The word carries weight coming from a Duskwalker.
Beings of shadow should be able to sense essence, to identify nature at fundamental levels.
For Cassius to find nothing where something should be...
"You think he's dangerous?" Mortimer joins us, dragon scales flickering beneath his human skin as he wrestles with his own concerns. His scholarly nature wars visibly with his protective instincts.
"I think he's something we don't understand," Cassius responds carefully. "And things we don't understand have a tendency to destroy us when we least expect it."
Zeke approaches from his corner position, frost still crystallized along his fingertips though his expression has settled into something approaching acceptance.
"We don't have to understand him to survive him," the feline suggests, his voice carrying the particular pragmatism of someone who has learned to adapt rather than control. "We justhave to keep Gwenievere safe until she can handle whatever he represents."
Keep Gwenievere safe.
The eternal mission.
The purpose that has transformed enemies into allies, rivals into brothers, isolated predators into a pack that might actually function.
Damien hangs back, his scarred form wrapped in crimson fabric that hides the evidence of suffering we still don't fully understand. But his crimson eyes track our conversation with obvious attention, and when he speaks, his voice carries something closer to genuine concern than the arrogant dismissal I would have expected from him months ago.
"She's going to wake up eventually," he says. "And when she does, she's going to want answers that none of us have. The prince, the chalice, her brother's separation, whatever Year Four actually involves—she'll want to understand everything."
And we'll have nothing to give her.
Nothing except our presence, our protection, our devotion that hasn't wavered despite everything that's happened.
I look at the men around me—Cassius with his protective shadows, Mortimer with his banked dragon fire, Zeke with his frost-touched patience, Damien with his mysterious scars and complicated redemption.
We're not friends, exactly.
Men bound together by love for the same woman, who have learned to tolerate each other's presence because the alternative means losing her.
Maybe the crucible of Year Four will forge us into something stronger than the sum of our individual parts.
Or destroy us all.
CHAPTER 7
Two Sides Of One Coin
~GWENIEVERE~
"You can't sleep forever like sleeping beauty, sis."
Gabriel's voice drifts through the darkness like smoke through silk—familiar and foreign all at once, carrying undertones of exhaustion and affection that make something in my chest ache with recognition. The words wrap around my consciousness like gentle hands, tugging me upward from depths I didn't realize I'd sunk to, pulling me toward a surface that shimmers with light I can't quite identify.
Wake up.
You need to wake up.
My eyes flutter open.
The world that greets me isn't the medical chamber I vaguely remember—crystalline walls and opalescent fluid and the steady pulse of magical monitoring equipment. This is something else entirely. Something that exists in the spaces between heartbeats, in the liminal territory where dreams and reality forget their boundaries and bleed into one another like watercolors on wet paper.
I'm standing on a hill.
The realization arrives with dreamlike delay, my consciousness catching up to my body's position in incrementsrather than all at once. Grass—if it can be called grass—ripples beneath my bare feet in waves of silver and gold, each blade humming with magic that vibrates through my soles and up into my bones. The wind catches my hair, sending silver strands dancing around my face in patterns that feel almost deliberate, almostchoreographed, as if the air itself has opinions about how I should appear in this moment.
