ARIELLA'S POV
We travel through the night like ghosts, speaking only when necessary, touching only to help each other over rough terrain.
But I can feel Rhys dying beside me.
Not dramatically—no sudden collapse or blood-soaked coughs. Just the slow grinding down of a body pushed past its limits. His breathing is labored. His steps are uneven. Every few hours, he stops to lean against a tree, pretending to check our path while actually struggling not to collapse.
The Void Break spell cost him more than he's admitting.
And my curse isn't helping. Every suppression ritual takes longer now, requires more of his failing magic. The shadows beneath my skin are growing stronger, testing boundaries, whispering in feelings I'm learning to translate.
Hunger. Freedom. Return.
The curse wants something specific—to reunite with whatever was sealed in the Forbidden Tree. And the closer we get to the mountains, the more insistent it becomes.
By the third night of running, I know we're out of time.
We make camp in a shallow cave, hidden but defensible. Rhys collapses immediately, too exhausted to even build a fire.
"Rest," I tell him. "I'll keep watch."
"The suppression ritual—"
"Can wait an hour. You need to sleep before you fall over."
He wants to argue—I can see it in the stubborn set of his jaw—but exhaustion wins. He's asleep within minutes, his breathing finally evening out.
I watch him in the darkness, cataloging injuries I've been trying to ignore. The brands on his hands are weeping blood constantly now. His eyes are bloodshot from burst vessels. There are new scars forming where magic has torn through his skin.
He's burning himself out keeping me alive.
The realization sits heavy in my chest. When did this stop being pragmatic survival and start being... whatever this is? When did I start caring whether he lives or dies beyond the practical necessity of our bond?
Sometime between the wraith fight and the Guild hunters, I think. Somewhere in the space between him calling me "his" and me believing it might be true.
Two hours pass before I wake him for the suppression ritual. He's still exhausted, but marginally more functional.
We position ourselves—close enough now that our knees always touch, that I can feel the heat of his body, smell the copper-and-smoke scent that clings to him after using dark magic.
He draws the runes, and I can see his hands shaking.
"This is getting harder," he admits, voice rough with exhaustion. "The curse is adapting faster than I can suppress it. Fighting me."
"How long?" I already know the answer, but I need to hear him say it.
"Days. Three, maybe four before the suppression stops working entirely."
Three or four days.
Not the weeks we'd hoped for. Not even close.
"The mountains," I say. "How far?"
"If we push hard? Two days to the foothills, then three more days climbing to the temple." He meets my eyes. "We'll make it. We have to."
His magic rises, and I channel the curse into his spell. The merging is rougher than ever—the curse fighting, raging against containment, wanting freedom.
Pain explodes through both of us. I bite down on a scream, tasting blood. Across from me, Rhys goes rigid, more blood flowing from his nose.
But he holds the spell. Forces it to lock into place through sheer will.
When it's done, we're both gasping.
"I can't keep doing this to you," I whisper. "I'm killing you."
"You're keeping me alive. There's a difference." He wipes blood from his face with the back of his hand. "Besides, you saved me from the Void Break backlash. We're even."
"That's not how this works."
"No? Then how does it work?"
I don't have an answer. Don't know how to explain that somewhere in the past week, he stopped being my reluctant ally and started being something more. Something I'm afraid to name because naming it makes it real, and real things can be lost.
"We should rest," I say instead. "Both of us."
"You first. I'll watch."
"Rhys—"
"Please." His voice is soft, almost pleading. "Let me keep you safe for a few hours. That's all I'm asking."
The vulnerability in his words breaks my resistance. I settle onto my bedroll, close enough to the fire that I can still see him keeping watch.
I mean to stay awake, but exhaustion drags me under within minutes.
I wake hours later to Rhys's voice, urgent and sharp: "Ariella. Wake up. Now."
I'm alert instantly, reaching for weapons. "What—"
Then I see it.
The curse has manifested while I slept, spreading across the cave floor in patterns of shadow and frost. Not just leaking—spreading actively, consuming light in a ten-foot radius around me.
And my eyes. I can feel them. They've gone completely black, no white, no iris, just absolute darkness.
Rhys tries the suppression spell. Carves runes. Speaks the words.
Nothing happens.
The curse doesn't respond. Doesn't even acknowledge his magic.
For the first time since we bonded, the suppression completely fails.
We stare at each other in horror, both realizing the same truth:
The curse has evolved past his ability to contain it.
"How long?" My voice sounds strange—layered, like the curse is speaking through me.
"I don't know. Hours? Days?" He's trying to stay calm, but I hear panic underneath. "We need to move. Now. We reach the temple or—"
"Or I become the monster they always said I was."
"You're not a monster."
"Look at me, Rhys." I gesture to the shadows spreading from my body, to my black-mirror eyes. "I'm exactly what they feared."
He moves closer—into the radius of my curse, into the cold and darkness spreading from me. His hands cup my face, forcing me to look at him.
"You're Ariella. You're brave and stubborn and stronger than you believe. You're the person who saved me from Void Break, who faced down wraiths and hunters. The curse doesn't change that."
"It's changing everything."
"Then we change with it. Together." His thumbs brush my cheekbones, and I realize I'm crying—black tears that evaporate into shadow before they can fall. "We have two days to the temple. We can do this."
I want to believe him. Want to believe we can outrun the curse consuming me from inside.
But the shadows are whispering louder now, and I'm starting to understand their language.
Return. Reunite. Become.
The curse doesn't want to kill me.
It wants to transform me into something else entirely.
And I'm terrified of what that might mean.