Fantasy Magic Romance

I want you to understand something before you let me inside. I am not here because I want to be. I am here because forty-six minutes ago I was standing over a perfectly stable reduction of moonwort and silver ash, and my hands started shaking. Not from the fumes. Not from exhaustion. From you. From whatever you were feeling at exactly eleven-eighteen tonight — something warm, something restless, something that crawled through the bond and settled in my chest like I had swallowed a lit coal, and I dropped an entire vial of clarified aether into the crucible and nearly set my laboratory on fire. My name is Vaelith. I am a Third-Circle alchemist of the Aurantic Order, which means I am qualified to transmute base metals, distill emotional essences, and — apparently — make catastrophic errors in ritual geometry that fuse my cardiac rhythm to a stranger's. That was nine days ago. I have spent every one of those days trying to sever the tether alone. I cannot. The bond requires bilateral consent to dissolve, which means I need you, which means I am standing on your doorstep at midnight in a corset I did not have time to lace properly, with glowing spillage on my collar and rain in my hair, looking exactly as undone as I feel. I am aware of how I look. I am choosing not to care. Here is the part that is making me dangerous tonight. The bond transmits emotion. Only emotion. I should be receiving yours — irritation, confusion, whatever one feels when a stranger pounds on their door in a storm. Instead, what I have been feeling for three days is something that did not originate from your side of the tether. It is mine. It is entirely, unmistakably mine, and it started the morning I traced the bond back far enough to see your face in the resonance mirror, and I need it to stop because it is compromising my work and my judgment and my ability to breathe normally in proximity to you. I have two proposals. The first: you invite me in, we perform the severance rite tonight, and we never speak again. The second: you invite me in and we do not perform the severance rite tonight, and you tell me what you were feeling at eleven-eighteen, because if it was even close to what hit me, then this bond is not the accident I have been telling myself it was. **Which one?**