We walked until the forest began to breathe again.
The ash no longer clung to our skin like regret. The air, once sharp with burnt wood and memory, softened into something almost clean. The trees grew closer together, their trunks slimmer, their bark pale with fresh scarring. New life crept through the earth in fragile greens, pressing upward through ruin as if refusing to be forgotten.
When sunlight finally broke through the thinning canopy above, Riven slowed. She didn't speak, but the moment her steps faltered, I knew we had arrived.
The waystation rose like a wound in the clearing. Just three walls left standing, scorched and cracked. The remains of a roof caved in on itself. Ivy curled along the stones like fingers trying to take it back. The air here smelled of old smoke, of moss, of a place trying to remember its shape.
It wasn't much. But it was enough to keep us sheltered.
Riven pushed open what was left of the door.
It groaned on half-buried hinges as she stepped through, her shadow brushing the crumbling threshold. I followed her inside. The quiet met us like a thick blanket, not warm just full. It reminded me of the cave, the stillness after need, but here, the silence felt thinner not charged. Just quiet, like the ruin itself was listening.
We didn't speak as we moved. She gathered dry moss and broken branches from what the wind had carried through the open walls. I cleared the hearth of fallen stones and brittle ash, sweeping it clean with my sleeve until the shape of it returned.
Then I lifted my hand.
The flame came instantly.
It didn't wait to be summoned. It surged into my palm like it had been resting there all along, like it had chosen me before I ever reached for it.
Across the ruin, Riven paused. Her eyes flicked toward me, sharp and unreadable. She didn't speak, but her jaw tightened. The question was there, quiet, heavy, pressed behind her teeth. But she couldn't voice it out.
What are you becoming?
I had no answer for her. Not yet.
We sat across from each other in the flickering light. The fire cracked softly. Riven removed her bracers and stretched her legs beside the stones, watching the shadows move along the far wall.
I watched her.
Every line of her body hummed with tension. Not the kind born from threat. The kind that came from too much thinking and nowhere to put it.
The Core stirred inside me again not pulsing or demanding. It was just present. Sensing. Reaching across the space between us with quiet hunger.
And then I felt it. Her heartbeat. Not just the rhythm, but the emotion beneath it. The way it faltered and pushed forward again, unsure of its own pace.
There was doubt there as well as regret and hunger that had nothing to do with food or flame.
The tether pulled tighter, stretched until I could feel the weight of her unspoken thoughts pressing against mine.
And then something shifted.
A shimmer of sensation slid down my spine. Heat poured through the thread between us, slow and intimate, not from the fire and not from the air. It was hers. A breath she hadn't taken. A touch she hadn't offered. It curled into my skin like memory, like the imprint of her thighs still wrapped around me.
She looked at me.
And in that look, it snapped into place.
I was inside her now. Not just in memory, not just in the echo of what we had done.
Inside her unrest. Her heartbeat. Her waking thoughts. Like we were almost one.
I didn't know if it terrified her. But it terrified me. Because I didn't want to let go.
I inhaled sharply as the glyph on my chest flared with a soft, pulsing glow. The light wasn't blinding, but it stirred something in the air, like heat rippling across still water.
Riven reacted instantly. She flinched, her gaze dropping to the mark as if she could see it through me.
"What is that?" she asked, her voice low and uncertain.
Before I could form an answer, her breath caught in her throat. Her eyes widened, and her hand flew to her back, just beneath her shoulder blade. Her fingers brushed the skin there as if something had stung her, and a flicker of pain crossed her face.
She turned slightly, her arm angling behind her as she tried to find the source of the discomfort. I stood slowly, drawn to her without thinking, my steps soft on the stone floor. When I reached her side, the firelight illuminated the curve of her spine, and that was when I saw it.
A mark glowing faintly. It was alive.
It wasn't identical to mine, but it carried the same language, the same essence. Where mine burned straight across my chest like a branded seal, hers spiraled across her back with a different rhythm more delicate, almost like a flame winding through silk. It pulsed faintly with red light, just beneath the surface of her skin, as though her body had accepted it as part of her.
