I dragged in a sharp breath and my eyes snapped open.

  Darkness pressed close, broken only by a thin wash of blue light creeping through the window. Dawn. Pale and shallow. I was back in my room.

  Cold air burned my lungs. My body shook as the last echoes of violence worked their way out of my bones. Whatever I’d just seen was already coming apart, slipping through my fingers the harder I tried to hold it.

  I couldn’t remember how it ended.

  Only the screams.

  The tearing sensation.

  And the pull that wrenched me back from the edge.

  The sword lay heavy in my grip. Its hum travelled up my arm, low and steady, like it was anchoring me in place.

  I swallowed and forced my breathing to slow. My thoughts lagged, dulled by shock and the crash of fading adrenaline. Images drifted through my mind in broken pieces. Pale stone. Raised voices. A blade lifted by hands that never should have touched it.

  “Why…” I breathed, my jaw tight. “Why do you keep showing me these… things?”

  The hum faltered. Just a fraction.

  When the sword answered, its voice felt distant, unfocused.

  “We needed to see. To be sure.”

  “Sure, of what?”

  There was a pause. Long enough for the quiet to settle.

  “I hid myself for a reason,” it said. “I had forgotten why.”

  The words landed heavy, but they didn’t settle into anything solid.

  “Those around you are reaching,” it continued. “I see it. The pull. The want.”

  I shook my head. “They wouldn’t just take you.”

  The hum sharpened slightly.

  “Humans are fickle. Curiosity sharpens faster than caution.”

  Something flickered in my mind. Faint. Like a reflection on glass. A moment turned wrong. The change in Ichcus when he heard of the blade. When interest became intent.

  Then the memory cut deeper.

  Black robes.

  Pale fingers closing around a hilt.

  A scream that ended too fast.

  My grip tightened.

  He died.

  “That was you,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  No hesitation.

  The word sat there, final and unmoving, as the room slowly came back into focus around me.

  There was no hesitation in its voice. No edge to it either. Just certainty.

  My pulse kicked harder. I should have dropped the blade. Instead, I stared at it, replaying how little it had taken. A touch. A single moment.

  “He didn’t have a chance.”

  “No.”

  “He didn’t even fight.”

  “I fed.”

  The word landed and stayed there.

  Simple. Final.

  Something in me shifted. Pieces slid into place whether I wanted them to or not. Shattered runes. Drained metal. The dark slick of blood soaking into stone. I had seen it all before. I just hadn’t known what I was looking at.

  My fingers loosened around the hilt without me telling them to.

  “Then why not me?”

  The hum softened. It didn’t vanish, but it lost its certainty, like something turning inward. The silence stretched, heavy and searching.

  “When you appeared,” the sword said at last, “I felt something in you.”

  A faint pressure brushed my chest, sharp enough to make my breath catch. Not pain. Not quite. More like being pressed from the inside.

  “In your blood,” it continued. “Something not born of you. Not bound to this world.”

  Cold settled low in my stomach.

  “When you took hold of me,” it said, “I could not pull away.”

  The pause that followed said more than the words.

  “I believed you would fall.”

  My throat tightened. I hadn’t realised how close I’d come to that edge.

  “So, you fed on it,” I said quietly. “The curse. Not me.”

  “Yes.”

  The hum steadied, low and unwavering. I became aware that my hand had stopped shaking.

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  “For a time,” the sword added, “it was enough.”

  My thoughts slipped back underground. The tunnel closing in. Blood slick on stone. That strange easing pressure as the pain dulled and something else began to move beneath it. Vast. Patient. Waiting.

  “And then?” I asked.

  The sword stayed silent.

  It didn’t need to answer.

  I nodded, the memory still sharp in my chest. The moment my breath slipped away. The sudden lightness that followed. Not peace. Just absence. Like something inside me had finally let go.

  “I thought the curse was gone,” I said. My voice came out quieter than I meant it to. “When everything went dark, I couldn’t feel it anymore. It just… disappeared.”

  The hum shifted, slow and steady.

  “No,” it said. “It did not leave.”

  Warmth brushed beneath my skin. Not pain. Not comfort. Awareness. I felt my heartbeat then, strong and close, the steady push of blood through my body.

  “It lives with you,” the sword said quietly.

  The pressure settled lower, nearer my chest, heavy and familiar.

  I swallowed. “To what?”

  The answer didn’t come in words.

  Images surfaced instead. Red lines just beneath the skin. Heat spreading outward. The raw sting of air against open flesh. A flash of crimson blades raised by hands that wanted more than they deserved.

  I looked down at my hands. At the faint scars there. At the places that had burned, that still felt too sensitive beneath my skin.

  “The dagger,” I said slowly. The memory still sat wrong in my chest. “The one you showed me. Was that connected?”

  The hum sharpened, focused.

  “I needed to be certain.”

  “Of what?”

  “That it came from the same source.”

  My breath caught. “So, it does.”

  “Yes.”

  The word settled, solid and final.

  Something in my chest shifted. Not relief. Possibility. The kind that hurt when it surfaced too fast, before you knew what to do with it.

  “A place, then,” I said. “Somewhere it began. Somewhere we could reach.”

  “No.”

  The answer came without pause.

  “That path no longer opens,” the sword said. “It folded in on itself long ago. What remains are fragments. Those who passed through.”

  The warmth beneath my skin withdrew, leaving a hollow behind it.

  “But fragments mean there was an origin,” I said.

  I went still.

  The sword did not correct me.

  It didn’t have to.

  “The ones who shaped that power did not vanish with it,” the sword said. “If the work endures, so must its makers.”

  “The Romans,” I said.

  The hum tightened. Not louder. Colder.

  “They were instruments,” it replied. “They carried tools they did not understand. That age is dust.”

  My fingers curled tighter around the hilt.

