Not the mixed light of before, not the careful pearl-white of control, but dragon fire given form. It spilled across the floor in waves, climbed the walls like living things, reached toward the ceiling with grasping fingers of flame.
The crack in the Gate had tripled in size.
And it was bleeding.
Not blood, but something worse. Pure, liquified power that pooled on the sanctified floor and began eating through stone like acid. Each drop that fell widened the crack further, and through that widening gap, I could see something that made my mind rebel.
An eye. Massive. Reptilian. Older than worlds.
Watching me with recognition, with hunger, with something that might have been approval.
Natalia stood at the Gate's base, her usual composure cracked like the seal itself. When she saw me, her face went white.
"What have you done?"
"What was always going to happen," I heard myself say, though the words felt like they came from somewhere else, somewhere deeper. "What was inevitable from the moment they made Pandora choose between love and duty."
The Gate pulsed, and through that widening crack, I heard Kaelen's voice, no longer filtered through the Threshold but raw and real and absolutely present.
"The game changes now, little Keeper. The seal is broken. The walls are falling. And you?—"
The golden light from my veins flared so bright it turned the world white.
"—you're becoming what you were always meant to be."
When my vision cleared, the Sanctorum had transformed. The walls ran with golden veins like the ones beneath my skin. The crack in the Gate had stabilized but not healed, a permanent wound in reality itself.
And I knew, with certainty that went deeper than knowledge, that everything had changed.
The Dragon's Ember seal was broken.
Kaelen was partially free.
And I was no longer entirely human.
ELEVEN
Kaelen
The crack in the Dragon's Ember seal pulsed with every breath I took, a living wound in the architecture of my prison. Not freedom, not yet, but the promise of it sang through chains that had burned against my skin for centuries. Each pulse sent ripples through the Threshold, reality itself shuddering as the careful equations that held us began to unravel.
I could taste the mortal world now.
Not just sense it through the filtered lens of the Gate, but actually taste it. Rain on stone. Bread cooling in ovens. The copper tang of spilled blood where someone had cut themselves on broken glass. A thousand small sensations that had been denied to me for longer than most minds could comprehend flooded through the crack, and I drank them in like a man dying of thirst.
But more than that, I could feelher.
Aria's presence blazed through the damaged seal like sunlight through a keyhole. Even when she wasn't in the Threshold, even when she knelt in prayer or walked through her stone corridors, I felt her. The golden veins spreading through her body weren't just marking her, they were connecting usin ways the original architects of this prison never imagined possible.
"She broke your seal."
Flynn's voice pulled me from my contemplation. My brother paced the edges of our shared consciousness, his wolf nature making stillness impossible even after centuries of forced immobility. His form flickered between solid and shadow, never quite settling, amber eyes burning with barely contained hunger.
"She didn't break it," I corrected, testing the chains that held me. They were still there, still burning with that constant drain of divine essence, but weaker now. Definitely weaker. "She chose. There's a difference."
"Semantics." Flynn's laugh held edges sharp enough to draw blood. "The seal is broken. You can reach further. Feel more. Soon you'll be able to manifest beyond the Threshold."
The possibility sent heat racing through what remained of my divine blood. To exist again, even partially, in the world we'd been banished from. To walk on actual earth instead of the non-space of our prison. To touch without the barrier of metaphysical distance.
