With hunger.
The sound reverberated through the Sanctorum, making the very air vibrate, and I swore I felt it answer something deep in my chest, a call and response I'd never noticed before.
I fled the moment the ritual ended, stumbling back to my quarters on legs that barely held me. But the dreams followed me into waking. Every time I blinked, I saw them. Felt them. My skin remembered touches that had never actually happened, retaining sense memories of hands and teeth and heat that existed only in the dreamscape but felt more real than any physical contact I'd ever experienced.
Cold baths didn't help. The water steamed the moment I entered it, my body burning with fever that had nothing to do with illness and everything to do with magic, with connection, with desire that had nowhere to go. Meditation made it worse, opening my mind to the connection that blazed between us like a bonfire in the dark. Even pain, pressing my nails into my palms until they bled, using the sharp sting to anchor myself, only sharpened the sensations, making me more aware rather than less.
Three days passed in a haze. I barely ate, food turning to ash in my mouth. Barely spoke, my voice seeming to belong to someone else when I tried to use it. The dreamsintensified until I couldn't tell sleep from waking, reality from fantasy. Sometimes I'd find myself standing in corridors with no memory of walking there, having traveled entire sections of the Citadel in a fugue state. Sometimes I'd realize I'd been having conversations while somewhere else entirely in my mind, my body operating on pure instinct while my consciousness wandered in dreamscapes with four princes who were slowly consuming every thought I had.
On the fourth morning, Ellie found me in the courtyard, staring at nothing.
More accurately, I was staring at the small patch of wildflowers that grew in a crack between stones, one of the sources of the pressed flowers I kept hidden in my room. But I wasn't really seeing them. I was seeing copper hair and molten gold eyes and amber that tracked movement like a predator and brown that held centuries of gentle sorrow.
"You look terrible." She sat beside me on the stone bench, concern creasing her features in ways that made her look older than her years. "When did you last really sleep? Not just doze or pass out, but actually rest?"
"I can't remember."
The answer was honest, at least. I couldn't remember the last time I'd slept without dreams, without hands on my skin and voices in my head and sensations that left me gasping.
She studied my face, taking in the shadows under my eyes that had deepened to bruises, the way my hands shook slightly when I wasn't concentrating on keeping them still, the constant flush to my skin that made it look like I was perpetually feverish.
"You look like someone in love," she said innocently, and the observation hung between us like accusation.
A laugh bubbled up from somewhere deep in my chest, bitter and sharp enough to cut. The horrible irony of it, that she was right in every way that mattered and wrong in everyway that counted. That I was drowning in desire for beings I was supposed to contain, for princes I'd been raised to see as monsters. That every drop of blood I fed the Gate only strengthened the connection driving me mad, creating a feedback loop I couldn't escape even if I wanted to.
"Love," I repeated, tasting the word like poison on my tongue. "Is that what this is?"
Ellie's eyes widened at something in my voice, some quality I couldn't control, couldn't hide behind Keeper discipline anymore. "Aria, what's happening to you?"
I wanted to tell her. Wanted to explain about the dreams, the touches that felt more real than reality, the way four princes had taken up residence in my mind and were slowly driving out everything else.
But how could I?
How could I explain that the monsters we guarded against had become the only things keeping me anchored to any sense of self? That their presence in my dreams felt more honest than years of waking life spent in service to lies?
"The Gate is changing me," I said finally, truth wrapped in omission, the only kind of honesty I could offer. "The connection required to stabilize it... it's not what anyone expected."
"Maybe you should stop. Let someone else?—"
"There is no one else." The words came out harder than intended, edged with frustration I couldn't contain. "I'm the last of Pandora's line. Without me, the Gate falls. Without me, the world ends. There is no choice, Ellie. There's only duty."
"And if maintaining it destroys you?"
I thought of Kaelen's hands on my throat, gentle despite their strength, despite the fact that those same hands could probably snap my neck with barely any effort. Flynn's teeth against my shoulder, marking without breaking, claiming without damaging. Thane holding me like something precious instead oftreating me like the jailer I was. Elias burning through me like phoenix fire, showing me visions of who I could become if I let myself change.
"Then I suppose I'll be destroyed."
But even as I said it, I knew that wasn't quite right. The words tasted false on my tongue, like a lie I was telling myself out of habit rather than conviction.
I wasn't being destroyed.
I was being transformed.
The dreams weren't torment inflicted from outside, weren't attacks or invasions. They were responses to my own suppressed desires, to wants I'd never been allowed to acknowledge, to needs I hadn't even known I had.
The princes weren't forcing themselves into my mind.
I was pulling them in.
