Chapter 141


    Digging into the Soulbond


    Rowan stood alone in the great hall of his grandfather’s keep. But it was different… distorted—a warped dreamscape that he recognized and yet did not. Instead of the heavy tapestries bearing symbols of the Garron family’s battles and triumphs, the walls were lined with mirrors.


    Each mirror flickered with shifting images, not of heroes or victories, but of Rowan himself, a mixture of faces both younger and older than he currently was. Each reflection carried a subtle change in his face—moments of joy, moments of rage, others of quiet resignation. And every reflection felt like a judgement, a thousand pairs of his own eyes bearing down on him.


    At the very back of the hall was Duke Garron’s throne, a fine thing of lacquered wood. To Rowan it would always belong to Bodh Garron. Rowan’s grandfather had been the Arch-Duke of Rubane for three terms. Thirty three years. Longer than Rowan had been alive, the man had ruled all of Rubane, chosen by other Duke’s three times.


    A voice cut through the silence.


    “What’s he doing here? He’s no heir to this place.” The words echoed from a figure standing by the throne. His grandfather stood there, dressed in full noble regalia, casting a long shadow down the hall. Rowan’s father, Taran, stood beside him, dressed simply in a hunter’s garb. There was a distance between them, even in this half-formed dream.


    Rowan’s father looked at him with a kind of weary warmth.


    “You don’t need this place,” Taran said.


    There was a large shadow moving beyond the windows. Something huge and fierce trying to find its way inside.


    Rowan’s attention was caught by a reflection in one mirror that shifted. He saw in it his own face hardening, brow creased, as he looked up towards his grandfather.


    “Too much of a savage and not enough of a Garron!” Bodh’s voice boomed out across the hall. “A Garron’s life is not his own. It belongs to the family, to the people. He is bound by it, like it or not.”


    The mirrors around him whispered his own failures, doubts, and the words he’d never said aloud. Fragments of Rowan''s life played out in disjointed scenes on the mirrors.


    In one, he was a boy, standing outside the great hall while the nobility gathered inside. He wore a simple but fine tunic, hands dirtied from a day spent playing in the gardens around the keep with his brother.


    The other children his age, dressed in silk and brocade, looked down their noses at him. A sneering young Boern, already taller and heavier, shoved him aside with a laugh. “You smell like horse,” Boern scoffed. The other children joined in, laughter echoing through the halls.


    Rowan turned away from that mirror, stepping toward another. He and his father walked side by side through a dense pine forest. His father was quiet, observant, showing him how to follow a trail, how to know the weather by the taste of the wind.


    Rowan felt something here he’d never felt within the stone walls of the keep… belonging. It was as if the forest that had claimed him, named him its own.


    The next mirror shifted, and he saw himself older, dressed formally and standing beside a young woman with a shy smile. Marie. He could remember her kindness, her gentleness, and his relief at finding someone who seemed untouched by the trappings of nobility. Yet, even on the day of their wedding, he’d felt a dull ache, a sense that something was missing. A whisper within him thaT told him he would never love her as a husband should. He’d smiled, said the vows, taken her hand in his. But he knew.


    The memory fragmented, and he saw Marie holding their firstborn son, the baby’s wails piercing through him as he stood awkwardly by her side. He knew he should feel something deeper… a bond, but it was as if a wall lay between them.


    He watched as Marie cooed to their son, her face softening, glowing with a love he couldn’t mirror. Marie was overjoyed, holding the love she’d sought from Rowan. But an emptiness ate away at him. Rowan had thrown himself into work, taking longer contracts, spending more and more days away from Garronforn.


    “Empty,” Rowan heard his own voice coming from the mirror.


    More scenes flickered through the mirrors—the passing of his grandfather, the formalities of the funeral, and then Boern’s ascendance to Duke. Rowan had stood there, stone-faced, as Boern sat upon that throne. He looked to that throne now, half expecting to see Boern upon it but it lay empty.


    He saw the battles in Balfold against the rakmen, Rowan as a young man and already making a name for himself as a warrior. Making the memory of my grandfather proud. Tanlor joined him near the end, now old enough to also serve. But there was a distance between the brothers that had only grown wider.


    Then the scene shifted as Rowan stood against his own Rubanian kin when Boern’s greed had turned to fighting Duke River’s men for the scorched remains of the Balfold lands. Rowan had fought because he had been commanded to, but the disdain grew in him like a rot. He’d watched as Boern rallied his men into frenzy, uncaring of the bloodshed. Boern himself charging into battle with a great battleaxe. The sight of Boern slaughtering the men in his path sickened him. The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.


    The sight of Rowan himself doing the same sickened him more.


    “Monster.”


    He stepped toward another mirror, seeing himself returning to his family after each campaign. His boys growing from babes into toddlers, their faces changing with each absence, while he’d become a stranger to them.


    Each return felt colder, each embrace more hollow. In time, he’d moved them into the city, away from the keep, telling himself it was for their safety. But that wasn’t the reason. He needed the distance, a buffer from the duties that had chafed him raw.


    The creature outside began to bat at the windows like a howling wind.


    The next mirror rippled into view, revealing a scene in the training yard in the keep. Boern stood over a young Tanlor, bloodied and bruised. Rowan, a little older, stood to the side, his fists clenched at his sides, heart hammering with fear.


    Boern had just thrown Tanlor to the ground and was sneering over him.


