Velka's POV
The silence was unbearable.
Not the comforting kind that wrapped itself around your shoulders like a cloak after a long day but the other kind. The hollow, echoing silence of a sealed tomb. The kind that settled beneath your skin and whispered, This is where the forgotten rot.
The magical cell pulsed faintly around me, etched with vampiric runes that buzzed like angry flies just beyond understanding. I'd stopped trying to decipher them after the first hour. The magic that held me here was too ancient, too foreign. Older than me, older than Aria, maybe older than the throne I had seen shatter in the mirror. It didn't hum with life it groaned with memory.
And I was losing my mind.
I paced, again, for the twelfth time or the hundredth. It was hard to keep track. The light in the room didn't shift. There was no sun, no moon, no window. Just me and the pulsing glass walls and the echo of Aria's smirk carved into my memory.
How dare she.
