"What do you mean?" Kaelen asked, his voice careful, like he was approaching a wounded animal.
"After my mother died," I said, the words tasting like bile. "They panicked. I was an adult, but I hadn't taken a lover. I was just... raw potential. And I was alone. If I died, the Gate fell."
I closed my eyes, and I was back in the white room. The smell of antiseptic herbs. The cold stone table. The faces of the Council looking down at me not as a person, but as a failing piece of infrastructure.
"They tried to breed me," I said, my voice flat, detached. "It wasn't... natural. It was clinical. Cold. Procedures. Rituals meant to enhance fertility mixed with alchemy. They had suggested lovers in the past, but none had appealed to me, so they had let it go. Until they didn’t, or couldn’t, let it go any longer."
Kaelen's heart seemed to pause against my back, then restarted with a violent, thudding fury. The temperature in the cavern spiked.
"They hurt you," he said. It wasn't a question.
"It was painful," I admitted, staring at my hands. "Invasive. Humiliating. Month after month. They brought in donors, Keepers chosen for their magical potential, or their theoretical, uh, potency, but..." I shuddered, remembering the instruments, the potions that made me sick for days, the disappointment in Natalia's eyes when my cycle returned, regular as the tides.
"It didn't work," I said. "I couldn't conceive. My body rejected everything. The healers said my womb was hostile. They said the magic of the Gate... the constant drain of my blood... One Keeper suggested that it had made me barren, but I never saw him again after he made that suggestion."
I let out a shaky breath. "Anyway, after a while they stopped. They decided that stressing my body with failed pregnancies was a greater risk than having no heir. They focused on keeping me alive instead. Preserving the container so they could try again later when they had better options or became more desperate." I pulled at the edge of my clothing. "That's why I'm the last."
Kaelen buried his face in my neck. He was shaking. Not with cold this time, but with a murderous heat. I could feel the dragon pulsing under his skin. It wanted to burn the world down for what they had done to me.
"They treated you like livestock," he snarled against my skin. "Like a broodmare."
"I was a Keeper," I said dully. "We give everything. Especially those of the Pandoros line."
"That is not giving," Thane rumbled from the shadows, his voice thick with disgust. "That is theft."
Elias had gone still. He was staring at me, his eyes wide, the pupils dilated so much that his eyes looked almost black.
"Barren," Elias whispered. "The Gate's energy... yes. That makes sense. It consumes the life force needed for creation."
He looked up, meeting my gaze. The fear in his expression was palpable.
"But Aria... the flashes I am seeing? The images of you carrying a child?"
"Echoes of what they wanted," I said, waving a hand tiredly. "Whatever future they tried to force, it failed. It's in the past."
"No," Elias said.
The single word fell like a stone.
He walked around the fire, crouching in front of us. He looked at Kaelen, then at me. His jewel-like gaze bored into my own.
"My sight…I usually only see the currents of what iscoming," Elias said, his voice trembling. "The probabilities. The potential."
My heart hammered against my ribs. "But I can't. You heard me. It’s impossible. They tried. I tried." My voice almost cracked on the last, but I kept it together, which made me proud.
"Nothing is impossible," Elias whispered, glancing at the golden markings on my skin, at the dragon fire linking Kaelen and me. "Not anymore. You merged with the Gate and took the Divine into your blood."
He reached out, his hand hovering over my stomach without touching.
"The flashes I see are strong. Insistent. They aren't drifting possibilities. They areintent." Elias looked up, his turquoise eyes terrified. "Someone is trying to bring this future into being. Someone is manipulating the threads of fate to ensure a new line is forged, or at the very least that this line doesn’t die out."
"Who?" Kaelen demanded, his arm tightening across my chest like a steel band. "The Council?"
"I don't know," Elias admitted, pulling his hand back as if burned. "But the child in the vision... it doesn't feel human. It feels... heavy. Like a star wrapped in skin."
The food I had eaten turned to lead in my gut. I scrambled away from Kaelen, and this time he let me, which was goodbecause a moment later I was dry heaving, the taste of ash filling my mouth.
A future where I was pregnant. A child that wasn't human.
