Chapter 25 Unseen Hands

Chapter 25 Unseen Hands
My name in his mouth shook something I didn’t want to recognize.
“What do you get out of all this?” I asked. “If we’re truly bound the way you claim, what do you want from me?”
Silence dropped for a moment. The roars outside faded. Only my breath and his remained, slicing the air between us.
He leaned closer. Not to kiss me, not like before. Just close enough that his face—still blurred—filled my entire view. I could see the line of his throat, the shadow of his collarbone, the faint crease between his brows.
“You,” he said quietly, “alive.”
Simple. Brutal.
“When you stop,” he went on, voice dropping lower, “the threads in this world stop with you. And everything falls in ways I don’t want to watch. I’ve already seen too many things collapse.”
There was exhaustion there—slipping into the edges of his multicolored irises, into the corner of a mouth that had earlier been bold enough to mock.
I almost said something soft.
Almost.
“Then,” I said, “don’t kiss my wounds again. It’ll shorten your lifespan if you keep sticking your nose into people’s problems.”
The man gave a low laugh, more honest this time. A sound that released a bit of tension from his shoulders.
“You’re going to die in the middle of a joke,” he remarked. “Fitting.”
I was about to respond when the world around us began to shift. Like fabric being pulled from both ends. The stars beyond the window stretched into lines. The dragons’ roars turned into one long, low hum.
“Not yet,” he murmured, staring at something over my shoulder, as if another hand was pulling me away. “It’s not time for you to see all this awake.”
“You can stop it?” I asked, surprised at the tremor in my voice.
“I can delay it,” he said. “A little.”
Light at the window bloomed—softly. Like a frozen firework lifted into the air and dissolved.
Before everything shattered, he grabbed my hand one more time. His fingers wrapped around the freshly healed palm, squeezing gently.
“Next time,” he whispered, the words brushing bone, “if you want to ask who I am… come conscious.”
I wanted to ask how. The world didn’t give me the chance.
Stars burst.
The floor vanished.
The bed, the window, his eyes, my breath—everything was released by something far too vast to comprehend. I fell. Again.
This time, before my body slammed back into the Evrithall mattress, there was a small pause in the middle.
Half-awake.
Half-asleep.
My eyelids stayed shut, darkness behind them belonging to neither room nor star-bed. In that space between two worlds, I felt something sharp, unmistakable, impossible to misread.
A touch on my left palm.
Warm. Slow. As if someone were drawing a small circle there with their thumb. No salve. No bandage. Just skin against skin, pressure enough for the tendons beneath to notice, but too gentle to hurt.
My heart kicked hard. Breath rushed short and fast.
I didn’t dare open my eyes. The room was supposed to be empty. Window shut. Door locked from the inside. No way in except the window, and I would’ve heard if someone climbed it.
The circle on my palm stopped. Those same fingers—or their shadow—pressed right in the center of my hand. Heat traveled up my arm, to my shoulder, then spread across my chest. The same feeling as in the dream, but solid, real, not an impression.
“Wake whole,” that voice came from nowhere.
The words didn’t pass through my ears.
They passed through bone.
Instinctively, I yanked my hand away. The touch vanished.
I opened my eyes.
Darkness greeted me. The lone candle on the desk had burned low, its flame small and tired. The shadows of the bedposts crawled along the wall. The window was closed, glass catching a faint glint of light. The door remained where it should be.
Silence.
No one else.
My breath returned in small, broken pieces. I lifted my left hand, heart pounding in my ears.
The white bandage still wrapped my palm. Neat. Tight. Mira always took her time. But… at the edge of the bandage, right above my wrist, a single mark glimmered: a tiny speck of gold, as if something beneath the cloth had been shining before.
My right fingers trembled slightly as I reached for the end of the bandage. Slowly, I unwound it, layer by layer. The cloth fell into my lap in a tangled spiral.
My palm opened to the candlelight.
The skin was whole.
No red line. No fresh scar. No sign a nail had ever pierced it. Just ordinary skin, faint creases, a little flushed around the edges from being wrapped too long. And at the center, where the wound should’ve been, a trace of warmth lingered—refusing to fade.
I brushed the surface with the tips of my fingers. Smooth. No sting.
The healer’s brew could’ve calmed the pulse. But that was all it could do. Mira herself knew wounds took time.
This—this was something else.
Something that had kissed blood the way he had.
I curled my hand into a fist, pressing it to my chest, right above the bone rattling softly with my heartbeat.
“Not polite,” I whispered to the dark ceiling. “Touching someone through a dream and finishing their wound without permission.”
No answer. No dry laugh. No dragon’s roar.
I lay back down, my bare palm turned upward beside my head. The candle dimmed, then slipped out, plunging the room into a friendlier kind of dark.
For the first time that night, sleep came without tearing.
And inside it, there was no metal bed.
No towering window.
No mouth pressed to a wound.
Only a thin warmth resting in my palm, like a promise that hadn’t yet found the courage to be spoken aloud.