"It was just... a lock," I murmured, swaying. "Just had to... change the key."
I looked up at them. Four princes, battered, bloody, and staring at me as if I were a bomb that had just armed itself.
"Food," I whispered, my voice slurring. "Flynn was right. We need... food."
Then the black spots connected, and the darkness became too tempting to resist. It was warm, inviting, and silent, and it finally took me.
As I slipped away, I felt a surge of pride. I didn't need them to catch me. I had caught myself. Just like I always had as a Keeper.
Only I wasn't a Keeper anymore, was I? The only thing I knew was that I didn't want to be the queen the prophecy talked about either, so then what was I? Or, maybe the real question was what was I becoming?
NINE
Kaelen
The silence that followed Aria’s collapse was heavier than the mountain pressing down on us, a physical weight that seemed to displace the very air in the cavern. It wasn’t the silence of peace or the stillness of a library; it was the suffocating vacuum left in the wake of a thunderclap, the ringing void where sound had been violently evicted. The mana in the air, previously whipping around us in a chaotic tempest, had settled into an eerie, static charge that raised the hair on my arms.
I stared down at the crumpled form of the woman who had just rewritten the fundamental laws of divine ownership. Aria lay on the cold, unyielding stone, one hand still splayed out against the damp floor as if she were trying to hold the earth in place by sheer will. Her chest rose and fell in shallow, hitching breaths that rattled in the quiet. The golden light that usually mapped her skin, the visible manifestation of the Gate’s power, had faded to a dull, dying ember, and without that celestial illumination, she looked terrifyingly mortal. Small. Breakable.
"She... she completely altered its allegiance," Elias whispered, his voice thin and laced with a profound, stunned disbelief.
He stood near the water’s edge, the damp hem of his robe trailing in the muck, his turquoise eyes fixed intently on the Skal. The monster, a nightmare of chitinous plating and wet, pulsating muscle under normal circumstances, lay prostrate on the bank. Its multiple eyes, usually burning with predatory hunger, were dimmed to a submissive, muddy yellow. It looked like a beaten hound waiting for a kick or a treat, stripped entirely of the oceanic arrogance it had arrived with.
"She didn't just alter it," I murmured, the words tasting like ash and cold iron in my mouth. I couldn't tear my gaze away from her prone figure. My strategic mind was reeling, trying to calculate the sheer magical expenditure required for such a feat. "She took a command keyed to the blood of a god, a command woven by Poseidon himself, and scribbled her own name over it in a language the universe wasn't supposed to know."
It was impossible, blasphemy against the ancient orders. And it was the most magnificent tactical maneuver I had ever witnessed.
"And she shattered herself to do it," Flynn growled, the sound vibrating through the stone.
The Wolf moved before my synapses could fully fire. He was there in a blur of motion, scooping her up from the hard stone with a gentleness that completely belied the violence vibrating in his wiry frame. He pulled her against his broad chest, tucking her head under his chin, wrapping his limbs around her like a living shield against the world.
My vision went red.
It wasn't a metaphor or poetry. A literal haze of crimson heat bled into my sightlines, narrowing the world down to a single point of fury. The dragon inside me, already agitated by the cold shock of the void earlier and the adrenaline of the battle, roared a challenge that shook my ribcage with the effort to contain it. All I could see wasminein the arms ofanother. The dragondidn't care that Flynn was my brother. It didn't care that he was the warmth in an icy tomb or the feral heart of our unit. All it knew was possession. All it saw was theft.
Smoke curled from my nostrils, hot and sulfurous, distorting the air in front of my face. My fingernails dug into my palms, biting through the skin, threatening to spark and ignite the very oxygen in the room.
Stand down, Kaelen,Thane’s voice rumbled in my head, heavy and grounding like a landslide blocking a mountain pass.
The Bear Prince stepped between me and Flynn, his movement deceptively fast for someone of his size. He blocked my line of sight with his massive frame, a wall of muscle and patience.He is keeping her body temperature stable. Would you rather she freeze on this damp floor while you posture for dominance?
I forced a breath through my gritted teeth, the air hissing audibly as it hit the super-heated lining of my throat. My blood felt like lava. "I am not posturing," I snapped, though I stopped my advance, my boots grinding against the gravel. "I am assessing the situation."
"You are literally combusting," Elias noted with maddening helpfulness, drifting closer to inspect the Skal. He poked the horrific beast with the toe of his boot. It didn't react, merely shivering. "Fascinating. The magical pathways haven't just been bent; they’ve been completely rerouted. It's a precision neurosurgery performed with a mystical sledgehammer."
"Is she breathing properly?" I demanded, ignoring Elias’s academic fascination. I skirted around Thane’s bulk, needing to see her face, needing to verify her life signs with my own eyes.
Flynn looked up at me, his amber eyes flashing with a primal challenge that made my knuckles itch to strike something. He held her tighter, his nose buried in the crown of her hair, inhaling her scent as if it were the only oxygen in the room."Barely. Her heart is fluttering like a trapped bird against its cage. She’s empty, Kaelen. Completely hollowed out."
He shifted her weight, cradling her legs more securely, and the sight of his hand on her thigh, protective, possessive, intimate, sent a spike of jealousy through me so sharp it felt like a punch to the gut. I wanted to tear him away. I wanted to be the one holding her broken form. I wanted to hoard her in the deepest, darkest part of my lair and dare the entire pantheon to try to take her.
But Flynn was right. Logic, cold and razor-sharp, pierced the fog of my rage. She needed heat. While I burned, my fire was volatile, radioactive. I was just as likely to blister her pale skin as I was to warm it. Flynn was a furnace of biological life, a radiator of consistent warmth.
"The reservoir is dry," Elias said, his tone turning somber as he turned away from the monster. He looked at Aria, his expression etched with ancient sadness. "She utilized every scrap of residual power she possessed, power she needed to recover from pulling us free of the Gate, just to leash this beast. There is nothing left. Her magical core is a vacuum. If she tries to channel the amplifier now, or even a simple cantrip, it will eat her soul to fill the deficit."
"Then we fill the tank," I said, my voice dropping to a gravelly low that scraped against the cavern walls.
The silence returned, but this time it was charged, thick with an entirely different kind of tension. It wasn't the silence of a vacuum; it was the silence of anticipation.
