Sarnyx took point without being asked, understanding that I was too far gone for tactics. Her thorns found gaps in armor with deadly precision, each strike calculated to cause maximum damage with minimum effort. A guard’s throat opened in a spray of crimson that painted the walls. Another fell with thorns through both eyes, his screams cut short as her poison liquified his brain. A third tried to raise a shield, but her thorns punched through it like paper, continuing through his chest and out his back in a spray of gore that made even the other guards step back.
“For the rebellion!” she roared, and for a moment, I remembered why I’d chosen her as my second. She was violence given purpose, destruction with a cause.
Vashael moved through the carnage like a dancer, never quite where attacks landed, always exactly where she needed to be to deliver death with a touch. Her poisons were works of art—one guard’s skin turned to rose petals that fell away to reveal nothing underneath, another’s bones becameliquid while his flesh remained solid, creating a sight that would haunt me if I still cared about being haunted. She hummed while she worked, a melody from the Petal Court that spoke of beauty and death being the same thing viewed from different angles.
Nimor pulled guards into shadows they never emerged from—I could hear them screaming, their voices echoing from a place between reality and nightmare. Sometimes parts of them would emerge—a hand here, a head there, always in the wrong places, always screaming.
But for every guard we killed, two more appeared. They poured from doorways I hadn’t seen, dropped from ceiling vents that shouldn’t exist, emerged from shadows that were darker than they should be. The Heartspire itself was generating them, or calling them, or creating them from its own corrupted essence.
“Something is wrong,” Eltrien said, his marks pulsing faster, throwing off light that made the corruption in the walls recoil. “Every time, this is where it falls apart. This exact corridor, this exact moment. We’re walking the same path, making the same mistakes, dying the same deaths.”
“Then we change it,” I snarled, corruption flaring around me like armor made of hungry shadows.
“You can’t change a pattern by playing into it!” He grabbed my arm, his glowing marks burning against my corruption. Where we touched, reality sparked and protested. “Don’t you see? This is what he wants. You, corrupted beyond recognition. Elle, dissolved into his apparatus. Both of you broken exactly the way the pattern demands.”
“Then what do you suggest?” I asked, even as I dissolved another guard with a gesture, not even looking at him as he screamed and died.
“I don’t know!” For the first time since I’d known him, Eltrien sounded desperate, almost panicked. “Every time I’ve watched this play out, you storm in corrupted, she’s bound to the Bloom, you both break, everyone dies, and we start over. The realm resets, memories fade, and we dance the same dance again. I don’t know how to change it!”
Vashael stared at him while casually dissolving a guard’s face with a blown kiss of poisonous pollen. “Are you sure you remember?”
“Fragments. Pieces. Enough to know we’re about to fail again.” His marks pulsed faster, almost solid light now. “The Convergence is almost here. We have minutes, not hours. And we’re exactly where we always are when it all goes wrong.”
I felt it too—reality thinning, the boundaries between Root and Bloom, between Earth and Wynmire, becoming gossamer-weak. And through it all, Elle’s agony, her sense of self dissolving into something vast and terrible.
“We keep moving,” I decided, cutting through two guards with one corrupted swing. “Pattern or not, I’m not leaving her.”
We pushed deeper, descending into levels I’d never seen before. I’d spent years in the Heartspire—trained here, lived here, served Auradelle from these very halls—but I’d never been permitted below the third floor. These depths were reserved for Auradelle alone, his private domain of secrets and experiments.
The corridors widened into proper halls that had been grand once, before the corruption. I could see traces of what this place had been—beautiful murals now twisted into nightmares, gardens now growing things that shouldn’t exist, fountains that ran with liquids that weren’t water and never had been. This was the original palace, I realized. The seat of the first Crown, before everything went wrong. Before the division. Before the rot.
The Heartspire’s defenses were waiting—not just guards now, but the building itself turning against us.
Walls grew thorns that reached for our blood with hungry intelligence. I let them pierce me, my corruption eating through them faster than they could drink. Where my blood fell, the floor dissolved, creating holes that opened onto rooms below where things that might have been people once writhed in endless transformation.
Floors became acidic, eating through boots and flesh with equal appetite. The corruption under my feet left prints of decay with every step. Sarnyx and Vashael had to leap from safe spot to safe spot, while Nimor simply stopped touching the ground entirely, existing more in shadow than substance.
The air itself turned poisonous, requiring Vashael to constantly neutralize it with her own toxins, creating a bubble of breathable atmosphere thatmoved with us.
My corruption was the only thing keeping me functional. My thoughts were becoming simpler, more focused. Save Elle. Kill everything else. Nothing else mattered.
Then I heard it—buzzing. Massive amounts of buzzing, coming from somewhere outside. And mixed with it, the sound of an army. Hundreds of voices raised in battle cries, the clash of weapons, explosions that shook dust from the ceiling and made the corrupted channels in the walls flicker.
“What is that?” Nimor asked from the shadows.
“Bryx,” Peeble said, their metallic voice carrying something like pride. “That magnificent idiot actually did it. He’s pulling their forces away. Listen—you can hear Kevin’s war cry.”
Through the walls, we could hear it—the distinctive sound of Kevin’s battle cry, which did indeed sound like a chainsaw made of bees, mixed with Bryx’s laughter and what had to be every bee in a fifty-mile radius. The Heartspire shuddered as guards abandoned their posts, rushing to deal with what sounded like a massive assault on the main gates.
“It’s a distraction,” Sarnyx realized, respect creeping into her voice. “He’s giving us an opening. The fool didn’t run away. He is actually being useful.”
“Then we take it,” I growled, corruption surging with renewed purpose.
We met less resistance as we pushed deeper, the guards drawn away by whatever chaos Bryx was orchestrating outside. The few that remained fell quickly—they weren’t expecting us to get this far, weren’t prepared for the level of violence we brought. One tried to surrender. I killed him anyway. Mercy was something I’d left behind three corridors ago.
“The Convergence chamber is just ahead,” Nimor reported from ahead, his voice echoing from multiple shadows. “But there’s something else. Someone powerful with old magic is waiting.”
We turned the final corner, and there he was.
