Chapter 48: Yara Borealis (1)
Yara pressed one hand against her side and felt warm blood slip between her fingers. For a moment, she only stood there and breathed.
The alley behind the market district of Exodus lay narrow and damp, boxed in old stone walls slick with night mist and soot. Water dripped somewhere further in. Rotting crates leaned against one wall. A stray cat, half-starved and clever enough to sense danger, stared at her from atop a broken barrel before vanishing into the dark.
Yara let out a slow breath through her nose. It hurts...
The cut on her side burned, the scorched flesh on her arm pulsed hot under the half-melted remains of her gauntlet. A thinner wound stretched across her chest where the dagger had found her once, then found her again where it had no right to. She could still smell herself. Burned fabric, burned skin, and blood.
How disgusting...
She lowered her hand and looked at the red blood glistening on her fingers.
This was not how things should have ended. She had walked into the throne room ready to harvest their ripped hearts. Instead, she had left it wounded. Because of Misha.
Misha...
Yara’s eyes narrowed with full, bitter hatred.
That soft-faced liar...
That clumsy, hesitant, late-arrival outsider who looked at people too directly and trusted far too easily.
A 2-star, Yara had thought at first.
She was useful only because the group needed one more body after Kylo had left them.
Misha was useful for the team since she was soft enough to round out the others, fragile enough to deepen the bonds between members. She was just a little creature to protect.
Yara almost laughed now, though that came out carried no humor.
How irritating...
She eased back against the wall and tilted her head just enough for the cold stone to touch her skin. The chill helped, it kept the pain sharp instead of wild.
Exodus murmured beyond the alley mouth. Distant footsteps, a cart wheel, and laughter from some tavern where people still had the luxury of pretending tomorrow would resemble today. Yara listened without actually listening.
Her mind had already turned inward, backward all the way to Gilead.
Yara Borealis was born on the 41st floor, where people spoke of bloodlines with the same reverence others reserved for gods.
In Gilead, power did not belong to the person, it belonged to the family first, to the blood before the bone. A child’s future began long before they did.
The First Generation, the ones summoned from outside of the Tower, received the only real choice since they selected their awakened abilities. Everyone after them, those who were born within the Tower, inherited their parent’s ability if they were lucky enough to inherit anything at all.
That was the rule of the Tower, one of many.
The Borealis family never allowed weak blood. Cryomancy ran through their line with the cold certainty of winter returning each year. Her father had wielded it, and the estate reflected that legacy everywhere, from old weapons carved with frozen sigils to the stern portraits of their family.
She had never failed them. That was the truth of her childhood.
Some of her siblings cried, some stumbled, others competed for scraps of praise like starving dogs circling a table. Yara simply stood above them, despite being the youngest of 12 children. Not all of her siblings awakened. Some turned out ordinary, lowly, humans with nothing. They faded quickly from relevance.
Yara inherited the best of her parents’ lines.
Her father carried cryomancy. As for her mother? She possessed a rare recovery-type ability known as Vital Conversion. It was a gift that allowed her to absorb vitality from organic matter and turn it into healing, and, under the right conditions, steal and assimilate fragments of another person’s ability just by touching. Yara did not inherit that skill directly since the stronger star always devoured the lesser one.
People called her gifted, her mother called her useful, and her father called her inevitable. Yara preferred her mother’s version. Useful things had purpose. Useful things did not need love.
The Borealis family held power in Gilead, though not for the reasons most people believed. Nobility, wealth, old influence, those were just pretty lies.
Behind them stood the real inheritance. Her family belonged to the Blessed Garden, a name Yara had always despised because it sounded delicate when it should have sounded rotten.
The Blessed Garden cultivated people. They searched for promising awakeners, fed them, protected them, guided them, nurtured their talents and attachments and fears, then harvested their hearts when those hearts had matured into the proper state.
Some hearts grew dense under devotion, others sweetened under longing. Grief sharpened them, fear and dependence made them stable. The results could be refined into methods of artificial awakening for those born with no gift of their own.
That was the family business.
Yara had never cared for drama. Her family taught her patience, how to smile at the right moments, how to listen without caring, and how to offer comfort she did not mean and loyalty she never intended to keep. People loved kind women. They trusted them, confessed to them, and leaned toward them without noticing the knife waiting under the sleeve.
So Yara learned to become necessary. She did not need affection, she only needed access.
When she descended to Genesis and entered the Academy, she did not come looking for friendship. She came searching for stock.
The city disappointed her almost immediately. Genesis overflowed with weaklings.
So many of them came begging to join strong guilds. Many have tried joining Skyreach after Kylo left only to fail the moment Gerbaut stood in front of them for testing.
Gerbaut.
Her lips curved faintly at the thought.
He had been one of her better finds. Quiet men always looked harder to cultivate from the outside. Most people misunderstood silence. They thought it meant emptiness or indifference.
Gerbaut had been neither. He carried responsibility the way others carried scars. Men like that had no interest in lust. She saw that early and set the method aside. Lust would have cheapened the process. No, Gerbaut required burden, the slow torture of failing to protect what he had accepted as his own.
He had once attached himself to a younger student at the Academy. A freshman who was eager, devoted, and annoyingly dependent.
That part had almost been convenient. Remove the student, wound the protector, and let the guilt settle. That had been the beginning.
Afterward, Gebaut carried that regret in him. He never showed it openly, Yara did not need him to. She only needed to know where it was.
Then Misha came along and stepped right into that empty place without even meaning to. It was surprising but she was what made Gerbaut’s heart ripened faster.