Chapter Five: The Mark Beneath the Skin

Lyra

Darkness wasn’t just the absence of light.

It breathed.

It pulsed.

It whispered her name like a lullaby laced with poison.

The Hollowed Ones hadn’t chained her, yet Lyra had never felt more trapped. The forest surrounding her wasn’t the same forest Kael had once dragged her from. This place… it bled a sickness into the air. The trees were ash-colored and moaning softly in the windless night. No stars broke through the canopy. No moonlight reached the floor.

She’d been here for days—or had it been weeks?

There was no sun. Only the cold breath of the Hollowed Realm and the soft, wet rustle of the shadows that watched her.

“You are not a prisoner,” the Hollowed Priestess had told her. “You were born to return to us.”

But Lyra could feel the truth writhing under her skin. She wasn’t free. Not even close.

She sat near the center of a clearing surrounded by stones carved with glyphs so old they bled silver when touched. Her blood had touched them once. It had sizzled like acid on stone. Since then, the Hollowed Ones had been reverent. Terrifyingly so.

She was their chosen one. Or their weapon.

Or their offering.

She no longer knew which terrified her more.

The shadowy figures around her were always just out of reach, cloaked in living darkness that shimmered and shifted like oil. Some had once been men. She could still see the vague shapes of what they’d been before they gave themselves to the Gate’s hunger. But most had no faces. No names. Just hunger. Just worship.

And they worshiped her.

Or what lived inside her.

Each night, the Gate called louder. A great stone arch, half-buried in the earth beyond the forest, pulsed with an energy that made her breath hitch. It called to her blood. It knew her. And she had begun to know it.

Sometimes, in sleep, she saw herself standing before it, arms open, her veins glowing gold while the world around her cracked and bled silver. Sometimes, she liked it.

But when she awoke, the fear came rushing back like a tide.

“I’m not one of you,” she whispered to the trees. To herself.

A rustle answered her—no animal, no wind.

Something was watching.

No—someone.

“Still lying to yourself, girl?” a voice purred behind her.

Lyra’s spine snapped straight.

That voice wasn’t Hollowed.

It was familiar.

Kael.

She turned.

And there he stood—at the edge of the clearing, boots dirtied, dark cloak flaring around him like a storm. His eyes blazed silver, but not with the cold hunger of the Hollowed. With fury. With relief. With longing.

“Kael…” Her breath caught in her throat.

He was real.

He’d come.

But before she could move, the shadows hissed.

Dozens of them surged from the trees like liquid night, converging on him with inhuman screeches.

Kael didn’t flinch.

He moved like fire, blades flashing in both hands, his claws glinting as he tore through the dark shapes with brutal precision. The clearing exploded into chaos. Shadows shrieked. The glyph-stones cracked.

And Lyra didn’t run.

She watched. Heart pounding. Blood singing.

Because part of her wanted to see what he’d do to them.

Because something inside her… was hungry too.

⸻

Kael

He could smell her before he saw her.

Lyra’s scent wasn’t like the others. It was a song carried on smoke. A memory wrapped in blood. When he’d tracked her here, through the Hollowed Forest, he hadn’t expected to find her alive.

But she wasn’t the Lyra he remembered.

The moment he stepped into the clearing and saw her, it was like being stabbed with light.

She was standing in the center of a ring of corrupted glyphs. Her skin glowed faintly, like moonlight woven into flesh. Her eyes—gods, her eyes—they were brighter. Wilder. Not entirely human anymore.

But she was still his.

And they had taken her.

The Hollowed swarmed him, as he knew they would. They smelled of dead magic and ancient rot. He moved through them like a wolf through mist, blades carving flesh, claws slicing tendons. But there were too many.

And she hadn’t run.

Lyra just stood there.

Watching.

Not afraid.

Not even surprised.

Was she waiting for him?

Or was she waiting to kill him?

Kael snarled and slammed one of the creatures into the glyph stone. It shrieked as its body exploded into ash, the rune flaring red for a heartbeat before fading. The others hissed and retreated.

Cowards.

He wiped his blade on his cloak and turned back toward her.

She hadn’t moved.

He took one step into the circle of stones.

“Stop,” she said sharply. “You’ll trigger it.”

Kael froze. “Trigger what?”

Her eyes flicked to the stones. “They’ve been feeding on me. On my blood. If you cross the circle—”

“We burn,” he finished darkly.

