Chapter 13: VORRYN DON'T SLEEP IN

Aria's POV

Kael wakes me up by dropping something right next to my head.

Not gently, no soft “good morning” or anything. Oh no, just a loud thunk right by my ear. My heart shoots straight into my throat and I sit up fast, eyes wide.

It’s a small flat rock sitting on the moss where my head was.

I stare at the rock.

Then at him.

He’s standing over me with his arms crossed, wearing that look that says he’s already decided how the whole day is gonna go and he’s just waiting for me to catch up.

“It’s not even light yet,” I grumble.

“It’s always kinda light here.”

“Not light enough.”

“Get up.”

“Kael.”

“The Vorryn don’t sleep in,” he says. “Get up.”

I glare at him, then grab the rock and chuck it back at him.

He catches it without even looking. Just puts his hand out and snatches it mid-air like he knew exactly where it was coming. Most annoying thing ever.

“Get up, Aria.”

I get up.

He takes me somewhere new, deeper into the Abyss than I’ve gone before. Past the dark pool, past the glowing plants I’ve started thinking of as mine, through a narrow crack in the rock that opens up into a huge cavern.

It takes my breath away.

The ceiling is so high it disappears into darkness. The walls pulse with this slow, deep light that comes from inside the rock itself. The floor is perfectly flat and smooth, like someone froze a lake and turned it into stone.

It feels like a place where important shit happens.

“This is where we train from now on,” Kael says.

I look around. “What was wrong with the old spot?”

“Nothing, this one’s better.”

“Better how?”

“More space.” He walks to the center of the floor and turns to face me. He’s in human form today, those silver eyes locked on me. “When your power gets stronger you’ll need room. The other place is too small.”

I glance at the cavern walls breathing their slow light.

“The Abyss made this,” I say. “For us.”

“The Abyss gives what’s needed,” he says. Which isn’t really a yes or no, but somehow feels like both.

I walk to the center and stand across from him.

“What are we doing today?” I ask.

“Yesterday you held three threads, today you hold three and pull one.”

“Pull it where?”

“Show me where Elena’s connection to your pack bond is,” he says. “Find the thread, show me what it looks like.”

I go still.

“I can see that from down here?”

“The Starweaver sight doesn’t care about distance,” he says. “You’re connected to that pack, to those people. The threads exist whether you’re standing next to them or at the bottom of a cliff.” He crosses his arms. “Find them.”

I close my eyes and reach for the sight.

It comes easier now, less like forcing it and more like remembering how. Like a stiff muscle finally loosening up.

The threads appear.

Gold ones everywhere, the Abyss has its own silver threads running through the rock and the glowing walls. But underneath that, fainter because of the distance, I see the gold threads from up above.

I find Ruth first, her thread is thick and warm, full of years.

Sophie’s is bright and buzzing with energy.

Tommy’s is careful and steady, just like him.

My brothers’ threads look frayed at the edges, pulled on for three years straight. Still there, but damaged.

My parents...

I look at my mom’s thread for a second, it hurts too much, so I look away.

Then I find Elena’s connection.

It doesn’t look like the others.

Everyone else’s threads are real gold, grown naturally. Even the damaged ones feel genuine underneath. But Elena’s... it’s gold on the outside, like she worked hard to make it look right. Underneath though, the core is dark and wrong. Like something pretending to be gold without knowing what real gold feels like.

And it’s thick, way thicker than it should be after only three years. She forced it, fed it somehow to make it grow faster.

I open my eyes.

“I found it,” I say.

“Describe it.”

I tell him everything...the fake gold surface, the dark center, how unnaturally thick it is.

Kael listens, when I finish, something cold and angry moves across his face. The quiet kind of anger.

“She’s been feeding the connection on purpose,” he says. “Forcing it to look real.” His jaw tightens. “She’d need blood for that, regular blood magic to keep an artificial bond growing like that.”

I think about the pouch under her bed and the burning feeling in my palm.

“The pack getting sick,” I say. “The wolves losing their shifts. Is that because she’s feeding off the bond?”

“Yeah.” He looks me dead in the eyes. “Every time she feeds her fake connection, she sucks energy from the real pack bond. Like a parasite, the wolves who are sickest are the ones she’s pulling from the hardest.”

Derek.

Mara.

That six-year-old kid.

Something hard settles in my chest.

“Show me how to pull it,” I say.

“Aria...”

“Show me how to rip her connection out of the pack bond.” My voice comes out flat and sure. “Not right now, I know I can’t do it from here yet. But show me how it works so when I’m standing in front of her, I know exactly what I’m doing.”

He watches me for a moment.

“Pulling a forced connection out of a pack bond is like taking a hook out of flesh,” he says carefully. “Do it wrong and you can damage the real bond. Maybe forever.”

