My fist connected with the first cultist's temple, and I felt rather than heard the bone snap beneath the impact, his head whipping sideways with a wet crack that would have made me ill a week ago. The second raised his corrupted blade high, but dragon fire erupted from my palm before he could complete the swing, golden flames incinerating him mid-motion, reducing flesh and bone to ash in seconds. The third tried to flee, survival instinct finally overriding his fanaticism. Flynn's impossible speed filled my legs like liquid lightning, and I caught him beforehe'd taken three stumbling steps, my hand closing around his throat with inhuman strength.
"Where are the rest of your forces?" The question came out in a growl that wasn't entirely human, wasn't entirely my own voice at all.
The cultist laughed despite the iron grip crushing his windpipe, blood bubbling from his split lips in dark rivulets. "Already inside. Already at your precious Gate. High Blade Malachi will?—"
I dropped him without ceremony, already running before his body hit the stone. If I remembered the intelligence reports correctly, and I'd studied every scrap of information about our enemies with obsessive thoroughness, then the High Blade, this Malachi, was one of the uppermost leaders of the Order of Khaos. Not just a commander but a true believer, utterly devoted to their apocalyptic vision. If he was here personally, leading this assault himself, then this attack was far more than just another skirmish or probing raid. This was going to be a full-scale battle, a genuine attempt to bring down everything the Keepers had built.
Unless I could stop it first.
The massive doors to the Sanctorum had been blown completely off their ancient hinges, the metal twisted and scorched beyond recognition. Inside, bodies littered the polished floor, guards in their ceremonial armor, senior Keepers still clutching their ritual implements, anyone and everyone who'd tried to stand between the cultists and their ultimate goal. The air reeked of blood, burned flesh, and that sickly-sweet corruption that clung to Khaos magic like a disease.
And there, standing at the Gate itself with the confidence of a man already victorious, stood a figure that made my enhanced senses scream in primal warning.
The High Blade of Khaos looked like someone had tried to create a person from nothing, like wrongness given physical form. Intricate scarification covered every visible inch of skin, his face, his neck, his bare arms, all of it was covered with symbols and sigils that shifted and writhed as I watched, as though they were living things crawling beneath his flesh. His eyes had been replaced entirely with perfect orbs of matte black that reflected nothing, absorbed everything, drank in light like twin voids. When he slowly turned to face me, he smiled with evident pleasure, and the expression sent ice water cascading down my spine. His teeth had been filed to sharp points, predator's teeth, yet they somehow seemed to fit together perfectly when his mouth closed.
"The last Keeper," he said, his voice like massive stones grinding against each other in the deep earth. "The princes' whore. How fitting that you'll watch your precious prison shatter before you die screaming."
He raised a blade that seemed wrong just to look at, coated in layers of putrid, corrupted magic that made my stomach heave with nausea. The power rolling off it in visible waves was older than the Citadel itself, stolen from places that should never be touched.
"Your Gate is already dying," he continued, advancing toward me with the absolute confidence of someone who'd already won, who saw my death as nothing more than an amusing formality. "Your princes are trapped like animals in cages. Your precious Council cowers in their chambers. And you? You're just a frightened little girl playing with power she doesn't understand and can't control."
He struck faster than anything human should be able to move.
I barely got my arm up in time, and even then his corrupted blade carved through my flesh like paper, parting skin andmuscle with obscene ease. Pain bloomed sharp and immediate, white-hot and all-consuming, but far worse was the crawling wrongness trying to burrow deeper into the wound, seeking bone and blood and the very essence of what I was. My blood hit the ancient floor, and where the drops landed, the stone cracked and splintered as though the Citadel itself recoiled from the contact.
"Weak," Malachi laughed, the sound echoing horribly in the damaged chamber. "Just like your pathetic mother. Just like every single Keeper who came before you, bleeding and dying for duty while the world rots and festers around you."
He struck again with brutal efficiency, and this time I couldn't dodge entirely. The blade opened a deep gash across my ribs, parting the thick leather of my top and my flesh beneath with equal ease. I stumbled backward, vision blurring at the edges, tasting copper and corruption in the back of my throat.
"The Gate will fall today," he said, raising his blade for what was clearly meant to be a killing strike, already savoring his victory. "But not to free your precious princes. Not to liberate them. To unmake everything. To return all creation to the primal chaos from which it was born, before order, before law, before meaning. And from that beautiful chaos, we will forge?—"
The blade descended in a perfect killing arc.
And I did the absolutely unthinkable.
I didn't just reach for Kaelen's power, for that golden flame I'd been drawing on in desperate moments. I reached forhim. For the consciousness behind the power, for the ancient being I'd been dreaming of, speaking to, denying and desiring in equal measure.
The connection between us had been growing stronger with each passing day, each shared dream that left me breathless and aching, each drop of blood the hungry Gate consumed. But this was completely different. This was conscious, deliberate,absolute. This was a choice made with full knowledge of the consequences. I grabbed that golden thread that bound us across dimensions and impossibilities andpulledwith everything I had, with every ounce of strength in my battered body.
Not just his power this time.
Him.
For a single, eternal moment, the entire world stopped.
Then Kaelen was there.
Not fully, the other seals still held, the Chains of Tartarus still bound him to the Threshold. But he was partially manifest, translucent but somehow solid enough, real enough to matter. He materialized between me and Malachi's descending blade with the casual arrogance of a king, catching the corrupted metal with his bare hand. The impossible weapon screamed against the dragon-prince's flesh, reality itself protesting the fundamental wrongness of the contact.
"No," Kaelen said, and his voice, his actual voice, not the filtered echo through the Gate but his real voice, shook the Sanctorum to its foundations. Dust rained from the ceiling. The walls trembled.
Malachi's void-black eyes widened behind their glass-like surface, genuine shock breaking through his fanatical certainty. "Impossible?—"
"I've had a thousand years of imprisonment to redefine what's possible," Kaelen snarled, and his smile was all sharp teeth and ancient fury.
And then we moved together.
Not separately, not as two distinct beings, but as one. His consciousness flowed through mine like molten gold, my body moving with his will, his millennia of combat experience guiding my limbs, our combined power fusing into something that shouldn't exist, that violated every law of magic and reality I'dever learned. I felt his presence like liquid fire in my veins, not possessing me but partnering with me, showing me exactly how to channel divine flame without burning myself hollow from the inside out.