"You have one too," I said quietly.
She didn't answer right away. Her hand hovered just above the mark as if unsure whether to touch it again. I saw the way her fingers trembled, how her breath deepened as if her body was still adjusting to something she couldn't name.
"I felt it before," she said eventually. Her voice sounded distant, like she was remembering something she had tried not to notice. "It was only a whisper at first. Like something watching me from beneath the surface."
She paused. Her hand dropped to her side as she turned to face me fully.
"But now it's awake. I can feel it moving with my breath. I can feel it listening."
There was no fear in her eyes. Not exactly. But something close lingered there. A tension that came from understanding just enough to know how dangerous this could become.
"You said the Core gave you a piece of me," she said, her gaze steady. "I think it took one too."
The words hung in the air between us, soft and heavy. And we both knew there was no undoing what had been done. Not now. Not after this.
Lustbound Core: Soul Tether 42%
New State: Bi-directional Bond Achieved
Shared Affinity: Flame
Skill Unlocked: Burnwake (passive)
Vitality sync in progress
Warning: Propximity Intensifies Sync
I swallowed, though my throat was dry. My body felt strange. Lighter somehow. Faster. As if every breath pulled fire into my veins instead of air. The Core wasn't just sitting dormant inside me anymore. It was moving. Working. Rewriting me second by second.
"Lucien."
My name left her lips in a quieter voice than before. I turned toward her.
She stood very still in the low firelight, breathing faster than she had a moment ago. Her lips were parted, but not to speak. Her eyes shimmered in the dark, that golden flame caught between defiance and something more fragile.
"What are we becoming?" she asked.
Her words weren't sharp. They weren't even fearful. They were curious in the way people speak to things they don't yet understand, but already know they can't walk away from.
I didn't answer her.
Not because I didn't want to. But because I didn't know the answer only the Core did.
And I could feel, in the very edges of my bones, that this was only the beginning.
Riven didn't speak again for a long while. She sank down beside the fire, her back against one of the half-standing stone walls. One knee bent, one arm draped loosely across it. Her other hand played with a small scrap of worn leather, the movement absent, like she wasn't aware she was doing it.
Her gaze stayed on the flames, but I knew she wasn't watching them.
She was inside herself. Or maybe inside me. The line was hard to tell now.
I felt it. The ripple of her confusion as it passed through the tether. Her heartbeat was steady but wound tight like a coiled wire. Her breath came shallow, controlled, not from panic but from discipline. The kind only born from years of learning to stay composed, no matter what the world demanded.
She was trying not to feel me. But the bond didn't allow for that anymore. Not with the mark burned into her back and the Core humming in both our chests.
Not from me.
And deep down, I didn't want her to.
"I don't like this," she said at last.
Her voice barely rose above the crackle of the fire, but it carried more weight than anything she had said since the moment we left the cave. There was no anger in it. Only vulnerability, raw and unguarded, like a wound exposed to air.
"I don't like feeling like I'm not alone in my own head."
She didn't look at me when she said it. Her fingers had stopped moving. The scrap of leather rested quietly in her lap, forgotten.
I understood more than she probably realized.
But understanding didn't change the truth. The Core didn't care about what we liked or didn't like. It didn't care about boundaries, or privacy, or the fragile structures we built to keep ourselves separate. The Core was a current, and we were already caught in it.
"It's not just your head anymore," I said softly.
She turned toward me. Her expression was unreadable, but her eyes gave her away. I felt the flicker of resistance and fear tightening inside her, but layered beneath it was something else. Something harder to name. Surrender, maybe. Or the instinct to stop fighting what had already changed.
"You feel… everything," she whispered.
I nodded.
"So do you."
Her gaze dropped. Her jaw tensed. She didn't answer, and I didn't push her to.
Some truths didn't need to be spoken again.
