I slam both hands against the crown-heart.
Pain explodes through my palms, up my arms, into my chest. The light tries to consume me too—tries to crown me, to bind my sight into its service. For a heartbeat, I feel myself slipping, feel the false authority trying to become real inside my mind.
It whispers to me. Telling me to submit. Promising power if I stop fighting. The lies are beautiful, seductive—they would be so easy to believe.
No.
I don’t fight it the way Tyr fights. I don’t try to overpower it.
I show it what it is.
My sight rips into the crown-heart’s core. Every lie woven into its structure—I expose them. Every false claim to power—I tear it open. The authority isn’t real. The control is a trick. A story told so many times that everyone forgot it was fiction.
Including the Arbiter itself.
The crown-heart flickers. Stutters. The golden light flooding into Tyr falters and dies. The thing trying to crown him loses its grip, its power draining away through the cracks I’ve created.
The Arbiter screams.
Not words—a sound that shouldn’t exist, that makes my ears bleed and my vision blur. Its grip on Tyr loosens. He falls, gasping, the golden light fading from his body.
I push harder. Dig my fingers into the light itself, feel the lies crumbling under my touch.
“Impossible.” The word rips from the Arbiter’s throat. “You cannot?—”
“I see what you really are.” Blood runs from my nose, my ears, my eyes. The effort is killing me. I don’t stop. “A puppet. A tool. Nothing without the lies that hold you together.”
“I am eternal?—”
“You’re already dead.”
The crown-heart cracks.
Not physically. The lies holding it together simply… break. Golden light bleeds away like water through shattered glass.
I collapse.
Tyr catches me before I hit the ice. His arms wrap around me, holding me up when my legs won’t work anymore.
“The crown-heart.” I force the words through numb lips. “It’s exposed now. You can?—”
“I know.” He presses his mouth to my forehead—brief, fierce—then sets me against a pillar of ice. “Stay here.”
“Tyr—”
He’s already moving.
The Arbiter has recovered enough to stand, but the damage shows. The crown-heart flickers erratically, barely holding together. It swings at Tyr—slower now, weaker—and he catches the blow, forces the arm aside.
“You changed things.” The Arbiter’s voice has lost its calm. “Both of you. This was not supposed to happen.”
“Stop talking.”
Tyr’s fist punches through its chest.
I watch through blurred vision as he finds the crown-heart. Grips it. The Arbiter screams again—ancient and terrible—but the sound cuts off when Tyr rips the golden lattice free.
For a moment, everything stops. The crown-heart pulses weakly in his grip, trailing strands of dying light. The Arbiter stands frozen, a hole in its chest where its power used to be.