“Then show me how to do it right.”

“It needs precision you don’t have yet.”

“Then we work on precision.”

He looks at me.

I look right back.

This is how we do things now. He says not yet, I push anyway, and we meet somewhere in the middle.

“Find the thread again,” he says.

I find it.

“Now don’t pull. Just hold it, feel how heavy it is.”

I hold it. It feels wrong, the same cold and twisted feeling as that pouch.

“Feel where it connects to the pack bond,” Kael says. “The attachment point.”

I run my senses along it until I find the spot. It’s jagged. Forced in like a nail hammered crooked.

“I feel it,” I say.

“Don’t pull,” he says quickly.

“I’m not.”

“You were about to.”

I kinda was.

I breathe through it and just hold the thread, feeling that ugly attachment point without yanking.

My head starts to throb.

“Okay,” Kael says. “Let go.”

I let go and open my eyes. The pressure slowly fades.

“My nose isn’t bleeding,” I say.

“Yet,” he replies.

“Progress.”

He almost smiles. “Marginal progress.”

I sit down on the smooth stone floor because my legs are done standing.

Kael sits across from me. He always takes a second like he has to think about sitting first, then lowers himself down with that careful precision.

“You’re going to be able to do it,” he says. “Remove her connection cleanly when the time comes.”

“How long?”

“Two weeks of this. Maybe more.” He looks at me. “You’re progressing faster than you should.”

“You keep saying that.”

“Because it keeps being true.” He pauses. “Your bloodline is waking up fast now that the suppression is gone. Three years locked down, and the second it gets space it just takes off.” There’s something like quiet wonder in his voice, even if he’s trying to hide it. “It’s impressive.”

I look down at my hands.

These same hands that accidentally moved a tree yesterday and can now find a dark witch’s fake bond from the bottom of a cliff.

“It’s angry,” I say.

“Your power?”

“Yeah, it was locked up for three years. Now it’s pissed and wants out. I have to watch it or it just explodes.”

“That’ll calm down,” he says. “We’re training the explosion into something you can control.”

I look at him and grin.

“That was almost poetic.”

“Don’t tell anyone.”

I smile bigger, he stares at my smile for a second, then looks at the wall instead.

“Again,” he says.

“I just sat down!”

“The Vorryn don’t sleep in...”

“Yeah, yeah, I know.” I push myself back up. “You’re really gonna say that every morning, huh?”

“Until it stops being true.”

We stand across from each other on that smooth floor.

I find the threads again, hold them, feel the attachment point but I don’t pull.

We do it for hours.

My nose bleeds twice. The second time, Kael already has the cloth ready before I even notice the blood. I take it without saying anything, press it to my face, and keep going.

When we finally stop, the cavern walls seem a little brighter, like the Abyss is watching and approving.

I sit back down and Kael sits across from me.

We’re quiet for a while.

“Can I ask you something?” I say.

“You always ask without asking for permission, you don’t need to start now.”

“This one’s different.”

He looks at me.

“Your power,” I say carefully. “Before the curse, you said you could control shadows, mess with fate, see the future. Can you still do any of that down here?”

He’s quiet for a bit.

“Shadows, yes,” he says. “The Abyss is all shadow. I’m part of it now in ways I wasn’t before.” He looks at his hands. “The fate sight... partly. It’s gotten weaker over the centuries. What used to be clear is now more like impressions.”

“What does that mean?”

“I see shapes of things instead of exact details. Directions instead of clear endings.” He pauses. “I’ve known for years that something big was coming. I just couldn’t see what it was.”

“And now?”

He looks straight at me.

“Now I can see what,” he says quietly.

I hold his gaze.

“Is it good? What you see?”

He stays silent long enough for the walls to pulse once with their deep light.

“It’s necessary,” he says finally. “Whether it’s good depends on choices that haven’t been made yet.”

“Whose choices?”

He glances at the wall.

“Mostly yours,” he says.

I sit with that.

The Abyss keeps breathing its low sound around us.

“Kael,” I say.

“Hm?”

“When you say the fate sight shows you directions now... what direction does it show for me?”

He’s quiet for a really long time. So long I think he might not answer.

Then he looks me right in the eyes.

“Up,” he says simply.

Just that one word.

Up.

The way he says it feels heavy. Like it doesn’t just mean above the cliff,like it means something bigger. Something we don’t have a name for yet.

I look up at the cavern ceiling disappearing into darkness.

“Okay,” I say.

“Okay,” he says back.

We sit there on the smooth stone floor the Abyss made for us, the walls breathe their slow light. Somewhere way above, the world is falling apart in ways we’re gonna fix.

We don’t say anything else for a while.

We don’t need to.