Page 41 of Mating Her Dragon

Garrett wanted a different answer. He just hadn't found it yet. But he was not giving up.

Carrick called a little before midmorning. Ginnie's voice came through faintly in the background, which told Garrett before a single word was spoken that this was not a courtesy check-in.

"They found something," Carrick said.

Garrett hated those three words instantly and completely.

"The Council pulled records on an old form of Ancient Elven threshold sorcery," Carrick said. "Not standard possession Magic. Not Portal work either. Something more specific. Older terminology calls it a Living Threshold."

"Explain," Garrett said.

"I was hoping you wouldn't say that."

Garrett did not find that reassuring. He needed an explanation.

It took a second, but ultimately, Carrick laid it out as plainly as the Council's ancient language allowed. Garrett felt the ground shift slightly under every sentence.

A normal possession forced one entity into another. It was crude, violent, and usually, almost always, destructive to the host in fairly short order. In this case, Leviathan hadn't simply possessed Garrett for a hundred years, not in the ordinary sense. Keevandrie's Magic had done something far more deliberate. It had restructured the Magical architecture around Garrett's own soul so that Leviathan could remain anchored there indefinitely, without burning through him the way a Demon Lord's presence should have burned through any lesser vessel, other than a Guardsman whose soul was joined with an ancient Dragon King, within months.

“Stating it plainly,” Carrick went on. “You, Garrett, survived because you are a Dragon Guardsman. Because Han is a Dragon King, and your combined soul structure is extraordinarily strong, strong enough to withstand what should have destroyed you a dozen times over.”

“See there,” Sydney faux-cheered. “You’re a modern miracle.”

Focusing on Carrick’s words and not how cute his Mate looked trying to make light of what they’d found out, Garrett prodded, “Go on.”

“Because Keevandrie reinforced the entry point herself,” the renowned Dragon Leader said. “Deliberately. With Ancient Elven threshold Magic built to last, you were not destroyed.”

“But she didn’t do it to save you.” Ginnie’s voice was soft and caring. “She did it to preserve the asset.”

Garrett went very still.

Everything he had just learned reframed an entire hundred years of his life in less than a minute. He hadn't simply been imprisoned, hadn't simply endured something terrible and survived it through sheer stubbornness, the way he'd always privately understood it.

He'd been architecture. A structure Keevandrie had built, and Leviathan had used. He had been engineered with the same cold precision a person applied to a load-bearing wall.

He felt the shape of that trying to open something in his chest he didn't have room for right now. He could not and would not give Leviathan or Keevandrie the satisfaction.

"What does it do now?" Garrett said instead, mission mode closing over the rest of it like a door.

Sydney sat down across from him. He felt her hand find his under the table. She didn't say anything. Didn't try to stop him from retreating into the only place he knew how to stand right now. She just anchored him, quietly and steadily, the same way he'd anchored her back in the desert when the seam had tried to pull her through.

He held onto that more than he let himself show.

There was one line, buried in the Council's translation, that Sydney latched onto so fast Garrett felt her attention sharpen through the Mating Bond before she'd even said a word.

"Every threshold remembers both shores," Carrick read.

Garrett hated that sentence on immediate, instinctive contact. From a tactical perspective, it meant he had two egresses to cover.

Sydney looked, across the table, like somebody had just handed her Christmas morning. The wheels of her mind were going a hundred miles an hour, and he didn’t need their intimate Bond to see it.

"Sydney," Carrick said, warning already in his voice.

"I didn't say anything."

"Your face did," Garrett said.

“And I heard it on this end,” Carrick grumbled before launching into more information he’d received from the Council.