Chapter 105
*Nathaniel*
Magic doesn’t lie.
It shifts. It hides. It evolves. But it never lies. When the world forgets how to speak, magic keeps whispering.
And right now, it was whispering loud as hell.
Eva and I stood at the edge of the leyline break near the southern cliffs, where the mountain dipped into a basin of old stone and deeper roots. The land here had always been strange–too quiet, too alive, like the wind held its breath every time you moved. Runes we hadn’t carved shimmered faintly across the rocks, and the air smelled like burnt pine and stormwater.
The leyline was bleeding.
Not with color, but with memory. Pulses of magic flared through the soil in uneven waves–surges of heat and pressure that came in slow, throbbing bursts. Something had cracked the natural flow here, and whatever had done it wasn’t trying to hide.
It was leaving a trail.
“She came through here,” Eva said, crouching to press her fingers to the earth. Her voice was low, focused. She’d changed since her recovery–still sharp, but softer in the right places. Like whatever she’d seen in her coma had stripped away the noise and left only the necessary truth.
“She didn’t just pass through,” I murmured, standing still, palms open at my sides. “She anchored.”
Eva glanced at me, frowning. “You’re sure?”
I nodded. The scar across my chest–the one that never fully healed after the bond broke–was burning again. Not like pain. Not even like longing. It pulsed. Matched the leyline beat for beat.
And then came the first vision.
It wasn’t clear. Nothing ever was. Just a flash–Jiselle, standing beneath a blackened sky, her back turned to me, her hands ablaze. Her hair was tangled with light, and when she turned, her face flickered between soft and sharp. Her eyes shifted- warm, then cold, then full of tears that steamed before they fell.
I blinked and staggered back.
Eva caught me. “You saw her?”
“I think so.”
She didn’t ask what I meant. She didn’t need to.
The next wave came harder.
This time it wasn’t fire.
It was laughter.
Her laugh.
Real. Breathless. The kind that used to unmake me from the inside out.
But then it twisted. Warped.
In the next flash, her voice was screaming–not in fear, but in rage. The trees around her bent backward from the force of it.
A crater burned into the earth beneath her feet. And in her hand, she held a blade I couldn’t name.
“I don’t know what’s real,” I whispered.
Eva stepped beside me. “She doesn’t either.”
That stopped me cold.
“You saw something,” I said.
Eva didn’t deny it. “During the coma. While everything around me was dying, I saw her. Not her body. Not even her soul. Her choice.”
She sat down on the flat stone and stared at the cliffside like it held the rest of the story.
“She stood between two paths,” she said. “One was scorched earth. Ash, ruin, the remnants of wolves who knelt and were forgotten. The other was lined with light–but cold. Controlled. Lifeless. Like a truth that was too clean to believe in.”
“And?”
“She didn’t choose.”
MPACT 103
I knelt next to her.
“She didn’t even look down either path,” Eva continued. “She looked up. And then the space beneath her feet cracked. She started burning her own trail”
I exhaled through my nose, the ache in my chest tightening.
“She’s rejecting all of it,” I said.
“She’s terrified of becoming what they want her to be. So she’s trying to become something no one can define”
I rubbed the back of my neck. “Or stop.”
We didn’t speak for a while..
The leyline flared again, and this time, it hurt.
I gasped, and Eva gripped my arm as I pitched forward. Images cascaded through me like glass shatterings
-Jiselle as a child, curled up beside Ethan in a sunlit clearing.
-Jiselle pressed to my chest in the rain, saying don’t let go yet.
-Jiselle standing in fire, her hands slick with blood, eyes blank.
I clawed my way back to the present with a shout.
Eva didn’t flinch. She just held on tighter.
When I opened my eyes again, the clearing had changed,
The runes glowed brighter now. The air had thickened. And the scar in my chest-
-it wasn’t scarring anymore.
It was pulsing.
Alive.
“I think the bond is trying to regrow,” I said.
Eva looked wary. “But the bond was severed.”
“Bonds break,” I murmured. “But scars? Scars remember. Maybe the pieces aren’t dead. Maybe they’re… changing.”
“You mean like evolving into something new?”
I met her gaze. “Exactly that.”
She didn’t speak for a long time.
Then, softly, “Do you still love her?”
The question didn’t need time.
“Yes,” I said.
“Even if she doesn’t come back the same?”
“She won’t.”
Eva looked away, but not before I saw the sadness in her expression.
“And if she doesn’t come back at all?”
I let the question hang.
I felt the answer burn beneath my ribs.
“If she’s still in there,” I said, “then I’ll find her.”
“And if she’s not?”
I swallowed.
“Then I’ll go wherever she went. Until she knows she’s not alone.”
The wind picked up around us. The leyline flared again–less violently this time.
Like it was listening.
I looked down at my palms. Faint flickers of light sparked across the lines in my skin–residue, maybe. Or the first signs of something else.
Something new.
Something tethered not by fate or mating rites or prophecy–but by memory. And choice.
The scar wasn’t healing.
It was opening.
