Chapter 4 Next to Your Grave

The roots of the great tree had cracked through the floor of my cell long before I arrived in it. I could feel them through the soles of my feet — old and indifferent, unbothered by whatever happened to the men who sat above them. The branches overhead swallowed the sky whole. Beyond the palisade, guards shifted and murmured. The torch nearest my bars guttered in a wind I couldn't feel.

Tomorrow. The Cave of the Skygods. 

I pressed my back against the wall and studied the iron above me the way a man studies a wound — searching for some detail that would make it less than it was. I found nothing. 

Fear, abandonment, cold — I couldn't separate them. They had merged into a single pressure behind my sternum that made each breath feel like a negotiation.

Footsteps approached. I didn't look. Another Imperial guard with another jar of water perhaps. The fifth tonight.

"Go away."

The footsteps stopped. Didn't leave.  

Then something scraped against the stone beside me — a plate being set down — and a familiar weight lowered itself to sit outside the bars.

"Brother."  

The word undid something I'd spent hours holding together.

I turned. "Darion."  

He looked exactly as he always did — like trouble that had decided to be loyal instead. A plate of steak balanced in one hand, a jar of ale in the other, his jaw set in that particular way that meant he had already decided nothing in this world was going to stop him from being here.

Tears burned at the back of my eyes. I forced them down.  

"Stupid boy," he muttered.

Then he reached through the bars and pulled me into an embrace, his arms locking around my shoulders with a force that briefly made breathing irrelevant. I gripped him back. We didn't speak. There was nothing either of us could say that would improve on the silence of two people refusing to let go.

He was the only reason I was holding together.

When he finally released me, he shoved the plate through the gap in the bars.  

"The guards said you haven't eaten. Or drunk anything."  

"The guards can mind their business."  

"Eat anyway."

I took the plate. Not because I was hungry. Because he asked.

"My father," I said after the first mouthful. My voice betrayed me on the second word. "He wouldn't come, or even look at me."  

"You know the law," Darion said. "A man chosen for Trial must spend the final night alone. No exceptions. Not even from a chief."  

"And yet here you sit, Darion Azara."  

The grin that crossed his face had nothing to do with happiness.  

"You know who I am," he said. "Nobody stops me. Especially not tonight. Besides, the guard by the east gate owes me a debt. He’ll forget he saw me by morning.” A beat. "Tomorrow the Codex rules me too."

I let out a long breath and washed down another mouthful of steak with ale. My hands had been trembling since the sentencing. I'd managed to hide it until now. Darion's eyes dropped to them immediately. He didn't comment. He just closed his hand around mine and held it still.

"You did the right thing," he said. The words hit harder than I expected.  

"Everyone knows it. Zevaris included."  

"I might die tomorrow."  

"True."

He set the ale down, reached through the bars, and gripped the back of my neck. Drew my forehead against his.  

"You better not."  

A laugh almost escaped. I swallowed it. "I can't promise that."  

"Then don't promise. Swear." His voice dropped. "Swear you'll fight for every second of it."

I closed my eyes. "You are the only brother I have ever had. I won't lie to you. No one has ever returned.”

"I don't care."  

"Darion—"  

"I don't care." His grip tightened. "You come back."

A tear escaped before I could stop it. Just one. It was enough.  

His jaw flexed. He pulled me in again — harder this time, one arm through the bars and around my shoulders, his other hand fisted in my shirt. The first embrace had been relief. This one was a refusal. A man holding the bars of a cage shut against everything that waited on the other side of dawn.

"Then let me swear instead," he said against my shoulder. "If you come back — if you walk out of that cave and prove every priest and every emperor wrong — I follow you to the ends of the earth. My grave stands beside yours. Whatever you are after tomorrow, I am beside it."

My chest ached in a way that had nothing to do with the bruised ribs. We stayed like that. Longer than was dignified. Neither of us moved first.

Then, into the silence:  "I hope you at least knocked out his teeth."  

I pulled back. Blinked at him. "Whose?"  

"The Prince's." That crooked smirk. "Cassian's."

The laugh came from somewhere I thought fear had already occupied. It burst out of me loud and undignified and Darion joined it immediately — reckless and warm, bouncing off the stone walls until the guards outside surely heard and decided not to investigate.

For a few seconds, the Cave didn't exist.

Then footsteps echoed down the corridor. Measured, deliberate, different from the guards. The laughter dissolved.  

