C A L L E N

I wake to the echo of her name still ringing in my veins.
Vesper.
It is carved into bone like a frequency I cannot shut off.

The room is black but not quiet. The walls hum. Every nail, every windowpane vibrates with the aftershock of what she did. The frost has not melted; it crawls backward across the glass, forming threads that twitch like veins trying to find a heartbeat. Mine.
The mark on my forearm burns beneath my skin, bright enough that I can see its light through my sleeve.

She called to the bell, and it answered through me.

It starts slow, a pulse under my ribs. Then the pain folds in on itself, heat and cold trading places until I cannot tell which is killing me.
The bell’s tone hides inside the sound of my breathing, too loud, too near.

I push off the bed, bare feet on cold floorboards, trying to breathe past the noise. The mirror across the room fogs from nothing. Words flicker and vanish before I can read them.
The voices rise, overlapping, layered, male and female, centuries apart. All saying the same word.

Anchor.

My vision whites out. I taste iron. The mark on my arm splits light like cracked glass. For a heartbeat I see Lira’s face behind my eyes, her lips moving with the same word.

Anchor.

The world jerks sideways.

Stone walls. Torch smoke. The bell is still molten, swinging above a circle of twelve. One man kneels in chains, my blood, the first Roe. His name trembles on the ledger’s fresh page, half-written, half-erased. When the hammer falls on the bell, the sound does not end. It threads into him, silver wire through flesh.

He screams once, but no one helps. The ledger keeper murmurs, “The debt is incomplete. The vessel is uncollected.”

The bell cools. The chain sears. The light running through him, through me, stops halfway. Someone drags him from the circle and leaves him breathing when he should not be. Their mistake became my inheritance.

When his eyes open, I hear my own voice echo through him.
If one stays unclaimed, the toll must find another way.

The flash sears out. I hit the floor, gasping.

The dorm window is open now. I do not remember opening it. Fog slides through the crack, thick as breath. It curls toward the bed, searching, tasting the air. When it reaches me, it hesitates.
Static bites the edge of my mark. The fog shivers and pulls back, coiling near the door instead.

It is afraid.

The whisper that follows is not a sound but a pulse. Lira.
Her name beats through my wrist like a second pulse. My scar flashes once, then again, in time with breathing that is not mine.

Somewhere across campus, she is still awake. The bond is syncing.

The fog crowds the ceiling, trying to escape the resonance bleeding out of me. Crows tap against the window, tink tink tink, counting down something I cannot yet name.

The mark drags me out of the dorm like it is pulling me by an invisible thread.
Every step down the hall makes the air heavier, fog leaking under the baseboards in long fingers. The hum of the bell matches my pulse. I cannot tell which started first.

By the time I reach the stairwell, the world narrows to light and breath. The scar under my sleeve sears white-hot. My knees hit the tile.
I choke on air that tastes like frost and iron, the inside of the bell itself.

Crows cluster on the landing railing, black feathers quivering. One taps its beak. Another answer. The sound skips through my skull like a countdown.
I press my palm to the wall for balance. Frost spreads under my hand, thin veins crawling outward in the shape of a heartbeat.

The bond wants something, not pain, not blood, something else. Her.
Lira’s breath fills my lungs for half a second before darkness tilts the world sideways.

Her voice reaches me first.
“Callen?”

The fog reacts like it knows her name, swirling low and fast before it breaks apart around her. The air itself bends away from her shape, but I feel it instead, pulled straight into my skin.

She is kneeling beside me, hair damp from the fog, eyes too bright. Her hand hesitates an inch from mine. “You are burning up.”

When she touches my forearm, the mark flares open. A vein of blue-white light streaks across both of us, a pulse syncing perfectly with her inhale.
My breath stutters. She does not pull back.

The glow flickers between us, like the bell is timing itself to her heartbeat.
For a moment, I can feel her, every tremor, every thread of fear, all of it weaving into me.

“Your pulse,” she whispers. “It’s matching mine.”

“It’s not just a bond,” I manage. “It’s a tether.”

Her gaze snaps up. “A tether to what?”

“To you.”

The light between us steadies. I should pull away. I don’t.
The bond feels like falling through the same note together, deeper than breath.

Something in the fog screams, high-pitched and mechanical, before tearing itself apart against the walls. The choir loft windows rattle. The bell’s hum goes silent.

