FREE USE in Primitive World

In the cold light of tribal tradition, what they had done against that tree and in the moss was shameless, wild, and utterly devoid of decorum.

But in those hours, she hadn’t felt like a weapon, an heir-bearer, or a sovereign carrying a thousand lives on her back. She had felt fiercely, breathlessly alive.

She had tasted a blinding, consuming pleasure she had never even known existed, a heat that had utterly rewritten her from the inside out.

It hadn’t been what she planned when she walked down to the secluded spring.

She had slipped away from the roaring feast simply wanting to breathe, and seeing him there, naked in the moonlight, a calculating, selfish thought had crossed her mind.

She had wanted to reward him for breaking the Coalition... and perhaps, use whatever allure she possessed to tie him closer, to tempt this terrifying, mysterious outsider into staying and anchoring the Veynar forever, even though she knew a man of his caliber could never truly be caged in one valley.

She had thought she could control it. She had thought it would be a measured, calculated transaction between a ruler and her Champion.

How foolish that felt now. The moment his mouth had claimed hers, the calculation had burned to ash.

She had ended up completely losing herself, coming apart under him again and again, unable to get enough of his heat, his breath, and the relentless way he filled her.

Even now, suspended in the dark with the sky caving in to crush her, her heart betrayed her with a desperate, dying whim.

If her breath had to be torn away, if her core was meant to shatter into dust beneath the weight of this ancient decree, she didn’t want to die pinned under the cold fury of the heavens.

She wanted to die in his arms. She wanted his rough hands locked around her waist one last time, his mouth drinking down her final breath.

A dying whim, she mocked herself faintly, feeling the golden blood seep past her cracked lips. A foolish, weak thought for a Warchief.

Yet beneath the bitter sting of that impossible wish, a strange, profoundly quiet relief bloomed in the center of her chest.

If she died here... the Veynar would not fall.

Kira would not be left defenseless to the wolves. Zeyra would not have to lead a broken line into another massacre.

The Coalition was shattered, the northern territory was conquered, and Sol was there.

The man who had carved through armies with an offhand shrug, who had laid her bare and uncovered every hidden, trembling part of her body and soul under the willows, was an anchor strong enough to hold up the sky itself.

With him standing at the gate, her daughter was safe. Her people were safe. The dawn she had bled thirty winters to see would still belong to them, even if her own eyes never opened to witness it.

I don’t have to carry the mountain alone anymore, she realized with a quiet, peaceful ache.

For the first time in her life, the crushing burden of the Veynar didn’t rest solely on her bruised shoulders. Sol was there. Kira would be protected.

The northern territory belonged to them now, and Sol would never let anyone take it back. She could let go knowing that the people she bled for would survive.

The thought brought a fleeting, peaceful resignation.

She could let go. She could accept her fate and sleep. The long, exhausting wars she had waged since she was seven winters old would finally be over.

...Except she was Veylara.

The moment the idea of submission settled in her chest, the thought of lying down quietly and letting the sky step on her, it turned into bitter, scalding poison.

She had clawed her way out of the mud with broken fingernails. She had stood alone, butchering rivals twice her size until the dirt turned red, dragging an entire fractured clan onto her back through sheer, stubborn will.

She had spent thirty winters refusing to kneel to warlords, to elders, or to the bitter frost of the northern peaks.

To surrender now? To lie down like a beaten cur just because some invisible, rotting decree in the clouds declared she wasn’t allowed to climb?

Just when she had broken every enemy in the north? Just when she had finally tasted true life, holding a man she actually loved and wanted with every fiber of her being?

Fuck the heavens.

She couldn’t help saying the words.

The crude phrase Sol had just taught her and she had heard him mutter a few times.

The peaceful resignation in her chest shattered into violent, defiant kindling.

Her sapphire eyes, half-blinded with blood, snapped wide open, blazing with a terrifying, unyielding fire.

Her teeth clenched tight enough to splinter the enamel, and with the very last ember of her soul, inch by bloody inch, she forced her trembling head upward against the falling sky.

If this ancient, rotten realm wanted to execute the Warchief of the Veynar, she would make it break its own hands on her bones. Death or ascension, she would meet it with her chin lifted and her fangs bared.

...

On the other hand, before Sol could formulate a single thought about home, about Ossari tribe, or about the artifact’s recovery, Orphos reacted to the descending malice crushing Veylara.

To an artifact that was older than law itself... forged before the universe even established its foundations, an artifact that represented the absolute authority to bypass every binding and decree in existence... the arrogant heavenly restriction pressing down on its bearer’s woman was nothing less than a direct, insulting provocation.

SHING!

A blinding flare of black-and-gold light erupted straight out of Sol’s forehead.

Instead of manifesting as a physical object. It erupted as an ethereal, four-pointed phantom of black-and-gold light, expanding instantly until it hung suspended over the entire clearing, casting a colossal, primordial shadow over the willows, the shattered pond, and the shattered ground beneath its shadow.