“The path’s narrowing.” I check the patterns one final time, feeling the options collapse around us. “One route left. Straight to the gate.”
“Then we take it.” His hand slides from my neck to grip my wrist—not restraining, tethering. As if letting go would cost him something he can’t afford.
We turn south-southeast, toward the convergence point, toward the trap we’ve chosen to spring. Behind us, the observatory’s lenses continue their silent watch. Ahead, the Divine Gate ruins wait with their concentrated power and their execution chambers and their carefully designed kill zone.
The Arbiter thinks it’s herding prey. It doesn’t understand what it’s summoned.
A dragon who can’t be crowned and a witch who can’t be deceived.
SEVENTEEN
TYR
The Divine Gate rises from the frozen landscape like a wound.
Sixty feet of cracked stone arch against a sky that refuses to look closely. The air here moves differently—thicker, denser, as if the space between breaths has been weighted with intent. Ice pushes up through broken flagstones in jagged spires, and the ground is stained with old blood. Divine blood. Silvery-black streaks frozen into the stone, proof that executions have happened here before.
We will not be added to that count.
I note the terrain as we approach. Broken columns that could provide cover—or become weapons. Rubble piles that create chokepoints. The way sound deadens, absorbed by the thickened air. Three exits visible from this angle, though my instincts say they won’t remain exits for long.
The gate itself is dark. Whatever power once made it a threshold between realms has been corrupted, turned inward, weaponized. Now it’s a monument to divine power—beautiful and terrible and designed to kill.
Zephyra walks beside me, her pace matching mine despite her shorter stride. She hasn’t spoken since we crossed the finalridge and the gate came into view. Hasn’t needed to. Her silence is assessment, strategy, the cold calculation of a mind cataloging threats and exits and possibilities.
She’s steady. Breathing even, heartbeat controlled, every step placed with the deliberate weight of someone walking into a fight she expects to win. Her scent—ice and magic and that darkness underneath that’s purely her—carries on the dead air. Every few steps, her arm grazes mine. Not accidental. A reminder of what we agreed to on that frozen ridge.
“The architecture’s wrong.” Her voice cuts through the stillness, low and focused. “Pre-divine construction, but the magic layered over it is divine standard. They built the gate, then the gods… repurposed it.”
“Execution chamber.”
“Efficient.” Her lips thin. “Build the killing floor where the power already concentrates.”
The gate’s shadow falls across us as we pass beneath its broken arch. The temperature drops—not natural cold, but divine cold, the kind that seeps into bones and makes magic sluggish. My power pushes back instinctively, creating a bubble of resistance around us.
She notices. Of course, she notices. Her gaze flicks to me, assessing the way the ice crystals in the air shatter and reform around us.
“How long can you maintain that?”
“Long enough.”
Not a promise. Not a boast. Statement of fact. I will maintain it as long as she needs me to, regardless of what it costs.
We pick our way through the outer ruins. Collapsed temple walls create a maze of rubble, corridors that narrow and widen without pattern. Every instinct I have screams warning—the space is designed to confuse, to herd, to funnel prey toward predetermined kill zones. The flagstones beneath our feet arecracked and uneven, ice pushing up between them like frozen veins.
More blood stains here. Old executions. Some divine silver-black, some mortal red that never quite faded. The stones remember what happened here.
But we knew that. Chose it anyway.
The word she’d used last night still echoes:Partners. Lifetimes of solitary survival, and now I’m walking into an execution funnel with a witch whose mortality I can smell on every breath she takes.
The dragon doesn’t like it. Neither do I.
But leaving her isn’t an option anymore. Hasn’t been for longer than I want to admit.
Her foot catches on a broken flagstone. I catch her elbow before she can stumble, steadying her with a grip that lingers a moment longer than necessary. Her eyes meet mine—acknowledgment, not gratitude. She doesn’t thank me for the basic act of keeping her upright.
I respect that.