A figure moved through the dark carrying a bowl of water, folded cloth, and a small oil lamp. When the flame reached her, it caught the red of her hair.  

Darion went still. His gaze moved between her and me. He rose slowly, unhurried, reclaiming his posture like a man who had decided something.  

"Godspeed," he said quietly. He didn't look at me again. The swagger in his walk remained, but I caught the brightness in his eyes before the shadows took him.

The cell door groaned. Vesenya stepped inside and latched it shut behind her. She set the lamp down and knelt in front of me without asking permission. The bowl touched the floor with a soft sound.

I looked away first. The resentment was already there, coiled and ready — because none of this would have happened without her, and I knew even as I thought it that I was wrong. It would have happened. Cassian would have found another reason. The Trial had been waiting for me since before I was born; I just hadn't known it.  

That didn't make the resentment any easier to put down.

"Vesenya," she said.  

I frowned at the plate.  

"My name. In case you didn't know it."  

I said nothing. 

"Your father sent me," she said quietly. "He couldn't come himself, but he's worried. Your mother too. They sent me here to treat your wounds."  

"How generous of them."  

She reached for the cut along my shoulder. I caught her wrist before she made contact.  

"Don't."  

Her eyes — green and sharp and seeing slightly more than whatever they were looking at — widened briefly before narrowing.  

"You are difficult," she said. "First I cannot read you. Now you won't let me touch you."  

I looked up sharply. "Read me?"  

Something crossed her face. Calculation, or caution.  

"You don't know."  

"Know what?"  

She exhaled through her nose and dipped the cloth into the water, wringing it slowly.  

"Let me clean the wound first."  

"Tell me now."  

"Enzo." My name in her mouth was not a reprimand. It was something else entirely. "I will tell you everything. But I need my hands to be doing something while I say it, or I won't be able to say it at all."  

That I understood.  

I released her wrist.

She worked with a gentleness that surprised me — careful and deliberate, each movement considered, as though the wound was something worth treating rather than an obstacle to get through. The scent of lavender reached me from her skin or her hair, and it had a disorienting effect on the inside of my chest.  

She leaned close to examine the deepest part of the cut. Close enough that the pulse came back — that specific pressure behind my eyes, the vibration beneath my skin that happened only when she was near. I pulled back instinctively.  

The sensation vanished the moment distance returned.  

"What is that?" My voice came out harder than I intended. "What do you keep doing?"  

"I'm not doing it." She kept her eyes on the cloth. "It's doing itself."  

"That's not an answer."  

"No." She was quiet for a moment. "It isn't."

Her hands stilled in her lap. She looked at the floor between us as though deciding how much of the truth was survivable.  

"Priestesses carry the blood of the Ancients," she said finally. "What the people call the Skygods."  

The word landed differently in a cell the night before the Cave.  

"So the stories were true.”

"Yes."  

No hesitation. No qualification. That single syllable carried more weight than a sermon.  

"Tomorrow," she continued, her voice careful now, like someone walking across uncertain ground, "you are going to meet them. I saw it."  

"How?"  

"The blood… It changes us. We see things. Futures. Pieces of them. Most people have threads around them. Possibilities. You don’t." She looked up. "I saw you descending into the Cave. Clearly. No ambiguity."  

My pulse was doing something irregular. "Do I come back?"  

The pause before her answer was the longest of my life.  

"I don't know," she said. "That's what I need to tell you. You are the only person I have ever encountered that I cannot read."  

"What does that mean?"  

"It means when I look for your future—" She stopped. Started again. "When I look at you, there are no threads. No fractures. Only silence where a person's life should be. And then—" Her voice dropped almost to nothing. "Voices. Speaking in a language older than this empire. Older than anything I've been taught to name."  

Suddenly I wished she had lied.  

"And what do the voices say?"  

Her eyes met mine.  

"Your name," she said. "Over and over. As though they have been waiting for someone to say it aloud and finally someone did."

I opened my mouth to call it madness. Something in her expression stopped me. This was not a woman constructing a story. This was a woman telling me something that frightened her, in a voice she was keeping steady through effort.  

"The whipping," I said, to give myself something else to think about. "At the festival. Was that because of the visions?"  

"No." Her jaw tightened. "The blood doesn't just give abilities. It accumulates. Too much of it unspent drives the mind toward madness — visions that won't stop, futures bleeding into the present until you can't tell which is which. The rituals bleed off the excess. The pain is a release valve." A pause. "Without it, we don't survive the year."  