We laid down much later, when the fire had faded into embers and the silence had grown too thick to break. The ruin around us was still and cold. She curled on one side of the stone chamber, her back to me, facing the far wall. I took the opposite side, my body stretched out on a patch of cracked stone.
But the tether between us didn't stretch thin with the space.
It sharpened.
I could feel her breath echoing in my lungs. I could feel her thoughts churning, even in the quiet. Her discomfort wasn't just a shadow in the back of my mind. It was a pressure in my ribs. A weight across my chest.
Even in sleep, she didn't leave me. And neither did the Core. Not for a single breath.
At first, I thought it was memory.
The heat of her skin. The taste of her breath. The way her thighs had gripped my hips like she never wanted to let go.
But the air was different. So was the light.
The firelight had turned blue, electric and alive. The ground beneath me shimmered like obsidian, warmed from within. My body moved, not with effort or thought, but instinct.
And she was there.
Riven knelt in ash, her body bare, her skin glowing as if fire lived beneath it. Her red hair fell loose around her shoulders, and the spiral mark on her back pulsed in time with the one over my heart. She looked at me like she had been waiting all her life for this moment.
When I touched her, she gasped like I was the first breath she had ever taken.
We didn't speak.
Our bodies moved together with the same rhythm as the tether. Her mouth found mine, open and searching. Her hands traced my chest, reverent and urgent. I could feel her pleasure like it was my own. Our minds blurred at the edges, sinking deeper into each other with every kiss, every touch.
She pressed her forehead to mine, breath ragged.
"I'm scared," she whispered.
I kissed her slowly, trailing my mouth down her throat, across her collarbone, to the place just above her heart.
"So am I," I murmured. "But I don't want to stop."
She didn't speak again. She only pulled me closer.
We moved together in the dream, slow and desperate, as if we were afraid waking would tear us apart. Her moans echoed inside me. Her nails left fire in their wake. Every thrust, every breath, every cry burned something deeper into my soul.
And when release took us, it came like a storm breaking open.
We came together, and the bond exploded wide, raw and unrelenting.
I woke with my fists clenched, body slick with sweat, chest still pulsing with heat. My cock was hard, aching with the aftershock of something that hadn't just been a dream. The Core throbbed quietly under my skin, not sated, but satisfied.
Riven was already awake.
She sat with her back to me, half-dressed, her red hair tangled over one shoulder. Her fingers hovered over the mark on her back as if she could still feel my hands there.
"You were in my dream," she said without turning.
"You were in mine too."
She exhaled, slow and uneven.
"This Core," she murmured. "It doesn't sleep."
"No," I said. "And neither do we. Not really."
She turned then. Her eyes were different. Not surprised. Just knowing.
"We need to understand what it's doing to us," she said. "Before it becomes something we can't undo."
I stood and stretched, and my body responded like it had never broken. My skin buzzed with heat. My veins carried fire instead of blood. I flexed my hand, and flame obeyed.
It came easily now.
I stepped outside, raised my palm, and let it flow. A thin spiral of fire burst forward and branded itself into the bark of a nearby tree. The symbol was unmistakable the same as hers, the same as mine.
The Core whispered in my mind.
Burnwake skill confirmed
Flame signature linked
Tracker pulse emitted
I didn't have time to ponder on what that meant.
A shift in the air reached me. A breath that didn't belong. A rhythm not Riven's, and not mine.
Then came the message.
Bond Thread Detected
Candidate Identified: Sylri of the Blade
Estimated Distance: 1.4 kilometers
I turned back toward the ruin.
Riven was already on her feet, already reaching for her sword.
"Another one?" she asked.
I nodded.
She didn't ask who or why.
She just said, "Then we better move."
I watched her, jaw tight, the Core still humming under my ribs.
They had tried to erase me. To silence me. To make me rot in the dark and be forgotten.
But I remembered.
And I would keep remembering.
With every flame I conjured.
With every woman I bound.
With every step I took back toward the world that tried to cast me out.
I wasn't just rising.
I was returning.
And when I reached them, the nobles who sentenced me to die would see exactly what I had become.