Lira’s fingers tighten on my wrist, panic threading through the tether. “You’re bleeding,” she says, voice shaking.

I glance down. The mark’s edges are split, not with blood but with frost-light seeping out. It stains the floor like ghost ink.

“Callen..”

“I’m fine.” The lie tastes like metal. “It’s worse for you to touch it.”

She doesn’t move her hand.

There is a sound from the hall, the soft click of a shoe against wood.
Lira does not hear it. She is still holding me steady, breathing shallow. But I do.

Ezra stands at the end of the corridor, half-shadowed in the flickering emergency light. His glasses catch the glow, but his eyes do not. The resonance bends around him, refusing to be seen.
He is watching the tether glow between us, watching it sync to her heartbeat.

He looks like someone who just saw his reflection disappear.

For a long second, none of us move. The silence swells until I can hear the bell tone hiding underneath it, faint and constant, a note only I seem to hear.

Lira’s focus is still on me, her hand trembling over the mark. The light dims as her breath slows, our sync loosening. The air steadies.

That is when Ezra shifts. Just one step back, like the ground under him cracked. His hand finds the wall, fingers curling against the frost veins spreading there.
He is not angry, not yet. Just hollow.

The look he gives me is not hatred. It is surrender, the kind that hurts worse.

Then he turns away. The fog parts around him like it does not even see him.

Lira does not notice him leaving but I do.
Every step he takes down the hall sounds like a door closing, and for once I do not know which of us it is shutting out.

The mark on my arm pulses once, then again, harder, and the world fractures open.
I am not in the loft anymore. I am standing in the circle my ancestor died in.

The bell is whole this time, dark metal gleaming like oil. A forge hums beneath it, molten veins crawling up the sides. The air smells like iron and salt.
Twelve figures surround the forge, cloaked and faceless, hands linked. Frost crawls up their boots, spreading from a bowl of blood in the center.

And then I see her.
Not Lira, someone older. Same eyes, same voice when she sings.
Her song is not melody, it is command. The bell vibrates to her pitch. My ancestor kneels before her, bleeding from the wrist, mouth open in prayer or apology.

He looks up, directly at me.
“You are what’s left of me,” he says, though his mouth does not move. “The bond that never broke.”

The air around us ripples. The woman’s song cracks into two notes, hers and Lira’s, overlapping.
The frost lines between their bodies glow like a web, binding them together until the whole forge shudders.

I understand it now.
The tether was not an accident. The first Roe was bound to the first Vesper. One to carry the debt, one to channel it. Every generation after, the bond reforming stronger, until us.

Until her.

The scene folds in on itself, light bleeding white. The word Anchor flashes once in the air, then burns away to ash.

I wake to Lira’s hand on my face.

Her touch steadies me, just enough to breathe. The fog has gone still again, a living thing watching from the corners.
My pulse hammers against hers, the glow on my arm dimming and brightening in sync with her chest rising and falling.

“You’re scaring me,” she whispers. “What did you see?”

“Everything,” I manage. “The first bond. The first sacrifice.”

She shakes her head. “You’re talking nonsense.”

“It was my blood. My family’s debt. I was supposed to die with that first toll. They dragged me there, but the bell didn’t take me.”
I swallow hard, feeling the mark throb again. “It tethered me instead. Half alive, half collected. That’s why I feel it before it rings. That’s why it wants you now.”

The fog swells behind her, pressing against the stained glass until cracks vein through the colored panes. The air thickens, trembling with the echo of the bell that hasn’t rung yet.

“Callen,” she says, soft and scared. “Tell me this isn’t..”

The mark flares bright, interrupting her. A single pulse shoots between us, heat and light twisting together until I can barely see her outline. Her hair lifts in the current.
Her breath catches, and the glow matches it perfectly.

The bell hums once in the distance, low and final. The glass shatters outward like it is exhaling.

I pull her closer without thinking, shielding her from falling shards.
The bond burns down to the bone. I can feel it taking shape, sealing something that should not exist.

My voice sounds far away when it finally comes out.
“If the bell takes her,” I whisper, “I go with her.”

The fog recoils at the words, ripping backward like the room itself just flinched.
Then silence.

Just her heartbeat, steady under my hand, and the faint echo of mine answering it.