SERA HALLIN
The dead were easier to understand than the living.
Sera Hallin pressed her fingertips to the cold stone of her worktable, watching the silver thread of necromantic energy spiral upward from the sigil she'd drawn in ash and bone dust. The echo—a fragment of consciousness left behind by a merchant who'd died three weeks prior—flickered in the air like candlelight through gauze. Translucent. Harmless. Exactly as it should be.
"Show me," she murmured, her voice steady and low. "Show me what you saw before the end."
The echo rippled, and images bled into her mind: a marketplace, the scent of bread, a sudden pain in the chest. Natural causes. Nothing suspicious. She'd suspected as much, but the merchant's widow had paid well for certainty, and Sera didn't take coin without delivering answers.
She released the thread with a practiced flick of her wrist, and the echo dissipated like smoke. The sigil on her table dimmed to nothing.
Her workspace smelled of dried lavender and old parchment, undercut by something faintly sweet and rotting—the inevitable perfume of necromancy. Most people found it unsettling. Sera found it comforting. The dead didn't lie. They didn't judge. They simply were, and then they weren't, and in between, they left traces she could read like text.
She reached for her journal to record her findings, but her hand faltered.
The quill on her desk was pointing north.
Not resting. Pointing. As if drawn by an invisible thread.
Sera frowned and nudged it with one finger. It rolled slightly, then settled again—aimed precisely north, toward the capital. Toward Valcrest.
"Odd," she muttered.
She turned her attention to the reagent jars lining her shelves. Rosemary for clarity. Salt for protection. Crushed nightshade for—
The nightshade jar had shifted three inches to the left.
Sera's frown deepened. She was meticulous about her workspace. Everything had its place, aligned and ordered, because necromancy demanded precision. A misplaced ingredient could mean the difference between communion and catastrophe.
She moved to adjust the jar, but as her fingers brushed the glass, a sensation bloomed in her chest.
Warmth.
Not painful. Not unpleasant. But insistent, like a hand pressing gently against her sternum from the inside.
Sera froze.
The warmth pulsed once, twice, and then faded.
She stood there for a long moment, hand still outstretched, staring at the jar of nightshade as if it had personally offended her.
"Exhaustion," she said aloud, her voice sharp in the silence. "You've been working too long without rest."
But even as she said it, she didn't believe it.
She glanced at the sigil on her worktable. The ash had scattered slightly, blown by a breeze that didn't exist in her sealed tower room. And within the scatter, she could see the faintest outline of something she hadn't drawn.
A second sigil. Overlapping the first.
No—two sigils. Intersecting. Forming a pattern she didn't recognize.
Sera's pulse quickened. She leaned closer, studying the lines. They were delicate, barely visible, as if traced by an invisible hand. The geometry was wrong for any standard necromantic work. Too complex. Too... intentional.
She reached for her reference texts, flipping through pages of documented sigils and ancient symbols, but found nothing that matched.
The warmth in her chest pulsed again, stronger this time.
Sera pressed her palm flat against her sternum and exhaled slowly.
"This is nothing," she told herself. "A fluctuation in the ley lines. A resonance from the echo work. Nothing."
But her fingers trembled slightly as she closed her journal.
She didn't write down what she'd seen.
The Necromancer's Guild was housed in a sprawling stone complex on the edge of Ashford's city limits, far enough from the residential districts to avoid alarming the living, close enough to remain accessible. Sera had been a member for five years, ever since she'd passed her Journeyman trials at eighteen. She was good at her work. Better than good. And she knew it.
Which was why Master Torin's scrutiny felt particularly invasive this morning.
"You look distracted, Hallin."
Sera glanced up from the scroll she'd been pretending to read. The guild's meeting hall was dim and cool, lit by enchanted sconces that burned with pale blue flame. A dozen necromancers sat around the long table, reviewing case reports and debating the finer points of ethical echo work.
Sera had stopped paying attention ten minutes ago.
"I'm fine," she said, her tone clipped. "Just tired."
