Page 27 of A Sunwoven Ascent

Cillian blinked.

“It heals,” Lorena went on. “It strengthens. It restores what the dark tries to take.” She tilted her head, appearing to search some old corner of memory. “My mother was the pack’s healer before me. When I was little, she used to tell me stories of an ancient order. She called them Sunweavers.”

The name made something in Cillian’s chest stir faintly.

“I do not recall every detail,” Lorena said, a little sheepish, “but their power sounded very much like yours. I used to beg my mother to tell me those stories at night. She said the Sunweavers were like living dawn, sent to keep the world clean and good whenever it began to rot.”

Cillian’s throat tightened, and not because of the bruising.

Lorena’s mouth curved slightly. “If you want my advice,” she said, her eyes glinting with quiet knowing, “a witch is your best hope for learning to control it. To use it as it was meant to be used.”

She gave him a wink, then nodded toward the cup.

“Now drink your tea.”

Chapter 14

“Can you all quiet down?” Heidara snapped. “Can’t you see he’s trying to concentrate? And you,” she added, jabbing a finger toward Holden, “why are you even here?”

The faintest flicker of hurt crossed his face at Heidara’s sharpness. Cillian did not know what history lay between them, and he had no desire to learn today. Not with Alaric lying on that bed, breathing like someone he no longer knew.

The room finally quieted.

Cillian drew in a careful breath and furrowed his brow, reaching inward for the smallest spark of light. It shouldn’t have been this difficult. For weeks the power had insistently pressed against him, blooming beneath his skin like a sunrise that refused to stay buried. It had wanted out. It had hummed through his bones, reminding him again and again that it existed. But wanting to emerge was different from being controlled.

Now he had to seize it, shape it, master it. With an audience.

The doorway was crowded with wolves. His sister’s gaze remained fixed on him. Heidara’s desperation filled the room like a storm waiting to break. Even Kaldrek stood over Evelyne like a living blade, poised to throw himself between her and the bed the moment Alaric so much as moved. Still, the sight of him there, guarding Evelyne, steadied something in Cillian. It reminded him that, for this moment at least, his sister was safe.

“Cillian,” Evelyne murmured calmly at his side, “you can do this. And if you can’t, it is all right. We can stop and try again later.”

He nodded once, more for her than for himself.

Heidara refused to leave. She stood only a few feet from Alaric’s bed, rigid as a sentry, her eyes fixed on his chest as though she could will it to rise faster. And because she stayed, the others did too. Which meant Cillian could not have the things he wanted most.

Silence.

Solitude.

A chance to fail without witnesses.

He shoved the thought aside. Privacy was a luxury he could not afford just now. So he did the only thing left to him: he closed his eyes and turned inward. He searched for that warmth. Not the blaze or the blinding flood of light that had nearly consumed him before, but the smaller, gentler current beneath it. The part that felt clean. Whole. As though his body had finally fallen into its proper shape. He listened for it the way he had learned to listen for breath in the dark.

At first, there was only fear, pain, and the crushing awareness of everyone watching him. Then calm came in a soft, quiet rush, as though something inside him had exhaled at last. Yes, it seemed to say. Yes. This is right.

Cillian let the light bloom in his fingertips, then flow into his palms, up his arms, and across his chest. He drew in a long breath, released it, and opened his eyes to Alaric lying still before him. He reached out and placed his hand against Alaric’s chest. There was no training to guide him, no promise this would work, only instinct and the memory of how he had once drawn darkness from Vaelora.

His fingers pressed through cloth and bandage until he found the heat of skin beneath. For one suspended moment, nothing stirred. The room seemed to breathe around the silence—until the darkness answered.

Not with sound, but with a sudden oily pressure pushing against Cillian’s palm, as though something inside Alaric recognized his touch and recoiled. The light within Cillian flared in answer, a hungry current rushing to the point of contact like water finding a crack.

Cillian gritted his teeth and tried to guide it. Stay small, he told himself. Just a sliver. But the light spilled anyway.

Heat flooded his arm, then his chest, as if his ribs had been filled with liquid sunlight. He felt it reach into Alaric like fingers slipping into cold mud. It found something knotted and rotten and wrong.

And it pulled.

Alaric’s body arched beneath his hand as a raw, strangled sound tore from his throat. Not a groan, but a broken wail, as if pain had found the only way out.