EPILOGUE

  Before him lay the remnants of another failed experiment. Subjects who had been promised power but instead had broken, shattered like brittle glass against the unforgiving sigil magic. They had screamed, raved, begged for mercy, and in the end, all that remained was twisted flesh and fractured minds. Disappointments. Weakness incarnate.

  Vaelric stood amid the ruin, motionless, fists clenched so tightly his knuckles bled. The air still crackled with leftover energy, wild, unstable, hers. His eyes, ringed with sleepless shadows, burned with a volatile mix of fury and something far more dangerous: pride corrupted by obsession.

  She had escaped.

  Vex, the Hollow Thread, his greatest success, his unholy masterpiece, his daughter. The living sigil forged from ruin and precision. The one who was supposed to obey. Who was meant to stand at his side and end the war in his name.

  But she had run. And worse, chosen to run.

  The Eradicate ritual, meant to erase her memories and bind her loyalty, had instead unraveled her mind and unleashed something far more unpredictable. She had not just survived it. She had evolved.

  He had seen the signs. The flickers of defiance behind her eyes. The way her power pulsed just beyond his control. He should have locked her tighter, stripped her of choice, carved the will from her completely. But he hadn’t. He couldn’t.

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  Some part of him, the fractured part that called itself father, had wanted her to choose him.

  He let her believe she had a choice. A leash made of illusion and blood. Not out of mercy, but pride. Because he loved her in the only way he knew how—possessive, obsessive, and cruel.

  And now she was gone.

  “I sacrificed everything for you,” he whispered, voice raw. “Every failed experiment, every broken soul, all to make you perfect. And you chose to leave my side.”

  His words echoed, unanswered, swallowed by the silence of the chamber. His gaze swept over the shattered sigils, the claw marks scorched into stone. Power like that should not exist, could not, and yet she wielded it now, raw and unhoned. A storm wearing skin.

  “I made you,” he said, louder this time. “You are what they all failed to become.”

  He took a slow breath, letting his rage simmer beneath the surface, giving way to something colder. More patient. He tilted his head, just slightly, as if he were listening for her presence in the silence. And in the quiet, his thoughts stretched outward.

  Hear me, he thought. Feel me. You are still mine.

  He hoped she could sense it, his silent demands carried on the current of blood-bound magic. That somewhere in the broken maze of her mind, she still heard his voice whispering through the cracks.

  Outside, the world burned with war. Kingdoms tore each other apart in pursuit of control over the sigils, over power. But none of them knew that the true weapon had just slipped free of its cage.

  Vaelric’s expression darkened. A storm was coming.

  And he would be the one to either harness it,

  or end it.