Master Torin—a severe woman in her fifties with silver streaking her dark hair—raised one skeptical eyebrow. "Tired? Or careless?"
"Neither."
"Then perhaps you can explain why your last three sigils have been flagged for irregularities."
Sera's stomach tightened. "Irregularities?"
"Minor deviations in structure. Nothing dangerous, but... unusual. For you." Torin's gaze was sharp, assessing. "Distraction in necromancy is how you lose yourself to the dead, Hallin. You know this."
"I'm not distracted," Sera said, more firmly this time. "The work was clean. The echoes were stable. If there were deviations, they were intentional adjustments for—"
"For what?"
Sera hesitated. She didn't have an answer. She hadn't made intentional adjustments. But she also couldn't explain the overlapping sigils, the drifting reagents, the warmth in her chest that had returned twice more since this morning.
"For resonance optimization," she said smoothly. "The echoes were faint. I adapted."
Torin studied her for a long moment, then nodded slowly. "See that you remain sharp. We can't afford mistakes. Not with the political climate as it is."
"Political climate?" Sera asked, latching onto the deflection.
One of the younger necromancers—a man named Orin—leaned forward. "You haven't heard? Prince Kael's bonding ceremony is being expedited. Rumor is the King wants him bound before the summer solstice."
Sera's chest tightened.
"Why the rush?" someone else asked.
"Magical instability," Orin said, lowering his voice as if the walls might be listening. "Apparently the Prince has been experiencing... fluctuations. Unbonded souls are vulnerable, especially royal ones. The King wants him anchored before something goes wrong."
The warmth in Sera's chest flared suddenly, sharp and bright, and she tasted copper on her tongue.
And gold.
Two distinct flavors, metallic and sweet, flooding her senses for a heartbeat before vanishing.
She inhaled sharply, her hand flying to her chest.
"Hallin?" Torin's voice was distant, muffled.
Sera forced herself to breathe. To focus. The room swam back into clarity.
"I'm fine," she said again, but her voice sounded thin even to her own ears.
Torin didn't look convinced. "Perhaps you should take the afternoon. Rest. Clear your head."
Sera wanted to argue, but the weight in her chest was growing heavier, more insistent, and she didn't trust herself to sit through another hour of guild politics without betraying the fact that something was very, very wrong.
"Perhaps I will," she said quietly.
She gathered her things and left the hall, ignoring the curious stares that followed her.
Outside, the afternoon sun was too bright, the air too warm. Sera walked quickly, her boots clicking against the cobblestones, her mind racing.
Prince Kael.
She'd never met him. Never even seen him, except in passing during a royal procession years ago. He was a distant figure, a symbol of power and duty, nothing more.
So why did the mention of his name make her chest ache?
Why did she taste gold when she thought of him?
And why—gods help her—did she feel a second presence lurking at the edges of her awareness, cold and sharp and watching?
Sera's quarters were small but comfortable: a single room above an apothecary shop, with a narrow bed, a desk cluttered with books, and a window that overlooked the city's rooftops. She'd lived here for three years, and it had always felt like enough.
Tonight, it felt suffocating.
She paced the length of the room, her arms wrapped around herself, trying to make sense of the sensations that had been building all day.
The warmth. The tastes. The pull.
It wasn't magical interference. It wasn't exhaustion. It wasn't a ley line fluctuation or an echo gone rogue.
It was something else.
Something impossible.
Sera stopped in front of her mirror—a small, tarnished thing propped on her desk—and stared at her reflection.
Ash-toned hair, pale skin, dark circles under her eyes. She looked tired. She looked... haunted.
She pressed her palm to her chest, just over her heart, and closed her eyes.
There.
Beneath her own heartbeat, she felt it.
Two others.
Faint. Distant. But undeniably there.
One beat steady and strong, like a drum. The other quick and light, like a bird's wings.
Sera's breath hitched.
"This isn't real," she whispered. "This can't be real."