She nodded.

There was no fear in her. Only exhaustion. And something else.

Resignation.

“Lyra,” he said, more gently now. “I’ve come to take you home.”

“There is no home left for me.”

“Don’t say that.”

She turned her face away. “I’m not who I was, Kael.”

“I don’t care.”

“You should.”

Her voice cracked on that last word. Finally, finally, he saw the fracture beneath the surface. The broken girl beneath the fierce shell. And his heart ached.

But just as he took a step closer, a wave of energy blasted outward from the circle.

It knocked him back into the dirt.

The Gate had woken.

And Lyra’s eyes—once gold—had turned silver.

⸻

Lyra

She couldn’t stop it.

The Gate was pulsing beneath her skin.

The presence that had been whispering in her dreams—mother of shadows, child of starlight—was fully awake now. And Kael… Kael’s presence was tearing open everything she’d tried to bury.

He made her remember she wasn’t a weapon.

He made her remember she was human.

Or had been.

But it was too late now.

She dropped to her knees, clutching her chest as heat roared through her veins. Her scream was swallowed by the forest.

The ground beneath her cracked.

The glyphs began to bleed silver.

The Gate called.

And something inside her answered.

⸻

Kael

He was losing her.

Not to death.

To something worse.

To power.

To prophecy.

To the curse they had tried to prevent for generations.

He couldn’t cross the glyphs. Not yet.

But he would not let her go.

Not again.

He reached into his satchel, pulling out the obsidian dagger passed down through the Varyn bloodline. It was forged from a starfallen blade. One of the few things capable of severing a blood link.

Or sealing one.

He had one chance.

One spell.

One cut.

Kael stepped toward the circle again, slowly.

Deliberately.

Her eyes snapped up—silver, wild, afraid.

“Don’t—”

“I’m not leaving you in this place,” he said. “I will burn before I abandon you.”

The glyphs sparked. The ground shook.

Kael pressed the blade against his palm.

And drew blood.

Part Two

Lyra

The Gate roared beneath her skin.

It was not a sound anyone else could hear—it was the scream of something ancient waking inside her bones. Her blood ran molten. Her heart pounded not to the rhythm of life, but to the pulsing call of that cursed arch buried beyond the trees. The glyphs at her feet were no longer static symbols. They danced now, alive with the echo of a magic lost before time was born.

Kael’s blood hit the ground outside the stone circle.

And something inside her snapped.

“Kael, don’t—”

But it was too late.

The dagger had already tasted him.

The obsidian blade—a Varyn relic older than most of the packs in the Northern Wilds—had been made for this. Blood-forged. Moon-bound. It could either sever a bond or forge one.

He wasn’t using it to kill her.

He was trying to anchor her.

Fool.

Did he not understand what she was becoming?

Or did he already know—and just not care?

As Kael stepped forward, the blood on his hand shimmered, glowing with a silver fire. The glyphs flared, resisting him, screaming in protest.

But then—

They bent.

Folded.

Like they recognized him.

Like her blood and his… belonged to the same curse.

Lyra cried out as pain wracked her body. Her hands slammed into the earth, and the world turned upside down. Visions poured into her—the Hollowed Priestess, kneeling at the Gate centuries ago, offering her newborn child. The sealing of the forest in silver fire. The pact that had never been broken.

And a child born under a rare celestial conjunction.

Marked by moonlight. Claimed by shadow.

Her.

But she wasn’t only Hollowed.

She saw the Varyn sigil—Kael’s bloodline. Warriors chosen to protect the Gate. To keep the balance. To kill the Hollowed Chosen if the Gate ever stirred.

And still, Kael had chosen her.

He wasn’t meant to love her.

He was meant to kill her.

Lyra’s body convulsed. Her hands clawed at the dirt as a scream tore from her throat—raw, shattering, inhuman. Light and shadow swirled around her. Her skin split in glowing veins that healed instantly, as though her body was reshaping itself to house whatever monster the Gate had longed for.

Kael moved fast, crossing the final line of glyphs just as they flared red again.

And he dropped to his knees in front of her.

“I won’t let them take you,” he whispered fiercely. “Even if I have to bind you to me.”

She was shaking, barely able to speak. “You don’t understand what I am.”

“Yes, I do.” His voice broke. “And I don’t care.”

“You should care,” she hissed, her hands seizing his wrists with supernatural strength. “Because if I lose control, Kael—you’ll be the first I destroy.”