The beatings I had watched and called cruelty rearranged themselves in my memory. 

"You are different, Enzo," she said softly. "More different than you know. And the only thing that can explain it is waiting for you at the bottom of that Cave."

She was too close. She had been getting incrementally closer throughout this conversation and I had been letting her without noticing.  

The lamplight moved across her face. I watched it.  

I kissed her.  

Not planned. Not decided. The distance between us simply became intolerable and then it wasn't there anymore.  

She went still.  

For one terrible second, nothing happened. Then she pulled back and looked at me with an expression I couldn't decode.  

"I'm sorry," I said immediately. "I don't know what—"  

"Dead men," she said quietly, "shouldn't apologise."  

And she kissed me back.  

It was not gentle. It was not tentative. It was the kiss of two people who had been circling something inevitable and finally stopped pretending they weren't. Her hands found my face, then my neck. 

Mine found her waist. The fear that had been sitting in my chest since the sentencing didn't disappear — it transformed into something with heat in it, something that felt, for the first time, like it might be survivable.

I pulled back. Breathing was suddenly complicated.  

"Vesenya—"  

"Don't." Her eyes were darker than they had been. "Don't ruin this moment with guilt.”

"This is forbidden."  

"For a man walking into the Cave of the Skygods tomorrow morning," she said, "you are very concerned with forbidden."  

"I'm not walking into it to die."  

"I know." Something shifted in her expression. Softer and more frightening than anything else she had shown me tonight. "I know you're not."

She reached up and unclasped the necklace at her throat. Set it in my palm. Bone carved into a circular spiral, warm from her skin, heavier than it looked.  

"A Bone Nexus," she said. "It's connected to me. If you carry it, I can find you — project into whatever space you occupy. Even inside the Cave." Her fingers closed around mine over the object. "Even somewhere I have no right to be."

The hope that moved through me was painful in the way hope always is when it arrives somewhere that has already made peace with the alternative.  

"Why are you doing this?" I asked.  

She didn't answer with words.  

She moved into my lap slowly, deliberately, watching my face the whole time as though giving me every opportunity to object. I didn't object. Her forehead came to rest against mine and for a moment we simply breathed the same air.  

"I see the way you look at me," she said quietly. "You've been trying not to since the festival."  

"The laws—"  

"Priestesses are granted one night of defiance after ritual ascension." Her fingers traced the line of my collarbone. "One night that belongs entirely to us. I have never claimed mine." A pause. "I never had a reason to."  

"Until you," she added.  

Her touch moved lower and my breath left me in a way I hadn't planned. Every nerve I had went suddenly, completely awake.  

Then she whispered — low and careful, as though the words required precision: "Vel'kara threx ul na'vi."  

I pulled back, just enough to frown. "What—"  

"The language of the gods." Her lips moved to my ear. "A prophecy. The one I have been carrying since the first time I tried to read you." Her breath was warm against my skin. "The Chosen One commands what is not human."  

Something moved through me that was not desire — or not only desire. Older than that. Like a key turning in a lock I hadn't known was there.  

Her hand found mine and guided it, and she exhaled sharply at the contact. Her forehead hit my shoulder. 

"Zor en Kai," she gasped...  

The lampfire shuddered. 

"What does it mean?"  

Her eyes found mine in the dimness. Ancient was the wrong word. What stared back at me was older than time, yet painfully alive. 

"Survive," she said. "By becoming."  

Then she closed the last distance between us.  

The moment she touched me properly, the pulse exploded — not subtle this time, not a pressure behind the eyes but a current moving up through the floor, through the roots of the tree, through the stone and the earth and into my spine, spreading outward until my blood felt like it was conducting something far beyond its usual purpose. Her nails found my shoulders and her breath fractured against my neck.  

The prophecy came apart in her mouth, syllable by syllable, as though the intimacy was drawing it out of her:  

"You are the prophecy, Enzo Aurelion—" a sharp breath — "that is what the voices say. That is what they have always—"  

Her words dissolved.  

Mine were gone long before that.  

There was the tree above us, enormous and indifferent. There were the guards beyond the palisade. There was the Cave, waiting. All of it existed, all of it was real, and none of it was present — because something ancient had decided that this cell, on this night, between these two people, was where it would finally speak.  

Dawn would come soon. 

And when it did, the gods would finally answer.