He met my gaze, impatience flickering in the gold. "We are wasting time."
"Do you really want this to bethememory?" I asked him quietly.
He frowned, confusion marring his aristocratic features. "What?"
"The binding," I said, gesturing to the cold, damp stone, to the exhaustion etched into the purple circles under Aria's eyes, to the lingering, sour scent of her recent fear. "It’s supposed to be a union. A merging of souls. Not just a magical power-up."
I looked at Aria. She was watching us, her arms wrapped tightly around herself, looking small and overwhelmed in the vast darkness of the cave. She looked less like a queen and more like a girl trying to keep from shaking.
"Do you want your first time, our first time, to be dictated by fear?" I asked Kaelen, keeping my voice low and dangerouslysoft. "Do you want to look back on the moment we finally claimed her and remember that we only did it because Marissa shined a flashlight in our eyes? That we used her because we were scared?"
Kaelen flinched as if I’d struck him. He looked at Aria, his expression fracturing. The arrogance bled out of him, leaving just the raw, terrified man underneath.
"I don't feel like I have a choice," he whispered, the admission stripping him bare. "If we don't power the amplifier, if we aren't strong enough, she dies. I cannot lose her, Flynn. I will not survive it a second time."
"We always have a choice," I disagreed, stepping closer to him, invading his space but not with aggression this time. "That’s what she taught us, isn't it? The Keepers said we had no choice but the cage. She said no. We say no."
I turned to the others, sweeping my gaze over Thane’s stoic concern and the quiet dread in the room. "We need to think. We need to stop reacting to Hera's moves and start making our own."
"Thinking takes time," Kaelen argued, though the fire had gone out of his voice, replaced by a weary desperation. "And we are blind. Elias can't see the future through this interference. We don't know what the Devourer is doing. We don't even know how to use this damn rock without burning her out."
"Actually," a soft, musical voice interrupted from the shadows near the water.
We all turned.
Elias was standing there, his copper hair catching the faint light. He was holding something in his slender hands, the leather-bound book. Theron's journal. He had retrieved it from where we dropped it during the initial Skal attack, and now he held it like a weapon.
He walked into the circle of dim light, his fingers tracing the scorched cover with reverence.
"We are not entirely blind," Elias said, his voice carrying that strange, ancient cadence he slipped into when the past overlaid the present. "Theron did not die just to give us a history lesson."
He opened the book, the parchment pages crackling loudly in the silence.
"I have been reading while you were playing mountain goats," Elias said, his turquoise eyes scanning the dense, handwritten text. "There are notes in the margins. References to an amplifier."
He looked up, and for the first time in a long while, his eyes weren't filled with sorrow. They were gleaming with frantic, brilliant intelligence.
"It says here that the binding does not require force," Elias said, tapping a specific paragraph. "It requires resonance. And it says something else. Something about the nature of the Devourer."
"What?" Aria asked, stepping toward him, her curiosity finally overcoming her exhaustion. She reached out, touching the edge of the book.
Elias tapped the page again, harder this time.
"It says the Devourer doesn't just eat magic," he said quietly, looking at each of us in turn. "It follows a frequency. A song."
He looked at us, a slow, terrifying realization dawning on his face.
"We aren't just loud, brothers. We are singing the wrong tune. We are broadcasting on a frequency that invites him in. And if we can change the frequency..."
"We can change the target," I finished, the scent of a new plan, a hunter's plan, suddenly filling my nose. It smelled sharp, like blood on snow.
"Maybe," Elias said. "But to do that, we need to know what the song is." He held the book out to Aria, placing it gently in her hands. "And I think, Little Queen, that this book tells us exactly where to find the sheet music."
Kaelen looked at the book, then at Aria, then at the silent, imposing amplifier. He let out a long breath, the tension leaving his frame in a rush, his shoulders finally dropping.
"Okay," the Dragon Prince said, his voice low. "We read. Then... we decide."
But as Aria took the book, hugging it to her chest, I saw her hand tremble. And I knew that while we might have bought a few hours of quiet, the storm outside hadn't stopped. It was just holding its breath.
