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And maybe that’s not such a bad thing.
Because if we’re going to face Branwen… we’re going to need a little madness of our own.
I throw my hands into the air with exaggerated flair, weaving a clever wolf from my fingers and casting it across the ceiling. It lunges for Silas’s bird-shadow, devouring it with flair and vengeance as I laugh, loud, unfiltered, wild. Silas howls like I’ve just murdered his firstborn, flopping dramatically backward onto the floor. Elias, ever the co-conspirator, gasps like the betrayal just broke his immortal soul.
“My shadow! You monster!”
“Merciless,” Silas adds, already halfway into forming a two-headed snake.
I counter with a dragon.
Lucien glares. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
And I yawn.
Not just a casual stretch-and-sigh yawn. No, I go full Elias, arms overhead, mouth wide, spine popping in a stretch that screams bored, distracted, done with your drama. The second the sound escapes me, I freeze.
Oh shit.
That wasn’t me.
Not the old me, anyway.
That was Elias. That yawn had his brand of defiance etched in every syllable of air. His irreverence. His shameless refusal to take anything seriously, especially Lucien.
Like a car crash in slow motion, I feel it building. That strange, inevitable compulsion twisting up my spine. My lips move before I can stop them. Before the part of me still trying to be careful can clamp down and reel it back in.
“Lucien, do you ever shut the hell up, or is brooding your full-time job now?”
Silence drops like a blade.
Silas gasps. “She lives.”
Elias claps slowly, like a proud father watching his chaos child speak her first insult. “Ten out of ten. No notes.”
Lucien turns to me, eyes glinting with something dangerous. Not rage exactly, no, Lucien doesn’t waste rage on things like me. It’s disbelief. Like he’s looking at a system failure. A glitch in the machine. Something he controlled…until he didn’t.
“You want to repeat that?” he asks, voice low, clipped, cold.
The old me would’ve backpedaled. Would’ve apologized or at least tried to reframe it into something diplomatic.
But there’s no room for diplomacy inside my head right now. Not with Elias’s laughter still clinging to my ribs, not with Silas’s wild joy tangled up in my pulse. Their magic, their essence, it’s in me now. And I don’t want to dial it down.
I shrug instead. “You heard me. Maybe try less pacing and more actual solutions.”
Lucien steps forward, and gods, he’s all heat and power, like the gravity in the room just tilted. His Dominion flares, it wants to dig into me, to bend me, to drag me down, but it doesn’t. Because I’m already bound to chaos, and chaos doesn’t bow.
Orin clears his throat, gently diffusing whatever disaster was about to unfold. “Perhaps now isn’t the time to turn on each other.”
Lucien doesn’t take his eyes off me. Not for a second. But he doesn’t reply. He just turns back to the window, jaw tight.
And me?
I smile. Just a little. Because for once, I got under his skin.
And gods, it feels good.
“This is your fault,” Lucien growls, voice sharp enough to slit throats. He points straight at Elias, eyes narrowed like he’s seconds from rewriting the concept of restraint.