He stops in front of Ambrose. "The Crossroads Keeper. Darkness itself and yet, so tired of paying prices." His voice softens further into something almost kind. "I can see every sacrifice written on your bones. I could make the costs disappear. Every contract powered for free, no price demanded, no sacrifice required. You would never have to give up another piece of yourself again."
Ambrose's jaw tightens. Through the bond I feel the termless contract he wrote this morning pulse against the offer, holdingsteady, but the longing underneath is raw. Centuries of paying and paying and paying, and someone is finally offering to make it stop.
"The demon." Dmitri turns to Jade. "Starving since the day you were born. The hunger that never stops, the emptiness that no amount of feeding ever fills. You've found ways to manage it, but it's still there underneath, waiting." His eyes gleam, a wicked smile spreading across his lips as he drags a finger through the air. "I could feed you forever. Fill that void completely. You would never feel empty again."
Jade's tail lashes behind him and his expression darkens, because the hunger is the one thing he can never fully escape, the one wound that doesn't close no matter how much love or refined emotion or careful practice he pours into it.
Then Dmitri moves to stand in front of me, his presence so close that the cold of him burns. "The wraith. Caught between worlds your entire existence. Never fully alive, never fully dead, pulled toward the void every moment of every day. You fight so hard to stay in life, and for what?" His voice drops. "I could release you. Give you peace. Let you rest in the realm you were always meant to belong to."
The pull of death is a constant negotiation between staying and letting go, the exhaustion of choosing life over and over. He's offering me the one thing I've never been able to give myself.
But my essence strips the packaging from his words and shows me what's underneath. Every offer is a chain disguised as a gift, a prison built to feel comfortable enough that you stop trying to escape.
"He's lying," I push out, my voice steady despite the emotions racing through me. "Everything he offers comes with chains. He doesn't want to help us. He wants to own us."
Dmitri's expression flickers, the benevolent mask slipping. "Such clarity from Death's Champion. You see so much. But do you seeeverything?"
"Yes," I say. And then I look deeper.
I've never turned my death-sight on something this old, this layered, this buried beneath centuries of accumulated power. I reach past the surface of his form, past the consumed essences that make up his body, past the hunger and the terrible ancient will, and I look at his core.
What I find there makes me stop breathing.
He's afraid. Not the calculated fear of someone who might lose a battle. The fear at Dmitri's core is primal and foundational, so deeply embedded in his being that everything else grew around it like scar tissue around a wound. The power, the hunger, the system, three centuries of consumption, all of it built on the terror of a young man who was convinced that if he stopped accumulating power for even a moment, the universe would notice how small he really was and crush him.
"You're scared," I say, and the surprise in my own voice is genuine.
Every one of my mates turns to look at me. Dmitri's form goes rigid.
"Under all that power, you're scared. You built the seven-element system because you were afraid. You consume other people's essence because you're terrified of your own emptiness." I meet his eyes and hold them. "I'm Death's Champion. I see souls. And yours is terrified."
His form wavers. The darkness ripples, and for one fraction of a second I see through it to something underneath, something young and small and so desperately afraid that it makes my chest ache. The entity showed me this in the valley, what Dmitri looked like before. A young man surrounded by people he loved,building a system he thought would keep them safe. The fear was already there. It just hadn't consumed him yet.
"You were trying to protect people," I say. "That's how it started. But the fear grew and the power grew with it, and now you can't stop consuming because stopping means facing what you've been running from for three centuries."
"SILENCE."
Three hundred years of compressed fury explode outward in a wave of darkness that throws all six of us backward. My back hits stone, the impact driving the air from my lungs. A mixture of our essences run haywire through the space paired with screams from my mates, our auras working against us rather than for us.
I blink a few times, trying to reorient myself before I can focus on Dmitri again. He’s raging, attacking with everything he has, blind fury directed by someone whose deepest wound has been exposed. The chamber responds to his anger, stone walls cracking, the pool surging, shadows thickening until Stellan's fire barely penetrates more than a few feet.
I try to phase between realms but the death realm itself recoils from the violence. There's nowhere to go. The space between worlds is burning with his rage.
"I will consume you slowly," he snarls. "I will make you watch as I devour everyone you love. Your students, your allies, your precious network. Every sanctuary that dared to hope. I will tear it all apart while you scream."
Rumi's golden light flares against the assault but the volume of darkness is overwhelming. His threads fray, his light dims, and I feel through the bond the moment his confidence wavers. The pool surges upward, tendrils of liquid darkness reaching for us. One wraps around Ambrose's ankle and he goes down hard. Stellan burns it away but two more take its place. Jade chokes on the essence being forced into him, too much to transform, too toxic to absorb.
Skye's bonds stretch to their breaking point. He's straining to hold us together, pouring everything into the connections, but Dmitri's power presses against every link, testing every thread. Our combination dissolves. We're six individuals again, each one fighting alone, each one losing.
Through the chaos, Skye's voice reaches all of us at once. I can just barely hear it, my mate shouting as loud as he can to reach us.
"We've been holding back. All of us. Keeping reserves, protecting ourselves. That's why the combination keeps failing."
"If we don't hold reserves, we're defenseless," Ambrose gasps. His words are barely above a whisper but it’s like his words travel across the bond rather than through my ears.
"If we keep holding back, we lose anyway. Complete surrender. Not most of ourselves.Everything." The words come out soft but for some reason, I can hear Skye speaking to us. I focus on him, staring at our bonds glowing so bright on his arm that I can see it through the darkness. "Trust me. Trust each other. Give everything."
Jade moves first. His hunger opens completely, every wall dropped, and instead of the void I always expected, it reaches for our fear and our pain and transforms it. Fear becomes focus. Pain becomes fuel. Despair becomes determination so sharp it tastes like metal.
