Elira didn't speak to him the next morning.
She didn't ask where the priest had entered from or whether the place that have been breached had been repaired. She didn't ask what it meant that someone knew how to find her and she certainly didn't ask about the mark still faintly glowing on her palm.
Even when fire demons howled outside the gate and he returned from the perimeter, blood-smeared and silent.
She kept her distance.
Not out of fear but control.
Because if she opened her mouth, she'd say something she couldn't take back and she wasn't sure she'd win the next argument. Not against him. Not against herself.
She just walked past him.
Eyes forward, shoulders straight. As if she hadn't almost burned the world down the night before.
Ravion didn't try to stop her.
Let her run, and let her pretend the fire between them hadn't shifted into something harder to name.
She found a smaller wing of the temple abandoned and half-ruined, the stones cracked with age. It was quiet, empty and more importantly, it was his least favorite place.
Good, she needed space.
So she trained.
Alone.
No watching eyes, no smug remarks, no heat curling around her skin like temptation.
Just silence.
And the whisper of her own thoughts.
She traced sigils in the air simple ones. Firebinding, focus and defensive flame.
At first, nothing happened.
Then snap her palm lit, a small flicker of controlled heat spinning like a thread between her fingers.
Not Ravion's flame. Hers.
Still, it wasn't enough.
She tried again, this time drawing the sigil with blood just a drop from the cut on her thumb. The magic answered faster, hotter. A flare of red coiled through the air, wild and sharp. It scorched a mark into the stone where it landed.
Good, she thought.
She focused.
A spark crackled in her fingers and shot into the broken wall, leaving behind a glowing rune.
It wasn't in any book she knew.
She did it again.
Another rune another burst of power that shouldn't have come so easily.
And still, she didn't stop.
Hours passed maybe more but she didn't care.
She traced her blood magic along the floor, testing how far she could push it before the exhaustion hit but it didn't.
It just kept coming.
Like something inside her had been waiting for permission.
Her palms shook, not from fear but from the weight of it. The raw, aching truth: She was changing or already had and Ravion... he'd known.
He knew something about what was inside her, something he wasn't saying.
And she couldn't afford to trust him until she understood why.
"Still hiding?" came his voice from the doorway.
Silence.
"Elira."
She didn't turn.
She focused harder, letting the fire flow into the sigil.
"Keep talking and I'll light your horns on fire," she muttered.
He chuckled, but it was short and dry. "You've been ignoring me for fourteen hours."
"Because I'm mad at you."
"You think I don't know that?"
"Then leave me alone."
He didn't move,"Your hands are shaking."
"Not because I'm weak," she said sharply.
"I didn't say you were."
She turned finally, fire still dancing at her fingertips. "What do you want?"
"To talk."
"Well, I don't."
"Too bad," he said quietly. "We're bound. Silence doesn't change that."
She stared at him, jaw tight. "I didn't choose this."
"No one chooses the old magic. It chooses you."
"I didn't want you."
He didn't flinch. "And yet here we are."
She stood abruptly to face him. Her hands were still glowing with magic, her braid falling loose across her shoulder.
"You should've told me. About the bond about what you saw in me."
"I did warn you," he said. "You just didn't want to hear it."
"That's not the same as honesty," she snapped.
"No," he said. "It's not."
A long silence followed.
Then Ravion looked at the rune she'd burned into the wall. "That symbol... it's not from your coven's texts."
"No."
He paused. "Do you know what it means?"
"No," she said, softer now. "But it's mine."
And something about that something in the way she said it made even him go still.
"You're changing," he said at last.
She nodded once. "Good. Because I won't be caught off guard again."
Ravion watched her a moment longer.
Then, for once, he said nothing.
He turned and left her there, standing in the quiet ruin, fire curling in her hands and power humming under her skin.
She didn't need him to say anything.
She'd heard it in his silence.
He didn't recognize her anymore.
And neither did she.