The dead didn't want to return.
Sera had learned this truth three months into her studies of necromancy, when her first resurrection attempt produced nothing but a handful of screaming shadows that dissipated before dawn. The dead had moved on, her teacher explained. They'd found peace, or punishment, or perhaps just nothingness. Dragging them back was like trying to catch smoke with bare hands.
But Sera didn't care what the dead wanted.
She carved the final sigil into the stone floor of the ruined cathedral, her fingers trembling as blood from her palms mixed with the chalk dust. Around her, thirteen black candles burned with flames that didn't flicker, their smoke rising in perfectly straight lines toward the shattered ceiling. Through the gaps in the ancient stonework, she could see stars—cold, distant, uncaring.
"Almost there, Finn," she whispered to the silence. "Just hold on a little longer."
Of course, her brother couldn't hold on. He'd been dead for six months, killed when the Crimson Tyrant's army swept through the Kingdom of Ashvale like a dark tide. Finn had been fourteen. He'd died holding a practice sword, trying to defend the baker's daughter.
Sera pressed her palm against the earth at the center of the circle. Beneath six feet of soil and worms and darkness lay all that remained of him—bones, mostly. The flesh had rotted away. She'd dug up the grave herself three nights ago, working by moonlight, ignoring the way her hands shook.
The necromancy textbook lay open beside her, its pages yellow with age and filled with warnings in three languages. The resurrection of the recently dead requires a soul anchor. The caster must offer something of equal value: years of life, memories, or... The rest was smudged with what looked like ancient bloodstains.
Sera had years. She had memories. She had nothing else worth keeping.
She began the incantation in the old tongue, words that tasted like ash and iron on her tongue. The candles flared brighter. The sigils she'd drawn began to glow with sickly green light, and she felt the temperature plummet. Her breath misted in the air.
"From the realm of shadow and silence," she chanted, "I call forth the soul of Finnian Blackwood. By blood I bind thee, by will I command thee—"
Something felt wrong.
The magic was responding too eagerly, too powerfully. The green light intensified until it hurt to look at, and the straight columns of candle smoke began to swirl, forming shapes that might have been screaming faces or grasping hands.
"—return to this vessel of flesh and—"
The magic exploded outward.
Sera screamed as power tore through her, not out into the world but inward, like hooks sinking into her chest and yanking. She felt something fundamental tear loose inside her, something that might have been her soul or her heart or the thin barrier between herself and the universe.
The world tilted. She was falling, or maybe the ground was rising, and there was pain—so much pain, like every nerve in her body was on fire—
And then there was something else.
Someone else.
Another presence slammed into her consciousness with the force of a cavalry charge. For one impossible moment, she felt everything: three centuries of weariness, an ocean of loneliness so deep it could drown worlds, and beneath it all, a core of determination burning like a dying star.
Then everything went black.
Sera woke to the sound of her own heartbeat.
No—two heartbeats, slightly out of sync, creating a strange stuttering rhythm.
Her eyes snapped open. She was lying on cold stone, but not the cathedral floor. This stone was smoother, polished, and the ceiling above her was intact, painted with frescoes of battles and burning cities. Braziers filled with red flame cast dancing shadows on walls hung with weapons—swords, axes, morning stars, all arranged with military precision.
She knew where she was.
Everyone in the six kingdoms knew what the inside of the Tyrant's fortress looked like. Survivors described it in whispers: the Crimson Keep, a nightmare of black stone and blood-red banners, where the immortal warlord plotted the destruction of anything resembling hope.
Sera tried to sit up and immediately regretted it. Pain lanced through her chest, centered around her heart, and for a horrible moment she thought she was dying. But the pain wasn't quite right—it felt distant, like an echo, as if someone else were in agony and she was merely feeling the reverberations.
"I wouldn't move too quickly if I were you."
The voice was deep, cultured, and came from somewhere to her left. Sera's head whipped around—another spike of pain—and she found herself staring at the monster himself.
Kael Mordain sat in a high-backed chair twenty feet away, one hand pressed against his own chest in an unconscious mirror of her gesture. He looked exactly like the wanted posters: tall, dark-haired, aristocratic features that would have been handsome if they weren't arranged in an expression of cold disdain. His eyes were what the poets called "molten gold," and they were fixed on her with unsettling intensity.
