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57: Dreams or Nightmares
publish date:
2026-10-14 09:37:00
Latest chapter
The stolen Heart 83: What the Water Owed Him
Votigern POVThe fragment sat on the table between us, small and cracked and nowhere near enough, and Cillin watched me study it with the particular caution of a man who’d learned exactly how quickly my patience could curdle into something worse.“You’ve been staring at it for an hour, my lord.”“I’m aware of how long I’ve been staring at it.”“May I ask what you’re looking for?”I turned it once more in the firelight, watching the dull red catch and hold, remembering the way I remembered everything from before, in perfect, agonizing detail, the same way a man remembers the exact shape of a wound long after it’s healed wrong.“Twenty-two years ago,” I said, “I held the whole of this stone in my hands. Not a fragment. Not a broken piece scavenged from a dead man’s chest. The entire heart of magic, complete, humming with more power than I’ve felt before or since.” I set it down. “You understand what that did to a man like me.”“I understand it made you Lord Votigern, my lord. Before th
The stolen Heart 82: What the Knock Interrupted
Sarah POVThe knock came a third time, harder, and I understood I had perhaps ten seconds to decide what kind of woman I was about to become.Not the woman who’d walked into that party eighteen months ago in a dress she’d been proud of, before Votigern’s men had torn it off her in front of a laughing crowd. Not the woman who’d spent the months after learning which herbs stopped a heart slowly and which stopped it fast, memorizing the difference the way other women memorized recipes. That woman had done her work. She was finished.I needed to decide, in the next ten seconds, whether I was also a woman who survived what came next.“Lord Votigern,” the voice at the door said again. “It’s Marsh. I need to speak with you regarding the western supply route.”Not one of his personal guard, then. Not someone who’d recognize immediately that the man on the floor behind me was dying rather than merely resting.I looked down at him one last time blood at his eyes, his mouth, his stomach visibly
The stolen Heart 81: Twenty-Two Years and Some Change
Votigern POVTwenty-two years.I’d had a long time to think about that number, lying in the dark of a burned-out settlement no one bothered checking twice, listening to my own ruined body slowly, painfully learn how to work again. Twenty-two years since a woman with poison in her hands and vengeance in her mouth had nearly finished what a dragon prince’s blade failed to.I’d survived. That was the first fact, the only fact that mattered in those first years I had survived, broken and half-blind and screaming into a gag no one heard, because whoever had knocked on that door had scared her off before she’d finished, and I had crawled, inch by agonizing inch, out of that room before anyone else found me and finished the job properly.It had taken years to walk again without the shake. Longer to speak without the slur her poison had left curled permanently around my tongue. Longer still to rebuild anything resembling the men I’d once commanded most of them had scattered the moment word s
The stolen Heart 80: What the Scouts Found
Captain Ilsa POV“You’re certain,” I said, for the third time, because the boy in front of me looked like he hadn’t slept in two days and men who haven’t slept in two days sometimes see things that aren’t there.“I’m certain, Captain.”“Tell me again. From the beginning. Slowly this time.”Denn shifted his weight, exhaustion written into every line of him, mud still crusted along his boots from the ride back. “We were three days past the old western border, scouting the trade route like you ordered. Nothing unusual the first two days. On the third, we came across smoke.”“Smoke isn’t unusual on its own.”“No, Captain. But it was coming from the ruins. The ones everyone in that region calls cursed. No one’s lived there in years not since word spread that Votigern died in that exact settlement.”“Smoke from a fire someone’s using to keep warm doesn’t mean Votigern.”“I know, Captain. That’s what I told myself too, riding closer.” He swallowed. “We found tracks. A lot of them. More than
The stolen Heart 79: The Thing She Didn’t Say
Mira POV“He’s sleeping,” I told Ryo, easing the tent flap shut behind me. “Finally. Properly, I think, not just pretending so we’d stop hovering.”“Good.” He didn’t look up from the map spread across the table the same one, I realized, that had been sitting there since our conversation days ago, still weighted down at the corners with stones he’d probably grabbed without thinking.“You’ve been staring at that map for an hour.”“I’ve been thinking.”“About Yophiel? Or about the name?”He finally looked up. “Both. Neither. I don’t know anymore where one worry ends and the next one starts.”I crossed the tent and sat across from him, the way I had days ago when we’d first tried to have this conversation properly. It felt like a different lifetime already.“I keep thinking about what he said,” Ryo continued. “About my father. About whether he’s tangled up in all of this somehow, and I don’t know what to do with that. I never got to ask him anything. Not really. Not the questions that ma
The stolen Heart 78: The Weight of Old Water
Ryo POV“He hasn’t left his bed in three days,” the attendant said, wringing her hands outside the tent flap. “We’ve sent for every healer we have. None of them can explain it.”“Explain what, exactly?” Mira asked, already moving past her.“He’s simply fading, my queen. No wound. No fever. He eats what we bring him and grows weaker anyway.”I ducked inside before she finished the sentence.Yophiel lay propped against a mountain of pillows, and the sight of him stopped me cold in the doorway. I’d seen him age gradually over fifteen years, the slow creep of decades finally catching up to a man who’d outlived most of his own generation. This wasn’t that. This looked like someone had reached into him and pulled something out.“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Yophiel said, and even his voice had thinned.“You look like you’re becoming one.”“Flattery. From my own king.” He gestured weakly at the stool beside the bed. “Sit. Both of you. I don’t have the strength to crane my neck up at
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