Your mother's tasted of sorrow,the third voice rumbled, deep as earth shifting, heavy as landslides.Bitter and broken, like ashes in water. Yours tastes of questions.
Questions that will unmake everything,the fourth finished, almost singing, the words lilting and prophetic.The pattern breaks. The wheel turns. The daughter becomes the key. As it was written. As it must be.
My hand pressed against stone, trying to push myself up, trying to run, trying to do anything but kneel before the Gate while four princes of Olympus invaded my mind like conquerors claiming territory. The golden veins in my palm flared in response, visible even through the bandages, glowing bright enough to cast shadows.
The dragon noticed immediately.Already marked. Already claimed. The Gate knows what you are even if you don't. Even if they've lied to you your entire life.
"I'm a Keeper. I hold the locks. I maintain the prison. I serve the mortal realm." The words were rote, automatic, pulled from years of training, from lessons beaten into me through repetition and discipline.
You're a liar.The wolf's presence pressed closer, and I could almost feel breath on my neck, hot and animal.We can smell the doubt on you. Taste the questions you're too afraid to ask. They reek of fear and forbidden curiosity.
Why do you bleed for us, little Keeper?The dragon again, that molten-gold eye still fixed on me through the crack, unblinking, unrelenting.What did they tell you we did to deserve this? What terrible crime justifies a thousand years in chains?
"You betrayed the mortal realm. Tried to rule as tyrants. Would have destroyed everything if Pandora hadn't stopped you." Again, the words came from training, from doctrine, fromeverything I'd been taught since I was old enough to understand language.
Silence. Long and heavy, weighted with centuries of accumulated rage. Then the bear spoke, and there was infinite sadness in every word, grief that made my chest ache:Is that what Pandora told them? Is that the lie her daughters die believing? Is that the story you've built your lives around?
The Gate pulsed, the crack widening slightly with a sound like breaking ice. Fresh agony ripped through me as the connection between us, the connection I'd never fully understood, never been allowed to question, pulled taut as a rope about to snap. They weren't just speaking to me through the Gate.
They were using my blood in its mechanisms to do it. Using the very thing that was supposed to keep them imprisoned to reach out and touch my mind.
Ask yourself,the phoenix whispered, his voice dancing through my thoughts like flame,why it takes Pandora's blood specifically. Why only her line can maintain the prison. Why you, only you, can feed the Gate. What makes you special, little Keeper? What did she know that they're hiding from you?
"Stop." My voice cracked, breaking on the word. "Stop talking. Stop?—"
We're not the monsters in this story.
All four voices spoke in unison, and the force of it drove me forward onto my hands, palms slapping against stone. Blood dripped from my nose onto sacred stone, each drop immediately pulled toward the Gate as if magnetized, drawn by invisible threads of power.
But we're learning to be.
Hands grabbed my shoulders, yanking me backward with bruising force. The connection severed like a rope snapping, and I gasped as my consciousness slammed back into my own skullwith enough force to make me dizzy. Natalia's face swam into focus above me, those cold grey eyes wide with something I'd never seen before in all my years under her tutelage.
Fear. Pure, undiluted, bone-deep terror.
"Get her out," she commanded someone I couldn't see, her voice tight and controlled despite the emotion in her eyes. "Seal the Sanctorum. No one enters without my direct?—"
The Gate screamed again, light flaring so bright it washed everything white, obliterating sight, obliterating thought. In that blinding moment, I heard them one more time, their voices branded into my mind like hot iron pressed to flesh:
Too late, little Keeper. The seal is broken. The game begins.
And you're the prize.
Then darkness claimed me, swallowing consciousness whole, but not before I felt the crack in the Gate spider-web outward, spreading like infection through stone and spell alike. I could hear it in my bones, in my blood, in that part of me that had always belonged to the Gate.
The first fracture had formed.
And I'd caused it.
FOUR
Kaelen
Lightning through dead nerves. That was the only way to describe it—consciousness returning after centuries of twilight existence, electricity racing through pathways that had forgotten what it meant to truly feel. I'd been aware for so long, trapped in that grey space between sleeping and waking, that true alertness hit like drowning in reverse. Instead of water filling lungs, it was sensation flooding a nervous system that had been dormant for a millennium.
The chains burned against my wrists, my ankles, my throat. Not with heat—the Chains of Tartarus were too sophisticated for simple physical pain. They burned with absence, with the constant drain of power being siphoned away, drop by agonizing drop. For a thousand years, they'd fed on my divine essence, keeping me weak enough to contain but alive enough to suffer.
But something had changed.
