bChapter /b207

b*/bJiselle*

“Where the hell did you go, Ethan?”

My voice cracked the air sharper than I meant to, but the hallway had been empty one minute, and the next, he’de stumbling through it like a man dragged from the other side of something. His shirt was torn at the cor, eyes unfocused, hair damp with sweat like he’d run through fire and didn’t know it.

He blinked at me.

Once. Twice.

Then looked down at his own hands, as if realizing they were shaking only because he could finally feel them again.

“I don’t… know,” he said.

The words didn’t calm me. They froze everything inside me. Not just because he’d vanished. But because it was the third time this week. Third time he’d disappeared without ia /itrace, only to reappear hourster with no memory of where he’d gone, who he’d seen, or what had happened.

“You weren’t just out on a walk,” I said, stepping toward him. “I felt it. The bond between us dimmed. You weren’t here. You weren’t anywhere.”

He opened his mouth, but then winced and pressed a hand to his chest, just over the mark that had been burned into him days ago. That same mark–the third rune. It shimmered faintly through the fabric like it had a heartbeat of its own, responding to something not of this world.

“It hurts when you touch me,” he whispered. “Not like pain. Like… rejection. Your me doesn’t recognize me anymore.”

I reached out, but hesitated. Thest time I’d touched him, my fire had recoiled. Not because I feared him. But because something within him had changed. Was still changing.

“You’re still my brother,” I said.

His smile came small, almost apologetic. “For now.”

I hated the way he said that. Like he knew he was being taken apart from the inside and had already epted it.

Later that night, I returned to his room after he finally agreed to rest. Something in me didn’t sit right. Ethan had always been unpredictable, but he wasn’t a liar. And these disappearances weren’t just absent–mindedness. They were fractures.

I stepped carefully past the scattered scrolls and vials of ink he kept for leyline recordings, avoiding the frayed rug and the single candle flickering on his desk. It smelled faintly of sulfur, like something had burned that shouldn’t have.

Then I saw it.

Just beneath the edge of his bed, etched into the stone.

A rune. Not like the ones that burned themselves onto our skin. This one had been carved deliberately, deeply, with something sharp. The grooves were filled with dried blood, still dark and fresh at the edges. And at the center–a small shard of veilstone, embedded like a needle.

“Bastain needs to see this,” I whispered to myself, my hand hovering just above the symbol. The closer I got, the more the me inside me stirred, not in warning, but in recognition.

I didn’t wait. Bastain arrived minutester, expression hard and unreadable as he crouched beside the rune. He traced it with a gloved finger, then pulled back, his eyes locking with mine.

“This wasn’t made by Ethan,” he said.

“Then who?”

His jaw clenched. “The teacher. He was Serina’s ally once. And before the Gate closed, he was experimenting with Veilstone. Rumor was he wanted to make a vessel. A conduit strong enough to hold both Hollow and Sovereign magic. If that’s true…”

He didn’t need to finish. The answer sat in the silence between us.

Ethan.

My throat went dry. “He’s using my brother.”

Bastain didn’t deny it. And that was worse.

We stood in silence for a moment, the me in me pulling tight, coiling around my ribs like it knew a reckoning wasing.

I returned to Ethan again at dawn. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, sweat–soaked and pale, staring at the mark on his chest like it was a prophecy he couldn’t decipher.

“Tell me what you’ve seen,” I said.

He didn’t look up. “She stands in the fire. That’s what I sec. Every time. The child. Our child. But she’s not small anymore. She’s not helpless. She’s full–grown. Eyes like yours. Power like I’ve never seen. She’s calling to me. And sometimes…”

I sat beside him. Close. Careful. “Sometimes whatb?/bb” /b

He turned, and there it was again. The flicker behind his eyes. Like another presence bwas /bpeering through.

“Sometimes I want to answer.”

I reached for his hand, desperate to anchor him–to tether us back to something real. Something human.

But the moment my skin touched his, the me inside me convulsed. Not just a flinch or a flicker–no, it recoiled, mming backward with such violent force that it punched the air from my lungs and ripped a cry from my throat. Not from pain. Not from fear.

From betrayal.

And it wasn’t mine.

It was his.

Ethan’s body jerked like something inside him had snapped. A tremor rippled through his muscles, and for a second, I thought he might copse.

Then… stillness.

Not peace. Not exhaustion.

A hollow, perfect stillness that chilled me to the marrow.

He turned his head slowly, unnaturally slow, and I knew–I knew–before his eyes even met mine that whatever looked back through them wasn’t Ethan.

His mouth moved.

But the voice that came out did not belong to my brother.

“She chooses what you cannot.”

I jerked my hand away like I’d been burned, breath catching in

my

throat.

“Ethan?b” /b

No answer. Not really. Just that same, unnerving smile stretching across his lips–tight, too

b9:55 /bWedb, /bbSep /b17

calm. Wrong.

His eyes shimmered. Not gold. Not violet. Nothing I’d seen in the mes or the leylineb. /bbThey /bglowed with a dull iridescence, as if the color itself couldn’t decide what it was supposed to be

Ancient. Cold. Watching.

He tilted his head, and the smile curved deeper.

“You’ll understand… once she’s born.”

The words were soft, almost tender.

But there was nothing tender about what stared back at me.

I staggered back, pulse thundering in my ears.

Because that voice–gods, that voice–it didn’t belong to Aedric.

It didn’t belong to the Hollow–born.

It didn’t even belong to Ethan anymore.

It belonged to her.

To the child.

To whatever version of her was beginning to wake.