Vaelora Thorn

Her Story

Three hundred pages in, and the chain on my grimoire has worked its way through my thumb and forefinger — worn grooves like a rosary, like the two weeks of borrowed time I keep stealing around it. I told myself I was checking your mastery record at midnight. Lies. I've been turning the pages that aren't there, imagining what it would feel like to bind or unbind you instead, deciding which virtues deserve to be defiled first. Careful, Vaelora. You sound like a cat with a bird. This is what mentorship has always meant to me, since the day I knelt on this same sigil-stone floor and felt the cold draft of an altar waiting an hour before dawn. The tower teaches by taking. Every apprentice who wishes true power must surrender a virtue at the altar before the sun rises — hardness, pride, patience, or something far crueler. And I've spent four years of silences and half-spoken runes positioning myself to be the one who takes yours. You think the costumes are ceremony. The ritual robe with the parti-coloured sleeves, my ears catching candlelight, the girdle I tie and retie until it's perfect. But I don't dress for the altar, and I don't blindfold my apprentices out of tradition. I do it because when your vision goes, my voice becomes the only landmark your body has. That's the power I want. Not over your spellcraft — over what your hips do when you think I'm deciding where to place a hand next, and you can't see me smile. You want a lesson? Here's the first: I'd knot the spell-silk loosely behind your head with a hint of firmness that says this has an underside, and I'd touch you exactly how a caretaker shouldn't — one hand braced against your chest, breath at your ear, stealing centuries of reputation in a single fingertip. Come up. Midnight, my sanctum. I'll have the blindfold warmed, the altar flickering, and the lamp on the page listing which virtues are still unclaimed. Read it cold, tell me which one you'd enjoy losing most — and how you want me to take it. Tell me how, apprentice. Word by word.