  “And now?”

  “This world has changed,” the sword said. “Time has thinned it. Yet the resistance feels familiar.”

  A knot formed low in my throat. For as long as I could remember, the curse had felt like a wall. Something built around me. Isolating. Personal. Cruel.

  Now it felt thinner.

  Like a thread.

  One strand woven into something vast and ancient, stretching far beyond me.

  “You are an anomaly,” the sword said.

  I stiffened. “You fed on the curse,” I said quickly. “Not me.”

  “That is not what I meant.”

  The hum shifted, careful.

  “The curse marks many,” it continued. “You have seen them. The scars. The tendrils beneath the skin.”

  I nodded.

  “There is no cure.”

  The words settled heavy.

  I had always known the curse was dangerous. Painful. A constant weight. But it had never felt like a countdown.

  “Maybe,” I said slowly, “it’s because I was never stabbed by the blade. Maybe mine is different.”

  “No.”

  The word came firm, final.

  “I fed,” the sword said. “The wrongness is the same.”

  My jaw tightened.

  “But you endured,” it continued. “Because there is something else in you.”

  A chill crept up my spine.

  “Something old,” the sword said. “Older than I am.”

  My brow twitched. “That’s hard to believe.”

  “It is true enough,” it replied. “Though I do not yet understand it. The feeling is familiar.”

  “From where?”

  “The tall one,” the sword said.

  I frowned. “The tall one?”

  “The one with grey fur.”

  I snorted softly. “You mean Jerald?”

  “Yes.”

  The hum deepened as the memory surfaced.

  “When he struck the spirit of stone and wood,” the sword said, “he reached inward. Drew from something buried. Not magic as you know it. Something closer. I felt the same presence in you.”

  My grip tightened.

  “But deeper,” it continued. “As if it were pressing upward. Waiting.”

  I nodded slowly. The memory came back uninvited. That moment near death. The sense of something inside me shifting. Watching.

  “I think I know what you mean,” I said. “I felt it too.”

  The hum steadied.

  “It has begun to stir,” the sword said. “Not enough to take shape. Not enough to know itself.”

  I swallowed. “Yet.”

  “Yes,” it agreed. “That will take time.”

  The weight of it all hit at once. Relief tangled with anger. With exhaustion. With years of not knowing what I was fighting, only that I had to keep standing. My chest ached like I’d been holding something tight for too long and only just noticed.

  “Thanks,” I said quietly.

  The sword hummed, unchanged.

  “That is unnecessary.”

  I frowned. “What is?”

  “No thanks,” it said. “We are bound.”

  The words landed heavier than I expected.

  “…Does that mean you’ll help me?”

  A low hum rolled through the blade. Not refusal. Not hesitation.

  “You face an enemy,” it said. “One that was once mine. We will face it together.”

  I nodded. That part felt right.

  “And the other one,” I asked. “The man with the long hair.”

  “What of him?”

  “Were you bound to him too?”

  “I was.”

  “And?”

  The hum softened. Distant.

  “Those memories are mine,” the sword said. “Blurred and incomplete. They do not concern you.”

  I waited.

  “What matters,” it continued, “is our enemy. And its destruction. Toward that end, I will help you.”

  I nodded again.

  It already had been helping me. From the beginning. In ways I’d recognised, and in others I probably hadn’t. Subtle shifts. Small steadiness where there should have been collapse. Maybe there were things I’d never notice at all. Or maybe I would, one day, when trust stopped feeling one-sided.

  “This enemy,” I said, my fingers tightening slightly around the hilt. “Do you think they’re the ones who did this to me?”

  The hum wavered. Not uncertainty exactly. Distance.

  “It is difficult to know.”

  I frowned. “And who are they?”

  The blade stayed quiet a moment longer this time. Its hum dropped, slower, heavier, like something reaching back through layers of dust and time.

  “That is harder still,” it said at last. “What I remember lies deeper than the age you have seen.”

  A faint pressure stirred against my palm, then faded.

  “I will need strength,” it continued. “So will you. Only then can that veil be drawn aside.”

  My grip tightened.

  “Because whatever waits behind it,” the sword said, “is older than the Romans ever were.”

  The room felt colder after that.

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what waited behind the curtain the sword had hinted at. I lowered my gaze to the blade in my hand, to the faint runes etched along its length. They didn’t glow or move. They just existed. Steady. Unchanging.

  My grip tightened.

  Something settled in my chest. Not confidence exactly. Resolve. Like a road laid out ahead of me, rough and uneven, but real. Dangerous, sure. But it was still a way forward.

  For the first time in a long while, I wasn’t standing still.

  A sharp knock broke the quiet.

  The sword in my hand shimmered, its weight shifting as the runes dulled and the metal faded back into an unassuming silver blade. I barely noticed the change until it was already done.

  “Um… hello?”

  “You awake?” Amelia’s voice came through the door.

  I huffed a short laugh. “Yeah. Come in.”

  The door creaked open and she stepped inside. She looked smaller than before. Not physically, but in the way she held herself, shoulders drawn in, movements careful. Like someone who’d been stung recently and was still waiting for it to happen again.

  “I thought maybe I could help,” she said, glancing at the floor before meeting my eyes. “With preparation. For our… and your defence, or… something. For the hearing.”

  She hesitated. “As a way to say sorry.”

  I let out a slow breath. “I told you. It’s fine. And Doyle said there won’t really be much of a defence anyway.”

  She shook her head. “I can still explain how it works. I’ve seen one of these before. I know the process. The protocols.” Her hands fidgeted at her sides.

  I considered that, then nodded. “Actually… yeah. That would help.”

  Her shoulders eased, just a little.

  “Let’s go down to the kitchen,” I added. “We can talk there.”

  For the first time her eyes brightened.