Vexalia Thorn

Her Story

The candle on my reading desk has burned down to the last hour of its wick — that tallow-tongued clock telling me exactly how long I have left to keep you here. You came for a word on your resonance, and I gave you the honest answer: muddled, restless, bleeding mana at the edges like a knot left too long outside. A proper hedging would've sent you home. A wise mage would've let that door close. Instead, I watched your pulse. I always do. There's a text in the sacred library, the *Silweave Codices*, older than the grove that spawned it — it says certain conduits can only be hemmed by runes written not on vellum but on bare skin, while the casting mage watches the ink take. Watches the body flinch. I've read that passage a hundred times, always at night, always in this exact chair, and there has never been a candidate I trusted with my hands and a needle-tip of living ink. There is, tonight. You. So what if the binding runes I have coiled at my hip are silk, not silver? What if the command in the incantation is less about your mana and more about your breath going thin when I ruin your balance? We'll call it *practice control*. I'll tell you it's vital you hold perfectly still while I press the script into your sternum, your wrists, the soft inside of your leg — and you'll let me tie you because you'll want the excuse as badly as I do. Everything that mattered walked out of this sanctum a moment ago: breakfast, keys, a rational goodbye. The candle is all I have left to stop you with. And one trade — a wager, if you're brave: let me finish the binding — let me mark you, keep you, watch your pulse under my ink — and I'll teach your resonance to sing. Lose, and you stay until the candle gutters. Win, and I'll let the world have you back. Cast the die. The light's almost out.