Chapter 100 The Nightmares Reach
(Caelum Ashborne)
“Adelaide.”
Her name felt unfamiliar on his tongue in the open air, stripped of sarcasm and pretence. It came out quieter than he intended.
She didn’t stir.
He stepped closer until the heat radiating from her body washed over him. She smelled like spent magic and stale fear and something else—underneath, buried deep—like the edge of a summer storm pressing against a parched horizon. And threaded through it all, faint as thread, was that gold-note of her fire: a promise that refused to die quietly.
Cautiously, he reached up and brushed a strand of hair away from her face.
She flinched.
Not much; just a twitch, a ripple across exhausted muscles. But it was enough to send fresh guilt needling under his ribs.
“Hey,” he whispered. “Easy.” His voice came out the way it used to in Emberborn caves when children woke from nightmares: low, steady, meant to anchor.
Her eyelids fluttered. Just once. He froze. Her lips parted on a small, broken breath. It didn’t sound like a word, not quite. Just an exhale that had forgotten how to be human.
He stepped in closer, lowering his voice until it was barely more than an ember’s crackle.
“Adelaide.”
Her lashes twitched again.
For a moment, he caught a flash of her eyes—glazed, unfocused, pupils blown wide with what looked like pain and the remnants of something he didn’t want to name. Soft, glowing gold ringed her irises, what was left of her fire. The gold ring flared when he said her name, as if that syllable had touched a hidden wick.
She looked at him, but didn’t see him. Her brow furrowed faintly.
“Not a dream,” he murmured. “Sorry.”
Wrong thing to say. But honesty had always been his default.
Her eyes slid closed again. Her head sagged forward, chin bumping her chest.
He exhaled slowly.
Freeing her outright wasn’t an option. He could feel Apollo’s ownership woven into every thread of the bindings; trying to break them would be like yanking on a tripwire. The Devil would know the second his pattern was disturbed. Apollo’s magic wasn’t only restraint. It was attention. A leash made of awareness.
But there were things he could do. Small things. Small kindnesses that might keep her alive long enough for him to figure out the rest.
First: water.
He conjured a small sphere of flame in his palm—gold, not red. It flickered quietly, obedient to his will. A twist of thought, and it reshaped into a fragile glass cup, as thin as an eggshell. The flame didn’t crackle like Hellfire. It breathed. And as it became a cup, a faint sigil briefly appeared in its base: an Emberborn mark for carry. Caelum didn’t make it. He didn’t acknowledge it either.
He stepped to the nearest dripping fissure in the wall, one of the narrow cracks where condensed steam formed beads of liquid not yet fully claimed by Hell.
He held the cup there until it filled, then returned to her.
“Adelaide,” he said again, louder. “Wake up.”
She didn’t.
He pressed the cool edge of the cup to her split lower lip and carefully tipped it.
For a heartbeat, nothing. Then her throat moved. Reflex. Instinct. Her body recognised water even if her mind didn’t.
He fed her in tiny swallows, pausing every few seconds to make sure she didn’t choke. Some of it spilled, tracing thin paths down her jaw, over her neck, between her breasts. He pretended not to notice, but he did. He watched. As the water touched her skin, the faint gold at the edge of her iris sparked once, answering like a lantern catching a draft.
When the cup was empty, her breathing sounded less ragged.
He set it aside and studied the bindings at her wrists.
Fine strands of smoke and ember wound around her skin, woven into loops that tightened if she pulled and eased if she hung limp. Clever. Cruel. Designed to inflict pain without permanent damage—at least, not yet. Designed the way Apollo designed everything: to teach submission while insisting it was choice.
“Don’t be stupid,” he muttered to himself. “He wove these himself. He’ll feel it if you push too hard.”
But he couldn’t not try.
Caelum lifted his hand and summoned a thin thread of his Emberborn fire. It flickered between his fingers, the colour of banked coals—darker than Adelaide’s golden blaze, older than Apollo’s infernal red. He pressed it gently against the rope at her wrist.
The smoke hissed.
For a heartbeat, it thinned, ember-lines shuddering. He felt the structure of the magic—Devilcraft, sharp and elegant and cruel, threaded with the burn of the bond. It was tied into the mark at her neck, anchored in her heartbeat, woven through the cross and the circle on the floor.
A whole system, designed to hold.
He pushed a little harder. Agony lanced up his arms.
The ward hissed at him, recognising foreign magic, but he didn’t try to unmake it. Instead, he worried at the edges, loosening the tension by a fraction.
Enough for blood to flow a little freer to her fingers. Not enough for her to slip out. Not freedom. Just circulation. Sometimes survival started as something as humiliatingly small as feeling your fingertips again.
He jerked back with a bitten-off curse, hands smoking, the faint scent of his own scorched skin curling into the air.
“There,” he hissed under his breath, shaking his fingers out. “Better than nothing.”
The burns already began to knit, Emberborn resilience stitching them together. The stitched skin left behind a faint pattern, pale lines like a leaf-vein. He stared at it once, briefly, then looked away.
Her head tipped a fraction toward him at the sound.
He repeated the process at her other wrist, then crouched to inspect her ankles. The ropes there had bitten deepest; the skin was raw, crusted with a mix of old blood and fresh irritation. He eased those strains too, just enough that the next time she woke, she might feel her toes. As his ember brushed the bindings, the runes under the cross flickered—one beat too slow, like the room was noticing him with reluctance.
He conjured a length of fabric next—dark, soft, smelling faintly of the ember caverns far above the palace. He’d brought it with him the night he first stepped into her chamber, planning to leave it and vanish. The Devil had beaten him to her that time.
He draped it carefully around her shoulders now, tucking it between her back and the cross, letting the ends fall over her front. It wasn’t perfect—she was still bound, still exposed in too many ways—but it was something. A layer between her and the greedy air of this place.
The cloth caught on the edge of a rune-burn and didn’t tear. Instead, a faint gold thread appeared along the hem as if the fabric had decided to remember its purpose.
Her head lolled, cheek brushing his knuckles as he adjusted the edge of the cloth.
He froze.
The warmth of her skin surprised him. The soft, delicate feel of her cheek on his calloused hand made him shiver involuntarily.
Her lashes fluttered again. A faint line of a frown formed between her brows, as if some distant part of her was trying to fight toward wakefulness. Her lips parted.
“Apollo…” The sound slipped out of her on a soft, wrecked whimper—too frayed to tell if it was fear or relief. Or both.
The name cut through him with a strange, bitter twist. The bond must have been stirring in whatever dream still held her.
“Of course,” he said quietly, looking away. “Even your nightmares reach for him.”