection. Binding her shadows to someone else’s. Letting another soul step into the dark she had carried alone for so long.

And maybe… maybe that was even more dangerous.