    “Your father’s nothing but a peasant,” Boern spat. “Both of you would do well to remember your place.”


    Young Tanlor staggered to his feet, his lip split.


    He lunged, landing a fist squarely on Boern’s jaw. Rowan felt a surge of shock and awe as he saw Boern stagger back. The young man spit a bloodied tooth from his mouth. The mixed look of terror and outrage on Boern’s face. Tanlor, nearly half Boern’s size, had stood his ground. Boern may have killed Tanlor that day if Bodh himself had not intervened.


    “Coward.”


    Rowan was filled with a familiar, bitter shame. He remembered feeling a twisted jealousy in that moment—envying his brother’s courage, where Rowan had stayed silent. He’d stood by and watched Boern’s cruelty, his authority unchecked, feeling every bit the coward he despised. That memory still stung—still throbbed in his gut like an old wound that had never healed.


    Rowan noted flashes in the other mirrors. Just glimpses of scenes he did not recognise. In one, he saw a flash of himself standing tall on the ramparts of a fortress, his armour battered and worn, his face older and lined with the scars of countless battles. His plate armour bearing a sigil Rowan had never seen before, yet somehow felt familiar. In another, he wore simple leathers and skinned the hide of a deer.


    As he moved to the final mirror, he saw himself and his father on a narrow path. His father was sickly, but had insisted on this last walk through the woods. Rowan tensed knowing what this memory was.


    “Your mother… she… the story that everyone tells about us.” Taran admitted, voice trembling. “It’s a lie.”


    Rowan’s world fractured in that instant, as the truth of his family shattered everything he’d ever believed. He’d built his life on the story of his parents'' love. Had worn his history like a cloak against the judgement of others.


    To learn it was all a lie—that he himself was the product of it—it broke him in ways he hadn’t known possible.


    The crack in his heart echoed in the mirror.


    As the spiderweb of fractures split the surface the scene shifted and he heard his mother’s precious voice as she hummed a low tune—a song she’d often sung to lull him and his brother to sleep.


    Rowan felt his heart catch, the sight of her an anchor in the swirling tide of memories.


    "Rowan, love," she murmured, looking up with that quiet, knowing smile. Her eyes, soft and kind, crinkled at the corners as they met his. "You’ve been in the woods again."


    Rowan looked down and could see that his fine garments were stained with dirt and leaves.


    “Aye, Mama,” he managed, as if he weren’t still just a boy with scraped knees and tousled hair, trying to hide the mischief he’d gotten into.


    “You and Tanlor both, always off running wild. My precious boys. Come here, let me look at you properly.”


    Rowan hesitated, a part of him afraid to move, afraid that if he took one step, the vision would shatter. His mother was still alive, still in Garronforn with the rest of his family. But this woman before him was the mother of his childhood. Before he’d become the man that he was. The disappointment. The coward. The murderer.


    He felt his eyes well with tears as he remembered a time when he’d last truly felt safe and loved.


    “Oh, my boy,” she said, her voice filled with a tenderness that cut through the years and miles that had hardened him.


    And then the mirrors shattered. All of them across the hall raining down shards.


    He could still see glimpses of scenes in the shards as they fell but these were strange and unfamiliar scenes and people.


    A tower rising from the sea, with a bridge of seaweed and coral arcing toward it.


    A warrior in ancient armour, his face obscured beneath a black helm of twisted iron, a blood-soaked battlefield, surrounded by the bodies.


    Enormous chunks of molten earth rising into the sky, the landscape a hellish nightmare.


    The memories flickered, fading as quickly as they’d appeared. Hundreds of them in a cascade that his mind couldn’t keep up. A convergence of lives, each one carried forward with the bond, all converging now in him.


    The shadows outside writhed, pressing harder against the windows, shaking the glass with their intensity. Rowan realised he now held a large axe in his hand. He gripped it tight, as the last fragments of the mirrors clattered to the floor.


    He stepped forward, the echo of his boots on the stone filling the now-silent hall. The spectres of his father and grandfather faded, their outlines dissolving like mist.


    “We see you Rowan Shrydan, of Garronforn. Rowan, of the Wild Places,” he looked back and saw the ageing ocelix warrior—Hralvek. The one that he’d spoken with in the forest.


    The hall was filled with dozens of figures. Some were human, some were aeth or ocelix, and some were races he’d never even known existed. One was a tall, broad-shouldered man with red hair, with threads of white in it, dressed in heavy furs and leathers. He looked oddly familiar to Rowan.


    “The choice is yours, Rowan,” Hralvek intoned.


    Outside, the creature thrashed, rattling the very walls with its fury. Dust and debris, falling from the rafters of the high ceiling. Rowan’s gaze fell on his grandfather’s throne.


    Rowan looked at the axe in his hands.


    He took a breath.


    Then raised the axe and swung.


    The blow split the timber with a sharp, resounding crack.


    The windows shattered in unison, shards raining through the hall. Hralvek—in his true form—burst inside, a whirlwind of red and gold, circling Rowan like a storm.


    Rowan took a deep breath, closing his eyes.


    He felt the heat of an intense fire burn through him, like he’d drawn too much heat from a topaz. He felt the fire sear at his skin and burn through him. But he did not resist, did not cry out. He let himself be consumed by the whirlwind, his identity dissolving and reforming in the heat and light.