"Brilliant," Flynn breathed, and for once his voice held no sarcasm, no bitter edge. "Brilliant and insane and exactly what she would choose."
Through the Gate, I watched her consciousness spread further into its structure, finding every binding, every chain, every carefully constructed ward. She wasn't breaking them. She was rewriting them, transforming chains into connections, locks into choices.
"It's killing her," Thane said urgently, and he was right.
Through our connection, I felt her life force draining with each second she maintained this impossible transformation. Mortal bodies weren't meant to channel divine power at this level. Even with our essences flowing through her veins, evenwith five years of gradual transformation, she was burning herself out.
"Then we help her," I said, pouring more of my power through our connection. Not to her, but with her, joining my consciousness to hers in the Gate's structure.
My brothers followed without hesitation, four divine essences flowing through one mortal woman, not possessing but partnering, lending our strength to her impossible task.
The Gate screamed, not in pain but in transformation. Like metal being reforged, like mountains being reshaped, like the very laws of reality being rewritten. Through it all, Aria held steady, even as blood ran from her nose, her ears, her eyes. Even as her body began to fail under the strain.
Together,she whispered through our connection, and the word carried more weight than any prophecy.We do this together, or not at all.
The chains didn't break.
They transformed.
Black iron became golden threads, still connecting us but no longer constraining. We were still bound, to the Gate, to her, to each other, but now by choice rather than force. We could no more abandon these connections than we could abandon our own hearts.
"The world will never understand," I said, knowing she could hear me, knowing she was now part of the Gate itself, woven into its structure as surely as we were.
They don't have to,she replied, her mental voice exhausted but triumphant.They just have to accept that things have changed. That the old world is ending and something new is beginning.
Through the transforming Gate, I saw Natalia's face as she realized what was happening. Not the complete destruction she'd feared, but something worse from her perspective, changeshe couldn't control, transformation she couldn't stop, evolution she couldn't prevent.
"You're still choosing them!" she screamed at Aria. "You're still betraying everything!"
But Aria's response, when it came, carried the weight of absolute certainty.
"I'm choosing everyone. The princes, the mortals, the truth. I'm choosing a world where we're not defined by fear and lies and ancient betrayals, but by what we decide to become together."
The transformation was nearly complete. I could feel the chains becoming something else, not gone but fundamentally altered. Soon, very soon, we'd be able to step through. Not as conquerors or monsters, but as something new. Something the world had no name for yet.
Something chosen rather than imposed.
And at the center of it all, Aria blazed like a star, burning herself out to light the way forward.
"Hold on," I whispered urgently, knowing she was fading, knowing the price of this transformation might be her life. "Don't you dare leave us now. Not when we're so close."
Her consciousness brushed against mine, exhausted but still present, still fighting.
I'm not going anywhere. We have too much work to do.
The Gate's final scream split the air, and suddenly, for the first time in a thousand years, I could taste morning air that wasn't filtered through prison bars. I could feel sunlight that didn't carry the weight of chains.
We weren't free. Not entirely. The bonds remained, transformed but present.
But for the first time since Pandora's betrayal, we had a choice in wearing them.
And that, more than any key or breaking, was true freedom.
THIRTY
Aria
I stood at the threshold between choice and refusal, between the rigid binary they had forced upon me and something else entirely, something unnamed, something unprecedented. Through the transforming Gate, I could feel their desperate hope pressing against my consciousness like a physical weight.
