“Not this time.”
“That’s what you always say.”
We moved on. The tunnels grew warmer, the air thicker. My corruption responded to something ahead, spreading another inch with each step. Soon I’d be more monster than man.
Didn’t matter. Elle was ahead.
We encountered our first guards six hours into the journey. Nimor spotted them first—four Bloomguard patrolling a wider section of tunnel ahead.
“I can’t use corruption,” I said quietly. “It’ll flare like a signal fire. Alertevery guard in the Heartspire to exactly where we are.”
“Then we do it the old-fashioned way,” Sarnyx said, thorns extending. “Quick and silent.”
We set up an ambush in a narrow passage. When the guards rounded the corner, we were ready.
Sarnyx struck first, thorns piercing through armor gaps. Vashael’s poisons dropped two before they could scream. Nimor pulled one into shadow—I didn’t see what happened to him. Eltrien did something with his marks that made the last guard simply stop, frozen like a statue.
“Hide them,” I ordered.
We dragged the bodies into a side passage, covering them with loose stone. Not perfect, but maybe good enough.
“That was too easy,” Vashael said what we were all thinking.
“They weren’t expecting us this deep yet,” I replied. “That’ll change.”
We moved faster now, checking every surface for traps. Found three more binding circles, all disabled by Peeble. Found pressure plates that would collapse the ceiling. Found sections of floor that would drop into pit traps below.
And all the while, Elle’s pain pulsed through the bond. Constant. Relentless. A reminder of what was happening while we crawled through darkness.
Eight hours in, we stopped to rest in a chamber where the tunnel widened. I forced down food that tasted like ash.
“How much further?” Sarnyx asked while checking her thorns.
“Maybe halfway,” I guessed based on the bond strength. “But the second half will be harder.”
“How much harder?”
“Expect—”
The pain hit.
Not my pain—Elle’s, flooding through the bond with enough force to drop me to my knees. I felt my back arch, felt my throat try to scream, felt my marks burn like they were being carved fresh. But worse than the physical pain was the emotional bleed—her fear, her rage, her desperate attempt tohold onto herself while Auradelle pulled her apart.
My corruption exploded outward.
It wasn’t conscious. The rage and pain simply tore through every control I’d built. Black veins spread from where I knelt, killing everything they touched. Stone crumbled. Moss shriveled. Even the air seemed to rot.
“Kaelren!” Vashael’s voice cut through the haze. “Control it! You’ll bring the tunnel down!”
But I couldn’t control it. The corruption was rage given form, and that rage had a target. Every guard between me and Elle. Every wall separating us. Every second that kept me from reaching her.
The team backed away as my corruption spread further, creating a circle of death twenty feet across. But Peeble stayed.
“I can feel her too,” they said quietly. “Through our connection. She’s fighting. But he’s testing her limits.”
“Tell me something I don’t know,” I growled.
“In the previous iterations, this was the moment you lost. This exact moment. You felt her pain, let the corruption take you completely, and by the time you reached her, there wasn’t an unmarked place on your body. You killed everyone, yes. But you also killed the possibility of saving her.”
