Small draft from my Dark Romantasy - The Price of Mercy
I’m drafting a dark romantasy and wanted to share a small excerpt from a later chapter.
Eldra (FMC) is walking through her home grove when she passes the place where her people bind themselves to one another—and realizes she may want something she has been taught to distrust.
Would this make you curious enough to keep reading?
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The binding arch stands in the center of the grove, dressed in fresh thread, blue and green and white caught through the leaves overhead. Two carved bowls sit empty on the table beneath it.
Everpine does bindings the way most human places do. At the throat.
They call them houseband. Metal if the house has coin. Leather if it does not. Some are plain enough to disappear against the skin. Some are jeweled and bright enough to catch every eye in a market. The person wearing it tells the town whose house they sleep under and what place they hold there. The head of the house wears a braided cord in return, usually at the wrist or beneath a sleeve where nobody notices it unless they are looking.
People always look at the throat first.
Vael calls them collars when it wants to be cruel.
I remember the girls who left for human husbands. They come back with bands around their throats, some of them smiling, some of them carrying children on their hips, all of them trying to act like the grove has not changed around them. Nobody refuses them at the market. Nobody tells them they cannot walk the old paths or pray beneath the ash.
But the greetings never last too long. The questions about their families come with eyes that linger on the band before they move on. Nobody calls them pets to their faces. Not usually.
They say it’s because human men don’t take elven women as equals. That they don’t even take their own women as equals. That a man who can fasten proof of his claim around a woman’s throat has already decided what she is.
My fingers find the hollow beneath my jaw before I mean them to.
Bare skin. My pulse, steady beneath it.
Maybe some of those girls are happy anyway. Maybe they love the men they chose. Vael doesn’t need them miserable to decide it knows better.
The thought of something resting there makes heat stir low in me before I can stop it. Not the band itself, maybe. The closeness of it. Someone standing near enough to fasten it around my throat, their fingers brushing my pulse as they did. A mark I had chosen. A thing I let the whole world see.
No more quiet looks between Soren and me. No more mothers smiling like they already knew the ending. No more wondering where I belonged.
The thought should feel like a trap.
Instead, for one ugly second, it feels like relief.
Vael likes to say its way is different. Cleaner.
Here, both people bring something that mattered before the other ever entered their life. A hunter gives the first string from the bow he made with his own hands. A healer gives the pendant she wore through the winter that nearly broke her. You choose what you would feel missing if it was gone. Then you put it in someone else’s hands and trust them to answer with something just as real.
It sounds like choice when the words are spoken beneath the arch.
Standing here with the bowls empty, I am not sure how different it feels when everyone already knows whose hands they expect you to fill it with.
I try to envision Soren and myself standing there. Both of us decorated in beautiful clothing reserved for special occasions. I wonder what he would bring, I wonder what he would find so valuable that he would place it into the bowl for me to keep. Something from his bow, probably. Something useful. Something the whole grove would recognize before he ever set it down.
The worst part is not knowing what they expect from me.
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IF you got this far let me know what you think!