All Chapters of THE AUREUM TRIAL: BLOOD OATH: Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

I didn’t remember walking through the threshold.One moment, I was a girl unclasping her cloak at the estate’s entrance—bare fingers brushing against the woolen collar, the air too warm, the lighting too gold—and the next, I was somewhere else entirely. Drenched in sound and shimmer. Light blooming across every surface. The air perfumed with spellwork and winter citrus, honeyed wine and something older, darker, threaded beneath it all like a memory you couldn’t quite name but still somehow feared.I stood at the top of a shallow descending stair, just past the vestibule’s inner arch, and the ballroom stretched before me like something pulled from the ruins of a half-forgotten myth. Grand didn’t feel like the right word. Grand was a cathedral. A palace. This was older. Hungrier. A monument to power so ancient it had forgotten how to speak in anything less than opulence. Everything gleamed—walls panelled in lacquered ashwood so dark it caught reflections like a still lake at night, floo

I didn’t want to turn around.Every instinct in my body screamed against it—told me to stay perfectly still, to let the moment pass like a bad dream or a flicker of thunder you pretend not to hear. But the way Ingrid’s face had gone pale, how her lips parted slightly like a caught breath and her eyes locked over my shoulder with something between reverence and panic—it made the dread crawl up my spine in slow, icy increments, prickling beneath the skin like snowmelt sliding between shoulder blades.I turned. Slowly. As if pivoting too quickly might trigger some ancient trap woven into the opulence of the ballroom floor.And there he was.Atlas Blackwood.Standing just a few feet away, framed by the dim grandeur of the chandeliers above and the shimmer of legacy-blooded heirs behind him, he looked impossibly composed—his posture regal without stiffness, his expression unreadable but not unkind, the sharp lines of his jaw softened only slightly by the warm light cascading from the float

Lucian Blackwood.He appeared like he’d always been there, watching. His presence was neither violent nor warm—it was measured, like a sword weighed before battle. Lucian Blackwood strode forward, not to Atlas’s side, but in front of him, intercepting Theo’s gaze like a well-trained hound catching a thrown blade mid-air.He looked at Theo with a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “We won’t indulge your performances tonight, Voss. This isn’t your court.”Theo’s grin widened—something wolfish and theatrical, designed to needle under the skin.“Oh, Lucian blackwood. You speak like you still own the script.” He leaned in slightly, eyes glinting. “But the curtain’s already rising. Whether you like it or not.”I didn’t realize I had started to tremble. Just a little. The kind of shake that starts in your lungs before it touches your hands.I didn’t wait for the tension to ease or for someone to notice the way my chest rose and fell like I’d just surfaced from drowning. As Lucian Blackwood’s

A few days had passed since the night of the Pre-Ball, though the word passed felt too passive, too gentle, for what those hours had actually done to me. They hadn’t slipped by like soft pages turning in a forgotten book—they had dragged, hour by hour, inch by inch, and I had felt each one dig into my chest with the precision of quiet judgment. Ashwood went on, as it always did—bells ringing with cruel punctuality, hallways echoing with gossip, legacy students gliding through the corridors like they owned the dust and air alike—but I moved through it all like a ghost poorly pretending to still belong among the living.And Ingrid—Ingrid was silent.Not the kind of silence that meant she was too busy or tired, not even the ice-cold detachment she wore when she was trying to punish someone without saying it aloud. No, this was a subtler, sharper kind of silence—the sort that came wrapped in polite smiles and excuses about schedules, the sort that never confronted, never accused, but alwa

The greenhouse let us go gently—its warmth retreating with the reluctant sigh of moisture against glass, the fragrance of crushed mint and sweet rot dissolving behind us like the last breath of a dream we weren’t entirely ready to wake from. The corridors of Ashwood, by contrast, received us with their usual austerity. Polished stone beneath our boots. Cold air thick with hierarchy. The subtle pressure of unseen eyes. It was like stepping from some forgotten pocket of sanctuary into a world sharpened at every edge.Callum and I didn’t speak at first. Not out of tension, but reverence. The plan between us—newborn, delicate, still flickering with the tremble of risk—deserved quiet. It was a secret not yet ready to be spoken aloud too many times, lest it lose its shape or turn against us.The Legacy Common Hall rose into view like a cathedral carved from ambition and fire. Gold-fluted pillars framed the entrance. A chandelier the size of a carriage loomed overhead, its crystal drops catc