“Protect me?” A younger Zeriel—rawer, less broken, but no less angry in this moment—paces before her, shirtless, the muscles in his back rippling beneath the sweep of dark, formidable wings half-spread in agitation. “By meeting with him? By listening to his poison?”
“Blaise promised he could secure your family’s name,” she pleads, taking a step toward him. “He said he had proof. That he could expose his own father if I helped him.”
“He used you!” Zeriel shouts. “He fed you lies, Celisse, and you swallowed them whole because you refuse to see the viper he is!”
The scene fractures, the bond between us a conduit for his agony. I feel every shard of it. His fury, his terror for her, and the crushing weight of his… love. A desperate, drowning thing.
Another memory slices into me.The same room, but now it’s drowned in shadow, wreckage scattered across the floor. Zeriel is on his knees, arms wrapped around Celisse’s body as if he could will her back. Her flowing hair is matted dark with blood, her glassy eyes staring past him into nothing. An ornate dagger glints beside her, obscene in its stillness.
From the doorway, Blaise’s voice coils into the ruin, low, silken.
“You could dress it up as suicide,” he whispers. “But who would believe her hand held that blade? Better, perhaps, to leave her to the river—let them whisper she drowned of shame. The story doesn’t matter, Caelith. Only the truth does.”
He leans into the words like a knife twist.
“Remember what those poets say about men like you? That you're cursed to destroy what you cherish most. I used to think that was just pretty words. But here we are… They’ll call her a traitor’s whore, and you her executioner. You should’ve listened, Zeriel—could’ve spared yourself the scars.”
Zeriel’s grief detonates through the bond, a black hole collapsing inward, dragging me with it. My breath catches, sharp and panicked, as if the air itself has been stolen from my lungs. I clutch my chest, fighting to breathe against the weight pressing down.
Lithborn emotions are like no other—vast, relentless. They feel too deeply, and the walls they raise are brutal, crushing things, grinding away every softness until only a weapon remains.
Leave my head.The command is a jagged, broken thing, choked with a pain so profound it’s a wonder he can still stand.
I stumble, clutching the stone railing, the phantom grief clinging to me like a shroud.
Temple, please stop,I think desperately.This is counterproductive. We have enough to contend with already.
But the temple doesn’t relent. It seethes as though its very stones rage against the lies they’ve been forced to witness.
We stagger onto a landing, a circular chamber where the stairs split. Blaise is gone, dissolved into shadow, but several otherchampions are with us now, panting, their faces drained. Rook Fenvale grips the wall, knuckles bone-white. Even Raine Selwyn’s composure falters, disturbance flickering in her eyes.
Zeriel drags himself upright, Blaise’s absence igniting a cold, merciless fire in him.
He takes the left staircase without a word, a hunter catching a scent. The grief in him has crystallized into something harder, sharper: a promise of retribution. The thought is so clear, so absolute, it rings through me like a struck bell.He won’t get away.
I follow, scrambling up worn stone steps, the others a desperate clatter of armor and frantic footsteps behind us. The temple—or whatever is attempting to control it—seems to sense our renewed purpose. The assault shifts from memory back to matter. The stone carvings along the walls begin to move. A winged beast cracks itself free from the wall, its body like a stag’s but armored in living stone, its head an owl’s skull crowned with curling antlers. Eyes of molten amber blaze in its sockets, predatory and fae-bright.
It lunges for the nearest target, Damiar Korren. The mountain fae lets out a bellow of rage and, with a brutal shove, sends the ward of Kayan Hallowen, Champion of the Central Valleys, stumbling directly into the creature’s path. The stone beak clamps down with a sickening crunch of bone and a single, choked-off scream. The horror of another death clamps my chest, but Damiar doesn’t break stride, using the man’s death as a stepping stone.
Kayan curses in rage, his snarl cutting across the chaos. “You already threw your own to the reavers, Korren—now you steal mine?!”
The staircase itself begins to unravel. My heart slams into my throat as sections of stone fall away into the darkness below, leaving yawning gaps. Zeriel clears a chasm five feet wide with a powerful leap, his focus locked on the path ahead. I follow, my boots skidding on the landing, the drop a dizzying blur.
This isn’t a race, it’s a culling.My thought is a ragged edge ofpanic as I hear the traces of the noise of the crowd from outside.We’re a spectacle trapped in a box.
Let’s try dropping the trapped part,Zeriel sends back, his resolve a wall against the chaos.
The air itself becomes a weapon. Arcs of violet energy, raw and unstable, begin to lash out from the walls, hissing as they tear through the space between us.
“Behind the pillar!” Raine Selwyn shouts, pulling her ward—a young woman with wide, startled eyes—into cover. But the energy is unpredictable. A bolt ricochets off the archway and slams into the girl’s chest. Her body convulses, a strangled breath escaping, before she crumples bonelessly to the floor. The acrid smell of charred flesh surges in the air. Raine stares at the girl, her face for a single, stark moment utterly broken.
Then the expression is gone, shuttered behind a mask of cold fury. The survivors press on, the pack thinned, the desperation honed to a razor’s edge. Somewhere beyond the stone, the crowd roars—cheering, damning. The emperor won’t waste a moment of it.
And I’ll be lucky if I get out of this alive.
We burst through an archway at the top of the stairs and suddenly emerge onto a wide, windswept parapet high on the temple’s exterior. Zeriel has led us outside.
We are fully exposed, the arena a dark bowl in the distance, its roar carrying faint but unmistakable through the evening air. Overhead, imperial dragons drift so near I can make out the gilded edges of the palanquins strapped to their backs. This is the stage Pellvorn wanted.The emperor wanted.