He didn’t flinch.

“I’d rather be destroyed by you than live in a world where they break you.”

For a moment, something cracked in her chest.

The wolf in her snarled in protest. The Gate screamed.

But the girl—the human still buried somewhere beneath the power—clung to those words like air.

Then Kael did the unthinkable.

He drove the dagger into the earth between them.

The runes carved into the blade blazed white. His blood soaked the edge. And the ground trembled.

The bond was forming.

Not just any bond.

Blood-binding.

Illegal. Forbidden.

Unbreakable.

Kael offered his soul to tether hers.

Lyra screamed as silver light exploded from the circle, swallowing them both.

⸻

Kael

Pain.

It seared through him like wildfire.

The bond took more than he expected. Not just blood—it demanded memory. Spirit. Intention.

It saw him.

And in that moment, the Gate saw them both.

Kael glimpsed images that weren’t his—visions from Lyra’s childhood. Her mother hiding her from her own people. A forest full of voices calling her “heir.” A wolf with eyes like obsidian weeping over a cradle.

And then—

A flash of the future.

Lyra standing in a circle of ash, her hands dripping with silver blood, her eyes utterly void of warmth.

He was at her feet.

Dead.

Kael recoiled. The bond snapped him back to the present, sweat pouring down his face.

Lyra was breathing hard, crouched like a wild thing across from him, her fingers twitching.

But the Gate had gone silent.

The ground had stilled.

The glyphs dimmed.

“Kael…” Her voice was hoarse, confused. “What did you do?”

“I gave you a tether,” he said, barely standing. “So if the Gate takes you again—I can pull you back.”

“You shouldn’t have.”

“No,” he said quietly. “But I had to.”

⸻

Lyra

She hated him for that.

For choosing her over prophecy.

For believing in her when she could barely believe in herself.

The bond had forced the truth into her veins—Kael wasn’t just a Varyn warrior. He was a direct descendant of the first Gate Guardian. The only bloodline with the right to kill the Chosen before they turned.

He was her end.

But he was also her salvation.

The Gate might slumber for now. But the bond had awakened something far older than even the Hollowed Ones suspected. It wasn’t just Lyra the forest wanted.

It wanted both of them.

She stared at Kael, at the blood still staining his hand, at the faint glow beneath his skin where the bond had stitched itself to his soul.

“You’ve cursed yourself,” she whispered.

“I’ve saved you.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I don’t need to.”

Lyra stood shakily, brushing dirt from her trembling fingers. “The Hollowed Ones won’t stop now. They’ll see the bond as betrayal.”

“Let them come.”

“They’ll kill you.”

“They can try.”

He stepped beside her, gaze steady. And for a moment, Lyra leaned into him. Let herself believe in the impossible.

Let herself imagine a world where she wasn’t a weapon. A world where the bond between them was just love—not survival.

But that world shattered in the next heartbeat.

Because the shadows moved again.

And this time, they weren’t Hollowed.

They were something worse.

⸻

Kael

The forest fell silent.

Even the cursed wind stilled.

He felt it before he saw it—a new presence. No rot. No decay.

Something cold. Pure. Ancient.

He turned, pulling Lyra behind him just as the trees parted and a woman stepped into the clearing.

Tall. Graceful. Dressed in white that shimmered like moon-glass. Her hair floated around her like she was underwater.

But it was her eyes that froze Kael’s blood.

They were gold.

Like Lyra’s used to be.

“Hello, daughter,” the woman said softly.

Lyra went rigid behind him.

“Mother?”

The woman smiled.

But it wasn’t warmth. It was triumph.

“I see you’ve found your anchor,” she said, eyeing Kael with disdain. “Shame. I had hoped you’d embrace your destiny without this… distraction.”

Kael growled low in his throat. “Who are you?”

She ignored him.

Her gaze locked on Lyra like a hawk.

“The Gate is not yours to deny, Lyra. It sleeps only for now. But you have been marked since birth. The Hollowed Ones were only caretakers of your awakening. I—” her voice dropped to a whisper “—am your origin.”

Lyra stepped forward, eyes wide. “You gave me up.”

“I preserved you.”

“You let me grow up blind!”

“To keep you safe. And so when the Gate awoke, you’d have the strength to open it willingly.”

Kael stepped between them. “She’s not opening anything.”

The woman’s smile didn’t waver.

“But she already has.”