"Take it," he wheezed, his fingers curling forcefully around my own, locking them onto the worn spine of Pandora's journal.
"I have it, now come on!" I pulled at him, panic rising in my throat like bile. The aurora above us pulsed violently, casting sickly shadows that stretched and twisted across the ruin of the Sanctorum.
"Listen to me!" he hissed, digging his heels into the rubble to anchor himself. He gripped the front of my tunic, pulling me down until our faces were inches apart. The smell of old parchment and chamomile was gone, replaced by the copper tang of blood and the smell of fear. "Get them all out or none of you will survive what's coming. It's all or nothing, Aria. Leavingsome of them in there is to leave the door cracked. Open it or close it, but make the choice yours."
"I don't understand?—"
"You are not a key," he shouted, spit flying mixed with blood, his eyes frantic. "You are the door! If you do not commit, they will tear you apart from both sides!"
The hair on my arms stood up. The air suddenly felt heavy, dense with a static charge so potent I could taste aluminum on my tongue. The dust in the air stopped swirling and hung suspended, frozen in a sphere of charged potential.
A sound like chaotic tearing ripped through the chamber.
A bolt of lightning, thin and blindingly white, punched through the swirling dust. It didn't arc or wander; it struck with the precision of a spear thrown by a hateful god. It hit Theron squarely in the chest.
There was no scream. Just a wet, heavy impact and the instant, cloying stench of charred meat.
The force of the strike threw me backward, the book clutched instinctively to my ribs, as Master Theron collapsed. He didn't fall like a man; he fell like a puppet with cut strings, a smoking, ruined heap of grey robes and silence.
"No," I whispered, the word lost in the deafening roar of the crumbling room.
I scrambled forward on hands and knees, reaching for him, but the residual heat rolling off his body forced me to recoil. His eyes were open, staring up at the rift in the ceiling, the light gone from them forever. The man who had taught me to question, who had handed me the truth when the world tried to feed me lies, was gone. Erased in a flash of divine pettiness.
A heavy hand clamped onto my shoulder, unnecessary force spinning me around. Kaelen was there, his face a mask of fury and fear, his golden eyes flicking from Theron's smoking body to the breach in the wall where the white light had originated.
"He's gone," Kaelen roared over the noise, shaking me once hard enough to snap my head back. "Aria! Look at me! He's gone!"
I stared at the book in my hands, then at the charred remains of my mentor. The grief became a hollowed-out space in my chest where my heart used to be, but beneath it, the rage ignited. It climbed my throat, hot and choking. They had killed him. The "gods" above, the ones who had slept for millennia while we rotted in the dark, had woken up just to execute an old historian in a library robe.
"They're inside," Kaelen snarled, dragging me back toward the shadows, placing his massive body between me and the breach.
I clutched the journal until my knuckles turned white.All or nothing.That’s what he said. I looked past Kaelen’s shoulder at the swirling vortex of the Gate, at the golden tethers still binding the dragon prince, at the empty spaces where Flynn, Thane, and Elias should be standing.
Theron was right. I had been trying to thread a needle while the world burned. I was treating the princes like refugees to be smuggled out one by one, terrified of the structural cost to the Gate and myself. But the structure was already gone. The roof was open to Olympus. The walls were breached. The Citadel had fallen.
There was no door to leave cracked anymore. There was only the choice to tear the frame down entirely.
"Run!" Kaelen bellowed, shoving me toward the exit tunnel.
Through the smoke and the blinding dust, a silhouette stepped into the breach. It was tall, clad in armor that shone like the sun, holding a weapon that hummed with a frequency that made my teeth vibrate.
It wasn't a Keeper. It wasn't a cultist.
Kaelen shoved me behind him, a low roar building in his chest, dragon scales rippling along his forearms like liquid gold.
"Run," he roared.
THREE
Kaelen
The light wasn't just bright; it was heavy.
It poured through the jagged breach in the Sanctorum’s wall like molten lead, carrying a physical weight that pressed the air from my lungs and made the golden tether hooked to my chest scream with tension. It didn’t smell like the organic fire of a dragon or the warm hearth-flame of a home; it smelled of ozone and scorched ether, the sterile, terrifying scent of a lightning strike that refuses to fade. It was the scent of the High Seat, peering down from their gilded thrones to crush the insects beneath them.
I shoved Aria toward the shadow of the archive tunnel, my hand broad against the small of her back, and I put every ounce of my recovered strength, strength I had spent millennia hoarding for a moment of escape, into the push. I was a Prince of Olympus, a dragon in human skin, and kinetic force was my mother tongue. I expected her to stumble, to yield to the momentum and flee like any sane creature faced with the sudden, blinding wrath of the heavens.
She didn't move.
