My mother stepped from the kitchen alcove, brushing flour from her apron, though her attention was already fixed on my face.
“You are late,” she said quietly. “The ward is saying the Master of Umbral stood in the market.”
I crossed the room and placed the twelve coppers on the scarred wooden table, the coins hitting the table with a hollow ring.
“He did,” I replied, keeping my voice even as I unpacked the small loaf of bread and wedge of cheese I had managed to secure. “He wished to be seen. That is all. A reminder to the unbound that they are observed.”
“That is never all,” my father said from behind me.
I turned to see he stood in the doorway of the back room, the dying light outlining his frame in muted gold.
The years at the tannery had already leached much of the warmth from his complexion, but tonight the strain about his eyes ran deeper, etched not by age but by apprehension.
He crossed to the window and drew the linen curtains shut with hands that did not quite conceal their tremor, sealing us within the amber glow of the hearth.
It was a futile gesture—as if a piece of fabric could keep out a man who commanded the shadows themselves.
“I am well,” I insisted.
I loved them, but their worry was a suffocating weight I had no desire to carry. It was a permanent fixture in our house. My mother had lost her younger sister to a lack of bond two decades ago. And my father had watched it happen.
It was as if they saw the same future each time they looked at me.
“She was likely caught up in the town’s vibrancy,” Lyra offered gently from her place beside Theron, her fingers resting in the clasp of her Elarthai.
I offered her a thankful smile.
Lyra was the calm to my storm, the daughter my parents wished I were: patient, demure, and safely bound.
Mother poured warmed cider into a cup and placed it before me.
“Vibrancy turns to whispers quickly,” she murmured. “And whispers turn to cautionary tales. You heard of Sena Torvin.”
A knot formed low in my stomach at her name.
She walked around our countertop to grab another glass. “Only last week, not even a heartbeat into twenty-one, and her soul… gone. Just like that. A whisper of Asvara in the night, and she was nothing more than an empty vessel.”
The cider turned bitter on my tongue.
Every moon cycle, the Veythar performed their assessments, checking their ledgers against the unbound souls in every district of Haelen.
Our ward had the unfortunate task of being first on that list the last moon cycle.
And Sena Torvin—being a single sunrise away from her solstice—was at the top of the assessment list.
As soon as the moon had reached its peak, her screams echoed beyond the thin walls of our home, every family lining up by their window to watch her be dragged away.
She was never to be seen again.
No one truly knew what happened in the Thrynn chambers, but the whispers said the Veythar would slowly feast upon a soul, shredding it piece by piece until nothing remained but a husk.
“Mother, please,” I murmured. “Do not speak of such things at dinner.”
“But we must speak of them, Kaelia!” Father’s voice rumbled, uncharacteristically loud. “You have less than a moon cycle until your solstice. Every day without a bond increases the scrutiny upon you.”
He began pacing the narrow stretch between hearth and table, his hands clasped behind his back in an effort to contain their restless movement.
“We will soon have an assessment,” he continued. “We do not wish to see you taken away.”