Anathema

Zevander² crosses the Umbravale into Mortasia, kills three boundary guards, and enters Maevyth's¹ cottage. He finds her sleeping, her scent — sweet oranges — dizzying him with unexpected desire. He channels sablefyre to boil her blood to stone, as he has done to hundreds before.

The flame enters her body and rebounds. It attacks him. His own scorpion stings his arm. Each subsequent attempt produces scorching pain in his veins instead of hers. His power, which has never failed or hesitated, simply refuses.

Standing over her with a blade to her throat, his hands tremble. She opens her pale gray eyes and catches the glow of his burning irises. He vanishes into black smoke, furious at a failure he cannot explain — and a face he cannot stop seeing.

Aleysia's⁴ pregnancy by Uncle Riftyn is exposed. The parish drags her toward the forest for banishment, and Maevyth¹ attacks the guards with a stolen torch. The crowd brands her a witch. When she flings out her hands, a pile of ancient bones erupts from her palms — her first glyph, manifested by rage.

Both sisters sprint into The Eating Woods, where the wrathavor creature catches Moros,⁶ swallows him whole, then shapeshifts to wear his face. It flays Uncle Riftyn alive. Maevyth¹ finds the Umbravale archway and leaps through its shimmering barrier.

She turns to pull Aleysia⁴ after her, but the wall has hardened to impenetrable glass. The Moros-creature seizes Aleysia⁴ by the throat. Maevyth¹ pounds and screams, but cannot break through. Her sister⁴ vanishes into the dark.

Imperial Guards on the Aethyrian side capture Maevyth.¹ Instead of delivering her to the king,¹² they take her to Bonesguard prison, planning to let violent criminals assault her for entertainment. A prisoner is thrown into her cell. She bluffs about poisonous mortal blood and slashes him with a confiscated knife.

Before the guards intervene, an impossibly massive scorpion fills the doorway, its metallic stinger punching through the prisoner's chest and disemboweling the guards. Maevyth¹ blacks out. She wakes draped across a horse, an enormous cloaked figure behind her.

He guides them through a treacherous bog, kills a fanged toad-beast with one invisible thrust of his sword, and warns that mortals make delicious snacks. She recognizes his burning gold-and-orange eyes — the stranger from her bedroom. He tells her his name. Zevander.²

Maevyth¹ wakes in a dungeon cell furnished with silk sheets. Rykaia³ — Zevander's² silver-haired, two-hundred-year-old sister — brings food, apple slices, and dry wit. Dolion,⁵ a six-hundred-year-old Elvynira mage imprisoned voluntarily in the next cell, reveals why she was brought here: she is Corvikae, the last descendant of an extinct mortal tribe who worshipped the death goddess Morsana.

Powerful mages want her blood turned to stone for an ancient weapon. He tests her bloodline by applying vivicantem to her nape — a glowing death sigil surfaces.

He gives her a bone-spined puzzle book sealed by Corvikae magic. She pricks her finger on its surface, and the blood navigates a tiny maze, unlocking animated illustrations of raven warriors, feathered dragons called Corvugons, and a battle between mortals and golden-armored invaders.

Zevander² trains Maevyth¹ in combat and glyphs — Aeryz for wind, Propulszir for mental shielding. Each earned glyph scars her palm permanently. When he teaches staff-spinning, he channels sablefyre through their joined hands to levitate the weapon. The flame does not burn her. It ribbons through her veins in warm, erotic waves that leave her shaking.

She pulls more and more power into herself — enough to incinerate any other being — while the staff spins midair. He breaks contact, shaken. No one has ever siphoned his flame with such hunger. Dolion⁵ privately records the new glyph appearing on her palm and warns Maevyth:¹ this ability to commandeer another's power would terrify the magehood. If discovered, they would surely destroy her for it.

A spider from beneath Branimir's⁷ trapdoor lures Maevyth¹ with a mirror and key. She drops into his cell and finds herself face-to-face with Zevander's² older brother — bark-skinned, horned, surrounded by thousands of arachnids. He begs her to sing.

She does, trembling, and the grotesque creature lays his head in her lap and weeps while spiders retreat to the walls. Rykaia³ sounds the alarm. Zevander² hauls Maevyth¹ out, furious — but what he saw through the mirror haunts him: his brother⁷ at peace for the first time in centuries.

He agrees to escort Maevyth¹ nightly so she can feed Branimir⁷ raw meat and sing to him. Through these visits, he watches the impossible — a mortal girl offering tenderness to the monster everyone else abandoned — and something cracks in his chest.

In his study, Zevander² tests the sablefyre channeling again. Maevyth¹ places her hand against his palm and closes her eyes. She confesses it feels like chaos — and arousal. The flame pours into her in escalating waves until she begs him not to stop.

He breaks contact, sweat-drenched and trembling, and demands to know what she is. Before she can answer, he clamps his hand around her nape and crushes his lips to hers. She tastes toffee and embers.

His kiss is commanding, punishing, intoxicating — then he wrenches himself away as though scorched by something worse than flame. He tells her they can never do this again and orders her to leave. For the following week, he avoids training sessions, avoids meals, avoids her — while she tortures him simply by existing.

Maevyth¹ solves the puzzle book's music-box mechanism and discovers a silver whistle inside. When she blows it, silence follows — then the sky darkens.

Hundreds of ravens swarm the castle, parting for an eight-meter-tall Corvugon that perches on her balcony: Raivox, the creature she hatched from a mysterious egg back in Foxglove, now fully grown with a horn and wingspan wider than a cottage. His silver crescent markings confirm his identity.

