He looked at me then, really looked at me, and I saw fear in his eyes. Not fear of the fanatics in the forest. Fear of me. Of what I was becoming. Of the golden veins that pulsed beneath my skin like channels of molten light.
"Because the Gate is weakening," he said quietly, his voice barely above a whisper. "Because they can feel it, just like we can. The barriers thinning. The seals cracking." His gaze dropped to my hands, where golden veins pulsed with their own light, visible even in the forest's shadows. "Because things are changing, and change draws the mad like honey draws flies. They think their moment is coming. The apocalypse they've been praying for."
We climbed the rest of the way in tense silence, the basket of supplies forgotten in my hands, their weight meaningless compared to everything else I carried. The Citadel loomed before us as we crested the final ridge, grey stone and centuries of secrets, its walls rising like judgment against the darkening sky. But it no longer felt like safety, like the sanctuary it had been my entire life.
It felt like a trap about to spring.
That night, as I lay in my narrow bed, listening to the familiar sounds of the Citadel settling into darkness, I couldn't stop thinking about the pregnant woman. About the child she carried, the one they might name after me. A child who would grow up believing the Keepers were heroes, protectors, sacred guardians standing between civilization and chaos. A child who would beraised on the same lies I had been, shaped by the same careful deceptions.
Unless the Order of Khaos reached us first and burned everything to ash.
Unless the Gate fell and the princes' rage consumed the world.
Unless I chose to break it myself and shatter the fragile peace built on suffering and lies.
The golden veins in my arms pulsed with warmth, a steady rhythm that matched my heartbeat. And in the depths of my mind, four voices whispered variations of the same truth, each one finding a different angle to slip past my defenses:
The ignorant are not innocent.
Their comfort is built on our suffering.
Your suffering.
How long will you bleed for those who don't even know your true sacrifice?
I pressed my face into my pillow, trying to muffle the sound of my breathing, the rapid heartbeat that the guards outside my door could probably hear with their ordinary senses. In the darkness, the golden light from my veins cast faint patterns on the ceiling, like stars in an alien constellation.
Tomorrow, I would enter the Threshold again. Tomorrow, I would face them with the image of that pregnant woman burned into my memory, with the weight of Oakhaven's ignorant gratitude heavy on my shoulders. Tomorrow, I would have to reconcile the princes' suffering with the villagers' fragile peace, would have to find some way to balance justice against preservation.
Tomorrow, I would have to choose between the lie that protected them and the truth that might destroy them.
But tonight, I traced the golden patterns spreading across my skin and wondered if the choice had already been made. Ifevery drop of blood I'd fed the Gate had been choosing. If every question I'd swallowed had been choosing. If every moment I'd felt the wrongness of it all, the fundamental injustice of the system I served, had been a small decision accumulating toward an inevitable conclusion.
If every moment I'd spent wanting to be more than a keeper, more than a key, more than a chain, had been choosing.
The Order of Khaos was coming, their symbols burned into trees like a countdown to catastrophe.
The Gate was failing, its seals cracking.
And I was changing into something neither side could predict or control, something that belonged to no faction and followed no predetermined path.
Come as yourself,Flynn had said, his amber eyes seeing through every pretense.
But I no longer knew who that was. The girl raised to be a key? The woman discovering her own desires? The jailer beginning to question her prison? The protector who might become a destroyer?
All of them. None of them.
Something new entirely.
TEN
Aria
The midnight prayers had existed for centuries, a sanctuary for Keepers whose minds refused the mercy of sleep. Better to kneel in contemplation than to wrestle with the selfish thoughts that crept through darkness like thieves. Better to lose oneself in repetition of sacred words than to acknowledge the doubts that gnawed at the edges of consciousness.
Every time I closed my eyes, I saw Oakhaven's trusting faces. Every time I began to drift, Flynn's voice echoed through my bones:Come as yourself. Come as ours.The golden veins had spread, creating patterns that looked almost like armor beneath my skin, and they pulsed with heat that made rest impossible.
The prayer chamber was nearly empty at this hour. Only Brother Francis knelt at the altar, his aged form bent in supplication, lips moving through litanies he'd probably forgotten the meaning of decades ago. Sister Catherine sat in the far corner, fingers working through prayer beads with mechanical precision, each bead a ward against whatever kept her from her bed.
