"You're a liar." Flynn's accusation hit her like a tidal wave crashing against the shore. I felt her emotional spike through our connection, fear, doubt, and underneath it all, that delicious curiosity she'd been taught to suppress.
"Why do you bleed for us, little Keeper?" I pressed my consciousness against the crack in the seal, that beautiful fissure that promised eventual freedom. The eye I manifested through the Gate fixed on her, unblinking. "What did they tell you we did to deserve this? What terrible crime justifies a thousand years in chains?"
She recited their propaganda, their careful lies about tyranny and destruction. The words fell from her lips without conviction, and I knew she'd already begun to doubt. Perfect. Doubt was the first crack in any wall.
When Thane asked if this was the lie Pandora's daughters died believing, I felt something shift in her. A fracture in her certainty that matched the fracture in the Gate.
"Ask yourself," Elias whispered, his words dancing through her thoughts like flame, "why it takes Pandora's blood specifically. Why only her line can maintain the prison."
She was breaking. I could feel it, that careful control shattering like ice under spring sun.
When she begged us to stop, her voice cracked with more than fear.
Desperation.
The sound of someone whose entire world was crumbling.
"We're not the monsters in this story," I said, and my brothers' voices joined mine, our combined will driving her to her hands and knees.
Blood dripped from her nose onto sacred stone, and each drop pulled toward the Gate, toward us. The sight of it, the waste of it, made my jaw clench. That blood was meant for better things than feeding a prison.
"But we're learning to be."
The threat hung in the air between us, a promise of what would come if she continued to be our jailer rather than our salvation. She needed to understand that we wouldn't remain contained forever. That her choice, to free us or keep us chained, would determine whether we emerged as allies or enemies.
Natalia yanked her back before I could press further, severing our connection with violent efficiency. The High Keeper's face appeared in my peripheral awareness, twisted with fear she couldn't quite hide. Good. Let her fear. Let them all fear.
The Gate screamed, light flaring white-hot, and I threw my consciousness against the barrier one last time.
"Too late, little Keeper," I snarled through the connection. "The seal is broken. The game begins."
My brothers added their voices to mine for the final words, "And you're the prize."
She collapsed, consciousness fleeing her body like a coward from a battlefield. But even unconscious, I could feel her through the Gate. The connection we'd forged wouldn't break just because she'd fainted. If anything, her unconscious mind was more open, more vulnerable.
Through the crack in the Dragon's Ember seal, I felt the fracture spreading. Not just through the Gate, but through her. That golden light spreading beneath her skin wasn't just marking her. It was changing her. Making her into something that could bridge the gap between mortal and divine.
Making her into what she was always meant to be.
"She's different," Flynn said, his mental voice reverberating through the Threshold. "Her blood, her power. It's not like the others."
"The prophecy," Elias murmured, copper eyes seeing things that hadn't happened yet. "The Unbound Queen rises from the Keeper's fall."
"She's a child," Thane rumbled, disapproval heavy in his tone. "Innocent of her ancestors' crimes."
"Innocent?" I turned my attention to my brother, letting him feel the weight of my rage. "She feeds our prison with her blood. She speaks the words that keep us chained. She is exactly as guilty as every Keeper before her."
"Until she chooses differently," Elias said softly.
And there was the crux of it. Choice. For a thousand years, no Keeper had chosen anything but duty. They'd bled, they'd served, they'd died, all maintaining the careful lie that we were monsters who deserved our fate.
But this one... this one had golden light spreading beneath her skin. This one's blood tasted of questions and suppressed fire. This one had looked at me through the Gate with those amethyst eyes and felt something other than fear.
I'd seen it, just for a moment before Natalia pulled her away. Recognition. Connection. The first spark of something that could either damn her or save us all.
"She'll be back," I said with certainty that came from somewhere deeper than strategy. "The Gate is damaged. She's the only one who can stabilize it."
"And when she returns?" Flynn asked, though his hungry grin suggested he already knew the answer.