Days later, when fyredrakes chase Maevyth¹ and Rykaia³ across Eidolon's grounds after a failed attempt to cleave home, Raivox descends and roars silver flame over the beasts, scattering them. He is bonded to her through the whistle, fiercely protective — a living relic of the Corvikae that scholars had dismissed as myth.

Rykaia³ disguises Maevyth¹ with scent-masking potion and a jeweled cicada mask, then smuggles her into Princess Calisza's¹³ Becoming Ceremony at Costelwick Castle.

In a ballroom glittering with candles and half-naked acrobats, Maevyth¹ dances the Lunasier waltz with Zevander² — palm to palm, circling, dipping — while he whispers that her dress is a torment and she is incapable of blending. Afterward, he interrogates the mage Anatolis, whom Maevyth¹ recognized as a scribe from Foxglove Parish, and learns that Cadavros⁹ is alive in Mortasia, that a vein of sablefyre exists there, and that the Magestroli have been secretly crossing the Umbravale.

Before Anatolis can name who orchestrates it all, a binding spell liquefies his organs, and Nilivir villagers storm the outer walls chanting Cadavros's⁹ name.

In the chaos, Melantha¹¹ — the Magelord's new apprentice — seizes Maevyth¹ and delivers her to an underground ritual chamber. Robed mages chain her to an altar and shove sablefyre into her mouth, intending to boil her blood to stone.

Maevyth¹ plunges into caligorya — the dark mindspace — where the death goddess Morsana instructs her to command the flame. She opens her eyes. Black fire erupts from her lips, destroying the Magelord's eyeballs and incinerating two other mages to ash. A ring of sablefyre blazes around the room, trapping everyone.

Rykaia³ and Dolion⁵ cleave through the altar stone to reach her, and the three escape down corridors. Melantha¹¹ intercepts them, offering to return Maevyth¹ to her sister⁴ through a portal that shows Aleysia⁴ pacing alive in the forest.

Elsewhere in the undercroft, Zevander² overhears General Loyce¹⁴ — his former Solassion enslaver — conspiring with the Imperial Guard captain to steal the bloodstones by capturing Rykaia.³ He discovers that Prince Dorjan's¹³ life is soulbound to Cadavros:⁹ killing the ancient mage would kill the prince and unleash a plague-amulet over all of Nyxteros.

Then Dolion⁵ confesses what he has known since before sending Zevander² to Mortasia — Maevyth¹ is Zevander's² fated mate, the reason his flame refused to kill her.

Forced to choose between protecting his sister³ and pursuing the woman bound to his soul, Zevander² sends Rykaia³ to the Elvynira island of Calyxar with Dolion⁵ and the bloodstones. Then he follows Maevyth¹ through the portal. Months have passed in Mortasia, and the spider plague has consumed the village.

Maevyth¹ enters her abandoned cottage and is ambushed by Uncle Felix — half his face melted smooth, spider-legs erupting from his spine. He pins her and tears at her clothes. She drives an embalming needle into his ear, then lashes out with the bone whip glyph — Osflagulle — which shatters every bone in his body with one crack.

Agatha¹⁵ crawls from a corpse drawer, mutated and hissing, spewing hundreds of black spiders from her mouth and eye sockets after Maevyth¹ severs her head. The swarm covers Maevyth's¹ body.

She cannot scream. Zevander² materializes behind her, suspends the spiders in midair with telekinetic force, and incinerates them alongside the entire cottage in a torrent of black flame. She collapses into his arms, begging to go home to Eidolon.

They shelter at The Crone Witch's⁸ cottage, whose real name is Elowen.⁸ She is no village herbalist but a Nilivir — a powerless Aethyrian — who lived with the Corvikae tribe nearly a thousand years ago.

When Solassions massacred the tribe and hurled them into the Crussurian Trench, the priestess gave Elowen⁸ the last rose of the death goddess and told her to flee to the mortal world — to wait for a child who would avenge their people. For centuries she watched.

Then Cadavros⁹ crossed over, banished but alive, harboring the spirit of Pestilios, God of Disease. When a baby appeared at the archway surrounded by ravens, Elowen⁸ placed her on a doorstep with a black rose and masked her silver eyes with a spell. Only death, she says, will restore them.

Sharing a narrow bed in Elowen's⁸ cottage, Maevyth¹ and Zevander² finally yield to weeks of tension. He pleasures her with devastating expertise, floating her with telekinetic magic while she explores the cruel piercings forced on him during a century of Solassion enslavement.

He tells her he craves her more than breath but cannot trust himself. That night, Cadavros⁹ seizes his mind — trapping Zevander² in abyssal binding, a caligorya prison where the ancient mage tortures him with memories of sexual abuse and demands fealty.

Maevyth¹ wakes to find him convulsing, eyes pitch-black, skin scorching. She presses her palms to his, channels the sablefyre into herself, and holds on until his eyes clear. He gasps awake. She promises to grab the rope with both hands and never let go.

Elowen⁸ ventures into the woods for herbs and returns infected — her face swelling shut, teeth lengthening. She attacks Maevyth,¹ who seizes her throat. A new glyph manifests: death itself. Maevyth's¹ fingertips turn onyx, and the old woman disintegrates to black dust.

Freed from the cloaking spell, Maevyth's¹ eyes shine fully silver. Mutated creatures surround the cottage but cannot breach Elowen's⁸ protective ward. Zevander² wakes, holds her through the night as monsters pace outside, and accepts Dolion's⁵ revelation — she is his fated mate.

He vows to take her to Calyxar, to safety. As they prepare to leave, Maevyth¹ notices a loose floorboard shifting beneath her feet. She kneels, pulls the hatch open, and lowers a lamp into the crawl space. There, curled beneath the witch's cottage, alive, lies Aleysia.⁴