"What do you mean?"
"We are children of nature, Ruka. Our magic doesn't just flow from the earth beneath our feet—it needs the sky above. The sun's kiss on our skin. The moon's pull on our blood. The endless, sacred dance of seasons and stars." Each word seemed to cost her. "Buried in the deep dark, severed from those gifts, our magic began to starve. To wither like plants cut from soil. Generation by generation, it faded—and the fated mate bond,the most precious blessing our magic could bestow, dimmed with it. Until it became nothing more than a story. A beautiful tale we told ourselves to remember what we'd lost."
I stood frozen, her words sinking into my bones.
"Until now," she whispered, soft as a prayer.
The true mate bond. I'd heard those words my entire life—whispered around dying fires, woven through the old songs, invoked at mating ceremonies like prayers cast into an empty void. A connection that could survive death itself. A pull toward another granted by the fates.
Just stories. All of it.
They were hollow promises spoken over clasped hands, wishes that evaporated like breath on winter air. Every mated pair hoped they'd be the chosen ones. None ever were.
My own parents loved each other with a ferocity that could shake mountains. I'd watched my mother hold my father's cooling body, her screams of anguish tearing holes in the night. If that soul-deep, world-ending love wasn't a fated bond, then the magic had died generations ago—if it had ever truly existed.
And yet.
The instant Sarsa named it, something primal awakened in my chest. A truth I'd been fighting like a cornered beast since Jordan's scent first slammed into me and knocked the air from my lungs.
That pull. That relentless, suffocating need. The insistence that every fiber of my being demanded I protect her, possess her, mark her so completely that even the gods would know she belonged to me. I'd told myself it was lust—powerful, yes, all-consuming even, but nothing more than flesh calling to flesh.
I'd been a fool.
This ran deeper. Older. It lived in the spaces between my breaths, in the very marrow of my bones.
When Jordan stood beside me, the chaos of the world settled into perfect order. When she left, her absence carved itself into my ribs like a wound that wouldn't close. Her scent didn't simply draw me—it ignited something ancient and sleeping, something that had claimed her as mine before my mind could even comprehend what was happening.
My parents had built something extraordinary together—a partnership forged in fire and tempered by time. I understood devotion. I'd seen it in every glance they shared, every touch, every unspoken word that passed between them like a secret language only they could speak.
But this thing with Jordan? It devoured all comparison. Swallowed it whole and left me grasping for words that didn't exist.
This wasn't a choice I'd made. It was a force of nature—inevitable as gravity.
"The bond." The words scraped out of me, raw and reluctant. "You're saying it's come back."
Sunlight played across Sarsa's weathered face, catching in her eyes until they blazed with something timeless and knowing. "I'm saying our people have wandered in darkness for too long. That the surface world has stirred something in us—something we thought lost to the ages."
She leaned in, and suddenly I was a youngling again, transparent as glass before her penetrating stare. "Tell me true, Ruka. Her scent—does it haunt you? Does it wind through your thoughts like smoke, until you can think of nothing else?"
The word felt like defeat and relief mixed. "Yes."
"And when other males look at her—when they dare to stand too close, to share her air—don't you hunger to teach them what it means to covet what isn't theirs? To write the lesson in blood and bone?"
Fire licked through my veins at the memories. Every Orc whose eyes had lingered a heartbeat too long on Jordan's face. Every accidental touch that had flooded me with murderous rage. Kael, poor fool, still working double shifts because he'd been stupid enough to let his desire show. "Yes."
Sarsa's voice softened, which somehow made her next words slice deeper. "And now that she's gone—you feel it, don't you? That void. Like someone reached past your ribs and tore your heart away, leaving you to bleed in ways that have no words."
The realization hit me like a warhammer. That gnawing emptiness that had made a home beneath my ribs. The restlessness that stalked through me like a predator with nowhere to hunt. The way everything had dulled to grey, as if Jordan had stolen all the color from the world when she walked away.
"Yes." I could barely force the word out.
Sarsa sat back, satisfaction crossing her weathered features. "Then you understand what this is. What you feel transcends mere attraction or even the love humans speak of in their poetry. This is the sacred bond, awakened after centuries of silence." She leaned forward, her gaze sharp enough to cut. "And if you let her slip away without a fight, you'll suffer that regret to your grave. The bond doesn't choose the unworthy, Ruka. It doesn't stir on a whim. If the old magic has woven her fate with yours, then you dishonor both of you by surrendering without raising your blade."
I stared at Sarsa, her words reverberating through the hollow cavern Jordan had carved in my chest. Magic. Destiny. Ancient bonds clawing their way back from the grave after centuries of slumber.
The rational part of me—the part forged in combat, tempered by steel and sweat—wanted to scoff at mystical forces I couldn't grip in my fists or cleave with my blade.
But there was another part. The part that had felt reality shift the moment Jordan crashed into my world, all defiance and care wrapped in soft human skin. That part recognized the truth when it heard it.