Riverbend dozed beneath a copper-washed dawn, the kind of early light that turned rooftops to tarnished coins and made the river shine like molten brass. The city might have slept, but I did not. Sleep belonged to those who could surrender. I hadn't surrendered in a very long time.
I crouched on the roof of the old paper mill, damp slate cool beneath my palms. The scent of last night's rain still clung to the air, but I'd layered my own perfume over it—roses, a note of smoke, a subtle reminder that I'd passed this way. Mortals noticed without noticing, inhaling the fragrance and feeling something just beyond memory stir in their chests. A calling card, yes, but also a challenge.
Far below, delivery trucks hummed awake and a lone cyclist skimmed the empty street. Their heartbeats beat a soft percussion in my mind, but one rhythm pulsed clearer, brighter, irresistible: hers.
Lila.
Her heartbeat threaded through the edges of my consciousness, a faint golden echo that refused to fade. I hadn't meant to forge a link, not yet. A glance was supposed to be harmless—a brush of attention, a whisper of possibility. But when she met my eyes last night, something ancient in me had recognized something unshaped in her. The connection flared, and now her pulse lived in my senses like a distant melody I couldn't forget.
The Concord would call it contamination. They would say I had infected a mortal heart.
I called it truth.
A flicker of power shivered across the city's aura, green and disciplined, like the snap of a bowstring. Elior. Of course he had noticed. Even when I was one of them, he'd always been the dutiful arrow—precision incarnate, every emotion filed down to purpose.
"Still the faithful soldier," I murmured into the dawn. My voice caught in the rising wind and scattered over the rooftops.
I closed my eyes and let the world narrow inward. The scars of my punishment still ached—phantom wings, torn and cauterized by Concord judgment—but the spark they had failed to take from me burned hotter than ever. Choice. Pure, ungoverned will. The raw ability to bend a heart toward freedom instead of a script. They could strip my rank, break my bonds, but not that.
And Lila… she carried the rarest potential of all: the power to refuse destiny.
She didn't know it yet. That was the beauty.
---
A sudden ripple of golden light pooled at my feet, spreading in a perfect circle that shimmered against the rooftop's weathered stone. Not my doing. Someone else had opened the door.
"Vale."
The voice was silk drawn over steel, a sound that once commanded every arrow in the field.
I straightened before I turned. "Virel."
My former mentor stepped from the glow, tall and unyielding as ever. His hair was the same glinting silver I remembered, his eyes sharpened starlight. He carried the calm of someone who believed the universe itself would bend to his will.
"You've overstepped," he said. No greeting, no courtesy.
I smiled without warmth. "You always did skip the pleasantries."
"The mortal is not your stage," Virel continued, ignoring the jibe. "Withdraw before the Council convenes."
"She isn't a stage," I countered. "She's the stage for everyone. They just don't have the courage to admit it."
"You court destruction." His gaze cut through the thin morning haze.
"I court freedom." I let the words fall like a blade between us. "Isn't that what love is supposed to be?"
A faint crease marked his brow—a rare crack in his composure. "You lost the right to speak of love when you chose yourself over the balance."
"And yet," I said softly, stepping closer to the circle's edge, "she listens."
That, at last, drew a reaction. A tiny tightening at the corner of his mouth—anger or fear, it didn't matter. It told me I'd struck home.
"You think you're the only one who can hear her heartbeat?" I asked. "You forget who trained me."
Virel's expression hardened back into marble. "Do not mistake indulgence for permission."
The circle of light around him flared, bright enough to etch afterimages into my vision. Frost swept across the rooftop, crisping the morning air.
I held his gaze and let a slow, deliberate smile unfurl. "You and the Concord can build a thousand cages and call them harmony. I will still show her the sky."
For a long beat he said nothing. Then, with the quiet inevitability of an eclipse, he dissolved into radiance and was gone, leaving behind only the scent of winter and final warnings.
---
I exhaled, the city rushing back around me—the hiss of buses, the distant bark of a dog, the rising warmth of the sun. The encounter should have chilled me. Instead it steadied my resolve.
I turned toward the horizon where Riverbend's spires caught the first true light. Even through the noise of awakening hearts I could feel hers, that luminous thread—silver now, laced with a streak of Concord green. Elior's mark. Protective. Possessive.
He would guard her with everything he had.
But every guard has a weakness.
Mine was simple and unstoppable: I wanted her to decide. Truly decide. No nudges. No divine strings. Only choice.
I unfurled my senses, weaving a thin current of gold through the morning breeze, not enough to breach Elior's wards but enough to remind her that the world was wider than any cage.
Soon, Lila would see the Concord for what it was: a lattice of beautiful bars.
And when she did, I would be there—not to claim her, but to show her the door they never wanted her to find.
The sun climbed higher, burnishing the rooftops with molten light.
Somewhere across the waking city, her heart beat once, strong and free, and I smiled into the rising day.