But even as she said it, the beats grew stronger, syncing with her own. Her heart stuttered, trying to match their rhythm, and for a moment she felt as if she were standing in three places at once.
A palace chamber, gold and cold.
A shadowed rooftop, wind and silence.
Her own small room, dim and close.
She gasped and opened her eyes, stumbling back from the mirror.
Her reflection stared back at her, wide-eyed and pale.
But for just a moment—just a heartbeat—she'd seen something else.
Golden light in one eye. Shadow in the other.
Sera sank onto the edge of her bed, her hands shaking.
She'd studied multi-soul bonds in theory. Every necromancer did. They were part of the old magic, the forbidden magic, the kind that got you executed if you were caught practicing it. The guilds taught about them as cautionary tales: bonds that drove people mad, bonds that consumed their hosts, bonds that shattered kingdoms.
But those were always single bonds. One soul to one soul.
Never three.
Never two others pulling at her simultaneously, filling the hollow spaces inside her she hadn't even known existed.
Sera thought of her childhood. Of the loneliness that had driven her to necromancy in the first place. She'd lost her mother young—too young—and had spent years trying to reach her, to hear her voice one more time. She'd failed. The dead didn't linger for the living, no matter how much you begged.
But she'd learned to listen to echoes. To fragments. To the spaces between life and death.
And maybe—gods, maybe—that was why she could feel this now.
Because she'd spent so long searching for connection in the wrong places that she'd learned to recognize it when it finally found her.
"I'm not alone," she whispered.
The words felt fragile. Dangerous.
But true.
Sera didn't sleep.
She tried. She lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, willing her mind to quiet. But the pull was relentless now, a tide rising inside her, and she couldn't ignore it any longer.
At midnight, she gave up.
She lit a candle and sat at her desk, pulling out a blank sheet of parchment. If she couldn't sleep, she could at least try to document what was happening. To make sense of it.
She dipped her quill in ink and began to write.
Symptoms: warmth in chest, multiple heartbeats, sensory overlap (taste, vision). Possible causes: ley line interference, echo contamination, soul fragmentation—
Her hand cramped suddenly, violently, and the quill jerked across the page.
Sera hissed in pain and dropped it, clutching her wrist.
The ink had spilled, spreading across the parchment in a dark stain.
But it wasn't random.
It was a sigil.
Fractured. Incomplete. But unmistakable.
Sera stared at it, her pulse roaring in her ears.
And then the pain hit.
Not in her hand. In her chest.
She gasped and pressed both palms to her sternum, doubling over as the warmth she'd been feeling all day suddenly blazed into fire. It didn't burn—it didn't hurt, exactly—but it was overwhelming, consuming, as if something inside her were trying to claw its way out.
She heard voices.
Two of them.
One low and steady, edged with desperation: "I am not meant to be alone."
One quiet and cold, laced with disbelief: "What is this?"
And then her own voice, raw and breaking: "I am not alone. And I am not meant to be."
The fire in her chest condensed, focused, and Sera felt something shift beneath her skin.
She looked down.
On the inside of her left wrist, just below her pulse point, a mark was forming.
A sigil.
Fractured into three pieces, glowing faintly with silver light.
Sera watched, breathless, as the lines etched themselves into her skin. They didn't hurt. They felt... right. Like something that had always been there, finally made visible.
When the light faded, the mark remained.
Permanent.
Undeniable.
Sera touched it with trembling fingers, tracing the delicate lines.
She didn't know who the others were. Didn't know where they were, or why this was happening.
But she knew, with a certainty that defied logic, that they were real.
And they were hers.
Just as she was theirs.
Sera closed her eyes and let the pull wash over her, no longer fighting it.
Somewhere in the capital, a prince stood alone in his chambers, staring at the same mark on his wrist.
Somewhere in the shadows, an assassin crouched on a rooftop, cursing softly at the sigil burning on their skin.
And in a small room above an apothecary shop, a necromancer smiled for the first time in days.
"I'm coming," she whispered to the night. "Whoever you are. I'm coming."