Semua Bab Her Enemy, His Curse: Bab 81 - Bab 90

LucianThe Tower had no heart. But it had memory.And in the dark between one stair and the next, it remembered me.It knew what I was.What I’d done.What I would become.I’d thought the dagger was the price. I was wrong. The price was me.Each step of the climb had peeled back a layer I thought I'd buried deep: my rage, my grief, my guilt. Each stair made me bleed in ways that had nothing to do with skin.I no longer knew what waited at the top only that she was there.ArielleThe moment Lucian crossed the threshold, the world staggered.Not trembled—staggered. As if it had held its breath for too long and was only now remembering how to exhale.The Tower dimmed. The torches flared, then snuffed themselves one by one. Darkness did not fall. It descended—like royalty.Lucian stood at the top of the stairway, silhouetted in it. Raw. Ripped open. His shirt was gone, and across his chest, ancient symbols burned like firebrands. Not from magic. From meaning.He wasn’t just carrying the d

ArielleThe stars dimmed.Not vanished. Not gone.But quiet—like they, too, were holding their breath.I felt it in my bones, in my blood: the stillness before change. The hush before the storm.Lucian’s hand was still in mine, fingers woven like we’d done it for years instead of minutes. His shadows wrapped loosely around us, soft as dusk. My fire had banked to an ember-glow, but it still burned, deep and slow and sure beneath my skin.We were no longer two.We were no longer cursed.The Tower had seen it. Blessed it. Or maybe feared it.Because something was shifting now.Beneath the stone.Above the sky.Inside us.I sat up slowly, drawing the silk sheet around me like armor, even as my body still sang from his touch. From the vow sealed not in blood—but in choice.Lucian watched me with that unreadable look again. Half reverence. Half possession. All his.“I feel them,” I murmured, the words coming like a confession. “The Council. The others. It’s like they’re waking.”“They are,”

LucianSmoke clung to the air like regret. Bitter. Lingering. Stubborn.The sanctum was still standing, but barely. The walls pulsed with a bruised sort of light, as though the Tower itself was trying to remember what whole felt like.Arielle hadn’t moved.Her crown had dimmed, the fire receding into a soft, angry glow. But the weight of it—the weight of her—still filled the chamber.“She’s not coming back alone,” she’d said.I looked at her, really looked, and realized something that struck deeper than fear.She wasn’t shaken.She was preparing.“Ari—” I started.She raised her hand, not to stop me, but to feel the air. Her fingers twitched, like she was listening to something I couldn’t hear.“She opened a gate,” she said. “One that shouldn't exist anymore.”“Then we close it.”A flicker of something passed through her—grief, maybe. Or memory.“We can’t.”The words were quiet. Final.“Not from this side.”I stepped closer. “Then we go to hers.”Arielle met my gaze, and for a heartbe

ArielleThe scream fractured the sky.Not in sound.In meaning.It wasn’t a cry of anguish or rage. It was the kind of scream that made silence heavier. Like the world had been holding its breath for too long—and now it had remembered why.I turned toward it instinctively, even as every instinct told me not to. Behind me, Theron unsheathed his blade with a hiss of steel. Lucian, slower, didn’t draw anything at all. He only reached for me.“Arielle?” he asked. Not as a question. As a tether.My name echoed again—closer now. Not spoken aloud. Not in any language with a shape. Pulled. Carried on a thread of unraveling magic, as if someone had plucked it from the Weave itself and was tugging.“You heard that,” I said. It wasn’t a question.Theron’s jaw clenched. “I didn’t hear it,” he muttered. “I felt it. Like my soul blinked.”Lucian didn’t speak.The space around us had gone thin. The kind of thin that wasn’t about air or distance, but about meaning—like a book whose spine had been ben

LucianThe Tower didn’t speak again.Not in words. Not in prophecy. Just the low thrum of stone remembering silence. I kept waiting for it to rise—another scream, another test, another demand. But the veil held. The runes dimmed.And Arielle slept.We stayed like that for hours, or maybe minutes. Time meant nothing inside this place. There were no windows, no stars, no sun. Just the endless hush of a world that had come too close to ending.Again.I looked down at her. Her face was streaked with ash and something like starlight. Her fire had marked her—not scars, not burns. Etchings. Sigils that hadn’t been there before, faint as dust, glowing softly against her skin like whispers only the Weave could hear.And the bond between us pulsed.Not with pain. Not with strain. It settled, like a heartbeat aligning with another. I could still feel the echo of her power—like a shadow cast behind my thoughts—but it didn’t pull anymore. It simply was.Woven.I didn’t know what that meant yet. On