The Gembound: The Price of Keeping Chapter 11: Chapter 10 — The Gem-Bound

Read chapter 11 of The Gembound: The Price of Keeping by Taliorn on NovelPedia.

Chapter 10 — The Gem-Bound She made it halfway up the stairs before her legs quit pretending. The world tilted. The hum in her chest surged all at once, slamming against her ribs from the inside. She fell hard against the stone steps. Pain arrived distant and dull, like she was feeling it through someone else's body. She stayed where she'd landed, trying to pull herself back together. Before, she'd been running on desperation and the thin edge of terror. Now the choice was made. The Gem was inside her. And her body finally understood what she'd done. The exhaustion hit like a wall collapsing. Her arms shook. Her legs wouldn't respond when she tried to move them. The cut in her palm throbbed—ugly, infected-feeling, clotted dark. No light came from it now, just the plain hurt of a wound worked too hard. The pulse that had shaken the temple lived in her chest, too deep to reach. Each breath wanted to come on its own rhythm, but the Gem corrected it. In, out, matching its tempo, not hers. She closed her eyes. That helped for maybe three seconds. Sleep pulled at her, heavy and dark and promising relief. She started to sink into it. Her thoughts went soft at the edges. Her body began to let go. The beat inside her chest tightened like a fist. She jerked awake, gasping. Her heart hammered double-time—her rhythm trying to restart, the Gem's rhythm never stopping. Every time she drifted toward unconsciousness, that second pulse yanked her back, sharp and insistent as a hand shaking her shoulder. She couldn't sleep. The thing inside her wouldn't let her. She was so tired. And it didn't matter. She understood it then, not as words, but as fact laid into flesh: She could go without sleep. She would not be allowed to rest. Rest was where bruises softened and bones remembered how to knit. Rest was where the patterns came back to a mind that had emptied them to live. Without rest, cuts stayed cuts unless she poured a bottle over them and called it medicine. Without rest, the cold that leapt at her command would remain a single bright knot and nothing more. You don’t fill a well by standing beside it. She turned her head toward the chamber below. The Scion filled the base of the stairs like a wingless dragon built for crushing rather than flight. Its body sat low and heavy: powerful shoulders, thick haunches, splayed talons gripping stone. Black-green scales armored its hide, each plate edged with faint fire as if it had been forged and set to cool. Its head—broad-jawed and reptilian—stretched nearly the width of the stairwell, easily large enough to swallow a man whole. A thick tail curved against the far wall, balancing the mass. Rows of teeth, too many and too regular, shone like carved crystal behind lips that never fully closed. What had been a lantern's blaze inside its chest now banked low behind the ribs, a bed of coals turned inward. It breathed. The sound filled the room the way surf fills a cove. When it was inhaled, the Gem in her chest warmed. When it exhaled, something under her sternum tightened and waited. “You’re… real now,” she said, because the mind liked labels when fear made it clumsy. It did not answer. The air between them thickened anyway. Its attention slid over her and through her, not like hatred—like need with very good manners. Under that great, careful hunger, she felt the new one that lived in her. The ache began as a small hollow under her ribs—a sign that space had once existed there. Soon, it evolved into a clean ache with its own rhythm. Neither food nor water could answer it, though her mouth filled and her body, the old animal, craved both. The ache kept the Gem’s count—that alone made it seem reasonable. Her fingers found her belly and pressed as if she could argue with emptiness by pointing to it. “I need to rest,” she said. The stone gave her voice back quieter. “If I don’t rest, I can’t—” She stopped, because the word she needed felt different. Can’t what? Cast spells? Shape patterns? Summon gifts? The