He also looked like he'd been stabbed in the heart.
"What," Sera managed through gritted teeth, "did you do to me?"
"I?" His eyebrow rose. "I'm not the one who attempted a catastrophically illegal resurrection ritual in an unsecured location." He shifted in his chair and winced. "Though I am suffering the consequences regardless."
The pain in Sera's chest pulsed in perfect time with his wince.
Understanding crashed over her like ice water.
"No," she breathed. "No, that's not possible."
"And yet." Kael stood, moving with careful precision, and she felt every step as a strange pressure in her own legs. "Tell me, necromancer, did your forbidden texts mention what happens when a resurrection spell finds no suitable soul to resurrect?"
Sera's mind raced. The spell had reached out for Finn's soul and found... nothing. He was truly gone, beyond even magic's reach. But the spell had already been activated, the power already committed, and magic always demanded completion. It would have looked for the nearest powerful soul, the nearest source of life force to—
"It made a soul-bond," she whispered.
"Congratulations." Kael's tone was drier than desert sand. "Your bungled attempt at necromancy has tied your soul to mine. We are now, in the most literal sense possible, inseparable."
He took three steps toward the door. Sera felt her chest constrict, the pain intensifying with each step. By the fourth step, she was gasping, and Kael had stopped, his jaw clenched.
"The initial bond is weak," he continued, returning to his previous position. The pain immediately eased. "I estimate we can manage about a mile apart before the pain becomes... problematic. Perhaps fatal."
Sera stared at him. This couldn't be happening. She'd tried to bring back her brother, and instead she'd bound herself to the man who'd killed him.
"Break it," she said. "There must be a way to break it."
"There is." Kael moved to a table covered in books—her books, she realized with a start, from the cathedral. "I've spent the last four hours researching while you were unconscious. Soul-bonds are ancient magic, rarely seen in the modern age, and notoriously difficult to dissolve. However, there are accounts of successful severances performed at places of significant magical power."
He turned back to her, and for the first time, she saw something in his eyes besides a cold assessment. It might have been exhaustion. It might have been a resignation.
"The nearest such place is the Veil's Edge, where the boundaries between worlds grow thin. It's a three-month journey by horse, through territories both friendly and hostile, across the Desolation and through the Whispering Woods." He paused. "We'll need to make the journey together."
"Together," Sera repeated numbly.
"Unless you'd prefer to remain within a mile of each other for the rest of our lives, yes." The corner of his mouth twitched, though whether with amusement or irritation, she couldn't tell. "I have a kingdom to run, armies to command, and approximately seventeen different enemies currently plotting my demise. Dragging a necromancer along is... inconvenient."
Sera felt a surge of emotion through the bond—not her own. It took her a moment to identify it: bitter amusement mixed with something that felt like loneliness so profound it made her want to weep.
She clenched her fists. "I'm not going anywhere with you."
"Then I'll have you imprisoned here, and we'll both suffer for your stubbornness until you see reason." Kael's expression didn't change. "Or you can accept reality: your choices are limited to traveling with me willingly, or traveling with me in chains. Choose."
Through the bond, she felt nothing from him now—he'd somehow locked down his emotions, leaving only a smooth, impenetrable wall. But she'd felt that flash of loneliness, and it had been real.
The Crimson Tyrant, scourge of six kingdoms, architect of countless deaths, felt lonely.
Sera wanted to laugh. She wanted to cry. She wanted to kill him, but killing him would apparently kill her too.
"How soon can we leave?" she asked instead.
Kael's smile was sharp as broken glass. "Dawn. I suggest you rest. The road ahead is long, and I have no intention of slowing down for your convenience."
He left the room, and Sera felt every step as a gentle tugging sensation in her chest, as if an invisible thread connected them. When he'd gone far enough that the thread grew taut, she felt the warning pull.
One mile. That was her leash.
Sera put her face in her hands and tried very hard not to scream.
Finn was still dead. The monster who'd killed him was alive.
And they were bound together until they could cross half the continent to undo what her grief-stricken stupidity had created.
Outside the window, the sky was beginning to lighten toward dawn. In a few hours, her new life—her cursed life—would begin.
She had three months to figure out how to survive a journey with the Crimson Tyrant.
Three months to not murder him.
Three months to break the bond and get her revenge.
It would have to be enough.