The gnawing hunger was a blunt, persistent ache, a reminder that the grimoire's lessons were theoretical until she could practice them. The stolen sips of Kaelan's residual Echoes from the books and furniture were a temporary stopgap, like drinking seawater. The Relic needed a real source. Her eyes, bleary from reading the shifting, silvery script, scanned the spartan room. There was nothing here of sufficient age or emotional weight, nothing that had soaked in the Aethel for centuries. It was all too new, too clean, too much him.
Her gaze fell upon the single, severe armchair in the seating area. It was different from the sofa. Older. The oxblood leather was worn smooth in places, the brass tacks along its arms were slightly tarnished. It held a gravity the other pieces lacked. It was his chair. The one he inhabited. The Echo from it would be stronger, more recent, more potent.
It was a violation. She knew it. To deliberately draw from an object so intimately tied to him was to cross a line far more profound than grazing from his bookshelf. It was an intimacy, a psychic trespass. But the hunger twisted in her gut, a sharp, demanding spasm. The grimoire's first lesson on selective feeding echoed in her mind. She needed to learn. She needed to control the ache before it controlled her.
Hesitantly, she rose and crossed the room. The air around the chair felt different colder, denser. She knelt before it, her hands hovering just above the worn arms. She could feel the Echo radiating from it even without touch, a low thrum of contained power and profound weariness. Taking a steadying breath, she reached out and laid her palms flat on the cool, smooth leather.
The world did not dissolve into a chaotic vision. Instead, it focused, sharpened. She was not bombarded with a lifetime of memories, but with a single, recurring sensation. It was the feeling of sitting in this exact spot, in the deep, profound quiet of the refuge. But the silence wasn't empty. It was a practiced, hard-won stillness, a conscious suppression of the storm that raged within. She felt the ghost of a weight in the chair his weight and the immense, tectonic pressure of his will holding the Shade at bay. She felt the texture of his solitude, not as self-pity, but as a fundamental, accepted fact of existence, as immutable as the rock walls. And beneath it all, a thread of something else, so faint she almost missed it: a memory of the view from a high place, the smell of salt and pine, and a feeling of… freedom. A memory from a time before.
It was not the feast of agony she had feared. It was a portrait of endurance. The Relic drank it in, the clean, powerful energy of his disciplined will. The gnawing hunger receded, replaced by a warm, steady hum of sustenance. It was more satisfying than any of the scattered Echoes she had sampled before. It was coherent. Potent.
And then, she felt it. A shift. A presence.
It was like a spider feeling the faintest tremor on the far end of its web. A consciousness, vast and dark and intricately attuned to its own domain, had noticed a disturbance. She had not just consumed a passive Echo; she had actively drawn energy from an object saturated with his essence. She had plucked a string, and the instrument had felt it.
In the silence of the refuge, the door to his room opened.
Kaelan stood in the doorway, his form silhouetted against the dim light from his chamber. He had not changed, but he seemed… more present. The storm in his eyes was a visible, churning force. He didn't look angry. He looked… assessed. As if a complex calculation had just been confirmed.
Elara snatched her hands back from the chair as if burned, scrambling to her feet. Her heart hammered against her ribs, a frantic, guilty rhythm. She had been caught. Not in a malicious act, but in an intimate one.
He didn't move from the doorway. His gaze swept from her face, down to the chair, and back again. The silence stretched, thick and charged.
"Did it sate you?" he asked, his voice dangerously soft.
She could only nod, her throat too tight for words.
He took a single, slow step into the main chamber. "The hunger. The grimoire speaks of it, does it not? The need to feed."
Another mute nod.
"Understand this, Elara Vayne," he said, his eyes holding hers, pinning her in place. "You may feed from the echoes in this place. The books. The walls. Even this chair." He gestured with a slight tilt of his chin. "But know that when you do, you are not just consuming energy. You are reading a text I have written with my life. You are walking in my footsteps. There is a cost to that knowledge."
He was not forbidding her. He was warning her. He was telling her that every time she sated her hunger this way, she would be forging a connection, building a bridge between their souls. She would be learning him, and in doing so, giving him a measure of understanding over her.
"It was that or…" she trailed off, unable to finish the thought. Or crave the source directly. Or crave you.
He understood. A flicker of something unreadable crossed his face. "I know," was all he said.
He stood there for a moment longer, a silent sentinel acknowledging the new, unspoken term of their pact. Then, without another word, he turned and retreated back into his room, closing the door behind him.
Elara stood alone, trembling, the warmth of the energy she had consumed now feeling like a brand. She had taken a thread from the tapestry of his solitude, and in doing so, had woven herself into its pattern. The hunger was gone, but she felt more vulnerable than ever. She had learned to feed, but the lesson had come with a terrifying price: the realization that her jailer and her sustenance were now one and the same.