“Blood?” Nyssa offers, because of course she does.
“Everyone always starts with blood,” Dastian mutters, rolling his eyes. “Have we considered trying a good time? Bit of music? A sexy threat?”
Dreven ignores him. “What does it want?” he asks me, silver eyes like knives.
“A master.”
Nyssa snorts. “Hard pass on the master.”
“Warden, then,” I correct, stepping close enough that the dead crown is within arm’s reach. Up close, the craftsmanship is obscene—scales etched with runes so old they make my eyes ache. “It was forged to command my legions and contain what we could not destroy. It will not wake for a thief.”
“I’m not a thief,” she counters, chin up, eyes bright with that stubborn heat that got her killed. “I’m the only one who can wear it.”
“She’s right,” Dastian says, because agreement sounds more like trouble on his tongue than dissent ever did. “It wants her.”
I nod slowly, wondering what will wake it, when the earth rumbles under our feet.
“Okay,” she says, taking it off her head quickly. “That was more in line with how I thought this would go.”
“We’re leaving,” I state, and grab her hand. “Now.”
For once, she doesn’t argue.
I don’t waste the warning. The floor groans like a dying leviathan, and the dead air tries to drink my power dry. Dreven folds the shadows into a corridor.
The chamber unravels. Edges fray. Depth tilts. I lay a ribbon of wraith-light ahead, a pale track that clings to reality when reality forgets how. Nyssa stumbles once, twice, but her grip on me is iron.
Behind us, something like a tide whispers in hunger. This room wants to keep what enters. It can choke. We hit the obsidian threshold, and the runes breathe against my skin,recognising the blade at Nyssa’s hip, tolerating me. I push through first, drag her after, Dreven’s storm closing like a lid, Dastian’s heat snapping at our heels.
The corridor of doors tries to wake up. A dozen memories rattle their hinges, sniffing for leaks. I drop the temperature. Frost skims the handles. They go quiet. Nyssa’s shoulders tense under my hand, but she doesn’t look.
We reach a split seam, the first gate. I coil my power around her waist and jump. The realm tries to take my footing; I nail it to the floor with a spike of light that screams like a choir dying and doesn’t move.
The chamber shudders again. Hairline seams zip up the walls, opening into thin, hungry mouths. Whispering starts—faint, needling.
Nyssa tenses at my side. She’s still raw from the crossing; I feel it in the way her pulse flutters under my hold, too fast, too human. “Move,” I order, dragging her with me.
We run.
It’s not graceful. Dastian blasts a path; Dreven blankets the whispers. I lay a road as we go, strips of wraith-bridge over gaps that shouldn’t exist, silver ribbons appearing under our feet a heartbeat before we fall. Nyssa keeps pace, jaw set, breathing roughly, eyes on the dark like she means to pick a fight with it for inconveniencing her.
A seam splits ahead. The way we came is wrong—longer, bent out of true. Trick of the realm. I taste it sour in the air.
“Left,” I say.
“There is no left,” Dreven grinds out.
“There is.” I pull us into the wall and through it. The doorway remembers me. The memory hall snaps into place around us, doors trembling like they want to be brave.
Behind, the dead chamber howls.
“Don’t stop,” I tell Nyssa, because she’s about to. She wants to glare back at the thing that tried to keep her. “It can’t follow us if we don’t invite it.”
“You hope,” she grits out.
The obsidian threshold spits us back into the shattered spire. The river of blood is gone; in its place is a field of stone that thinks it’s ice. I don’t test it.
The stone groans under our feet, a sound like grinding teeth.
