Time snapped back into motion with a deafening, thunderous crack.
The Sanctorum ceased to exist. The walls blew outward, not from an explosion, but because the space inside suddenly contained more reality than the stone could hold. The domed ceiling vanished. The floor vaporized.
I fell.
I hit the ground hard, the impact jarring breath back into lungs that suddenly remembered they needed oxygen. Pain rushed back in a tidal wave, bruised ribs, scraped skin, thescreaming ache of muscles pushed past their breaking point. I gasped, curling into a ball on the cold, broken stones, coughing up the dust of disintegrated history.
"Aria!"
Hands were on me instantly. Rough, frantic hands.
I blinked, trying to clear the grit from my eyes. The light was blinding, searingly white, but it wasn't the Sentinel's spear. It was sunlight. Pure, unfiltered daylight streaming down into a crater where the sacred Sanctorum used to be. The dust was settling, sparkling like pulverized gold in the sudden updraft.
"Breathe," a voice commanded. It was deep and gravelly, shaking with a terror that didn't match its command.
I forced my eyes open.
Kaelen was kneeling over me, solid. Truly, completely, terrifyingly solid. His black hair was wild, whipped by the aftershocks of magic, and his chest heaved with exertion. His skin was flushed with life and heat, smelling of smoke and hot metal. He was touching my face, his hands trembling as he checked for a pulse, for breath, for life.
Behind him, the curtain of dust swirled and parted.
A man with hair the color of dried wheat and eyes like burning amber crouched low, like a beast ready to spring, watching the perimeter of the crater. He wore nothing but shadows and the gray coating of rock dust, but the power radiating off him made the air shiver.
Flynn.
He turned his head, sniffing the air, and locked eyes with me. A grin split his face, sharp and edged with the madness of relief.
To his right, a giant rose from the rubble, pushing aside a slab of masonry that would have crushed a dozen men. He was broader than any human had a right to be, his skin the color of deep, rich earth. His presence was a heavy, comforting gravity.
Thane.
He looked at his hands, turning them over as if seeing them for the first time, then looked at me with an expression of profound, heartbreaking gratitude that stole the air from my lungs.
Stepping out of a drift of golden sparks, moving with an eerie, weightless grace, was Elias.
He looked exactly as he had in my dreams, ethereal, tragic, beautiful. His copper hair shifted color in the true sun, and his turquoise eyes seemed to see everything and nothing simultaneously. He offered a slender hand to Thane, pulling the larger man closer to the center. Both of them were naked as the day they were born, forged from light and magic, but undeniably, brutally real.
We were in ruins. The Citadel walls loomed high above us, jagged and broken teeth biting into the sky.
Across the crater, standing amidst the rubble of the shattered doorway, stood the Sentinel. The ancient armor was scorched black and the spear of light that it held flickered, unstable and buzzing like an angry hive. The thing seemed stunned, its helmet turning slowly as though it was having trouble taking in the impossibility before it, four Olympian princes standing in the mortal realm, fully powered and fully unbound.
Kaelen stood up. He didn't look back at me. He stepped between my prone form and the sentinel. The surrounding air ignited.
This was not the illusion of fire I had seen in the Threshold. This was real flame, white-hot and hungry, dripping from his fists to hiss against the stones. The heat of it curled the hair on my arms.
"Flynn," Kaelen said. His voice was low, vibrating with the strategic clarity of a general and a thousand years of accumulated rage. "Flank him. Keep him turning."
Flynn vanished. He didn't run; he blurred. A streak of amber motion too fast for the human eye to track, leaving only the scent of ozone and musk in his wake.
"Thane," Kaelen continued, his voice dropping an octave as iridescent dragon scales began to ripple across his shoulders, tearing through his skin. "Shield her. If anything gets past you, you answer to me."
Thane moved backward, planting himself in front of me like a cliff face, blocking out the sun. I felt the rumble of his affirmation in the ground.
"Elias," Kaelen growled, fire wreathing his arms, the golden eyes burning with a terrifying intelligence. "Tell me how he dies."
Elias tilted his head to the side, peering into the weave of destiny. His turquoise eyes brightened, reflecting the sputtering light of the Sentinel’s spear.
"Painfully, brother," Elias whispered, the sound carrying over the wind. "He dies painfully."
