One wrong move and everything would collapse.
"Steady," he said, his voice tight with concentration.
She could feel the strain in his shadows. Holding twelve components in alignment demanded immense power. Could sense his focus narrowing down to this single task.
She applied pressure to the obstruction, feeling it resist. More pressure. The crystal components around it started to vibrate, resonating with the stress.
"Careful," he murmured, and she felt his shadows tighten their grip.
Almost there. Almost?—
The obstruction gave way, coming free with a sound like breaking glass. All the elements were gone, the pathways clear, and the mechanism was ready to function as it was designed to.
"There," she said, sitting back on her heels, breathing hard. "That should do it."
He moved closer, shadows shifting around him as he prepared to channel power into the now-clear pathways. "Ready?"
She nodded, both of them watching as he began feeding energy into the mechanism.
For a moment, everything seemed to work. The erratic lights stabilized. The grinding sounds stopped. The crystal components began turning smoothly, one by one.
Relief flooded through her. They'd done it. They'd actually?—
Then, instead of closing and sealing properly, the mechanism burst open like a door thrown wide.
The blue light flashed into blinding white, and alarms blared throughout the castle, a sound that seemed to shake the stones.
Oh no. Oh no no no?—
"Get back!" he shouted, but it was already too late.
Souls began pouring through the breach—a flood of spirits from other realms. Ghostly figures swirled around the chamber, some flickering between translucent and solid, others manifesting as nothing more than wisps of cold light. Their cries echoed in chorus, a cacophony of longing and despair.
Brynn stared in horror at what she'd unleashed. "What have I done?"
He moved to shield her as the figures pressed closer, his shadows rising defensively around them both, swirling like a dark cocoon. She could feel his power ramping up, cold and vast and barely restrained.
Amidst the chaos, she could hear the echo of footsteps in the corridors above. Others rushed to investigate the disturbance, each stride growing louder.
More souls poured through the breach, their forms filling the chamber with chaotic light. The ward-lock blazed brighter, the opening widening with each passing second.
XV.
BRYNN
The souls came through in waves. Peaceful figures in flowing white robes who should have passed quietly materialized alongside violent shades still marked by the wounds of their brutal deaths. Desperate souls with hollow, hungry eyes pressed against those consumed by obsession, flickering between solid and translucent with every heartbeat.
This was bad. This was very, very bad.
The chamber was filled with clashing energies that made the air feel heavy and suffocating. Cold spots gathered where the peaceful dead clustered while searing heat radiated from the violent ones. The presence of the obsessed spirits created a nauseating vertigo that made her vision swim.
She'd broken something that had been holding back entire realms' worth of death, and now?—
"No, no, no." Brynn lunged toward the ward-lock mechanism. The device blazed with unstable light, its opening growing wider with each spirit that passed through. "Close, damn you!"
She pressed her hands against the crystal housing, trying to force the mechanism shut through sheer will. The tools scattered on the floor around her feet, forgotten in her desperation to undo what she'd done.
Nothing happened. The magical flows she'd been able to see so clearly during their repair work were now a tangle she couldn't begin to unravel. The ward-lock pulsed with malevolent energy, as if feeding on her panic.
