***
~~CALIX MALZARETH~~
***
I watched Revka’s apprentices clean Lyric up in a makeshift tub.
She didn’t speak. Didn’t move. Her eyes were closed, her breathing shallow. The bruises and bite marks covering her neck and chest were already fading, but the toll it took on her body wasn’t.
I should’ve been weak, too. But instead, I felt... more alive than I had in decades. Magic surged in my blood, stretching through every vessel. Tai was purring somewhere in my mind, basking in the aftermath like a cat stretched in sunlight.
So this was it. The mating high. The euphoria all the old ballads sang about. When poets wrote that no being could make a better choice than the gods themselves—this was what they meant.
I never believed in it. Not really.
Fated mates were rare. So rare that most t
